Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat as inheemse Big House-roman

Abstract

While there is no indication that Marlene van Niekerk consciously referred to the Irish literary genre of the Big House novel in her novel Agaat, there are historical parallels between South Africa and Ireland as well as similarities between Van Niekerk’s novel and the work of Irish authors such Somerville & Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and William Trevor, which make it possible to employ the existing concepts and structures of this genre to explore interesting, even crucial aspects of Van Niekerk’s complex work. The genre is closely associated with the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy that ruled Ireland for centuries until displaced and marginalized by the rise of a native nationalism in the twentieth century. In these novels the “Big House” or the demesne becomes representative of the class and its traditions within Irish history. The historical and political are always presented in terms of the personal and intimate, however. In Agaat the intimate history of the female dynasty of Grootmoedersdrift and in particular the relationship of love and resentment, accusation and guilt between Milla and her ironical heiress, Agaat, are revealed, but this personal history also becomes representative of Afrikaner culture and ideology during the second half of the twentieth century.