IV.
How do we define gender within the larger social context of Post-Apartheid South Africa? French feminism, written in an entirely separate time and place from Coetzee’s novels, may seem to have entirely different criteria to define sex and gender than In the Heart of the Country and Disgrace. Yet many of French feminisms inherent arguments, related to Witting and Beauvoir at least, seem to have the same themes of social and political commentary specifically when discussing the role(s) of women in society. Both Witting and Beauvoir seem to address the idea of a body, of a woman’s ability or inability to control her own body and being, and what gets sacrificed, as a woman, to patriarchal society. Putting this into context then we can view the texts of In the Heart of the Country and Disgrace through French Feminism, specifically in regards to the constructs that Magda and Lucy are forced to succumb to.
In order to do so, we must attempt to understand gender and the ways in which women function alongside men. For the sake of this analysis gender should be understood both in terms to what men are and what they are not. In regards to the characters of Lucy and Magda they both function within the constructs of their male-centric patriarchal societies. Whether or not they thrive or fail as characters, and thus, as representatives of women in their cultures, can be understood through the ideology of French Feminism.
According to Simone de Beauvoir women represent what men are not. As described in analysis of Beauvoir in the French Feminism Reader, “Women are defined wholly in terms of their deficiency to men and therefore represent what is base, frivolous, and contingent to human experience. For Beauvoir, the concept of ‘Woman’ is synonymous with the concept of the ‘Other’. ‘Woman’ cannot be defined concretely or positively, but only as the dark, nebulous side of ‘Man’” (3). Furthermore women “…have no shared history of oppression, no shared cultural traditions, no shared religions like other oppressed groups such as racial minorities or Jews. Beauvoir also claims that within patriarchal culture, men are those creatures capable of transcendence—they are capable of acting upon the world and bestowing meaning upon it— while women are immanent beings who derive means from their relationship to men” (3).
This as much is true in regards to both Lucy and Magda. Both are apart from society, set in rural atmospheres where they are function alongside men as opposed to individuals. Both have estranged or complicated relationships with their fathers, relationships that are effectively forced upon then, and absent mothers. Magda is forced to take care of her father, despite all he does to disregard her (according to her narrative), while Lurie, caught in the ‘shame’ of his scandal retreats to Lucy on the Eastern Cape, where she too, at the very least cares and houses her father.
Further, as Beauvoir notes “…women are immanent beings who derive means from their relationship to men”, which is applicable to both Lucy and Magda. As Susan Gallagher explains “Magda’s desperate search for some kind of intimacy with her father results both in Oedipal longings and in imagined acts of violence. In her story of her father bringing home a new bride, Magda depicts this woman as fertile and sensual, able to arouse and satisfy all of her father’s baulked desire, quite unlike herself” (99). Similarly in her father’s affair with Anna, Anna is able to satisfy her father in ways that Magda cannot. Her father seems to, as a man, be able to transgress racial hierarchies in his affair because he can have what he wants, both as the owner of the house and as a man. Magda, a woman, is emphasized instead quite instead as a ‘displaced other’ (see above for Atwell’s description of the ‘displaced other’) who has little, if any legitimate place in this society. Atwell ties this sense of ‘legitimacy’ (in reference to Magda’s father) or illegitimacy (perhaps in reference to Magda) as tied to identity. Atwell maintains “Legitimacy’ here implies an identity and a name and provides a notion of order; thus, the father’s role, in the absence of the mother, is to carry the historical destiny of the colonizer more deeply into Magda’s consciousness of herself” (61). Absent of a mother, Magda places importance on the significance of her father. As her consciousness narrates he has everything that she cannot, thus she imagines usurping his role, killing him and disposing of him, and thus, creates an idea that without patriarchy, quite literally without her father, she herself may be more legitimate. However, as the text continues we see that the usurping of patriarchy in Magda’s world is impossible. She cannot secure money to keep the farm running, as it has been mentioned, Hendrik and Anna do not have the same amount of comfort as she does to maintain a world where they are equals because as Coetzee depicts in this world they are not equals or beneficiaries of the world Magda attempts to create. And thus, at the end of In the Heart of the Country we find her father in fact alive, and a world without patriarchy nothing but an imagined fantasy. Effectively silenced Magda “Struggles to understand her identity in relationship to her natural surroundings. The solitary wasteland of her desert environment appears to reflect her own hollowness, but Magda’s frequent meditations on the natural world invariably conclude that the romantic identification and bond between human beings and the land extol in the Afrikaner plassroman are impossible” (Gallapher 97). For Magda then, “The natural world exists only as being; she exists as consciousness…Although the unreflective existence of insects, flowers, and stones appeal to her, Magda cannot escape her human attributes of voice and choice, language and morality” (Gallagher 97). Simultaneously Lucy’s world is problemitized through her being a woman, the world of the masculine in Disgrace becoming favored over the world of the feminine. As Beauvoir describes
“The masculine and the feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form,
as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that
of two electrical poles for man represents but the positive and the neutral, as
indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general;
whereas women represent only the negative, defined by limiting criteria without
reciprocity…” (8).
