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Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism:
An Underlying Unity“A unity underlying all nature”1
—Olive Schreiner
RUTH K NECHTEL
The University of Manitoba
IN THE MIDST of nineteenth-century social discourses that had
scientifically “proven” that woman is essentially different from man,
dangerously unwomanly if she shirks her maternal duties, inverted
if she deviates from her proper sphere, Olive Schreiner’s fiction offers
complex and effective modes of resistance. Throughout several of her
works, Schreiner strives to represent a unity or cohesion of the natural
and social organism rooted in creativity, both artistic and maternal. In
emphasizing unity and connection, her ideal is often one of androgy-
nous sameness, yet her concept of healing is rooted in images of nur-turing, creation, and maternity, emphasizing difference. In considering
The Story of An African Farm (1883), From Man to Man (1926) and “A
Dream of Wild Bees” (1890), this article analyzes the ways in which
Schreiner works through evolutionary and scientific discourses, as well
as gender norms, while striving towards an animist ideal of human,
animal, plant, and spiritual connectedness.
Schreiner’s amalgamation of idealist and materialist aspects is pur-
poseful and complex. Borrowing from several schools of thought (no-tably Transcendentalism and social Darwinism), she crafts a type of
feminist humanism that develops to include animism—the doctrine
that all living entities have souls.2 Her unique philosophy foregrounds
the fluid boundaries between human, fauna, and flora in an attempt
to transform conventional binary models of relationships, particular-
ly as they involve sex and gender. While critics such as Joyce Avrech
Berkman have outlined Schreiner’s struggles with an “integration of
spiritual and material,”3
Schreiner’s approach ultimately surpassesa fusion of these categories. By strategically invoking maternal, an-
d d th i ti ( t ti )4 t d i th
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for her own purposes, Schreiner’s combinatorial rhetoric goes beyond a
reconciliation of duality. It offers, instead, a dissolution of such hierar-
chies, celebrating multiplicity and producing the tension necessary for
social change. As such, Schreiner’s open-ended fusion refuses simply
to “resist exploitative hierarchies only to promote the reversal of thosehierarchies.”5 The ethos that Schreiner envisions emphasizes a unity
among all beings in order to promote equality; yet she also accentuates
the maternal, thereby highlighting the generative power of what she
calls “mother-love.”6
The term “animism” became popular in the nineteenth century
through the work of Edward Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871). His use
of the term, which he derived from the Latin animus (soul), was pri-
marily negative, referring to those primitive cultures that mistakenly
believed in souls or spirits. Graham Harvey refers to this understand-
ing of the term as “old animism,” one that considers its presence “a
sign of primitive stupidity.”7 There is, however, a “new animism” that,
instead of referring to God as the unity among all beings or under-
standing the world through dualisms, works to prove “boundaries are
permeable and putative ‘opposites’ are necessarily engaged in various
ways.”8 Animists “celebrate plurality, multiplicity, the many, and their
entwined passionate entanglements.”9 Val Plumwood suggests that in
order to overcome certain spiritually based pantheistic theories that
often rely on dualisms, “we need a concept of the other as interconnect-
ed with self, but also as a separate being in their own right.… Feminist
theory can help here because it has developed logical and philosophi-
cal frameworks based on maintaining the tension between Same and
Different.”10 That is, a framework that allows sameness and difference
to exist simultaneously would successfully advocate an animist per-
spective that goes beyond the hierarchies still inherent in humanist
perspectives. Schreiner’s breakdown of boundaries between humans,animals, and even vegetation undermines many of the binaries that
deemed women inferior. By undoing the dualisms of masculinity/femi-
ninity, human/animal, and even animal/vegetable, Schreiner plays
with connection and unity, celebrating multiplicity, yet she also retains
a sense of difference, emphasizing the generative aspect of maternity.
Much of Schreiner’s emphasis on the connection of all things in na-
ture can be allied with the Transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Wal-
do Emerson. Schreiner once told Arthur Symons that Emerson “‘hasnever said not even a half sentence that [I don’t] absolutely agree with
d f l ’”11 O li i hi hil h i N E b
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that “the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we,
through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to
the universe?”12 This “original relation” consisted of finding in nature
“the perpetual presence of the sublime.”13 Communing with nature,
man is able to allow the “currents of the Universal Being to circulatethrough [him]; [he is] part or particle of God.”14 In this way, all living
things bear the imprint of a higher power and are all linked with one
another. “The greatest delight,” Emerson continues, “is the suggestion
of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.”15 Emerson’s use
of “occult” implies both a hidden and supernatural relationship be-
tween humans and nature. This kind of interdependence would become
the basis for Schreiner’s ethos of unity.
