J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: A Silenced Trauma Narrative
Introduction/Thesis
In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth discusses how often “texts of… literature…both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience” (4). Much of J. M. Coetzee’s earlier work directly addresses traumatic experiences of those affected by historical and powerful patriarchal regimes. For example, Dusklands is a two part narrative that reflects two versions of patriarchy oppression. The first part addresses the traumatic aftereffects of a man who has to document and justify the crimes imposed upon the victims of the Vietnam War. The second part focuses on a time in history when Dutch colonizers brutalized South African natives during a hunting expedition. Waiting for the Barbarians is perhaps Coetzee’s most graphic representation of both the victims and victimizers of a patriarchal regime and its imposition of power upon the “barbarians” of a foreign land. In Michael K., Coetzee focuses on the victims of apartheid through the story of an escaped black man whose only desire is to be left alone and live off his mother’s native land. In much of his work, Coetzee addresses those involved in some way due to the attempted takeover of an imperialistic patriarchal force.
Furthermore, often Coetzee’s narratives specifically address female victims of assault by brutal patriarchies. The first part of Dusklands alludes to a photograph of a young Vietnamese girl, one who is “tiny and slim, possibly even a child” (13), being raped by an American serviceman. The second part reveals two incidents that are recalled by Dutch colonist, Jacobus Coetzee. In one, he describes watching one of his men raping a Hottentot child, and in another, he recalls his own act of intercourse with a captured bushman girl which serves both to consolidate his power and to eliminate her: “You have become power itself now and she is nothing, a rag you wipe yourself on and throw away” (61). In the Heart of the Country is the story of a lonely and delusional spinster isolated on a sheep farm in a barren country whose only value is to fulfill the demands of her cold and unloving father. A major plot of Waiting for the Barbarians surrounds the story of a barbarian girl and her brutalization by Colonel Joll and his henchmen from the Third Bureau. Moreover, many of Coetzee’s female victims are rendered without a voice, unable to speak of the violent atrocities imposed on them, such as the voiceless Vietnamese girl in Dusklands who is only seen in a photograph, and the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians who refuses to talk about her brutal ordeal. In the Heart of the Country, Magda often complains about her inability to voice her feelings and be heard. Enveloped and formed in the web of patriarchy, Magda believes that her father sees her as “zero” and sees herself as one of many such subjected women: “The land is filled with melancholy spinsters like me, lost to history” (3). Even Susan Barton in Foe cannot write her own story but instead enlists the man, Crusoe, to write it for her.
Yet, perhaps the most powerful statement Coetzee makes about silenced female victims is in his novel, Disgrace, which addresses two female victims of sexual assault by two aspects of patriarchal power in a post-apartheid setting. Through the “not rape, not quite” (25) of Melanie and the brutal gang rape of Lucy, Coetzee makes a strong statement about a history of imposed silence and brutality on a gender that has undergone years of oppression at the hands of patriarchy. Cathy Caruth claims that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that the effects of the sexual assault by the female victims in Disgrace parallel the effects of trauma suffered by the female victims of the apartheid and post-apartheid settings. Like many victims of traumatic sexual assault, both Melanie and Lucy withdraw into a world of suppression and silence because they cannot put into words the unspeakable acts they have suffered. Likewise, the female victims of apartheid and post-apartheid were silenced and rendered unable to verbally articulate the many atrocities imposed upon them. Disgrace is a rape trauma narrative which focuses not on the attack so much as on its stifled and silenced response to the attack which provides a grim statement about a gender that remains voiceless in a country striving for independence and autonomy.
Trauma Theory
Although this paper will focus on the trauma narrative of Disgrace as it represents the silenced female population by a dominating patriarchal order, it is important to first look at how trauma has played a role in the development of the violence that South Africa is facing today.
