The more things change the more they remain the same. History repeating itself, though in a more modest vein. Perhaps history has learned a lesson.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

*many many many spoilers ahead*

I've been on a blissful reading spree for the past four books, reading books that resonate with me in the best ways. In A River Runs Through It, On Writing, History of Love and History of the Rain, I found characters who eloquently voice how I feel about family/writing/reading/life in general. I connected with Norman MacLean, Stephen King, Alma Singer and Ruth Swain to higher-than-average extents.

Yet because the serious reader should not only stick to reading what makes her/him comfortable, I decided to read a novel that has been on my to-read list for ages and definitely tackles dark themes: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

Our protagonist is the 52-year old and twice-divorced professor David Lurie, who goes through life teaching classes in which he has no interest (with the exception of his one course on romantic poets) and picking up scores of women who help him maintain a "moderated bliss." His one rule, "follow your temperament," is echoed in Byron's Lara, which David teaches to his class:

"... in some strange perversity of thought,

That sway’d him onward with a secret pride

To do what few or none would do beside;

And this same impulse would, in tempting time,

Mislead his spirit equally in crime;"

And thus it is by this "impulse he could not resist" that David begins a short-lived affair with one of his students, is later found out, brought to court, and eventually resigns, leaving civilization to visit his daughter, Lucy, in her farm in South-Africa.

By the way, the court case reminded me very much of Meursault's. Both demonstrate an absence of guilt and the eccentricity of the accused. As David says,

There is a difference between pleading guilty to a charge and admitting you were wrong. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse.

And as someone who believes that

No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts,

David is even able to rationalize the unnecessariness of a issuing a formal apology. He makes the following remark about the women he meets:

“A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”

So by this expert foreshadowing and in a striking turn of the plot, the tables are cruelly turned on David as his daughter - strong, independent, purposeful Lucy - becomes the victim of a double-rape. (I know that Wordsworth, one of the poets frequently alluded to in the novel, often wrote of a Lucy who was young, pure, but died an early death. After her rape, Lucy says that part of her has died, and David grieves for her as Wordsworth did for his Lucy. I can't help but notice the parallel).

Here is where the novel truly takes off, highlighting the grim depths of racial tensions, generation gaps and gender differences Coetzee explores. David has been "disgraced" by his scandal and now his daughter is disgraced by men she never laid eyes on. Men who, in a bitter stroke of irony, share David's views on the forgivability of an impulsive act and the commodification of women.

In the aftermath of the incident, the word "rape" is scarcely mentioned, but it need not be for readers to infer what Lucy suffered. Most troubling/shocking of all is her reaction to the incident, her initial apparent indifference and staunch refusal to raise criminal charges against anyone. Roles reverse as the steadfast Lucy seems maturer than David, who is absorbed by anger, saying, "'I want those men to be caught and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to want justice?'" Again, how ironic is it that he, who was just trialled in court and pit against colleagues demanding an apology, is now begging his daughter (with similar fruitlessness) to accept his advice? How ironic is it that the professor of communications has lost the ability to connect with his own daughter, who does not even address him as 'dad,' but rather David?

The theme of generational gap is captured by David's inability to understand Lucy - her determination to stay on the farm, her love for women (as opposed to men), her decision to not report the rape. With the last point, however, Coetzee points out more troublingly the problems of South-Africa during the post-apartheid era, during which many homes of white farmers were trashed and robbed. Lucy's unwillingness to report the rape is tied to the fact of "this place being South Africa." Perhaps she feels that the rape is too "private" of a matter to be reported? That the rapists' act is in some twisted way rationalizable? That reporting will only bring her further trouble in a troubling society? Early on, David says that "there is a limit to sympathy," but his daughter's limit clearly extends much further than his does.

More on farm attacks, a problem which persists to today, can be found here: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/30/15571149-killings-of-white-farmers-highlight-toxic-apartheid-legacy-in-south-africa

Disgrace haunts nearly all the main characters in the book - the seemingly incorruptible Bev Shaw (who turns out to be not so incorruptible after all), in some ways Petrus's wife (is her brother disgracing her?) and even the animals. At one point in the novel, David speaks of the death of the sick dogs at the animals welfare center as the "disgrace of dying." To be "like a dog," as we learn from David's conversation with Lucy, is "to start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity." It is to be disgraced. And David is indeed "sunk in disgrace;" he becomes the "dog-man" who takes the corpses of dogs to the incinerator to be burned.

Yet in the final pages of the novel, he lets go. He gives up the dog to whom he was so attached. He even (in a bizarre way) manages to have dinner with the family of the student he seduced. Even though David insists at the beginning that "his temperament is fixed, set," and that he cannot change himself at this age, he proves himself wrong. Of course, this is the optimistic conclusion. One could equally say that the dog at the end of the novel is being released into the "disgrace of dying" (or being released from the disgrace of living). Yet with David's gentle treatment of the dog, his acceptance of Lucy's pregnancy (not as if he has a choice, anyway) and the somewhat-closure he achieves with his past, I'd like to think that he is less disgraced at the end of the novel than he was initially - that everyone is less disgraced.

