The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

The Woman as a Place of Cultural Encounter

Stephen Naudé (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg)
"A Very Bitter Love-Making": women as places of cross-cultural encounter in William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe

William Plomer's novel Turbott Wolfe (first published in 1926) is set in a fictionalised South Africa of the 1920s, and deals with attempts at meaningful interpersonal cross-cultural, cross-"racial" (often sexual) encounters. It may be read as suggesting that such attempts are, to a certain extent, doomed by the social circumstances and (specifically white) mindsets of 1920s South Africa. This notion is illustrated by the white Turbott Wolfe's own tortured, distanced idealisation of the passive figure of Nhliziyombi. It may be argued that, in venerating her as an embodiment of a certain projected idea of black African culture, Wolfe accordingly refuses to engage with and encounter Nhliziyombi on an interpersonal level. On the other hand, a far more active, sincere and arguably far more successful attempt at a cross-cultural relationship is made in the novel, one of the parties being the transgressively strong female figure of Mabel van der Horst. This paper will explore the significance of these two women as loci of two very different kinds of (attempted) cross-cultural encounter.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES