Identity Struggles and Spatial Margins: A Gendered and Racial Reading of Nadine Gordimer's Burger’s Daughter

Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter (1979) is an influential novel that reveals the complicated intersection of gender, race, and spatial tension in apartheid South Africa. This study aims to examine how Gordimer presents the heroine, Rosa Burger, navigating the political and personal spheres created by patriarchal values, structural oppression, and racial conflicts. Through its interpretation of significant spaces, such as the political spheres, home, and exile. This study highlights the role of physical and ideological boundaries in the construction of identity. Based on postcolonial and feminist theoretical frameworks, the essay suggests that Rosa's struggle to assert herself is insightful of a broader critique of the restrictions imposed by social structures. The application of narrative strategies like shifting narrations and fragmented narrative by Gordimer also establishes the nature of identity in a politically and racially fragmented society. Through this literary analysis, the research paper adds another contribution to the spatiality argument in literature and how oppressed identities are negotiated in oppressive regimes.