Disgrace is best described as striking. It carries a brilliant and gripping plot, shocks us, and asks questions that have no definite answer but provoke important conversation. Should one be convicted for desire? Why does Lucy make the choices she does? Why do three assaulters get away so easily with rape, while David is brought before court in no time at all for seducing a student?

...We cannot live our daily lives in a realm of pure ideas, cocooned from sense-experience. The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist? 

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All the sleeping women / Are now awake and moving

The Essential Feminist Reader by Estelle B. Freedman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Essential Feminist Reader is a collection of feminist essays edited and compiled by Estelle B. Freedman, a U.S. historian specializing in women's history at Stanford University.

The essays in the book span time and geography. We begin with an essay published in France in 1405 by Christine de Pizan, who lamented, "in my folly I considered myself most unfortunate because God has made me inhabit a female body;" we conclude with a statement issued in 2004 by a women's group from Afghanistan, celebrating International Women's Day and looking towards "the road to democracy and prosperity." How far we have come! Containing essays written by Alva Myrdal, a member of the Swedish Government in the 1940s, as well as Ding Ling, the director of the Chinese Literature and Arts Association in Yan'an during Mao's time, The Essential Feminist Reader powerfully attests to the extended and universal fight for women's rights.

Kishida Toshiko uses a sublime extended metaphor in her essay to describe how women are confined inside a "box." Like Toshiko,  Simon de Beauvoir argues that the "physiological, psychological, or economic forces" of women decide their destiny and deny them "full membership in the human race." On the subject of women's victimization, Susan Brownmiller presents one of the strongest arguments in the whole book by saying that "to talk about rape, even with nervous laughter, is to acknowledge a woman's special victim status."On a similar plane, The Committee on the Status of Women in India argues that "prostitution is the worst form of women's exploitation and inequality" because it forces a woman to be "viewed solely as a sex object and as an outlet for man's baser instincts." These are just some examples of the problems facing women that are illustrated in the book. 

It is fascinating to see how the arguments for feminism have evolved over time. Mary Astell, like many  early feminists writers, framed her argument in religious terms in order to appeal to a secular audience. Many also stress the advantages that gender equality brings to men: Flora Tristan argues that a female workforce would double productivity levels in industries, and that better-educated women would raise better-educated sons. Despite the pragmatic truth in such arguments, however, the best essays are those that vouch for feminism with less of an accent on how feminism is important because it benefits men. For example, François Poullaine de la Barre points out the absurdity of laying so much emphasis "on the constitution of the body to justify the difference between the sexes." One of the most memorable lines in the whole anthology is her argument that "the mind has no sex."

The writers in the anthology also present solutions for the problem of gender inequality. Many essays emphasize the importance of education and being well-informed; in particular, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective puts forward the argument that learning about women's health can help women understand their own image "on a firmer base," becoming "better friends and better lovers, better people, more self-confident, more autonomous, stronger, and more whole." Margaret Sanger argues for birth control as a way of giving women more agency over their bodies. Susan B. Anthony also claims that it is important for marriage to "be a luxury, not a necessity" and that only working women can see it as so because "whoever controls work and wages, controls morals." John Stuart Mill shares the same philosophy, saying that the "power of earning is essential to the dignity of the woman." Most memorably of all, Virginia Woolf presents an elegant solution in Three Guineas, arguing that financial support in preventing war, promoting women's education and providing for professional women would help women have a more significant presence in the public sphere. 

The road to gender equality, however, is no easy path. Qasim Amin, writing from Egypt, considers the status of women "inseparably tied to the status of a nation. She rejects the traditional veil and instead advocates for "a type of upbringing that will itself become an impenetrable veil and fortress protecting a woman from all forms of corruption at each stage of her liberation.” Mary Wollesetencraft blames upper-class women who are "so intoxicated by the admiration" they receive that they neglect to assert their own rights as individuals. (In other words, she is saying, "wake up," to these women.)  

The problems of "intersectional feminism" is also tackled in some essays. In "Two Speeches," Sojourner Truth points out the problem of racial discrimination overlaps with gender inequality, stressing that black women do not share the same rights as white women despite their common dream for feminism. Palesa Beverly Ditsie from South Africa urges the members of the Fourth World Conference on Women to "remove the brackets from sexual orientation," saying that some women are victims of not only gender, but also sexual, discrimination. Only through transcending such obstacles can, as Anna Julia Cooper says, "the cause for freedom" become "not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class," but "the cause of human kind." And of course, as Pat Mainardi humorously pointed out in The Politics of Housework, the gender stereotypes of men are bulwarks to the advancement of gender equality. 

Right before we get to the contents page, we see that the book is dedicated "to John."
Indeed, The Essential Feminist Reader is an important read not only for women, but also for men. As Jonah Gokova from Zimbabwe reminds us, "the term 'gender' is not synonymous for 'women.'" Rather, the Federation of South African Women defines it as the search for "permanent peace throughout the world." The anthology is a testament to how the power of the written word, be it in fiction or essays, is harnessed in fighting for equal rights and, as Betty Friedan wrote, in helping women become "complete." 

To quote Sarah M. Grimké: "Thine in the bonds of womanhood,"

May

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