Yet Schreiner is critical of Transcendentalist tendencies to “subor-
dinate matter to spirit.”16 She often returns the material, frequently
maternal, body to her version of transcendent connection. In Emerson’s
lecture “The American Scholar,” he outlines one of the more contentious
aspects of Transcendentalist thought: the transcendence of masculine
creation through art. “When the mind is braced,” Emerson argues, “by
labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes lumi-
nous with manifold allusion.”17 In order to become “Man Thinking,” the
individual must create, because “if the man create not, the pure efflux
of the Deity is not his.”18 In this way, Emerson highlights the common
metaphor of masculine “birth” through artistic creation. Schreiner’s re-
joinder, the interconnection of ideal and material, becomes political as
it works to promote feminist reform through images of female mater-
nal and artistic creation.
While Transcendentalism (inspired by German Romanticism) of-
fered her the language and philosophy with which to highlight her
ethos of connection, Herbert Spencer’s First Principles (1862) provided
a more materialist version of the concept of a unity underlying all na-ture. The theory of evolution, as outlined by Spencer, offered Schreiner
a framework through which to emphasize the role of maternity in el-
evating the human race. In this way, she creates a hybrid perspective
that, by corresponding in many ways to dominant discourses attempt-
ing to define womanhood, resists such totalizing and instead utilizes
androgyny and maternity to express the importance of connection and
creation. Schreiner, living an isolated life in South Africa, had early
on begun to doubt the authority of her strict religious upbringing andfound answers in Spencer’s theory of social Darwinism. From as young
i ld S h i bl “ i f G d d
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and the material universe as distinct from one another”19 and sought
solutions from diverse sources. Spencer’s text became for her akin to
the time when “Christianity burst on the dark Roman world”;20 it al-
lowed her to reconcile her belief in an “Absolute” beyond human knowl-
edge and her experience in the material world. Such revelations wouldeventually become refined into Schreiner’s pantheistic vision, one that
undermines hierarchical thinking by unifying the natural, spiritual,
and human realms.
Spencer’s social Darwinism also gave Schreiner a language through
which she could espouse her strategic use of maternal essentialism. Al-
though much of Spencer’s theoretical work uses biology to prove “nat-
ural” differences between the sexes and argues against equal rights,
Schreiner was inspired by First Principles. Having read it at sixteen,she likened it (in a letter to Havelock Ellis in 1884) to having a doctor
set a fractured limb. “‘If one has a broken leg,’” she writes, “‘and the doc-
tor sets it, when once it is set one may be said to have no more need of
the doctor, nevertheless one always walks on his leg. I think that is how
it is with myself and Herbert Spencer.’”21 In this way, Spencer’s theo-
ries inspired her to believe in the connections among all living things,
and they helped her to formulate her ideal for the future of the human
race. Spencer’s First Principles also offered a materialist version of the
connections among all living things by arguing that all beings are uni-
fied in their progress towards evolutionary equilibrium. Yet, as all mat-
ter evolves, it becomes more complex and heterogeneous. “Evolution,”
observes Spencer, “is a change from the homogeneous to the heteroge-
neous, it is a change from the indefinite to the definite. Along with an
advance from simplicity to complexity, there is an advance from confu-
sion to order.”22 In other words, according to Spencer, “all phenomena
receive complete interpretation only when recognized as parts of the
evolutionary process.”23 As such, the “deepest truths we can reach aresimply statements of the widest uniformities.”24 Therefore, as Spencer
relates, “during its earlier stages, every embryo is sexless—becomes
either male or female.”25 In emphasizing the evolved position of hetero-
geneity, sex differences become the focus. Evolution, Spencer explains,
necessitates the disappearance of intermediate forms in the simplest
organism and in the social organism. The “impassable limit” of evolu-
tion, continues Spencer, is the “ultimate establishment of a balance.”26
The theories of Emerson and Spencer offered Schreiner a series ofrhetorical and intellectual strategies for her own spiritual and scien-
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work including images and discourses through which Schreiner in-
scribed androgyny and maternity with resistant power. Throughout
Schreiner’s fiction, echoes of Emerson and Spencer inform her artic-
ulation of sameness and difference and her emphasis on connection
and creation. It is thus crucial to acknowledge both authors in order tounderstand more fully Schreiner’s incorporation of both idealism and
materialism into her feminist unification of the natural, human, and
spiritual realms that moves towards animism, with an emphasis on
maternal nurturing.
