Presentation and Representation of Women in J. M. Coetzee’s, “Disgrace”.
Hiten Solanki
N S Patel Arts College, Anand.
Abstract:
Presenting black and white women, native marginalized African and semi-marginalized liberal Afrikaner, Nobel laureate Coetzee has appropriately represented two distinct voices with a view to explore socio-political scenario of post apartheid South Africa in his well acclaimed novel “Disgrace”. Presentation of women seemingly reflects the feministic point of view wherein all female characters appear struggling for the assertion of their possible authority in patriarchal South African society. Representation of the women is the manifestation of textual strategy in the elucidation of settler’s postcoloniality. The present paper is an attempt to examine the apparent presentation and embodied representation of women that indicate the reverse role of colonized and colonizer communes in post- apartheid South Africa.
Coetzee’s use of the differences within feminism itself, as well as on his representations of his own self-positioning as not feminist but feminized, in order to show how this informs his use of feminism and white women narrators. While some critics (Dunbar and Rody) argue that Coetzee’s work is ‘feminist’, I argue that Coetzee’s use of the feminine must instead be read in terms of the broader impact of the feminine as a textual strategy in the elucidation of settler postcoloniality.
- Fiona Probyn
University of Sydney,
New South Wales, Australia
Twice divorced, libidinous protagonist David Lurie, quintessentially representative of Coetzee’s “self-positioning”, evokes a sense of hatred initially and then that of pity among the readers. His carnal relations with an Asian prostitute, Soraya, ‘quickly in quickly out’ affair with his own student, Melanie and intercourse with unromantic, ugly Bev Shaw project Lurie, as his name suggests, an erotic person who always lures and as, in his own words “a servant of...