Molly Bloom and Elizabeth Costello: Coetzee’s Female Characters and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination

Abstract

As evidence in support of her argument for the boundlessness of the sympathetic imagination upon which her ethical outlook depends, Elizabeth Costello cites her novel The House on Eccles Street and its representation of the life of Molly Bloom outside of Joyce’s Ulysses. This chapter asks how seriously we can take this argument, and what is its relation to Coetzee’s own thinking of his way into the existence of Elizabeth Costello, Magda, Mrs Curren, and Susan Barton. Is the ethical force of the novelistic imagination equivalent to that of our responses to actually existing beings? And how might the gender dynamic implicit in the male writer’s creation of the inner lives of female characters bear on the ethics of the sympathetic imagination?.