Representation of women in ‘Waiting for the Barbarian’

1. The African Literature
Representation of women in
‘Waiting for the Barbarian’
Sejal Vaghela
M.A. Sem:4
Enrolment No. PG13101036
Batch Year: 2013-15
Email Id:
Sejal.vaghela43@gmail.com
Submitted to: Department of
English Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University

2. J.M. Coetzee
 He is a south African
novelist.
 He writes many novels
 It was chosen by Penguin
for its series Great Books
of the 20th century and
won both the James Tait
Black Memorial prize and
Geoffrey Faber Memorial
Prize for fiction.
 It is first published in
1960

4. Two main characters:
 The Magistrate
 Colonel Joll
 Barbarian Girl

5. Barbarian Girl
 Barbarian girl is a prisoner of Colonel Joll’s but
after their release she is left behind by her folk
in the outpost, begging, semi-blinded and
disfigured from the torture. This symbolizes in
extremes that how people can be transformed to
be perceived as the other by an ideology and
how the normal can turned out to be abnormal
by the system.
 Relationship between the Magistrate and the
barbarian girl

6.  she will always stay as the other, both as
a barbarian in the eye of the Empire and as
carrying the marks of the Empire in
her uncanny body, in the eyes of her folk.
 Wenzel reads the relationship between the Magistrate
and the girl by saying that “ the Magistrate seeks to
eliminate his sense of the girl’s otherness and to
understand the pain of her torture as he verbally and
physically probes the girl in an effort to read the signs
of torture written on her body”

7. The Magistrate
 The Magistrate is the story’s first-person narrator
 He is an administrator of a territory belonging to an
unnamed empire.
 he admits to his laziness, his fondness for young native
girls, and his satisfaction with the old ways of imperialism
 he still emerges as an admirable and sympathetic
character.
 he searches for some significance in his own wasted
life.
 The Magistrate represents all men and women who face not
only their inherent weaknesses but the forces of
totalitarianism

8. Colonel Joll
 Colonel Joll was an official in the
mysterious Third Bureau and an arm of the
Civil Guard
 He was created to protect the empire
 which is threatened by barbarians.

9. My Profiles:
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 https://twitter.com/VaghelaSejal
 https://www.facebook.com/people/Sejal-
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 https://plus.google.com/u/0/118335400158
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 https://www.blogger.com/home?pli=1