A Study Guide for Bessie Head's "The Prisoner Wore Glasses"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Bessie Head's "The Prisoner Wore Glasses," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839044

Book preview

10

The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses

Bessie Head

1973

Introduction

Although The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses is the author Bessie Head's most widely anthologized short story, it is unusual in her overall body of work. Head is best known as the author of novels, most of them set in Botswana and featuring female protagonists, but this short story set in South Africa has no important female characters. The story is about Brille, a black political prisoner in South Africa under apartheid, and Hannetjie, the white man who is assigned as the prison section's new warder. The political prisoners assigned to Span One have become accustomed to stealing and eating cabbages and other food from the prison farm, smoking contraband tobacco, and whispering in secret conversations. When Hannetjie is transferred to Span One, however, he uncovers and shuts down all of these activities. Through the course of the action, Brille, who appears small and inconsequential, engages in a psychological battle with the physically powerful guard, eventually persuading him to behave less harshly toward the prisoners.

The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses was first published in 1973 in London magazine; after the author's death, it was published in book form as part of the 1989 collection Tales of Tenderness and Power. Head's collection is no longer in print, but the story may be found in the anthology Under African Skies: Modern African Stories (1997), edited by Charles Larson.

Author Biography

Bessie Amelia Emery was born July 6, 1937, in a mental institution in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Her mother, a white woman also named Bessie Amelia Emery, had been institutionalized by her family when they discovered she was pregnant but not by her husband; they did not know until the birth that the child's father—never identified—was black. The child was placed in foster care with the Heathcotes, a mixed-race family, and her mother died in the institution in 1943. Although they helped pay for her education, her mother's family did not contact Bessie after her mother died, and Bessie was raised to believe that Mrs. Heathcote was her real mother. Bessie's