Maria Mouton in the Heart of the Country?

Abstract

Summary This article notes and substantiates the intertextual link between an eighteenth- century case of adultery and murder involving Maria Mouton in the Tulbagh area of the Cape of Good Hope and the narrative in J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977). The details of the crime and subsequent execution of Maria Mouton and her accomplices, which are recorded in the Cape Archives, provide the historical facts that are absorbed into Magda's fictional experiences on a remote Cape farm and inform the intellectual reflections on history that are evident in her discourse. In Coetzee's novel, details such as the porcupine hole in which Magda buries her father are spatial signs which simultaneously reflect repetitions of events from the past, the apparent circularity of rural life, the vacuity of Magda's existence, and her sense of a stifling psychological and sexual incarceration. The porcupine hole is both grave and archaeological site and as such it recalls the digging site in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1981) and the use of archival material in The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee (1998). The use of historical texts in these works acknowledges an indebtedness to the historical discourses which informs the written experience of fictional characters in these works and the act of writing itself. The centrality of the porcupine hole in In the Heart of the Country also reflects the Lacanian and Freudian elements of Magda's relationship with her father, which become the more apparent when viewed against the background of her historical predecessor, Maria Mouton.