Because history and trauma are never simply one’s own, the trauma narrative pertains to a nation as it does to the nation’s individuals (Caruth 24). The victims of apartheid are often forced to come to terms with their experiences and often demonstrate the reactions of many victims of trauma. Trauma expert Bessel A. Van der Kolk states, “Traumatized people often fail to maintain a personal sense of significance…they often identify with the aggressor and express hate for people who remind them of their own helplessness” (197). It can be said that the increase in violence in South Africa, especially against women and children, is an aftermath of the traumatic loss of power that the black male experienced during apartheid.
Furthermore, Van der Kolk claims, “Reenactment of one’s own victimization seems to be a major cause of the cycle of violence” that often occurs to victims of trauma (199). After enduring years of racialized suppression and humiliation, many male victims of apartheid want to regain the power they feel so important to their patriarchal identities, a power they lost under the regime of apartheid. This mindset represents the oppressive patriarchal norm of both the apartheid and post-apartheid setting:
In South Africa, violence has become normative and, to a large extent, accepted rather than challenged…it is presented as one of the few ways that township men have to assert their masculinity…it has been suggested that men are often reacting as victims themselves and have to take on a persona that serves as a coping mechanism for the risks and dangers of everyday working lives … leading them to disregard their safety from HIV/AIDS and to perpetrate violence against those weaker than themselves. (Outwater et al. 139)
Consequently, South Africa has the highest ratio of reported rape cases per 100,000 people, yet this represents only a small amount of the enormity of sexual violence that is committed as most sexual abuse cases does not get reported to police (Outwater et al. 139). To this day, “[t]he use of certain forms of violence by men to control and punish women in particular situations is perceived as socially acceptable to all ages of both sexes” (qtd. in Outwater et al. 140). Unfortunately, the methods used to usurp power by the patriarchy are reenactments of their own victimization which, in turn, victimizes women in the domestic setting.
There have been numerous studies about the recovery process of victims of various kinds of traumatic experiences. “Because the traumatic syndromes have basic features in common, the recovery process also follows a common pathway” (Herman 3). The recovery process involves establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community. For the trauma victim, there is a “privileged moment of insight when repressed ideas, feelings, and memories surface into consciousness” (Herman 2). It is through this insight that can best promote the victim’s healing process. Consequently, trauma experts emphasize the importance of reconstructing the trauma story in order to promote healing. Reconnecting traumatic episodic fragments in order to reconstruct history and then making meaning of their present symptoms on the light of past events, provides a big step towards a trauma victim’s recovery (Herman 3).
It has been often recognized that “the most common post-traumatic disorders are those not of men in war but of women in civilian life” (Herman 28). Unlike the male victims of apartheid, the violence towards women is in the sphere of their personal and private lives which, in turn, render women practically invisible. Trauma expert Judith Herman states that traumatic events “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experiences…and violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order” (51). Because of the stigma of sexual assault, women are reluctant to consciously come to terms with their traumas and often resort to a world of suppression and silence due to guilt and embarrassment. The female victims of rape often have no possibility of overcoming the barriers of denial, secrecy, and shame that their particular traumas invoke and their silence, in turn, provides a license to repeated forms of sexual and domestic exploitation. These female victims are caught in a spiral of reenactments of their traumas because they are unable to voice their trauma experiences which can help to end the brutalities they suffer.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Trauma Narrative for a Select Few
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in line with the basic Freudian insight that we are destined to repeat that which we fail to work through, was set up to "establish the truth in relation to past events as well as the motives for and circumstances in which horrendous violations of human rights occurred, and to make the findings known in order to prevent a repetition of such acts in the future" ( qtd. in Durrant 23). Many questions have been asked concerning whether the TRC is "simply dependent on establishing the factual truth in relation to past events or should require some demonstration of grief on the part of victims and perpetrators alike" (Durrant 23). Furthermore, many feel that the demand for amnesty by the South African perpetrators by testifying at the TRC hearings can be seen as a kind of “political form of amnesia” (Herman 242). In other words, the admittance alone without an act of remorse is simply not enough but instead provides exclusion of guilt to the perpetrators. This, in turn, may produce a later resumption of the reign of terror and violence towards the victims of apartheid.
