Bernard Chabalier-Rosa Burger relationship in Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter"

 

Bernard Chabalier is the French lover of Rosa Burger. He is the gentle university don. On the French Riviera, Rosa enters into a love affair with Bernard, a member of the French leftist bourgeoisie. Rosa rejects her past and her denomination as ‘Burger’s Daughter’, indulges her sensual desires and becomes the lover to the married Bernard.

Rosa is attracted at first to the tapestries, as part and parcel of her assumption of the role of Bernard’s mistress: “Bernard Chabalier’s mistress isn’t Lionel Burger’s daughter; she is certainly not accountable to the future; she can go off and do good works in Cameroun or contemplate the unicorn in the tapestry forest. ‘This is the creature that has never been’ he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis invente.”



But soon, Rosa comes to the realization that Chabalier’s mistress is none other than Burger’s daughter and that she cannot deny her Afrikaner heritage. When she looks into the bathroom mirror, she sees in brutally realistic terms that she has been defining herself only in terms of her gender that she has ‘disfigured’ herself and is ‘filthy and ugly... Debauched’. But very soon Rosa understands that the people in Paris are not concerned about the fact in some “countries people die for ordinary civil rights.” Rosa joins the French branch of the anti-apartheid movement and is very much in demand as the daughter of Lionel Burger. She proceeds to London from Paris in order to meet other revolutionaries in exile.

With Bernard Chabalier she has an emotionally and sexually fulfilling love affair. However, romance threatens to put her inborn sensitivity to sleep just as Lionel's pill did to her mother. Their self-enclosed desire can have hurtful consequences for others: "A wild, strong, brazen, narrow eyed resoluteness, cast in desire, treading on the fingers of restraint, knocking aside whatever makes the passage of the will improbable and even impossible".

Bernard's political sympathies approximate Lionel's: a history teacher aspiring to a university professorship, he is aware of and signs petitions for political prisoners all over the world. He also, however, belongs to the leftist bourgeoisie; he has a wife and children and is saving for his house and a plot of land. Although Bernard satisfies Rosa's desire for a companion and a lover, he lacks the empathy for others that flows naturally in her. She knows that Bernard, like Conrad, would not have recognized the poor black family's agony that she remembers having seen in the donkey-drawn cart on the South African backroads.



Thus ironically, Bernard’s relaxed but committed liberalism helps Rosa to comprehend her own destiny as a South African. He offers her a tranquil new life in France. He is a worldly, civilized man. The thought process that culminates in her decision to return to South Africa is complex, but Bernard assures her - “you can’t enter someone’s cause of salvation.” Their relationship can only really lead into a one-sided domestic situation while Bernard remains married.

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