“But I have quite another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness…” (41)
Magda, the anti-heroine of In the Heart of the County, yearns to transcend the limitations of her desert-bound life. She is trapped both in the vast barrenness of her father’s desolate desert farm and within the confines of her own “interiority” (35). And yet that very internal life – so disparate from her small, submissive outward life – is also presented as her sole means of escape. Within her vivid imagination, she can conjure scenarios in which she is empowered, in which she is not simply bound to “dwindle and expire here in the heart of the country” (23).
Indeed, the novel opens with one of her imaginings. Magda describes in vivid detail the coming of her father’s new bride, their lovemaking, the desperate desolation she feels in the wake of this new woman’s coup. (For that is how Magda sees it; the new wife as a “rival [mistress]” (7)) Finally, in the wake of their lovemaking one night, Magda sets upon their sleeping forms and murders them both with an ax. It is not until Magda has done the deed and considered the disposal of the bodies (“Am I strong enough to move them unaided in a wheelbarrow, or must I hack away until I have portable sections?” (15)), that it is revealed that a new wife never came, that in fact it is her father’s African servant who has taken a new wife.
This vivid interior dream world in which Magda lives – for her exterior world is so stilted in the first half of the book that it cannot be said that she truly lives within it; she merely exists – surely has her teetering on the edge of insanity (if not already plunged over it). But it is also her only means of escape, of life, of agency. Throughout the novel, when exterior action eludes her, when the walls of the desert and her farmhouse and her father and her loneliness close in on her, she slips into these dream narratives where she creates alternate storylines and endings. Coetzee, through Magda, thus plays with the reader’s sense of reality while evoking the unsettling consequences of the deep-seated desolation, detachment, and rage that are the fruits of South African colonialism.