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Lucy's Desire In Disgrace By Bennet And Royle

768 Words4 Pages

Desire is something that is universal in every human, everyone desires something. According to Bennet & Royle, a simple definition of desire is that it has binaries, it is either right/wrong, moral/immoral etc. (207). They also speak about how desire is present in every literary work, whether it be explicit or not (208). So what is Lucy’s desire in Disgrace? Her desire, after the rape, is to repent for what ‘her people’, the colonizers, did to the indigenous South African people. She does this repenting by not reporting her rape to the police and agreeing to marry Petrus. After Lucy is raped, Laurie wants to go to the police straight away. However, Lucy surprises him by saying “David, when people ask, would you mind keeping to your own story, to what happened to you?” (Coetzee, 99). Why does she refuse to tell the police what happens? Lucy gives us a vague answer when Laurie ask her: “But in this time, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone. This place being what? This place being South Africa" (Coetzee, 112). Since Disgrace is taking place after apartheid, it is reasonable to believe that Lucy does not report it since she knows what the cause of her rape is, the rapers are angry at how they were treated during apartheid. This also suggests that Lucy knows what would happen if she reports it, a witch hunt for the people who raped her which would most certainly imprison many innocent black men and a controversial discussion of violence against whites would

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