II. Masculinity as a (Sometimes) Primary Socio-Political Force: Magda
Masculinity is described in both novels as a driving socio-political force. Whether or not Magda prevails or succumbs to patriarchy and masculinity in In The Heart of the Country is a point of contention in scholarship. Some sources find that because the narrative is Magda’s narrative she is able to prevail despite the world she lives in. In contrast, the fact that Magda’s usurping of her father in her narrative is imagined begs the question if there is any real form of femininity at all, as it silenced as everything returns to as it once was at the end of the novel. This idea is enforced in Laura Wright’s article, “Displacing the Voice: South African Feminism and J.M. Coetzee’s Female Narrators” where Wright states, “Magda’s narrative is a narrative of desire, the specific desire of a white woman for language, for sex, for connection, and for connection, and for salvation, within a context that repeatedly negates those desires” (16).
Further, as Pamela Cooper describes, “They (the women in Coetzee’s novels) give shape to lust without themselves claiming it” (27). Instead of being able to claim what is theirs, and their own sense of self, the women in Disgrace and In The Heart of the Country are forced to become second-class to their male counterparts. Cooper describes that Coetzee thus is succumbing to the
archetypal portrayal of women tactically informs the novel’s exploration of
masculinity as a primary sociopolitical force in the ‘new’ South
Africa…Disgrace depicts ‘the eternal feminine’ as a figure mythically replete
but also empty, the signifier of both impossible fullness and vacancy. The
women are effectively placeholders, ready to be animated by energies beyond
their control (29).
Paradoxically then she, the female character, is both empty and complete. She is waiting for something that she could be but because of her place, her society, the society of South Africa, she cannot be. It is for these reasons that it is difficult to define these two texts as either wholly feminist or wholly anti-feminist. Rather gender, just like race, and class, do not have one narrow definition, but rather serve as a larger response to life in South Africa.
The above quote then can be understood through an analysis of how Magda and Lucy respectively prevail and simultaneously succumb to patriarchy. Though the quote is in direct relation to the ‘archetypal portrayal’ of Lucy in Disgrace the same seems to be true of Magda in In the Heart of the Country. Told from Magda’s lamenting point of view from the rural countryside, Magda longs for a world in which she is not subservient to her father. Throughout the text Magda envisions killing her father and replacing him as the head of the household. Lonely and without company, Magda envisions a world where she is not who she is. As her prose depicts Magda is shrewdly intelligent. However her intelligence serves her no good, because although she longs for a different life, she is trapped in the place she is in. Alone, empty, vacant—In the Heart of the Country describes Magda in a conflicting position. She is white and thus hypothetically in a better position in the world she lives in than her African counterparts, yet she is in the country, where she is surrounded by Africans that for the most part disregard her, for her authority—if any—is handed to her by a father that ignores her. Thus Magda is neither here nor there but as an effective placeholder in the rural parts of South Africa alone on the farm, save the company of a father that ignores her and servants that disregard her. As she describes
I live neither alone nor in a society but as it were among children. I am spoken
to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in
conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of
tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has been recorded. Reading
the brown folk I grope, as they grope reading me: for they too hear my words
only dully listening for those overtones of the voice, those subtleties of the
eyebrows that tell them my true meaning: ‘Beware, do not cross me’ ‘What I say
does not come from me’ …That is why my words are not words such as men use
to men. Alone in my room with duties behind me and the lamp steadily burning,
I creak into rhythms that are my own, stumble over rocks of words that I have
never heard on another tongue. I create myself in the words that create me. (7- 8).
Thus Magda if forced to create language that functions for herself alone. She is neither at home amongst the white men, represented by her father and white-male society, because she is a woman, nor does she have a place with the ‘brown’ servants that work for her family because she is white. As she describes throughout In the Heart of the Country she must then create a place for herself solely within the language of her self, a language for herself and only to herself. Thus, Magda creates and subverts her own language, because she must in order to fit within a male socio-political order. She imagines, as I’ve described above, killing and burying her father, and her black servant, Hendrik, raping her (which will be discussed more in depth later). Magda is forced to make her world, through her narrative and prose, her own, because otherwise there is no place for her. However, whether or not Magda effectively subverts patriarchal discourse and thus thwarts the theory that masculinity is the thriving socio-political force of patriarchal Post-Apartheid South Africa is debatable in criticism.
On one hand Susan Gallagher describes that Magda is a parody and anti-heroine of the typical Afrikaner woman “extolled in national mythology…she is a solitary social being with neither a mother nor siblings. Her physical and emotional characteristics are antithetical to the Afrikaner ideal. The images of which Magda characterizes herself are negative and perverted’ she repeatedly describes herself as black, scrawny, dried up and sterile” (94) and for these reasons In the Heart of the Country “subverts Afrikaner patriarchal discourse in a number of ways, both on a representational level and on a generic level” (105) because of her character and the pastoral setting of the novel Gallagher addresses that the novel is a parody of typical “South African realities” (105). Paul Rich comments that ‘In the Heart of the Country emerges as an ‘anti-pastoral’ novel in that it takes an idealized rural situation…and subjects it to a merciless scrutiny in order to try and reveal some inner truths about the nature of real social reality” (“Tradition” 70 quoted in A Story of South Africa 105). Thus, in a sense, because of it’s setting and how atypical Magda is, Gallagher is suggesting that the novel is theoretically subverting patriarchal discourse. However, because Coetzee presents Magda’s narrative as imagined, in other words, by the end of the book everything was as lonely and unchanged as it was in the beginning, I am not entirely convinced that Magda is able to challenge patriarchy. Arguably, Magda’s language is her own, but it has no real, solid, place in the world she lives in.
