Introduction: Gendered Violence, Liminality, and South African Writing

Abstract

A controversial novel that has generated a considerable amount of critical notice since its publication at the turn of the century, J.M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning Disgrace (1999) attracts most attention for its problematic depiction of race and racial relations between white and black South Africa in the transition to post-apartheid—this is true even with regard to the controversy surrounding the depiction of Lucy’s rape.¹ There is, however, also a troubling power dynamic evidenced when it comes to gender and sex. This is most powerfully demonstrated in a central theme that permeates the novel: that is, the idea of contested ownership, particularly the ownership of women. In the novel, the two most prominent classifications of ownership are material on the one hand and on the other symbolic and they are explored in various forms, combinations, and permutations throughout. A symbolic economy of ownership, one that is concerned with the right to own one’s pain and the power of narration, is expressed in the second quote above where significantly the story of Lucy’s rape visits shame on her, nonetheless it belongs not to her, but to her rapists. This type of symbolic ownership, of course, has very real consequences for Lucy.

Everything in South Africa is like a mirror with two sides. One side reflects what you know best; the other side is a dark pool into which you must peer constantly to realise the strange and changing scenes it reflects.

—Hilda Bernstein, The World That Was Ours

She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for.

—J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace