A Study Of White Female Figures As The Other In J.M. Coetzee's Three Novels

John Maxwell Coetzee(1940-)is a famous contemporary South African novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.In his novels against the background of South Africa,Coetzee pays much attention to the misery of marginalized groups in the rise and fall of apartheid whose struggle and self-redemption in a colonial society are represented as the key points of his writings.Among the marginalized groups characterized by Coetzee,the white women as the Other are a special kind.Living in different social periods in South Africa,they experienced the oppression of patriarchy,identity crisis and spiritual dilemma.However,in their marginalized situation,they also strive to break through the predicament and reconstruct themselves with their rebellious spirit and discourse of feminine caring.Both in China and other countries,various studies of Coetzee' s works have been made on the predicament of white females as the Other,their identity crisis and spiritual dilemma,as well as their efforts to get themselves out of such predicament.Despite of rich achievements in such studies,almost none of them has made an overall and in-depth analysis of the white females' status as the Other and their efforts to overcome the plights in the context of South Africa' s social transformation from the perspectives of gender relations,power discourse and the conflicts and integration of civilizations.Enlightened by the feminist theories of the Other,identity theory and Foucault' s theory of the power of discourse,and with focus on white women in Coetzee' s novels,this thesis takes Magda in In the Heart of the Country(1982),Mrs.Curren in Age of Iron(1990),and Lucy in Disgrace(2000)as the object of study,trying to analyze the plights of the three white female characters as the Other,their identity crisis and spiritual dilemma,the reasons for their status of the Other and as well as the effortsthey made to get rid of Otherness at different periods of apartheid.In the different periods of time of apartheid system in South Africa,white women experienced the constantly marginalized situation of the Other both as females and whites.In order to get out of the situation of the Other and achieve self-identification,self-salvation and self-reconstruction,white women chose different ways from resistance to struggle to integration.Different results show Coetzee' s criticism of dichotomy in patriarchy and colonialism behind racial discrimination and racial violence in his writings.It also shows his concern over the living predicament of the marginalized white female group and their desire to achieve racial integration through caring and reconciliation discourses.