"Space for Herself": Nadine Gordimer's "A Sport of Nature" and Josephine Humphreys' "Rich in Love"

Abstract

In a recent article on global scope of problem of homelessness, Newsweek described world in closing decade of twentieth century as awash in refugees.1 But even before midcentury, Martin Heidegger had named placelessness as an essential factor in destitution of humankind in a technological age, an era one of Heidegger's translators describes as the time of world's night, in which man has even forgotten that he has forgotten true nature of being.2 Heidegger asserts that one recovers being, or achieves selfhood, when one recognizes interdependence of self and place. In essay Building Dwelling Thinking, he points to common linguistic root of verbs to be and to live in: then does ich bin mean? ... Ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell.3 Christian Norberg-Schulz, writing in 1980, defines Heideggerian concept of dwelling or to mean a total man-place relationship: To gain an existential foothold man has to be able to ... identify himself within environment.4 More specifically, Norberg-Schulz says, The place is concrete manifestation of man's dwelling, and his identity depends on his belonging to places.5 However, if one is a woman, this apparently axiomatic interdependence of place and identity may become highly problematic. What I shall do here is demonstrate how two recent novels by women, Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature and Josephine Humphreys' Rich in Love, illustrate that for a woman, being is made possible not by