A Colonized Colonist: The Question of the White Female Colonist in John M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country

Abstract

This paper traces the differing experiences of a female protagonist in voicing herself as a white colonizer in the land of the colonized in two contexts: her relationship with the white male colonizer, and that with the colonized native. The protagonist’s marginalization by the white colonizer, on the one hand, and the colonized native man on the other, does not merely reduce her white supremacy to inferiority, but rather becomes the main reason for the protagonist's sociological confusion, ultimately resulting in her mental illness, which will be argued as a mode of resistance against those patriarchally hierarchized representations. This theme will be tackled in the character of Magda in John Maxwell Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977). The selected literary work will be examined through a postcolonial feminist lens, through which gendered hierarchical structures will be explored, and madness will be employed as a possible means for female empowerment.