In "Once Upon a Time," what is the connection between the events Gordimer describes in the frame story and the events in the fairy tale?

Gordimer begins her story with a first person narration. While it is unwise to presume that the narrator and the author of a story are the same person, it is implied that they are in the frame story; the narrator is a writer in an increasingly unstable South Africa, a description that matches that of the author.

Having been awakened by something unknown, she fears for her own safety. She remembers the violence recently perpetrated in her own neighborhood and wonders if she is to be the next victim; she classifies every sound in the darkness. She notes that:

I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take those precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass.

But then she realizes that she is to be "neither threatened nor spared." In her own words:

There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me.

And then Gordimer starts her bedtime story, in which a family succumbs so deeply to fear that their son dies as a result of their precautions.

The frame story and the fairy tale seem tangential, connected only to the role of fear, until one examines the significance of the mine. The narrator had previously feared individually-driven violence, but the real source of stress is structural. In recognizing this, she shifts the blame from individuals to society itself.

The mine is the source of instability in the first story; if the stories run parallel, where does that place the blame in the fairy tale? At first glance, as in the frame, it seems to be individually driven, but in fact Gordimer places heavy blame on the South African government, personified as the "wise old witch." The husband's mother plays the role of the government: spreading fear based on racial discrimination and encouraging hysteria. The family's "happily ever after" begins its downward spiral after she cautions them not to hire anyone off the street, as the government did in South Africa, and she provides the stepping-stone to the little boy's death: the book of fairy tales.

Gordimer does not excuse the actions of individuals in either the frame story or the fairy tale, but she puts them in a broader context.