Sexuality, Anxiety, and Old Age Theme Analysis

The magistrate’s sexuality is riddled with quandaries. The barbarian girl, whom he takes in and begins an odd sexual relationship with, represents to him something that he cannot fully know—something that is alien, and which his understanding can’t penetrate. He therefore becomes unsure of himself and his own sexuality, because he cannot understand why he desires the girl. In this way, even the magistrate isn’t immune to “exoticizing” the barbarians in some respect, for he perceives the girl to be entirely alien, something he can’t assimilate to the logic of his own sexual desire. Unable to reconcile the elusiveness of the barbarian girl’s sexuality with his own, the magistrate’s sexuality is therefore made incomplete in a way he’s never experienced.

The magistrate eventually concludes—a good while after he’s returned the barbarian girl to her people—that the main reason why he could never fully connect with and understand the girl is that he was trying to uncover a part of her that was lost after Joll tortured her: the way her body looked, and the way her mind viewed the world, before. Faced with the bleak cruelty of the girl’s scarred body, the magistrate is obsessed with recovering something he cannot get—the pure, untold history of the girl’s past. The girl has changed, and therefore so has the way she identifies/does not identify with the formative years of her past.

Doubtful about his sexuality as a whole, the magistrate also sometimes finds the degree to which he fantasizes about and desires sex to be reprehensible for his age. He has a very active sexual life, and his imagination frequently revolves around thinking about sex. For instance, he has a recurring dream throughout the novel where he strives towards the mysterious figure of a girl (sometimes the barbarian girl) and longs to capture her in his embrace—that is, to assimilate her to his own sexual identity and understanding, to make her mysteriousness more coherent. But despite its active nature, the magistrate’s sexual imagination is also full of doubt. He wonders what the barbarian girl could possibly see in his old, husky body, and finds consolation in the fact that she probably can’t make out its contours since she’s nearly blind.

Further, sometime after he’s begun seeing the barbarian girl intimately, the magistrate resumes seeing a girl at the inn (perhaps a prostitute) who was his mistress before he became acquainted with the barbarian girl. Relieved to be with a sexual companion who reacts to him in ways he understands and finds enjoyable, the magistrate enjoys an escape from the indecipherable detachedness of the barbarian girl. Even though the magistrate knows that the girl at the inn is probably just pretending to be exceptionally pleased and enthusiastic when she sees him, he prefers her artificial performance to the blunt, less censored, and seemingly alien reactions of the barbarian girl. This suggests that the distance between him and the barbarian girl leaves him with a gap, with an opening he can’t close by uniting his body with hers, and which he feels impelled to fill with thoughts and explanations.

The magistrate’s sexuality is therefore challenged: he realizes that his own sexual drives elude him, that he can’t quite define them, since they’ve mysteriously propelled him towards someone he simply cannot understand his attraction for. The novel thus uses the magistrate’s sexuality as a venue to express how the exotification or alienation characteristic of the Empire’s treatment of the barbarians can take place on subtle, psychological levels—on levels seemingly less concrete than, and removed from, those of military action and political commerce. Coetzee also seems to explore the magistrate’s sexual life partly as a way of portraying the psychology of an older man when it comes to thinking about his sexual identity.