Therefore, we must question Magda’s place in her society. To this theme David Atwell questions what place Magda has alongside patriarchy. Atwell attributes Magda’s narrative discourse as representative of a tyrannical historical presence in South African literature as the consequence of rootedness (10), arguably which favors certain groups over others (in regards to this argument male over female). Atwell asserts that Magda is placed within a particular place and time, and thus is a displaced subject. Atwell claims, “If history is a determining and circumscribing force, the question remains, what form of life is available to prose narrative as it attempts to negotiate that determination and circumscription” (10). Thus Atwell argues throughout his book that Coetzee creates displaced subjects that are forced to live in aggressive situations in which they are displaced by colonialism, and I would add patriarchy. Atwell states that Magda, in In the Heart of the Country, is such a displaced subject, further “Magda’s transgressions make up the sequential episodes in the narrative structure, with one sequence leading logically to the next in a pattern of conceptual reversals. Through Magda the novel forces the social codes to light, exposing them to scrutiny in the public domain of reading” (60).
Thus the text of In the Heart of the Country stresses a particular social order that the female protagonist attempts to break free of. According to Atwell Magda’s “transgressions” are put to light through the text and through the ability of the reader to be able to connect and understand the stories that Magda tells. Therefore the text is portrayed and foretold through the stories Magda tells. Their validity/invalidity is silenced or expressed through the very voice and imagination that Magda uses to portray the society in which she lives. Although she sees herself as empowered by the end of the text Magda’s position is the same as it was at beginning of her text, leaving the reader to question the validity of her last sentence in the text “I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die here in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy” (139). Still locked away it seems Magda’s destiny is as little her own as it was in the beginning of the novel. Her writing is in fact her own, but it is manipulated by a disrupted sense of truth as her father is alive and her identity is as much enslaved as it was at the start.
Magda attempts to find and construct her own identity but it is questionable if she ever does. As Susan Gallagher notes
Magda thus endeavors to write herself by constructing her own history. She writes
herself not only in her act of composing the mediations and creating the story of her
father’s murder, but also in her feeble attempts to recover an alternative past…
Magda shrinks from the history bequeathed her by her father and attempts to find an
alternative (97).
Therefore the terms and understanding of gender and patriarchy are often convoluted in respect to Magda. She is viewed as both feminist (in her abilities to write her own text and attempt to “find an alternative”) and anti-feminist (in its inabilities to succeed). Magda attempts to obtain power, yet at the same time she is unable to subvert the very ideology that represents power. In many respects “Magda comes to understand…that the destruction of the old order, symbolized in her father, will not allow any subversion of the ideology of power because that ideology is already encoded into language” (Wolhport 221), a language, in many respects of patriarchy. Magda’s language, reflective of Magda herself, must function alongside patriarchy. Effectively then the text of In The Heart of the Country questions whether or not women can exist by themselves and/or alongside men. Magda, after all, needs Hendrik’s help even after her father’s ‘murder’ As Gallagher explains
The death of her father and the past he embodies frees Magda, she thinks, to go beyond the patriarchal system to establish new relationships with Hendrik and Anna. Yet the difficulties that she has with disposing of her father’s body and the assistance she must have from Hendrik reveal that the burden of the patriarchal system is not so easily removed. Even before her father’s death, Magda had begun to search for humanity in the desert of her life by turning toward the two black servants. Her initial interest takes the form of numerous imaginative journeys into their lives…despite these imaginative forays however, she feels stymied in her attempts to achieve connection and relationship (100).
Thus, Magda’s story is often conflicted between whether she can or cannot survive despite patriarchy. As much as she wishes to be in a world where it is possible, it appears to be convoluted. Magda imagines a world where she can dispose of her father, and live happily alongside Hendrik and Anna. Yet, Hendrik perpetuates a patriarchal system, demanding money for the work he has done (Gallagher 94). When she cannot supply the money, he attempts and succeeds in claiming her body against her will. As Gallagher claims
“Clothed in the outward garb of the master, wielding the weapon of the male organ, Hendrik has become the new father who rules the farm. His history of economic and cultural deprivation and the perverted structure in which he lives do not allow him to escape the master/slave relationship. Magda acquiesces to his new role, longing to believe that it is the path to the intimacy for which she has been searching…Magda believes that an individual act of the will is sufficient to escape the history that confines them all…However, Magda cannot escape her existence as a social being: she remains a part of a people, trapped by that social role” ( 101).
Thus masculinity, in regards to Magda is a sometimes-primary socio-political theme within the theme of In the Heart of the Country. Within the text gender is often problemitized through Magda’s imagined life versus real life as described in her narrative structure, her relationships that are forced on her by the men in her life (both her father and Hendrik), and the ways in which gender is depicted as a part of the larger racial picture of colonial South Africa. As the scholarship of Gallagher and Atwell show Magda is both empowered and subjugated to the socio-political theme of patriarchy within the text. She, at times, is able to succeed only to be silenced by the very same forces moments later.
(L)Imitations of Freedom 