Dehumanisation, Otherness and Animal Tropes in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron

This paper aims to investigate J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) from the perspective of the metaphorical connotations acquired by animal tropes in the narrative. It demonstrates how the elderly protagonist of the novel, Mrs Curren, uses animal imagery to define and categorise people she associates with otherness, particularly in relation to two groups: the racialised and marginalised ‘victims’ of apartheid, and the white supremacist ‘perpetrators’, including nationalist politicians and compliant white citizens. In both cases, these figurative devices contribute to a broader process of dehumanisation, highlighting the contradictions and limitations of the protagonist’s liberal-humanist perspective and its entanglement with anthropocentric and Eurocentric biases.