Despite the criticisms given to the TRC process, the importance of giving a traumatic experience through a reconciliation of the past is detrimental to a victim’s recovery. The TRC was established to enable individuals and the nation of South Africa to overcome their traumatic legacies through the establishment of historical truth and the creation of collective memory. Those involved in commissions and associated memory projects have insisted that “truth-telling provides opportunities to heal, restore human dignity, demonstrate censure for horrific acts, encourage democracy, and promote reconciliation” (Stanley 528). Therefore, victims of apartheid were given an arena in which to voice the atrocities imposed upon them which can, in turn, aid them in the recovery process.
However, the TRC has received much criticism from various female trauma victims of South Africa because of the lack of voice they were given at the TRC hearings. In her article, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa”, Cheryl McEwen “explores attempts to build collective memory through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the relative absence of the agency of black women in this process” (741). There has been much discussion of the unfair practices of the TRC in that “[p]ervasive sexism constantly undercuts women’s equal rights and progressive legislation often seems far removed from the lived experiences of many women” (McEwen 741). McEwan doubts the effectiveness of the TRC hearings and argues that “truth commissions can only ‘reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse’” (741). In Trauma and Recovery, Dr. Judith Herman refers to policies of many political regimes: “It [is] difficult to recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home” (28). It is no wonder that the biggest single criticism of the TRC has come from feminists and women activists who have challenged the continued erasure of black women’s accounts of their lives under apartheid:
‘Given the support for women’s rights in the new government, it came as a surprise to many observers that when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began hearings in 1996 to look into human rights violations committed during the Apartheid era, women’s voices were not being heard, and the nation was getting a skewed look at the nature of human rights violations that had been committed’. (qtd. in McEwen 745)
It is because of the suppression of the female victims’ voice that survivors still regularly experience discrimination and inefficiency at the hands of the courts and police, and rape in particular remains hugely under-reported.
Furthermore, discourses of race, including accusations of racism, have stifled open scrutiny of the function of rape as a source of patriarchal control. Hannah Britton, in her article “Organising against Gender Violence in South Africa”, discusses the ineffectiveness of the TRC hearings due to patriarchal oppression in all facets of the government in the apartheid and post-apartheid settings:
It is perhaps due to this lack of complete trust on the part of women that, at the hearings, the suffering and the horror do not always turn into singing and celebration of survival and renewal, but tend to surface as fragmentary and resistant to language. Some of the testimonies were hopelessly disjointed, sometimes incoherent. Behind the women’ shuttered sentences clearly lay depth of personal suffering that were glimpsed but would never fully find their way into language: It is impossible, and perhaps unjust, to impose meaning and order on what is unspeakable. The fragment resists subordination to the whole, to the ordered system, and itself a critique of the overarching narrative of the new South African dispensation. Suffering often remains a black hole in their speech: During Apartheid, South African Defense Forces regularly raped black women, regardless of where they were civilian women or part of the guerrilla forces. Women were asterisk not only from the opposing, but often were also subjected to rape or harassment by their own comrades, even in the ANC camps. This abuse often went unreported out of loyalty to the overall fight against apartheid. (Britton 149)
The new South African government may have given voice to the traumatic experiences of the South African male population, but they have failed to include the atrocities imposed upon women simply because they are not considered acts of oppression. Consequently, this only gives them leave to resume their violence towards women in the new regime.
In her article, “‘These Women, They Force Us to Rape Them’: Rape as Narrative of Social Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, Helen Moffett states that, “[t]oday it is gender rankings that are maintained and women that are regulated” (132). Furthermore, Moffett also claims, “During the transition from war to peace, or from military dictatorship to democracy, the rhetoric of equality and rights tends to mask the reconstruction of patriarchal power” (134). Futhermore “{s]exual violence is an instrument of gender domination and is rarely driven by a racial agenda” (134). For example, one woman who has worked at a helpline for sexually assaulted or battered women talks of her experiences: “I listened to women who had been sexually assaulted or beaten not only by gangsters, illiterates, alcoholics and unemployed men, but by ministers of religion, teetotalers, university professors, doctors and lawyers” (qtd. in Moffett 134). It is clear that rape, like most crimes, is intra-communal, committed by insiders, not necessarily outsiders, and not by impoverished strangers, but usually by their equally middle-class and educated partners. Because many feel that the “denunciation of rape is an attack on black men” and such talk of rape is racist, the narrative of the racial accusations and assumptions that only black men rape women prevent the unmasking of patriarchal violence (Moffett 134).
