Disgrace
So we start this book with a picture of David Lurie’s sex life. I’ve had to read Coetzee once before, so the idea of a sexual old man with a taste for exotics didn’t disturb me as much as it probably should have. The first few pages flew by, and I was on to his stalker/pedophilic tendencies. Again, not quite a shock. I was still trying to stay objective when in walks Melanie, the spineless child. We were talking in class about whether she’s spineless or just intimidated by her professor; I think it’s a combination of both. The fact that she can’t seem to say “no” to Lurie flat out, only “not now” suggests that she’s never really said no to someone in her life. The presence of her boyfriend in class doesn’t bolster her strength or lend her courage to speak to Lurie, but rather diminishes her even farther. I think Melanie is one of those girls who tends to cling to a man stronger than she is with the idea that he’ll take care of her. It’s really all speculation, but this is the only kind of girl I can see reasonably getting into this situation with Lurie. One that will instinctively do anything before saying ‘no’, that will accept any fate she earns before having to admit that she’s gotten herself into something she can’t handle. Skipping ahead, this made Lurie’s imagining of her family filing the compaint, rather than her, much more acceptable.
We were also talking about the scene on pages 24-5, wondering about Melanie’s reactions and Lurie’s motives. I do still think it’s rape, but I’ve been thinking more about Lurie’s side of it. When he first meets her and they have dinner, at the end, on page 16, Lurie asks her to stay the night. It’s clear throughout the ‘date’ that she’s not smitten with him, but she doesnt’ give a concise ‘no’. She says ’why?’. Again, I really think this girl just has a problem saying ‘no’, but Lurie’s response was interesting. He says she ‘ought to’. That “a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” If David Lurie’s view of women is that they exist to share their virtues, then to a like mind his taking advantage of Melanie isn’t wrong at all. It’s his duty to appreciate what she brings into the world. Melanie’s own opinion wouldn’t matter; how it affected her wouldn’t matter. Only the physical would matter, and so far as the physical goes, it was the “slender hips of a twelve year old” versus those of a fifty-two year old man who towered over her. Perhaps it was gratifying sex for him, but his size added to her own, as well as her temperament, the fact that he was her professor, with more than just physical power on his side, and the fact that Lurie never does see what he’s done as wrong though the drastic and negative changes in Melanie all speak to the obvious, all point in the direction of rape. As of page 58, with Lurie’s complete refusal to even remotely apologize (not that it would matter, the damage already done), I understand his mindset, but I’m still ready to sit back and watch him deserve every bad thing that comes his way.
On a completely different note… you really have to hand it to Coetzee. Man’s brilliant.
Adding to your comment, David also explains that it’s really not his fault since he is just a subject of Aros…the force of love. I think this excuse, if that’s what he wants to call it, is just a cop-out for not taking respinsibility for his own actions. What do you think about his general relationship towards women or that of his daughter? – Mike Hill, UAH student 12:45 to 2:05 class
I’d love to call it a cop-out, but the man sits back and basically digs his own grave before his colleagues in the committee hearing, ready to accept whatever punishment they want to give him. He insists he’s guilty, to the point where Rassool insists that they suggest the ‘severest penalty’, taking away his job and his pension. He won’t hear another word on it, refuses to make a statement… it’s the most backwards method of denial I’ve ever seen. Rassool is angry he isn’t sincere, more emotional, but you still have to wonder whether or not that emotional part would even mean anything to someone like him.
I think that Lurie’s view of women is flawed, typically chauvenistic, and markedly a product of a society that accepts the routine abuse and mishandling of women. I think he respects very few women, Rosalind among them. My class has just started this novel, so I haven’t reached Lurie’s interactions with his daughter yet, but I think that if this plot is headed any where near reconciliation for Lurie’s behavior, his daughter will be added to that list.
While a part of me does agree with you about Melanie being naive and too easily overcome, I think that this is really hard to understand without ever experiencing it. After doing some research for this project, I found that one in every three South African women will be raped in their lifetime. When I read that statistic I was floored. We live in a society where rape and social violence is not only wrong morally, but illegal. In South Africa it is a part of their culture and is overlooked legally and almost condoned as part of their culture. This book is written in the post-apartheid era, which was a huge turning point in the reintegration of the South African culture. The drastic shift left many people unsure of their place in society, and men used rape as a way to maintain the patriarchal order. Our class has already finished the book, and understanding the history of aparthied and its effects on the society is vital in grasping Coetzee’s purpose for this book.
