The Obstacles of Otherness: The Female Other
It is important to note that one of the most significant obstacles between his understand of the girl is his inability to understand how he should view the girl. Should he look to her as a maternal deity/martyr figure who is to be worshiped, or as a mistress that needs to be opened and used up in order to arrive at her core. True, the barbarian girl symbolizes pain and suffering, but she is also female a fact that the magistrate is unable to ignore. As stated previously, it is no mistake that the magistrate takes to the girl to do his soul searching because he status as a female leaves her open for subversion. In other words, the magistrate can only see the barbarian girl, as Cixous suggests, as a “maternal mistress,” simultaneously mother and lover. Part of the magistrate's confusion as to how to deal with the girl stems from the fact that he cannot step outside his biases to give the girl the place of an equal, and so she must remain in her position as the Other. The magistrate attempts to make sense of his desires for the girl but he can only go between frustrated lover or frustrated worshiper.
We see the magistrate trying to understand her role in his story by treating her as a martyr type figure that he must pray to in order to receive the divine truth from her lips. This can be seen in the instances when he washes her feet. The magistrate seems to enter into a trance where during the most intense part of the ritual he loses himself, and reaches a sort of climax of sleep. However, this rapture he feels in bathing the girl are more like “dreamless spells” that are “like death” or like an “enchantment, blank, outside of time.” (Coetzee 35) Despite the fact, that they seemed to first present some sort of relieve for him, they soon turn into only blank moments without meaning and as this becomes more apparent he becomes frustrated with her. It can be said then that the magistrate obstinacy in seen the girl as a surrogate mother (goddess) to take the place of the father (god) Empire, results in a misinterpretation of her role in his narrative. Unfortunately, rather than looking past
the girl's sex the magistrate continues to try and place her in context that he can understand better, and he tries to see her as simply a sexual mate.The barbarian girl then sees herself subverted into position of the lover. At many times the magistrate will remark on his confusion in the desire he feels for the girl, one example is when he states: “There are moments...when the desire I feel for her, usually so obscure, flickers into a shape I can recognize. My hand stirs, strokes her, fits itself to the contour of her breast.” (Coetzee 46) In this instance the magistrate admits to having no clear view of what his true desires for the girl are and that it is only when they manifest themselves in the form of sexual desire that he can feel as though he can grasp at something tangible. This is because although the magistrate means to treat the barbarian girl as more than a sexual object, he is unable to overcome the old hierarchy of superiority which decrees the woman as the submissive party that must relinquish all to the male patriarchal figure. Cixous tells us that the male writing is caught up on its “self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism,” which is the same structure that is part of the Empire. (261) But it cannot be ignored that it is also part of the magistrate's mindset as well. Therefore, the barbarian girl is not giving a chance to escape her female otherness in the text she “has never her turn to speak,” in spite of the fact that she has dialogue in the novel, descriptions of her experience of pain are dominated by fact, and she does not ever let us, or the magistrate enter into the realm of emotion with her, or through her. Unfortunately, the barbarian girl falls victim to the magistrate's selfishness and egotism which does not allow him to fathom himself outside of the center of the narrative. The magistrate asks her of her experiences of torture, yet he does not do it with the intention of letting her tell her story in her own words, but in order to hear her story to later transform and translate it to fit into his own.
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