American Research Journal of English and Literature

This paper examines the silence and rebellion of the western female who is marginalised in the Afrikaner colonial and patriarchal culture in South Africa in the late 1970’s. Through an analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s, In the Heart of the Country (1977), I attempt to explore the gender dimension and therefore deconstruct patriarchal and colonial ideology. My aim is to interrogate the Afrikaner colonial culture through the point of view of a farmer’s daughter who is deemed as a subordinated woman within the Afrikaner colonial formation. In effect, I elucidate and unravel the way the main protagonist challenges the patriarchal colonial culture by engendering a specific feminine discourse of language which concentrates on plurality and attempts to represent what has been repressed by masculine modes of writings. The paper eventually demonstrates the failure of the liberal humanist subject to achieve reciprocity with the other and therefore transcends the colonial ideology between coloniser and colonised.