Disgrace: Rape or Not a Rape, That Is the Question

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MAF May, 20, 2013 Rape or Not a Rape: That is The Question In Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee, there are two rape scenes. The protagonist David Lurie is involved in or is a victim in both scenes. The one he in involved in, he sees as an “affair.” The other, where his daughter is the victim, he is outraged by it. I maintain that the “affair”, as it is described by Lurie, is not only an abuse of power but it is just as ugly as the second rape scene. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, during the period of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. It is the story of a fifty-two-year-old professor at Cape Technical University. Professor David Lurie is an ordinary, rather unhappy white man. He is twice divorced with one grown-up daughter named Lucy and he is obsessed with sex and the poet Lord Byron, who was a leading figure in the Romantic Movement. When his weekly sexual relationship with the “honey brown”, Muslim” prostitute named Soraya ends (Disgrace 1,3), he has what he thinks is “an affair” with s student thirty years younger than him, Melanie Isaacs (the “dark one,”). (Disgrace 18) The “affair” leads to a widely publicized disciplinary hearing and ultimately to Lurie’s resignation. Lurie’s own account of the proceedings, which self-consciously evoke South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its media coverage, emphasizes his contemptuous refusal to accept the terms of the disciplinary committee’s requests due to “reservations of a philosophical kind” (Disgrace 47). He justifies his behavior by claiming allegiance to “the rights of desire” (Disgrace 89), scoffs at the committee’s demand for a written confession, and goes to live with his daughter Lucy, a post-hippie earth mother lesbian, on her Grahamstown farm. In the novel's second rape scene and most controversial scene, two black men and a boy arrive on the farm and attack

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