According to Beauvoir women have the possibility of change through her pregnancy because “It is in maternity that woman fulfills her physiological destiny; it is her natural ‘calling’ since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species” (20). It is through motherhood that “She is no longer an object subservient to a subject; she is no longer a subject afflicted with the anxiety that accompanies liberty, she is one with that equivocal reality: life. Her body is at last her own, since it exists for the child who belongs to her. Society recognizes her right of possession and invests it, moreover, with a sacred character” (21). Perhaps in understanding this concept of motherhood something good can at least come to Lucy. Although the child is born out of rape and violence, and the way it was conceived was unwanted, the chance of motherhood allows Lucy to become a woman and perhaps even poses a threat to masculinity. Like Magda then, Lucy functions within patriarchal order but simultaneously functions outside of it. Though Magda challenges patriarchy through the body of her writing Lucy perhaps challenges patriarchy through her body that carries her unborn child. Perhaps Lucy is able to challenge patriarchy because in carrying a child she can do something that man cannot. Further her baby will be of mixed race, perhaps suggesting a hope for the future, as the child may represent something unified.
Effectively then both In the Heart of the Country and Disgrace, like many of Coetzee’s other texts, mark worlds of political and social unrest where there is no clear definition of whether things are entirely one way or entirely the opposite. The portrayals of both Magda and Lucy are as entirely anti-feminist as they are Feminist. Both women maintain certain qualities that make it difficult to cast them as either one way or the other. Though far apart in years of publication, In The Heart of the Country published early in Coetzee’s career and Disgrace much later, both texts create worlds of female oppression and subjectivity where rape is a lens through which the violence and brutality of Post-Apartheid South Africa can be depicted.
As this paper has illustrated Lucy and Magda attempt to find their own forms of identity despite the worlds that they live in. In understanding how French Feminism, namely the works of Beauvoir and Witting, can be used as a theoretical background to In the Heart of the Country and Disgrace this paper has explored how female constructs of gender and identity operate under the patriarchal society of South Africa, not as a separate entity used to understand a people but rather one that constantly overlaps with issues of race and class. Through all of this dueling imagery Coetzee describes South Africa, and life there, as a place where all we can do is attempt to understand the concepts of alterity and otherness. There is no one answer or definition but rather South Africa appears a place where gender, race and identity, right versus wrong are often complicated and misunderstood through our inabilities to understand each other.
(L)Imitations of Freedom 