The feminine in Disgrace is sexualized, unable to be alone, taken advantage of and forced to depend on man as Lucy is forced (and further complicated by a choice she makes) to depend on Petrus. Beauvoir shows that women have always been “subordinated to man and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change—it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts” (10) stressing that gender hierarchies are not something random, or something that grows over time, but rather something continuous and absolute.
Effectively the stress is on the theme of dependency, the need of the female to be dependent on the male. Despite her father’s objections Lucy accepts Petrus’ protection. She states
“Before you get on your high horse with Petrus, take a moment to consider my
situation objectively. Objectively I am a woman alone. I have no brothers. I
have a father, but he is far away and anyhow powerless in the terms that matter
here. To whom can I turn for protection…Practically speaking, there is only
Petrus left. Petrus may not be a big man but he is big enough for someone small
like me. And at least I know Petrus. I have no illusions about him. I know what
I would be letting myself in for…Go back to Petrus {she urges her father}…Say I
accept his protection. Say he can put out whatever story he likes about our
relationship and I won’t contradict him…” (Disgrace 204).
Thus because of the ways of rural South Africa Lucy sacrifices herself and everything save her house to stay on and be under the protection of Petrus. In agreeing to marry him Lucy receives protection for herself and her child (born of the rape) but at a cost where she has nothing but the house she lives in. Through Petrus’ “protection” the only protection that is valid is rural South Africa she finds a way to stay on, no matter that the cost is in her succumbing to patriarchy. Lucy’s need for protection is part of a larger response to colonialism, gender and societal pressure all of which are consequences of apartheid. As Lucy Graham maintains
“Coetzee claims that colonial culture and process of apartheid are deeply
implicated in the escalation of sexual violence in the contemporary context:
{Colonialism} fractured the social and customary basis of legality, yet allowed
some of the worst features of patriarchalism to survive, including the treatment of
unattached (unowned) women as far game, huntable creatures. Disgrace points to
a context where women are regarded as property, and are liable for protection
only insofar as they belong to men” (440).
Feminism then, in regards to In the Heart of the Country and Disgrace can be understood through an analysis of how Magda and Lucy’s sense of identity are a deeply rooted response to larger socio-political issues. Both Magda and Lucy are forced to partake in certain social constructs because of the society in which they live. Both Magda and Lucy have dismal fates. As Monique Witting describes
“It is the fate of women to perform three-quarters of the work in society (in public
as well as in the private domain) plus the bodily work of reproduction according
to a preestablished rate. Being murdered, mutilated, physically and mentally
tortured and abused. Being raped, being battered, and being forced to marry is the
fate of women. And fate supposedly cannot be changed. Women do not know
that they are totally dominated by men and when they acknowledge the fact, they
can ‘hardly believe it’. And often, as a last recourse before the bare and crude
reality, they refuse to believe that men dominate them with full knowledge (for
oppression is far more hideous for the oppressed than for the oppressors). Men,
on the other hand, know perfectly well that they are dominating women…and are
trained to do it. They do not need to express it all the time for open can scarcely
talk of domination over what one owns” (125).
This is something that appears to be blatantly clear in both texts. Through the rapes in both texts and through the ways in which both women remain stuck in their patriarchal societies, little seems to improve for Magda or Lucy. The act of sex, represented by the rapes, oppresses both women as Witting argues “There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside) of society” (Witting 124). The act of sexual violence perpetuates a sense of anti-feminism within both novels and confines both Magda and Lucy to their places in society. Gender serves as a greater commentary on the social problems of South Africa, as the women, one disenfranchised group portrayed in the variety of Coetzee’s texts, has little room for success. The men in the texts all appear to be beneficiaries of this world, the only man that makes any inclination towards change is David Lurie, who’s change is arguably minute and only slightly changed through the horrors that befall on Lucy.
(L)Imitations of Freedom 