These early stories reveal some of the ideological features of liberal aesthetics. They concern themselves largely with individuals within specifically individual contexts. In some, the revelations which form the structural keystone of the story are revelations which suggest the potential for "salvation" on the individual's own efforts, and generally the perception of reality they encompass is non-problematic. However, the position is not held simplisti-cally. Gordimer is regularly critical of those Whites holding so-called liberal views. In the story "The amateurs" a group of well-intentioned Whites presents Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest to a Black audience, and the Whites do not really know what they are doing, nor do they understand the Blacks' response to it. In "Ah, woe is me" the White woman finds herself unable to react with normal human sympathy to the distress of her former maidservant's daughter. In "Six feet of the...