While Olive Schreiner was born and lived for years in South Africa, she remains important to the British writing tradition as the first colonial novelist held important by British readers. She brought a manuscript with her when, at age 26, she moved to England, where she searched for a publisher. Her novel, The Story of an African Farm, became important to later feminist critics in its development of a strong, independent female protagonist, exhausted by the demands of the land.
The farm itself, an unremittingly bleak landscape, serves as a symbol to counter the romantic traditional version of the frontier. It focuses on two sisters, one of whom dies delivering her lover’s child. It also offered readers a cross-dressing male character with the ironic surname of Rose. The workers’ suffering indicts the imperialistic attitudes of those “civilizing” Africa, as did the violence that characterized imperialism, and she galvanized feminist issues in the first work by a colonial writer to garner acclaim.
Critics were appalled by her promotion of a “free union” in the place of marriage, and she was roundly taken to task for her revolutionary attitude on the pages of publications including Punch and Progress. It also proves of interest to Marxist critics, and socialist Edward B. Aveling, while not praising her style, wrote that Schreiner was “pointing the eyes” of her audience toward a “great socialistic revolution” that he judged imminent.
Schreiner published adopting the name Ralph Iron, and her protagonist voices many of the author’s own views, such as “I regard marriage as other people regard death.” She later received credit for anticipating what would be labeled the New Woman fiction in the next decade.
Schreiner’s condition as a governess writing of her observations adds to the importance of her achievement. Her style omits all sentimentality as she adopts a tone of frank hostility, sketching the unpleasant reality of the lack of women’s rights, the spiritual struggles caused by isolation and sexual harassment. The narrative includes some polemic material in Part II delivered by the novel’s protagonist, Lyndall, focusing on women’s rights. In addition, two sections resemble allegory; in those sections, Schreiner imitates, in order to subvert, biblical diction. She avoids sensationalizing scenes involving sex by suggesting the action.
In addition to the first-person point-of-view narrator, Lyndall, who will die following the death of her three-hour-old child, the plot follows a number of additional characters. They include the evil Bonaparte Blenkins, an Irish shyster who brings ruin to the farm; Tant’ Sannie, who believes Blenkins’s lies and prospers due to her material nature; Sannie’s wealthy niece, Trana, whom Blenkins hopes to marry; Em, Lyndall’s sister and a young woman of low self-esteem who marries out of loneliness a man she had once rejected; the gentle, naive German farmer, Otto, who will die due to Blenkins’s duplicity; and Otto’s son Waldo, who becomes an agnostic and dies an early death.
Readers understand that those honorable characters that seek an ethical life will not survive in an environment where material gain alone is admired. Tant’ Sannie represents the most practical of the characters. Twice widowed and placed in charge of Em and Lyndall by their dying father, she finds freedom when Em turns 16 years old and inherits the farm. Released from control over the property and the girls, Sannie at age 30 makes a marriage of convenience to a 19-year-old albino named Piet Vander Walt, a widower.
Those individuals who develop relationships share a sense of humanity, and they will lose everything in a land made barren more by the lack of compassion and by inequity than by nature. Even the spiritual bond that develops between foils Lyndall and Waldo will not save them. Death haunts this group, and no relief comes from religion. Waldo questions his family’s faith as a result of the inexplicable suffering he witnesses. He suffers for every death that occurs, not only in his own environment but the world over. His compassion is such that when Blenkins pleads with him at the conclusion of Part I for food and water, Waldo supplies his needs, despite Blenkins’s persecution of the farm’s inhabitants. Such a sensitive nature as Waldo’s cannot survive on Schreiner’s African farm.
Critics compared Schreiner’s rendition of Lyndall’s lot as a governess to that constructed by Charlotte Brontë through the title heroine of her novel Jane Eyre (1847). At the time Brontë’s novel was published, the public stood unprepared for the stark facts laid out by the diminutive Jane. When Schreiner’s novel arrived almost 40 years later, social revolutionaries of a new generation welcomed her as their champion.
Bibliography
Aveling, Edward B. “A Notable Book.” Progress: A Monthly Magazine of Annotated Thought. 1 (1883): 162.
Berkman, Joyce Avrech. The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
Bristow, Joseph. Introduction to The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, vii–xxix.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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