John Maxwell Coetzee used the white woman narrator in three of his novels: In the
Heart of the Country (1979), Foe (1986) and Age of Iron (1990). Macaskill and
Colleran (1992) observe that Coetzee is “undermining” feminist discourse in order to
critique a “western feminism” (Anglo-American feminism in particular) that is inattentive
to the ramifications of its universalizing claims. Not only does Coetzee utilize feminist
discourse as a necessarily marginalized and complicit strategy, but also adopts feminine
symbols—fluidity, maternity, writing the body, silences, and weaving metaphors.
Coetzee’s white women narrators fall into two categories: those who see Coetzee’s
mimicry of the white woman’s voice as an appropriation of otherness, and those who see
the white woman’s voice as an appropriate vehicle or textual strategy for interrogating
structures of power, authority and language. Coetzee brings to the fore the differences
within feminism and his representations of his own self-positioning as not feminist but
feminized, in order to show how this informs his use of feminism and white women
narrators. |
