‘A New Footing’: Re-reading the Barbarian Girl in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

David Attwell’s chapter on Waiting for the Barbarians challenges a tendency to mistake the magistrate’s perspective for that of the novel itself. He focuses on the barbarian woman who is often discussed as the quintessential other: silent, inscrutable, without agency. Such readings (which arguably result from heavy-handed application of postcolonial theory) overlook the subtleties of the woman’s portrayal. A careful analysis shows that she is a fully social being: resistant, multilingual, sexually independent, and politically savvy. In the end, the magistrate imagines her riding into the imperial outpost, ‘erect in the saddle, her eyes shining, a forerunner, a guide, pointing out to her comrades the lay of this foreign town where she once lived.’ She is a pivotal figure whose presence serves to convey longing for a transformed colonial order, rather than a system locked in the permanent stasis of alterity.