Through David, the main character is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the reader is confronted, for the first time, with a character whose multi-layered personality deems him both a colonizer and a colonized individual, or if continuing the thread of binary oppositions, the monster and the victim. He is a colonizer in the sense that he sees himself in charge of the women whom he engages in sexual activity with; in his eyes the women are not individuals with a mind, a heart and a soul; rather, to him, they are objects of desire who could be courted, “fucked,” and forgotten. David sought it best to live without any attachment to anything and no one; in this sense, he had power over his life and nobody was to tell him how to live. The line that specifically stood out to me was when David, shamelessly tells Melanie, “ You ought to…spend the night with me…because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it” (16). As if women existed just to be subsidiary agents to men’s liking, David places a responsibility on Melanie just because she’s a woman. He in this same sense is a monster that places no importance on the age or the background of the women he sleeps with. In his obsession with Soraya at the beginning of the novel, he disregards the fact that she is a mother and a wife and stalks her. His selfishness feeds on his lonely and desolate being.
Ironically, David is also colonized by events linked by the women around him. The women do not become the direct colonizers; it is the sexual desire that David feels for them that in a sense gives them power. First of all, it is important to consider his past. He was married multiple times, and those marriages all ended up in divorce. I’m not implying that David was not at fault in the outcome of his marriages, given his view of women, but he did ultimately wind up alone, and this thus drove him not to see women as companions. Also, in having a sexual relationship with his student Melanie, he is confronted not only with her boyfriend who terrorizes him, but also by his friends, colleagues, and ex-wife. Worst of all, he finds himself jobless. He falls victim of his uncontrolled sexual desires for women. When everyone found out what he had done with his student, they all turned against him and wanted him nowhere close: “The circle around him like hunters who have concerned a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off” (56). This appalling mistake drove him out of town and with his daughter Lucy, where he would once again see himself puzzled by his daughter’s sexual orientation (86). David no longer had control over his daughter. In his mind he could not understand how she could be with a woman. This also increased his assumptions about women. He thought that the reason why his daughter wanted to be with a woman was perhaps because women did not creak the bed, for instance. This lack of understanding subsequently adds to the negative perception he had of women and further increased his doubts about having a serious and committed relationship again.
