Rape and Silence in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Sammanfattning: This essay discusses rape and silence in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, with focus on how and why the characters Melanie and Lucy are silenced after being raped. Paying special attention to gender and race, as well as the novel’s South African context, an attempt is made to consider how rape is represented in Disgrace, and how this representation is related to the silence of Melanie and Lucy. The discussion’s theoretical framework is based on feminist theories on sexual violence and rape, as well as theory on cultural scripts, sexual scripts, and rape myths. This essay finds that the rapes in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace are representations of South Africa’s inverted racial power structures, and its traditional gender structures; structures that contribute to silencing Melanie and Lucy. This essay argues that Coetzee has deliberately activated South African cultural scripts in the text in an attempt to expose problematic viewpoints regarding gender and race in society, as well as in the reader.