Violence and Empathy Theme Analysis

Disgrace concerns itself with failures of empathy. When David forces himself on Melanie, he recognizes that his advances are “undesired,” but he continues anyway, exhibiting a troubling lack of compassion. In a similar but much more severe manner, the three men who rape Lucy do what they want to her without considering her humanity. These cases are quite different, since one is a blurrier instance of relational coercion and the other of sexual violence, but there are some uncomfortable overlaps between both situations. Indeed, while what David does to Melanie isn’t as physically aggressive as what the three rapists do to Lucy, he and his daughters’ abusers have something in common: they prioritize their own cravings over all else, even when this means subjugating another human being. Simply put, they act without empathy. By presenting this discomforting similarity, Coetzee gives readers a way of approaching the complex topic of sexual harassment and assault, ultimately suggesting that all such instances—whether physically violent or socially manipulative—are at their core failures of empathy.

After Melanie and David have sex for the first time, she avoids him. Instead of taking this as an indication that she doesn’t want to continue their relationship, David appears one afternoon at her apartment, and when she opens the door, he embraces her. Melanie tries to tell him that her cousin will be home soon—indicating that she feels she has to justify her desire not to have sex with him—but he ignores her protests. This moment shows how David has created an unequal relational environment in which he feels free to ignore Melanie’s wishes. Her comment about her cousin does nothing to stop him, as he brings her to the bedroom and undresses her. What’s most important to note in this scene is that David isn’t unaware of Melanie’s reservations, as he notices that she “avert[s] herself” from him. At the same time, Melanie “helps him” undress her, though she remains otherwise passive. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core,” Coetzee writes. Readers see that, although it’s perhaps true that David hasn’t technically raped Melanie (and even this could be contested), he has subjected her to sexual activities that he knows she doesn’t “desire.” In this way, it becomes painfully obvious that the only thing he’s thinking about is what he wants, and he’s perfectly willing to make Melanie uncomfortable in order to satisfy himself.

After failing to empathize with Melanie, David is distraught when three men appear at his daughter Lucy’s farm and, after locking him in the bathroom, rape her. Of course, he is traumatized by his own experience, since the men steal his car and try to light him on fire, but what stays with him is the image of the intruders abusing his daughter. This image forces him to consider the lasting repercussions of sexual abuse in a way that he hasn’t previously contemplated. Indeed, when he got in trouble for harassing Melanie, he told a reporter that he didn’t “regret” what he did, saying, “I was enriched by the experience.” Judging by this statement, it’s apparent that David was still thinking only about himself even after he was publicly disciplined. Now, though, he finds it impossible to move beyond what has happened to Lucy, as he sees the profound impact of this traumatic experience on her life. Whenever he tries to talk to her or to Bev Shaw about what happened, though, he grows frustrated because they insist that he can’t possibly understand. “Do they think he does not know what rape is?” Coetzee writes. “Do they think he has not suffered with his daughter?” Of course, David hasn’t truly “suffered with his daughter,” since he’s not the one who was raped. However, the idea that he’s so hurt by the entire experience suggests that he’s finally starting to empathize with someone else. Whereas he appeared unwilling or unable to put himself in Melanie’s shoes, now he projects himself into Lucy’s experience and is horrified by what he finds.

As the novel goes on, Coetzee explores David’s gradual progression toward a more empathetic worldview. This manifests itself in his willingness to volunteer with Bev Shaw at the Animal Welfare League, where he helps her put unhealthy and unwanted pets out of their misery. At first glance, this might seem like a job for somebody who isn’t empathetic, since—as David thinks at one point—it requires a certain “hardness.” However, this isn’t necessarily the case, as David discovers when he first asks Bev if she “minds” having to end so many lives. “I do mind. I mind deeply,” she says. “I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me who didn’t mind.” By the end of the novel—in the aftermath of Lucy’s rape—David devotes himself to these helpless animals because he finally understands how callous and uncompassionate he has been. “He has learned by now, from [Bev], to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love,” Coetzee notes. Although David can’t change what he did to Melanie, he can learn to embrace empathy, which ultimately would have kept him from transgressing in the first place. In this sense, Coetzee intimates that if more people cultivated their capacities for empathy, there would most likely be fewer instances of violence in the world, though Coetzee characteristically applies complexity to David’s newfound empathy, since he is—after all—killing an animal. As such, the author implies that people ought to strive to be empathetic while also acknowledging that choosing to live compassionately might not always be an easy choice.