The Story of an African Farm: The Rejection of Dualisms
In The Story of an African Farm (1883), Schreiner, under the
pseudonym Ralph Iron,27 publishes her first novel, a work, according to
many of her contemporaries, that “gives us pictures of the nineteenth
century rather than any earlier century.”28 It is in The Story of an Afri-
can Farm’s “pictures” of her century that she seeks to prove an under-
lying unity to all nature, her particular enfolding of Spencerian evo-
lutionary theory and Emersonian Transcendentalism. In a language
reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s view of humans’ powerlessness to fate
and foreshadowing Waldo’s loss of faith, the narrator explains that we
have no God because “there is no order: all things are driven about
by blind chance.”29 The solution to a lack of faith in God comes as “weturn to Nature.”30 It is in nature that we find “not a chance jumble; a
living thing, a One.”31 Schreiner’s narrator (focalizing through Waldo)
perfectly echoes Emerson’s question in Nature: as did our forefathers,
“why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”32
Communing with nature, man is able to allow the “currents of the
Universal Being to circulate through [him]; [he is] part or particle of
God.”33 In this way, all living things bear the imprint of a higher power
and are all linked with one another. But Schreiner’s narrator movesbeyond Emerson’s divine connection between living things, recounting
one of the most striking animist emblems of the kind of unity that
resonates throughout the novel in the image of the drowned gander
connected to the tree of life:
We take it [the dead gander’s body] out, and open it on the bank, and kneel,
looking at it. Above are the organs divided by delicate tissues; below are
the intestines artistically curved in a spiral form, and each tier covered
by a delicate network of blood-vessels standing out red against the faint
blue background. Each branch of blood-vessels is comprised of a trunk,bifurcating and rebifurcating into the most delicate, hair-like threads,
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over—and here we drop from our kneeling into a sitting posture—this we
also remark: of that same exact shape and outline is our thorn-tree seen
against the sky in mid-winter: of that shape also is delicate metallic trac-
ery between our rocks; in that exact path does our water flow…; so shaped
are the antlers of the horned beetle. How are these things related that
such a deep union should exist between them all? Is it chance? Or, are theynot all the fine branches of one trunk, whose sap flows through us all?34
These images of repeated patterns and networks among animal, plant,
insect, and mineral domains give answer to the “weltering chaos”35
that we perceive around us; according to the narrator, it is the connec-
tion between all things in nature that provides the answer to a loss of
faith in traditional orthodoxies and to correcting the inequalities con-
structed through privileged discourses. Just as the branches of blood
vessels in the gander are repeated in the shape and outline of the thorntree, and the tracery between rocks parallels the shape of the antlers
of the horned beetle, so too are all human beings connected in such
a way that should elide traditional dualisms such as gender used by
those who preach inequality. Similarly, Schreiner’s distinctly natural-
ist focus in these images calls attention to her emphasis on Spencerian
connection through evolution. She will use this notion of unity to blur
the boundaries between her male and female characters, foreground-
ing androgyny. Moving beyond androgyny, Schreiner’s fusion of hu-man, animal, plant, and mineral refuses the hierarchy of human and
nature, thereby using a pantheistic approach to deny traditional bi-
nary relationships.
Embodying a challenge to the Victorian ideal of “separate spheres,”
Lyndall both represents and professes an androgynous view of the
sexes so feared by many late Victorians. Schreiner has also created a
complex relation of doubles—between Lyndall and Waldo; Lyndall and
Gregory Rose—that also reinforces the androgynous ideal of unity.36 In
Part Two, chapter four, Lyndall becomes the mouthpiece for Schreiner’s
criticisms of women’s subjugation. She emphatically advocates equal
rights and freedoms for women (which prompted many to herald Lyn-
dall as the first fictional representation of the New Woman). Upon re-
turning from a type of finishing school, Lyndall has an extended con-
versation with Waldo during which she expounds her beliefs on the
relations between the sexes. The image that begins the sequence is
telling; as Lyndall notes, after seeing a group of ostriches, “‘I like these
birds … they share each other’s work, and are companions.’”37 Locatingthe ideal relationship between the sexes in nature, specifically using
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day, it also praises the blurring of boundaries between conventional
masculine and feminine behaviours. She also fuses the human and ani-
mal realms, which furthers her animistic approach to existence.