Trauma, TRC, and Coetzee’s Disgrace
Coetzee reveals his concern about the silenced oppression of women through an oppressive rape trauma narrative which is the vital theme of his novel, Disgrace. To begin with, Disgrace is not told through the female victims but through David Lurie, an aging English professor who resides in Cape Town, South Africa. In fact, the female victims, Melanie and Lucy, have little, if any, voice throughout the novel. Lurie begins by saying that “he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). Lurie’s idea of solving the problem of sex is not through a desire of mutuality but instead domination, hence his relationships with women who are much younger and passive, first with a prostitute, Soraya, then with Melanie, a student thirty years his junior. His regard for Melanie’s obvious rejection of him is acknowledged but not taken seriously enough to consider suppressing his dominating pursuit of her. Lurie is a predator and an exploiter which can be seen in his relationship with Melanie. His seduction of Melanie can be seen as a kind of rape: He arrives at her flat and “has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette’s” (24). When Melanie protests and tells him “no, not now!”, yet still “nothing will stop him” (25). Although “she does not resist”, Melanie averts herself and still Lurie claims it is “Not rape, not quite that”, and admits, for Melanie, it is “undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core” (25). Lurie continues to pursue Melanie and, to his surprise, is eventually brought up on charges of misconduct.
Many critics view Coetzee’s criticisms of the TRC through David Lurie’s refusal to show remorse over his seduction of Melanie:
This is where a number of early commentators on the text have seen a parallel with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process; that of making a public apology for the past crimes of apartheid and receiving an amnesty for public admission of guilt. Interestingly, remorse was not considered part of the TRC process, as it was deemed too difficult to measure its sincerity. Lurie refuses public repentance, drawing a distinction for the tribunal between a “secular plea” of guilty, and the more spiritual realm of repentance which David believes to be “another universe of discourse”, that of the soul. (Kossew)
Lurie believes that he has a right to his uncontrollable desires and insists he has become “a servant of Eros” (52) which he uses as his excuse for his ungovernable impulses while preying upon young and desirable women. By doing this, Lurie distances himself from the blame through use of a universal tale, one he is destined to repeat. Although it is not mentioned as to why she is absent, it may be assumed that Melanie’s refusal to be present at the hearing is a result of shame, guilt, and intimidation from a patriarchy that represents power in the university system, a typical narrative that many victims of sexual assault give in to. Additionally, Melanie’s absence almost invalidates her accusations and further emphasizes the oppressed victim’s inability to be heard. Moreover, Lurie’s hearing represents the insincerity of the TRC process which ironically distances the perpetrator from the crime.
When his daughter is brutally gang raped by three black men, Lurie cannot admit remorse for his desires with a vulnerable and younger female because he considers his involvement with Melanie “not rape, not quite that” (25). Instead, Lurie sees no connection and is outraged over the attack on Lucy and cannot understand her need for silence when she refuses to report the rape. Instead, Lurie attempts to dominate what she has decided is best for herself. He pictures Lucy’s assailants: “They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket. Too ashamed, they will say to each other, too ashamed to tell, and they will chuckle luxuriously, recollecting their exploit” (110). What Lurie fails to see is the silence that Lucy chooses is what Melanie felt propelled to choose in terms of her own sexual assault. His own recollections of his past conquests with women are much like what he imagines about the three rapists’ recollection about their own exploits with Lucy in the wake of Lucy’s silence. Although he cannot understand the charges hurled against him by Melanie’s family, as a father, Lurie wants Lucy to stand up to her accusers and press charges.
Unfortunately, both Melanie and Lucy’s refusal to stand up against their oppressors echo society’s response to gendered crimes such as rape and domestic violence in many patriarchal societies. Lucy knows “that evidence of autonomy and agency in a victim of sexual violence is always already compromising, since its absence is held against the victim as potential consent while its presence… is seen as taking away from—if not outright denying the scope and reality of the violation” (Moffett 76). Melanie and Lucy, like many women of sexual assault, are caught in a difficult position and so they choose silence. This is seen when Lucy states that “if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself” (133). Additionally, Lurie’s ex-wife states that,“trials are not about principles; they are about how well you put yourself across” (188). Lurie’s ex-wife realizes the fact that it is individual performance determined by gender and race, and not justice that perpetuates the legal system. Like many women in South Africa, Melanie and Lucy have no individual credibility because they are women in a world dominated by a powerful patriarchy, even with the change South Africa promises to make for its entire people.
Various critics claim that narratives about rape continue to be rewritten as stories about race rather than gender, which can only provide a back seat to the actual act of sexual assault on women. Furthermore, these rape narratives demonize black men, harden racial barriers, and greatly hamper educational efforts to disclose the gender violence that are at the crux of the narrative. Consequently, many critics claim that Disgrace “reproduces and perpetuates stereotypical representations of black and white relationships in South Africa” (Mardorossian 73). In her article, “Rape and the Violence of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”, Carine M. Mardorossian claims that through his “skillful use of narration and juxtaposition, Coetzee takes a horrific scene of violence and urges readers to view it not as the black hole of analysis, but as an opportunity to overhaul normative approaches to rape, justice, and human relationships” (74). Coetzee uses the two sexual offenses in the novel, by their overt representation of not being similar, to show how an act is decriminalized although they both are a sexually violent act against a woman’s will. Mardorossian strongly posits that Coetzee urges readers “to rethink not just the assumptions through which black on white rape is viewed…but also the deeply racialized way in which rape is naturalized precisely as a black on white crime (thus decriminalizing white on white or white on black sexual violence)” (74). At first, the reader is drawn to sympathize with Lurie’s thwarted attentions towards Melanie. After all, he is a white, educated, aging male at the mercy of his “impulses he could not resist” (Disgrace 53). But as the rape narrative moves forward, the reader cannot help but question Lurie’s attempt to not realize how his own conduct indirectly mirrors Lucy’ violent rape. It is no wonder that Lurie later appears at Melanie’s parents’ doorstep in order to apologize for his own deplorable acts against their daughter.
Furthermore, contemporary sexual violence in South Africa is fuelled by justificatory narratives that are rooted in apartheid practices that legitimize violence by the dominant group against the disempowered (women), not only in overtly political arenas, but in social, informal and domestic spaces. In Disgrace, Coetzee is writing not only about race but about gender oppression:
In South Africa, gender rankings are maintained and women regulated through rape, the most intimate form of violence. Thus, in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa, sexual violence has become a socially endorsed punitive project for maintaining patriarchal order. Men use rape to inscribe subordinate status on to an intimately know ‘Other’—women. This is generally and globally true of rape, but in the case of South Africa, such activities draw on apartheid practices of control that have permeated all sectors of society. (Moffett )
Coetzee is using a rape narrative to not only show the effects of trauma on a suppressed race, but also about how the rape narrative has the ability to show gender oppression in both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. “As historians have shown, the way rape has been brought to the public’s attention since the nineteenth century has primarily been through racism. In the United States, for instance, fraudulent rape charges were routinely invoked as grounds for lynching of black men” (Mardorossian 75). Unfortunately, Lucy is trying to reverse this very act of racism by choosing silence in order not to invoke a racial controversy pertaining to her rape. Thus, her duty to cover up for the boy, Pollux, even when he is dangerously violent is the result of her attempting to pay penance for the wrongs of apartheid. However, it still does not do anything to provide awareness of the actual act of violence imposed upon her as a woman. “What if…What if that is the price one has to pay for staying on?” (158). This shows a traumatized woman attempting to make sense of what has happened to her, to make her experience meaningful by construing it in some sense as deserved. Coetzee is not insisting that the price whites must pay for “staying on” in South Africa is “Subjection. Subjection”(159), but he is instead making a statement about the price that many female victims of patriarchal politics have to pay with their silence.
