The Defeated

“The Defeated” was originally published in the collection Why Haven’t You
Written? Selected Stories, 1950-1972 and was reprinted in 1993. It is a
firstperson narrative concerning a European Jewish family that runs a
concession store for black South Africans in a forbidden, filthy part of town.
The narrator, a young girl, befriends Miriam Saiyetovitz, whose immigrant
parents work long hours selling goods to indecisive customers. The shop they
live above is across from an eating establishment teeming with the smells of
slaughtered animals. Mrs. Saiyetovitz, “ugly, with the blunt ugliness of a
toad; the ugliness not entirely at home in any element— as if the earth were
the wrong place, too heavy and magnetic for a creature already blunt,” and
her dull husband devote their lives to giving their daughter everythingthey
possibly can. When Miriam describes all the birthday gifts her friend
received, her mother assures her they will throw her a huge party. As the two
girls grow up together and it comes time for university, Miriam’s parents
labor to send her to a good college. Miriam grows further apart from them,
moving into the upper classes as she attends pool parties and eventually
marries a doctor. Ultimately, she abandons the two people who made her
comfortable life possible. When the narrator, now a grown woman, goes to
visit Mr. and Mrs. Saiyetovitz, she learns that they hardly see their daughter
or her baby son at all.

In “The Defeated,” Gordimer conjures up an evocative variety of discordant

but powerful moments: the sweaty smell of the black Africans mingling with
the odor of bloodied meat, the toadlike mother juxtaposed with her
blossoming daughter, the quietly rage-filled father who takes terrible
advantage of his status as a white man to humiliate his black customers. Also
noticeable is the contrast between the narrator’s relatively benign home life
and the concession area where black South Africans are forced to shop
among the refuse. “The Defeated” deftly envelops in its fold class
differences, the burgeoning of female sexuality, and the tragedy of wasted
lives, both of immigrants and of dispossessed indigenous peoples. Gordimer
does not openly judge Miriam, but it is clear through the telling of her
growing alienation that Miriam is only one of the upwardly mobile
Afrikaners whose sights are set on material gain and not on remaining true to
those who sacrificed happiness for them.

As she sees Miriam’s parents, she knows it immediately: Miriam has

ungratefully abandoned her good parents. The Sayetovitzes try to veil their
grief and shame and still talk proudly about their daughter. The picture about
Miriam’s home clearly reflects her wealth, high social status: she lives in an
expensive suburb, in a large, white, modern house with flower border and
fishpond. Sadly, her parents have been there once only, when Miriam’s son
was born. They have never seen her husband and she has never taken them to
her home; she comes to visit them once or twice a year for an hour. The girl
understands now that Miriam feels ashamed of her parents and fears her
doctor husband would never accept them. Selfishly, she does not want to risk
the luxurious life she has in case her husband would leave her because of her
poor origin. Thus, Miriam rather chooses to reject and neglect her parents,
leaving them behind in the dusty mining town in poverty-- defeated.

The little dirty girl, Miriam, now turned into a queen and refused her
poor derivation. "She had forgotten a lot of things " (447): where she came
from, the poverty, the need and her dear parents who helped her climb up to
where she is now. Her smooth hands with expensive diamond rings contrast
the rude, working hands of her father; the hands that have worked for her so
hard to make somebody out of her. The Sayetovitz parents are now where
they have always been, on the deep bottom of society, trampled upon, poor
and defeated. As the title also suggests, they are the defeated, the weak and
the disgraced. They do not deserve this sad fate and disrespect of their
daughter. Instead of celebrating and sharing Miriam’s happiness, they sink
even deeper into the dejected and sorrowful morass of their misery.