Sexuality and Animals in Coetzee's Disgrace - Essay Example

20 October Sexuality and Animals in Coetzee's Disgrace Racial struggles continue at postapartheid Africa, as poverty and social inequality persist and shape people’s relations with the opposite race and gender. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace explores the meaning of race, gender, and social class in this society. In this novel, Professor David Lurie disgraces himself with a rape case involving a young student, where afterwards, he is discharged from his teaching post. He lives with his daughter Lucy, until an unfortunate event occurs. Several black men attack them and rape Lucy, which demonstrates another point of disgrace in Lurie’s life. In Disgrace, Coetzee uses animals as metaphors for the human experiences of pain and suffering because it removes white guilt and racial violence by putting it in the context of animal welfare, while his allusion to several literary works relate to sexuality because of the connection between rape and sexual desire, and the history of postapartheid South Africa’s continuing racial, gender, and class inequalities. Dogs represent the need for taking care of the vulnerable and the rise of violence, which is connected to the colonization’s traumatic effects in South Africa. Gal asserts that animals explore the “suffering” of the blacks after colonization, where white guilt is diluted through animal violence (243). Lurie leaves the city and goes to his daughter Lucy, who lives at a far-flung country farm. He is surprised that Lucy is alone and managing a boarding-kennel organization for watchdogs: “The pets tend to come in during the summer holidays…I’m thinking of branching into cats. I’m just not set up for them yet” (Coetzee 61). The housedogs are divided along cultural differences, in the same way that society is (Gal 243). Moreover, these differences emphasize Coetzee’s aim of demarcating the roles of stewardship and the oppressed. Lurie asks his daughter if she is nervous that she is alone, and Lucy answers: “There are the dogs. Dogs still mean something. The more dogs the more deterrence. Anyhow, if there were to be a break-in, I don’t see that two people would be better than one” (Coetzee 60). She undervalues her need for protection because for her, the dogs need protection more than humans. This emotion exposes the feeling of vulnerability in an uncertain socioeconomic condition. The violent treatment against the dogs aligns with the violence that Lurie and Lucy experience, as well as the general violence in society, which produces much pain and suffering for the latter. Lurie describes the attacks that infiltrate his consciousness. For all the slain dogs, Lurie feels their pain. More so, he senses the incoming threat, which is ominous and devastating. They might not experience their brains being blown off, but the brutal killing of the dogs foreshadows the materialization of their fears. In addition, the most critical motif is the innocence of the animals. The dogs are paying for their existence in “this field of human landmines,” where “the dogs’ lost ‘naturalness’ in Disgrace is essential for figuring the human characters in this text” (Gal 244). People deal with violence; they are the actors or the receivers, sometimes both, where the bully-victim exemplifies the ruinous effects of violence on postapartheid people. The dogs signify the sacrificed. They are the objects being removed in the process of colonization. They are people who have suffered pain and suffering under the repressive rule of the whites. Apart from the use of animals as metaphors for pain and suffering, Coetzee’s allusion to several literary works relate to sexuality because of the connection between rape and sexual desire and social stratification. Cooper presents her analysis regarding sexual desire in Disgrace: “Coetzee engages the complex social relations of the ‘new’ South Africa through sexuality as a code for or vocabulary of change” (23). Sex becomes a source of tension that is also present in South African society, where the tension is between those with power and the powerless. While seducing Melanie, Lurie quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1: “From fairest creatures we desire increase …that thereby beauty’s rose might never die” (Coetzee 16). He expresses his sexual crisis through his literary words, where these words help him release his sexual desires too. Lurie tries to write an opera on Byron’s last years in Italy, which represents the “diegesis of the writer/artist” (Cooper 24). His writing project is the mise en abyme of Coetzee’s own of two minds attempt in Disgrace to describe contemporary South Africa through the receptivity of a “white scholar steeped in the sort of Eurocentric education that the British colonial endeavor bequeathed” (Cooper 24). In Disgrace, aesthetic knowledge impacts the white man’s historical consciousness to touching consequences. Symbols in Anglo-European aesthetic literature help understand the situation of desire in the novel. In Africa, and particularly in contemporary South Africa, the erotic principles of Western art tend to separate from their signifiers. Lurie sees his lust for Melanie as having an instrumental effect: “She does not own herself; perhaps he does not own himself either” (Coetzee 18). The hunt stands for his desire, where “the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves” (Coetzee 25), indicates the pursuit of sexual desire, even if it means that it is forced, or leads to rape. The problems in his sexuality can be connected to the political incursions of colonization. Because of centuries of different oppressive rulings, the black people are divided and confused of their identity and directions. They are raped from their freedoms and have somehow lost their political abilities in directing their future. Disgrace pursues the intricate interactions of gender, class, and ethnicity in the symbolic uses of legal and moral norms. Mardorossian argues for the importance of deeply analyzing the political implications of hiding rape in Lucy’s case. Lucy cannot adequately explain her decision to not report the rape the police: “I can’t talk any more, David, I just can’t…I know I am not being clear. I wish I could explain but I can’t” (Coetzee 155). She may not possibly be able to rationally express that to protect her gender; she needs to be silent. Rape, since the nineteenth century, projects racial struggles through the lynching of adult and adolescents black men (Mardorossian 75). Likewise, in South Africa, and until the elimination of the death penalty, “more black men were hanged for raping white women than white men for raping black women,” and this reality produces literary representations that manifest the “hierarchies of oppression and privileged ontological positions that problematically rely on binaries such as black and white” (Mardorossian 76). The binaries reflect the torturous act of rape as the culmination of gender, class, and racial divisions in South Africa. Sexuality and animals in Disgrace describe how sex and rape hide the white guilt in postapartheid South Africa. The power relations in rape and gender connections implicate the power relations in society. The dogs are treated inferiorly because of their differences from humans. The cultural differences in animals signify binary racial tensions. Social class and gender cause social problems too because of their intersections with racial differences and social hierarchies. Hence, Disgrace is as much about the rape of the oppressed, as it is about the rape of women in postapartheid South Africa. Works Cited Coetzee, John. Disgrace. New York: Viking, 1999. Print. Cooper, Pamela. “Metamorphosis and Sexuality: Reading the Strange Passions of Disgrace.” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (2005): 22-39. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. Gal, Noam. “A Note on the Use of Animals for Remapping Victimhood in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.”African Identities 6.3 (Aug. 2008): 241-252. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. Mardorossian, Carine M. “Rape and the Violence of Representation in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace.” Research in African Literatures 42.4 (2011): 72-83. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Oct. 2012. Read More