Furthermore, it is no coincidence that the very name, Pollux, represents a connection to the myth about the rape performed by two brothers, Castor and Pollux, who “‘ravished and carried away Phoebe and Phoebe’s sister’ Hilaira, the daughters of King Leucippus’” (qtd. in Franssen). Apart from the myth’s featuring two rapists and two victims, the situation in the novel is similar to that of Pollux in the myth: “[L]ike his mythological namesake, Pollux has taken part in a gang rape, and he is called to account for this by a man who has a proprietary interest in the victim, in this case the father” (Franssen 241). Like Lurie’s attachment to the classical hero who is controlled by Eros, Pollux symbolizes a modern figure that is using a classical hero in order to justify his actions against a woman: [T]he book shows the sordidness of all rapes, classical and modern” (Franssen 241).
In her article, “Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” Lucy Valerie Graham claims that “the central incidents in both narrative settings of Disgrace are acts of sexual violation, but notably, in each case, the experience of the violated body is absent, hidden from the reader” (438). Melanie’s and Lucy’s silence provides a statement on the condition of women who are not given a voice in a country dominated by patriarchy which makes Disgrace a statement on sexual violence in black South Africa and in the white liberal context of the university. Although Lurie acknowledges that his sexual violation of a student, Melanie Isaacs, was ‘undesired’ by her, he maintains it was “[n]ot rape, not quite that” (Disgrace 25). During the disciplinary hearing that ensues, Melanie’s account never reaches the reader, and Lurie, who refuses to defend himself, is accused of being “fundamentally evasive” (Disgrace 50). In the wake of the farm-attack, Lucy asks Lurie to tell only his story: “I tell what happened to me” (Disgrace 99), which ironically, Lucy does not tell and remains resolutely silent about her experience.
Additionally, while making allusions to Disgrace, rape narratives have been strongly criticized by the government and President Thabo Mbeki, in that they were declared racist. Such criticisms show no regard for how rape narratives instead exemplify the oppression of women. “The government’s denial of sexual violence as a serious social problem in South Africa has been extremely disturbing, but it is useful to place Mbeki’s objections in relation to a history where rape narratives have been deployed for racist ends” (Graham 434). Throughout its history, the rape narrative about a black man’s rape of a white woman was thought to be the result of the “symptoms of the black peril” (Graham 435). Black peril was sensationalized stories of white anxieties in times of social and economic crisis, a way of demonizing black men. These anxieties replayed in the transition period of the 1990’s. The African National Congress, or ANC’s allusion to Disgrace is not unremarkable or incidental. In short, it seems to reveal extreme discomfort with the interracial gang that occurs in the novel. In Disgrace, Coetzee self-consciously performs a subversion of the “black peril” narrative—by simultaneously scripting what is referred to as “the white peril”, the hidden sexual exploitation of black women by white men that has existed for centuries” (Plaatje 283). Black peril imagery was a common feature of racist political discourse throughout the twentieth century, the subversive status of “white peril” literature confirmed by attitudes of apartheid censors.
Only a few years earlier, In the Heart of the Country was under scrutiny, partly for representing an apparent rape of a white woman by a black farm-worker as well as the white farmer’s coercion of the black female servant. In Disgrace, Coetzee plays on these same racialized parameters. David Lurie translates Melanie’s name as “the dark one” (18) while Lucy’s name has associations with light. Playing on tropes of darkness and light, the names of the two women expose “black peril “ stereotypes and the residual threat of the “white peril that prevailed under colonialism and apartheid. Lurie has a history of desiring “exotic women” and assumes that he has the right to purchase or possess their bodies without being responsible for them or respecting the lives they live (Graham 437). Many white men in colonial South Africa exploited “colored concubines without offering the women long-term security, or caring whether or not they became pregnant” (Plaatje 277). Rather than confirming “black peril stereotypes, Lucy’s name reveals that these have been based on “up-holding” the purity of white women (Graham 437). The sexual violation of Lucy further highlights a history tainted by racial injustice, by possession and dispossession, where white women have been signs of that which was not exchanged between men in different racial groups. At the same time, Coetzee demonstrates very clearly that Lurie is blind to the history of his own actions and, during the disciplinary hearing in Disgrace, Farodia Rassool comments on Lurie’s’ refusal to acknowledge “the long history of exploitation of which his treatment of Melanie is a part” (53).
