On Beyond the Representational Binary: Coetzee (and the Women) Take Wing

Abstract

This chapter reviews the dominant modes of female representation in the work of J. M. Coetzee, including those covered in this collection. It proposes that the fictional work be divided into a series of women-centred phases predominantly associated with the themes of embodiment, voice, and perspective or subjectivity. As this suggests, Coetzee’s favoured ways of ‘doing’ women—the woman as embodied consciousness and the woman as muse—subscribe to a fault to recognisable types and stereotypes of women, even though they may be significantly more complex as creations also. The chapter moves on to ponder the next stages that our thinking about Coetzee and women may take. It submits that new directions may involve seeking to go beyond the gender binary, and exploring forms of visitation and even divinity, as might be embodied in the long line of angelic or part-angelic figures that have processed through the pages of the work since Age of Iron, and, since the millennium, in an ever more focussed and convinced way.