EN
This essay discusses the financial and moral complexities at the center of Disgrace by Coetzee, its inquiry positioned in the context of the postcolonial decoding of the novel. Primarily, I focus on Lucy’s choice to stay in the house where she falls victim to the crime. Following “the rhetorical signal to the active reader, to counterfocalize,” which Spivak pinpoints in Disgrace, I reconstruct Lucy’s story from intimations and hints woven into the main narrative. Having unraveled the mystery of Lucy’s abortion, mentioned in passing, I propose that during David’s visit to her house, Lucy falls victim to corrective rape as both a lesbian and a single woman who thrives living in the countryside; lastly, I proceed to prove that Lucy acts like a woman “corrected” when she signs her property over to Petrus, although the true price she has to pay to her assailants staged as “debt collectors, tax collectors” (158) is her sexuality.