The two rapes that take place in Disgrace reveal the power dynamics in each setting, and in the respective literary modes. Lurie’s misuse of Melanie exposes power operating at the level of gender and at an institutional level. Rassool’s comment at the hearing could refer to a history where white men have sexually exploited black women, and it could also point to abuses of power in the university that are as old as the academic profession. Immersed in a falsifying Romantic tradition, David speculates that “beauty does not belong to itself” (16). And thus justifies his underlying assumption, as Melanie’s educator, that she is somehow his property. This is revealed when he watches her in a play, claiming her achievements as his own: “When they laugh at Melanie’s lines he cannot resist a flush of pride. Mine! He would like to say to them … as if she were his daughter” (191). Thinking of her as an object he owns emphasizes Lurie’s relationship with Melanie in Disgrace as a betrayal of ethical responsibility, as he violates and will not take responsibility for her as an embodied human being. Although Lurie protests to the contrary, the act that he commits is rape, because it is undesired by the girl and involves an abuse of her. One may contrast Lurie’s concern for Lucy’s body after she is raped and he wants her to have IIV and pregnancy tests to his lack of concern for Melanie Isaacs, whom her forces himself upon after his sexual relationship with Soraya, a prostitute.
While some believe that Disgrace is a novel inciting a racism that feeds national hysteria while reflecting white anxieties of the post-apartheid, it is important to point out that instead Coetzee is merely pointing to the inability to openly discuss issues of gender; therefore, any discussion of rape is often subsumed in narratives about race or class, not gender. The truth is that the majority of rapists in South Africa are black only because the majority of the South African population is black. Ten years of transformation have nevertheless failed to deconstruct the old apartheid narrative of sexual violence that demonizes black men as incontinent savages, lusting after forbidden white flesh, with the result that opens discussion of a major problem is at a standstill. Gender is at the heart of this acute social problem. One hears repeatedly that “apartheid and its ills ‘emasculated’ black men, left them ‘impotent’ and experiencing a ‘crisis of masculinity’, and although these remarks are problematically embedded in unquestioned patriarchal discourses, they carry a grain of truth… but these explanations explicitly exclude white men, thus implying – however unwittingly – that they do not rape” (Moffett 135).
Moffett discusses “the complex blend of peer and societal pressures men experience regarding the need to ‘police’ feminine subversion exists against a backdrop that tells them that rape is a ‘safe’ crime to commit (and perhaps not a real crime after all)…and any shame attached to the act will adhere to the victim, not themselves” (129). In short, many men rape not because they want to or are tempted to do so, but because society tells them they can, and in some cases, they should do so with impunity in order to keep the female in check. This is demonstrated in Petrus’ harboring the villain who raped Lucy. Before her rape, Lucy is a woman who has asserted her own will. She survives on her own, keeps a farm and pays her bills without any assistance from patriarchy, not even from her own father, Lurie. Her rape is a socially approved project to keep her within certain boundaries and categories as well as in a state of continuous but necessary fear. Furthermore, it promotes Petrus’ desire to take the land he feels he has been robbed of.
