Female Voice In Rewriting Of The Canon

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in February9th1940in Cape Town. He is aDutch immigrant and grew up in the years when the apartheid policies formed andprevailed. In1969, Coetzee began his novel creation, and there are14publishednovels so far. Foe is his fifth novel which was published when the apartheid policiesprevailed. In this novel, Coetzee rewrote the western classical realism novel RobinsonCrusoe which was written by Daniel Defoe. Through the relationship between thefemale narrator Susan Barton and the men in the novel and Susan Barton’s reflectionsabout writing, it embodied Coetzee’s thinking and discussion of the identificationproblem of women who were under patriarchy discourse system, and the questioningand reflections of his authorship as a white male writer who grew up in the thirdworld. And he thought that the suppressed voice of women who were represented bySusan Barton and of the black who were represented by Friday in history should berestored.This paper consists of introduction, conclusion and four main parts. Theintroduction part introduces firstly the author and the novel; secondly it introduces thestudy situation at home and aboard; and finally it introduces the structure of this paper.The first chapter to the fourth chapter is the core part of this paper. The first quarter ofthe first chapter discusses about the missing of the female voice in western classicsfrom the perspective of western classics. The second quarter will compare about Foeand the western classic Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of feminism. The thirdsection will discuss the question whether women can speak in the western literature,which mainly use the theory of Spivak for instructions. The second chapter is mainlycombined with the text, analyzing the relationship between Susan Barton and thethree white men—Cruso, the captain and Mr.Foe—in Foe. The third chapter firstlyintroduces the history and predicament of female writing, and then combined with thesecond and third parts to explore the status of female writing through analyzing thepredicament which Susan Barton faced. The fourth chapter mainly discusses the contradictory and accordant relationship between Susan Barton who is a woman ofwhite race and Friday. Finally it’s the Conclusion. Coetzee, who is a white male writer,presented in the text his dilemma and his attention and concern about the socialproblems in South Africa. He hoped to restore the suppressed voice in the process ofhistory, but in the end he found himself unable to speak for them. The text didn’t saywhether Susan Barton had finished her novel. Who can retell their story to the end? Atlast, Coetzee returned the authority to those bodies that got hurt in the history. In thoseplaces where language will be eaten, only the body itself can retell the history.