Disgrace & Envelopment

Coetzee’s Disgrace has more to do with post-colonial theory then one might think. Whether it’s from the educational standpoint where David, a professor teaching at an African University a course on romantic poetry, mainly if not all being concerned with English author’s. Or from David’s own sexual desire, in some ways can be symbolized of colonialism itself.

Soraya for example, the novels described prostitute and “exotic” is being used for pleasure. Used for a commodity that an Englishman (from 6hat I could make from) is paying for a service that has no true monetary value. David’s affair with his student Melanie is maybe the most significant example of a connection with colonial workings. For an older, experienced man is entering into a new, ripe world. Taking from it, all the while knowing it isn’t a reciprocating trade, he thrusts himself upon her, takes time to call, track down and find. She merely is too weak to evade or too young to know to evade. Siad’s words are best used to describe this “relationship” between David and Melanie, “The thing to be noticed about this kind of contemporary discourse, which assumes the primacy and even complete centrality of the West, is how totalizing is its form, how all –enveloping its attitudes and gestures…”(372). David creates scenerios in his mind of the women he encounters, with Melanie it was the signing of a complaint against him. Where throughout the whole scene, she is forced to do it, pressured from her family to incriminate him. There is no evidence supporting this imagining, but the reader is given it without further pondering, it is Laurie’s western envelopment that is given, nothing else is allowed.