Women in Disgrace Novel

David Lurie’s life has at every stage involved women, and his upbringing and his past have formed his attitude towards women. His childhood was spent in a family of women and the company of women made him a “lover of women” and, to an extent, a “womaniser”. Such an admission, coming as it does from David, provides some insight into his attitude towards women. As a “womaniser”, he sees women almost as objects, simply there to satisfy his sexual urges.

This image is further reinforced by his description of his past: “If he looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain intent, she would return his look, he could rely on that,” and also by how, after his physical attraction fled overnight, “he existed in an anxious flurry of promiscuity.”

Clearly David feels no need for intimacy or a relationship; rather, he desires sex. The fact that he feels that, “for a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” by employing the services of prostitutes, emphasises his carnal priorities.

His relationship with one of his students, Melanie Isaacs, once again indicates how David sees women as objects – despite social conventions and moral obligations, he impulsively initiates a sexual relationship with Melanie, overruling both his common sense (“a last leap of the flame of sense before it goes out”) and his conscience when he muses that she “is no more than a child. What am I doing?” Such impulsiveness creates a parallel between David and Byron’s Lucifer – both do not “act on principle, but on impulses, and the source of their impulses are dark”. Indeed, both have mad hearts” and both choose to live dangerously.

David’s impulsive behavior towards women is again mentioned at the disciplinary hearing, when he states that he “became a servant of Eros” but also that “the impulse was far from governable… I have denied similar impulses many times in the past.” Again he appears to see women solely as sex objects, an attitude reinforced