I was shocked as well by the rape statistics, but what bothered me more than the stats for women were the stats for men: its terrible enough for the violation of women to be generally acceptable if swept under the rug, but its ten times worse to see that the perpetrators of such awful crimes are such a significant part of the population. I read an article at Time online the other day that reported a study done on rape in South Africa; it said that one in four men have committed rape, and that of that number, 46% have done it more than once, and 73% committed their first before they were 20 years old. Those are terrible numbers. Applying that to Disgrace, where in the first few pages you have a fifty-two year old man paying a woman half his age for sex every Thursday, where you have this man paying a private detective to find her after she has disappeared and it is clear she does not want to see him again, where you have this man approaching a student of his in an extremely inappropriate fashion, ushering her back to his house, asking her to sleep with him, going through private records to find her address and phone number after she turns him down, forcing her into sex she clearly does not want and a relationship she doesn’t understand; applying those statistics and that norm of sexual violence to the novel paints a clearer and more disturbing picture of Disgrace than one might get without that prior insight. I do understand that Melanie has grown in a world in which rape is not an outstanding or nonrecurring crime, and that David Lurie chooses to see what he’s done as an ‘affair’ more than a rape because he doesn’t know any better than the mindset he’s grown with. I do think, however, that even in South Africa it might be common for a woman to be more aware of herself and her surroundings than Melanie is, and to be more in control of her own body than Melanie is. If rape is so common, I think that she had no business being ambivalent about how she wanted to spend her time; that if she wanted to leave that first night she should have just left, rather than allowed herself to be drawn in to the point of discomfort and almost-intimacy. Opening that door with Lurie was not a good idea, clearly, yet she allows the evening to progress to that point… if Melanie were uncomfortable saying ‘no’ to an authority figure, I can see how she would end up in that place, and I can understand how she would let the ‘affair’ continue for as long as it did. I can understand why she suddenly began to wear all black instead of her usually bright outfits, why she became so unhappy and unwilling to attend her classes, and why she eventually withdrew from the college. This is all avoidance behavior; I only can see a certain kind of personality not being able to stand up for itself until it had outside help, like Melanie’s family and boyfriend filing the complaint for her. Once that happened she refused to speak to Lurie again, suddenly strong in her resistence of him. I can’t see a stronger woman allowing all that to happen, standing back the entire time and waiting for someone else to stumble in and help her, no matter how acquainted she is with rape in her society.
- and I apologize if this comes over a little too forcefully, it’s just that this issue really does bother me. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, anyone?
You are by no means being too forceful, and I definitly agree with your views on Melanie. I actually almost see her as a bit manipulating. I mean, yes, what Lurie did was wrong, but she shows up at his door asking to stay with him. I mean, seriously, who does that? She had to know what was going to happen. But she also uses that situation to her advantage. The formal accusations against Lurie didn’t happen until he tells her that she needs to makeup the test that she missed. It is almost as if she was ok with everything as long as she got something out of it. Amy Pittman – UAH student
That’s true, I didn’t look at it that way. I keep getting hung up on Lurie because it’s from his perspective and his behavior appalls me, but he’s not all there is. Do you think the book would have any more impact if we did have other characters perspectives? My class was discussing this too, that by making us think so hard about the characters’ motivations Coetzee’s making us look deeper into the novel than we might have provided with that information. I can’t decide whether Lurie’s actions would be more or less significant with other characters’ thoughts to help us process them… thoughts?
You know, I am not really sure about that question. I think that some aspects of his actions and thoughts would appear far less significant, but I think that is the beauty of this book (if you can call it that). Despite the difficult issues he is dealing with, he is brilliant in the way he portrays it. I mean, you can go on and on about what he meant, or what he didn’t. But that is the beauty of literature. It is what makes reading a book like this more interesting. Finish reading the book, and then see how you feel. Amy Pittman – UAH student
I don’t think that Lurie felt as if it was wrong but he did feel uneasy about it later. He even said that he needed to take a shower “to cleanse” himself afterwords. It’s like a sense of regret. This made me think that he does have a conscious even if it does not influnece his actions.
In some situations people don’t see the fault or the wrong doing in things that they do, but at the same time there are ways that people know it was wrong but are so cold and or heartless that they don’t have a feeling about the situation or not phased in the rest of their life and don’t miss a beat and keep on rolling as if nothing ever happened.