Disgrace represents how women are “regarded as property and are liable for protection only insofar as they belong to men” (Graham 439). Graham states, “As a lesbian, Lucy would be regarded as “unowned” and therefore “unable”, and there is even a suggestion that her sexuality may have provoked her attackers (439). Lucy insists that in South Africa, “in this place, at this time”, the violation she has suffered cannot be a public matter (Disgrace 112). Therefore, “her refusal to report the crime may represent a rather extreme refusal to play a part in a history of oppression” (Graham 439). This does not, however, explain the complete absence of her story in the narrative structure of Disgrace. Similarly, the reader never hears Melanie’s story, and the accounts of the two women are significantly absent in each narrative setting. Rape is often depicted as “unspeakable” as severed from articulation and literary references to hidden rape stories cannot but bring into relief the complex relationship between literary silences and the aftermath of actual violation (Graham 439). Additionally, “[r]eading sexual violence requires listening not only to who speaks and in what circumstances, but who does not speak and why” (Higgins and Silver 3). Elision of the scene of violence in texts about rape both emphasizes the violence and suggests the possibility of making it visible (Higgins and Silver 3). Graham claims, “Coetzee presupposes and doubles back on such “ambivalence’, and not only is his reticence self-reflexive, it also leaves a certain responsibility with the reader” (434).
Conclusion
Although some critics claim that Coetzee, in Disgrace, insists that the price whites must pay for “staying on” in South Africa is “Subjection. Subjection” (159), he implies instead that it is the price that women have to pay through their suppression of their trauma in a society suppressed by patriarchal boundaries. Disgrace is more about the effects of collective trauma as it pertains to the victims of apartheid in the post apartheid setting with emphasis on the violence against women promoted by gender inequality today. Furthermore, rationalizing intimate violence is often used as a control mechanism when the group being violated is believed to be inferior, yet absolutely necessary to the continued comfort and survival of those in power: women are needed not only to provide conventional labor, but domestic chores and child-raising as well. It can thus be argued that political space on all sides of the spectrum for women in South Africa has invariably been carved out in ways that do not undermine the variety of interlocking patriarchies in society. In the process, the tension between validating women’s rights to full citizenship and political participation without revising their social subordination has created a new variation on the disjuncture between the private and the public realms typical of capitalist patriarchal systems. South African women are frequently reminded that their equality in the public domain does not translate into equality in the private domain, an arena that remains highly stratified and hierarchically structured.
South African women are sick of hearing that apartheid is to blame for the brutality that men enforce upon them. Rape may be about many things, including the toxic after-effects of apartheid, but it is probably one of the few burning social issues in South Africa that is fuelled not by narrative about race, but rather by patriarchal imperatives. The issue of rape is a problem of the making of patriarchal societies. In the task that lies ahead, nothing less than the dismantling of patriarchies on a global scale is a starting point for women. More useful goals for women are to establish freedom and autonomy in South Africa’s transformation process than political equality. After the end of apartheid, the position and the power of women in society can be reconfigured only if sexism and patriarchy, which supported the old order are still present, are removed. Of course, the kind of awareness that is dominant in Coetzee’s themes can provide an opening to cessation of this downhill spiral that the effects of trauma produce. Lurie does goes through a catharsis in the end that indicates the importance of awareness. He is willing to relinquish his hold on Lucy by accepting, although reluctantly, her decision to marry Petrus in order to provide a name for the child she is carrying.
By dissolving the clear boundaries of identity between Lurie and the men who rape Lucy, Disgrace becomes a novel about the female victims of the trauma of sexual assault and the patriarchal attempts to silence these victims. Like the three black men, Lurie is a rapist because his sexually aggressive act towards Melanie is, in fact, rape. Consequently, both Melanie and Lucy become the symbolic scapegoat caught within this cycle of violence by patriarchal power. Furthermore, although Coetzee is in no way condoning the act of violence by the black population against a white woman in order to regain power, he is instead showing the likely effects of the anger and rage that come out of apartheid which, in turn, produce a repetitive cycle of violent acts upon those who are deemed vulnerable and less likely to voice a protest. “Lucy’s refusal to speak about her experience certainly does not empower her and means that her story belongs to her rapists” (Graham 442). It is “not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners” (Disgrace 155). Lucy’s silence means that her rapists are “getting away with” their crime (Disgrace 158). Lucy’s life turns from what was once promising and hopeful to one that is shattered as she withdraws into a life which conforms to an order of patriarchal suppression that has only displaced the one already established during apartheid. In turn, this leaves little hope for inclusion for all women in post-apartheid South Africa.
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