What Is Lorie's Treatment Of White Women In Disgrace

Individuals often exempt themselves from their society’s moral or legal standards in order to avoid facing the ramifications of their actions. In J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, racial tensions in post-apartheid South Africa affect the protagonist, David Lurie’s perceptions of morality and his own privilege in society. This tense atmosphere also shapes the women in Lurie’s life and how his actions and events in the novel affect them.
Lurie, a white Afrikaner calls himself “a lover of women” (Coetzee 7), but he does not respect them. Lurie sees women as sexual objects and feels entitled to women’s beauty and bodies. His misogynistic sense of entitlement to women’s bodies is also racially motivated. He fetishizes non-white women as exotic, contributing
to the “hidden sexual exploitation of black women by white men that has existed for centuries” (Graham 437). For example, when Soraya, a non-white muslim prostitute, spurns Lurie and ends her service with him, he hires a private detective to “track her down” (Coetzee 9), only to be offended at the “shrillness” (Coetzee 10) with which she treats him for invading her privacy. Lurie also manipulates Melanie Isaacs, his student, who is also a non-white woman, into sex by saying she “ought to” (Coetzee 16) sleep with him because “she has a duty” (Coetzee 16), as a woman, to share her beauty, which Lurie believes “does not belong to her alone” (Coetzee 16). Later, he forces sex on Melanie, despite her refusal of consent. Although a committee is summoned to address his indiscretion against his student, which eventually results in the termination of his position in the university, Lurie never faces legal punishment for his actions, and he never shows remorse for them. Furthermore, he decries the performative justice of the commission. Lurie’s total lack of respect for women and concern for the law makes him dangerous, and his treatment of Melanie makes him a rapist, although he never acknowledges this.
In contrast to his treatment of non-white women, Lurie is personally affronted when his daughter, Lucy, is gang-raped by a group of black South African men.
Lurie does not see his sex with Melanie as rape, but is outraged at Lucy’s rape by black men, highlighting his racism. Arguably, Lurie’s offense at his daughter’s assault, especially because he was not physically present at the time, endorses the white supremacist construct of the “‘purity’ of white women” (Graham 437) and exemplifies the ever-present “‘black-peril’ hysteria” (Graham 435), which “contributed to oppressive legislative measures against black people in South Africa” (Graham 435), leading to apartheid. However, he is not concerned about Lucy’s mental health or wellbeing, or her ability to cope with the trauma she has survived. Lurie’s focus is on Lucy’s body. He repeatedly asks about her physical health after the assault, such as testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as pregnancy, despite her obvious discomfort in speaking with him on the subject. Lurie also cannot understand why Lucy will not report her rape to the police, and frequently pesters her to do so, which he believes will bring her attackers to justice. Whereas he, a powerful white man, deplored the very public condemnation of his assault on Melanie, he seeks the “retribution… [and] the symbolic verification offered by the law” (Anker 238) for Lucy’s
assault.
Lucy’s choice to never report her assault is a very common one among survivors of rape.
Personally, I reported the first sexual assault that I was a victim of, but my experience was so humiliating and re-traumatizing that I never reported another, despite falling victim to them multiple times. Sexual violence is often dismissed or denied by government bodies and other powerful institutions. For example, South African President Thabo Mbeki accused rape statistics of being faked and criticized outspoken survivors, saying that their critiques of rape culture were inherently racist (Graham 434). The fact that the reader is never shown Melanie’s statement on her rape, nor views Lucy’s rape from her perspective is representative of the active silencing of victims of rape, as well as the overlooking of survivors’ narratives when they refuse to be silenced. The fact that Lurie distances himself from the narrative of his assault on Melanie and that he asserts himself on the narrative of Lucy’s assault also shows the hypocritical feelings of men towards female survivors of sexual trauma. Many men do not care about victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault until a woman they are related to, such as a mother, sister, or daughter, is assaulted, and even then they are only angry that someone they knew was violated. A woman’s proximity to a male should not be an indicator of his concern for her should she be assaulted. Men should be concerned with the fact that women are raped
because that is an injustice, not because they may or may not be related to the victim.
Lurie spends a large chunk of the novel philosophizing about sexuality and entitlement, as well as their effects on human beings. Thus, it is simultaneously outrageous and rather unsurprising that Lurie never realizes that he is a rapist and predator of women. His blindness to the injustices he has committed against multiple women, contrasted with his hyper-focus on Lucy’s rape and his lack of concern for her emotional wellbeing confirms that he sees women as property.