In the Heart of the Country is a very interesting and complex novel that explores different themes and thus can be analyzed with different theoretical considerations. In this diary styled novel Coetzee introduces such various themes as lack of identity, pain and pleasure motif, as well as a story of repression and colonization. Hence, through a narration of a life story of a white African girl, Magda, Coetzee introduces passionate striving for individual identity, but also depicts cultural issues and the notion of colonization referring to South African life and reality and the repressive intentions of European countries in the 18th century, which thus give the novel plurality of meaning. Furthermore, the novel is like a puzzle, written in a very unique style that presents some of the events with different outcomes which can be understood through deconstructive analyses of a text or by referring to what Jacques Derrida calls “iterability”- the repetition of the text in new situation. Hence, the novel not only tells a story of an individual unsuccessful life, but also looks for what features of social and cultural life is deemphasized or privileged and aims at achieving a new, deeper understanding of various coexisting problems.
First of all the narrative of a white African girl,Magda, involves a motif to achieve the wholeness of self and relief/pleasure of her repressed desires for sexuality. This desire thus, leads to her hatred, jealousy towards the woman, her father brings home as “a new bride.” Hence, Magda’s inability to experience the pleasure of love, her sexual urges, and her dissatisfaction for not fulfilling her sexual desires represent the lack of establishing her own identity, which then can be related to Lacanian impossible wholeness of self, “plentitude of desire satisfaction” ( Jacques Lacan), and self identification, which Magda is trying to achieve by destroying/ murdering her father’s new bride. Moreover, her hatred toward her father also can be understood through Lacanian theory of self identification through mother’s image, “my father is the absence of my mother, her negative, her death. She is the soft, the fair; he the hard, the dark” (Coetzee 37). Hence, unable to reveal and construct her own identity due to the missing mother, this lack psychologically depresses Magda to the extream of hatred. Besides, in order to establish her own self, to identify her own desires and feel valuable as a woman, Magda compares her with her father’s bride since and as Luce Irigaray claims “ in order to have a relative value, a commodity has to be confronted with another commodity that serves as its equivalent.” However, being equal in gender, Magda was different from Klein-Anna in her skin tone. This difference as well as Magda’s oppressive desires thus can associate her with a colonizer.
In the Heart of the Country, hence also explores and describes the psychological effects of colonialism, portraying Magda as the oppressor and Klein-Anna as the oppressed black woman. Ultimately, Magda’s difference of being white and intelligent as well as her desire not to be “one of the forgotten ones of history” and her eagerness to establish her identity evokes the desire for mastery and domination as a colonizer.
~KY
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 1976.
Lacan, Jacques . “The Mirror Stage as Formative Function of the I.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan 2nd ed. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print. 441-446.
Martin, Alison. “Luce Iriguray and the Question of the Divine.” Modern Humanities Research association. Mhra texts and Dissertation. Volume 53. Web. 18 Sept. 2011.
Elucidating Coetzee's World and Works 
You bring forth an interesting theme in Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country: that of Magda’s repressed sexual desires. Throughout the text, this repressed desire is so closely aligned with her father that it lends itself to perversely Freudian commentary. While, as you say, she sees her father in opposition to her mother, the darker, harder and living parent, her compulsion with her own sexual identity is made more complex through her thoughts and desires concerning the new bride as well as Anna. While the reality of there being a new bride is in question (as she seems to disappear at one point), her description of killing the bride hint that she sees the new bride as competition for her father’s affection. She represents her father as having two sides: that which expels anger and violence, and that which is sexual. While she is continuously in danger of being the recipient of his anger, it appears that she wishes to be the recipient of his sexual side as well. In number forty-nine, Magda writes, “Am I a good mistress?” This comment along with her obsession with listening to his sexual sounds and watching her father sleep at night, bring further possible explanation to her hatred of the new bride and then of Anna. In reference to your last comment regarding Magda as the colonizer and Anna as the colonized, this idea bring new light to Magda’s sexual advances to Anna. She wishes to not only have what her father had but also serves as the oppressor in this situation, an idea which she wishes to be separate from. Having Anna sexually might bring her closer to an unconscious desire to have sex with her father, to connect with him on both of his sides.
~Kelley Heinrichs
I agree with your insistence on Magda as a colonizer. I think we see very clearly in the novel the privileges that she takes for granted as a white woman in South Africa, and how her race positions her as a person with power and privilege in relation to the characters of color, despite the fact that Magda is also oppressed as a woman. I also agree with your assessment of Magda’s intelligence (in your final paragraph), and thus am not sure why you deem her life “unsuccessful” in your opening paragraph.
As someone with vision and imagination, as someone who (like the writer of the book) is the author of her own story, and has a brilliant command of language, isn’t Magda quite remarkable and successful? She complains about the misfortunes of her life, to be sure, but aren’t these complaints to some extent undermined by the force of her narrative itself? As Magda says in section 227, “Hendrik may take me, but it is I holding him holding I” (she repeats a similar sentiment in the middle of section 94). Isn’t this a recognition that she, as the author of the story, the imaginer of the events and characters in it, holds all the power? In this context, then, I wonder what it would mean to be “unsuccessful”……
Ian Barnard