Mary’s ambivalent identification with Africanness (her submission to Muses), and with whiteness (her domestic space) could not be resolved and thus led to her self-sacrificial death. She feels a complicated sense of in-between-ness. She cannot fully identify with England, nor is she comfortable with her British colonial identity as the colonial in exile in Africa. “In the destruction of both Mary and Dick, the novel also seems to suggest that chaos lies always on the margins of (white) civilization in colonial Africa” (Fishburn 3).
According to Bhabha, The stereotype is a kind of multiple and contradictory belief. It substitutes for the cultural ascendancy that the colonial subject fears the loss of, the substitution of a stereotype gives
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“It is an ambivalent identification, containing both fear and desire” (Childs and Williams125). Therefore this identity is always in the process of identity-creation. The feeling of fear and desire as Tseng discusses in his dissertation happens when “Tony Morrison witnessed Mary’s intimacy with the servant” (Tseng 212) and his “presence temporarily helped Mary regain her lost authority as the white missus” (ibid), for charlie Slatter and the rest of the white population in South Africa, the back man will always be seen as the Other. But Mary’s ambivalent desire towards the Other (black servant ant the sexual relation with him) began to arouse. “Mary on the one hand thanked Tony for his gallant intervention, but on the other hand she resented him for interrupting her subservience to Moses” (Tseng 212). The natives work as a mirror “that reflect the colonialist’s self-image” (Fishburn 4).
Mary resisted against the Other but she at last as all the colonizers admitted that her identity is not a pre-given one but it should be in the process of change. Although she herself became mad but she internalized her new identity. She understood that the idea of England as Englishness as a controlling power was going to envision its future downfall by black revolt. The horrible murder of a white woman by her servant could only happen to the misfits and self-exiled who are not really British.