July's People
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In Nadine Gordimer's "July's People," we experience the life of a small, white, liberal, South African family known as the Smales. The family is forced to take upon a new life filled with struggles and harships. One family member in particular that has a tremendous time adapting to her new surroundings is Maureen. Throughout the novel her relationship between her husband (Bam) and her is equally tested, but in the end it is Maureen who experiences the biggest emotional and mental breakdown of all. Maureen and her husband Bam enter the new world with a sense of a strong relationship between them, but as the world began to change around them, their relationship became a challenged to support and hold together. Internal pressures began to build up among the two and eventually the two feel as If they do not recognize each other anymore. In this husband/wife relationship, Gordimer present issue's of cultural adaptation, language/communication, prejudicy of lifestyles, and clash of roles in socities, through the eyes of these two characters.
Maureen Smales lived most of her life feeling like things were normal. Every morning she woke up to the surroundings of her master bedroom. Her house, the master bedroom in partuicualr, was "the absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody as not more than the price of the master bedroom [...