Ethical reading: The problem of Alice Walker’s ‘Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells’ and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

The focus of this article is two texts, ‘Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells’ (1982) by Alice Walker and Disgrace(1999) by J.M. Coetzee, both of which present ethical problems for the reader. The texts share a common event, an incident of black-on-white, male-on-female rape. In each case the white wom...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Feminist theory 2001-08, Vol.2 (2), p.189-203
Main Author: Eagleton, Mary
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alice Walker
Ethics
Feminist theory
Gender
J.M. Coetzee
Literature
Race
Rape
Sociology of literature
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The focus of this article is two texts, ‘Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells’ (1982) by Alice Walker and Disgrace(1999) by J.M. Coetzee, both of which present ethical problems for the reader. The texts share a common event, an incident of black-on-white, male-on-female rape. In each case the white woman keeps silent about the rape and the narrative is troubled by that silence. I read the dilemma of these texts as at once ethical, political and aesthetic and I explore that multi-faceted problem through three perspectives – the issue of silence, the narrative structures of the texts and the impossibility of resolution. The texts repeatedly question my reading position, not least in that they both suggest that the silence of the white woman might, in certain circumstances, be a condition for political progress.
ISSN:1464-7001
1741-2773
DOI:10.1177/14647000122229479