The Psychotic Behaviour of Magda against her Father in J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country

Abstract

People who live in their own fantasies and imaginations react according to their own beliefs contrary to the real life situations. Thus, there is always an improper coordination of what they feel and expect and what actually happens to them. Magda, the book's central figure, is an elderly and psychotic spinster who lives on her father's remote farm. She is an intellectual, resentful, unattractive spinster and the daughter of a European sheep farmer. Magda, then, is the descendant of a coloniser who, during the height of colonisation in South Africa, is trying to establish who she is in the setting of a frontier house.  She is not one of the original Boer colonizers. Her ancestors, rather, were the conquerors of the native people, but those ancestors have left her with the responsibility of continuing their representational oppression. So, she serves as a representative of the people who have replaced the native culture with their own. As a daughter she is hostile towards her father since her mother’s death. When her father brings his new bride home, she behaves vehemently and gets into fantasies and starts imagining things and based on her imaginations behaves in a neurotic manner. This study throws light upon how loneliness, neglect, longing for love and patriarchy under the influence of colonialism affect the female character’s mind and behaviour and how she becomes psychotic. This study will also look at how Coetzee has used the female protagonist in his novel to rebel against the dominant patriarchy