Critique Of In The Heart Of The Country From The Perspective Of Feminism

J. M. Coetzee is one of the most important authors of South Africa, even of the whole world. He has written many valuable novels, and In the Heart of the Country is a special one, which narrates by a colonial woman who makes the whole text to be her dairies or her own story. In text, she tells her introspective and complicate meditation and her blazing passion of exploring freedom and happiness; she tells her dreary farmgirl’s life living in the cool stone house which lies in the heart of the country and her masterful father who always says NO and wooed his daughter when she was little; she tells her desires of sex and love and servants’slavish obedience and hidden animosity; she tells her hope to enter a greater world when she killed her father and her lyric calmness and poem of idyllic life when she is abandoned and hopeless. This novel is most difficult and forbidding among Coetzee’s writings, and therefore it has least readers and least critical attention. So far, there is little literary criticism about it, especially domestic’s. Therefore, more serious and thorough criticisms are necessarily needed, as the novel is very valuable, especially in the aspect of feminism. This inward-looking aspect of novel encourages a allegorical interpretation, in which the spinster Magda stands for South Africa and her women and also many other women like her, for example, Chinese women.This thesis analyzes in the heart of the country via the methods of feminist criticism and close reading. Magda publicizes her desires of expression, sexual passion and intimacy, as well as she revolts against patriarchy. However, this symbolic daughter of colonialism has her own difficult problem that she finally finds herself is in a terrible predicament and all hopes have gone.Chapter One analyzes Magda publicizes her own desires which are different from patriarchal women’s. Magda has the desire of expression, and she expresses herself in writing. Her dairies which also may be regarded as her creative story are fluidly organized and freely associative. She would like to be remembered and remarkably exist. She also wants to make conversation with people who live around. She has the desire of listening and being listened. As a bitter vestal, Magda’s sexual passion has been restrained and she feels very depressed. She wants to release her sexual passion and gain joyous vitality, or even ecstasy. Also, Magda is eager to gain intimacy in her life. Her family is so cold, and she wishes that her family could have a intimate relationship, and her father would love her. Magda, this white mistress, gets closed to her servants, and tries to create intimacy between maters and slaves. She loves this land which was colonized by her ancestors. Unlike her ancestors’ narrow love about pastoral tradition, she loves animals, plants, sunset and stones, and also the people living in this country, who would respond to mankind. She is eager to love and also be loved by soft scented loving mother and also others.Chapter Two analyzes Magda revolts against patriarchy. She challenges the authority of patriarchy. In her narration, father’s body is heavy, dumb, flaccid and decaying, and father’s phallus is a midget, a dwarf and an idiot son. She belittles the body of father’s body, so the corporeality of father, and destroys the symbol—phallus—of patriarchy. In text, Magda has two patricides, one by the weapon of Valkyries, and the other one by the two-bore shotgun. She forces father’s body to be absent in the earth. Magda reconstitutes the symbol of procreation and dispels the myth of patriarchy. Magda’s efforts of revolting against patriarchy also reflect in reforming the patriarchal discourse. She rejects her father’s discourse and seeks for a more equal discourse of her own. As revolting against patriarchy, she reconstitutes her own identity, and wants to find the real self. She is no longer accepting to be a slave controlled by her father. She refuses to be subordinate. She pursues freedom and happiness in poetic mind which resists patriarchal modes of thinking and writing.Chapter Three analyzes the terrible predicament which Magda has to face. Though Magda is an awakened woman, sometimes she must struggle against patriarchal ideology in her deep mind. As most people in this land are sleeping in the "comfortable" old ways, Magda must struggle against others’patriarchy ideology. Magda’s struggles finally failed. She stares other women’s bodies and her self s like patriarchal men. She values bodies by patriarchal rules and standards. She wants to discover who she is. She makes it up in order that it shall make her up. However, the ego in mirror is not her true self, and she only discovers fragments. She regards herself as a thin black beetle, an infant black shark, even never had animal integrity. She regards herself as a miserable black virgin, and wants to be man. She failed in reconstituting her identity. Magda wants to express her, but others’voice are silent, not only other women’s, but also her father’s and her servants’. As her father’s voice is absent, Magda can’t revolt against his soul and ideology and her efforts are doomed to be a failure. Also, her savants’ voices are absent, as they have been in the past and never want to discover a new life, so that Magda can’t get intimacy and love which she thirsts for in her monologue. Magda pursues freedom and happiness, and makes many choices for a better life. However, none of choices will take her to a happy ending in these harsh realities. Magda pursues to be equal and be rescued from being a castaway, but both of them are failed. Sometimes, Magda also yearns for old unequal life, and as a mistress she can have a sense of superiority. Magda is a masochist because that she is too eager to escape from loneliness, so that her concept of equality is half-baked. No one will save Magda, and she will live in the heart of the country with her father’s ghost—the patriarchy’s ghost—forever.