In fact, Lyndall’s is not an entirely pessimistic worldview. While pres-
ent conditions might be unfair, she contends that if she were born inthe future, then “‘to be born a woman will not be to be born branded.’”39
Yet, in a statement that mirrors John Stuart Mill’s theories on wom-
en, Lyndall criticizes her society’s notion of separate spheres: “‘we fit
our sphere as a Chinese woman’s foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though
God had made both—and yet he knows nothing of either.’”40 While the
private sphere might seem a natural fit to those who observe women
within it, Lyndall continues the metaphor, arguing that “‘we wear the
bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are
compressed, and chafe against them.’”41 Using another often-cited met-
aphor, and continuing the bird symbolism, Lyndall asks: “‘if the bird
does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep
the door so very carefully shut? Why not open it, only a little? Do they
know there is many a bird will not break its wings against the bars,
but would fly if the doors were open?’”42 With this series of questions,
Schreiner implies that one of the main reasons the “cage” is not open
is a pervasive anxiety on the part of the Victorian patriarchy: fears
regarding the possibility that women are indeed naturally capable of
intellectual work and, as such, cannot be defined or caught within such
strict categories.
Lyndall further articulates Schreiner’s points regarding women’s
rights when she emphasizes the sameness inherent to all things in the
natural world, which, in people, becomes differentiated only through
social customs. “‘We all enter the world,’” Lyndall argues, “‘little plastic
beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest—blank;
and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the endsit sets before us. To you it says—‘Work’; and to us it says—‘Seem!’”43
Again, insisting on the similarities between all “men,” Lyndall contin-
ues: “‘what is microscopic in one is largely developed in another; what
is a rudimentary in one man is an active organ in another; but all
things are in all men, and one soul is the model of all. We shall find
nothing new in human nature after we have once carefully dissected
and analyzed the one being we ever shall truly know—ourself.’”44 In
professing the sameness in all beings, Schreiner not only preaches abelief in unity reminiscent of Emerson; she also sets up an ideal of an-
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characters as the narrative unfolds. Her idealized androgyny, however,
moves beyond gender dualisms toward dissolution of hierarchical cat-
egories altogether. The emphasis on “one soul” foregrounds Emerson’s
notion that all living things are united beyond the material, because
they bear the imprint of a higher power and are therefore linked withone another.
While Lyndall’s speech emphasizes connection, she also makes a
strong argument for diversity by emphasizing maternity. “‘We bear the
world,’” observes Lyndall, “‘and we make it.’”45 This “‘woman’s work,’”
she argues, “‘needs a many-sided, multiform culture,’”46 which is denied
to women. “‘The mightiest and noblest of human work,’” she continues,
“‘is given to us,… it is the one window through which we see into the
great world of earnest labour.’”47 Schreiner’s emphasis on work as the
remedy recalls the social platform of many Victorian authors, such as
Thomas Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus (1834) Schreiner often cites in
her letters and diaries.48 While Schreiner’s reference to child-rearing
as work recalls the connection between all people who strive to make
“honest work” their duty, she is using a distinctly essentialist argu-
ment to stress woman’s difference from man through maternity. “‘It
is the only education,’” she contends, “‘we have and which they cannot
take from us.’”49 If, however, maternity is the only education available
to women, Lyndall’s fate in The Story of an African Farm proves that
it is inadequate in the current environment; Lyndall is incapable of
survival as a mother because society has not yet evolved to accept her
androgynous mind.50
The sameness between all beings, which inscribes androgynous ide-
als and also transgresses gender categories by approaching animism,
is enacted in blurring the boundaries between Lyndall and Waldo.
Between these characters, Schreiner emulates an interconnectedness
that undermines strict definitions of essential gender traits. Lyndallfeels an affinity to Waldo not only because of their shared life circum-
stances, but also because they each long for the “unknowable” in the
universe. “‘When I am with you,’” Lyndall confesses, “‘I never know that
I am a woman and you are a man; I only know that we are both things
that think. Other men when I am with them, whether I love them or
not, they are mere bodies to me; but you are a spirit; I like you.’”51
Through Lyndall and Waldo, Schreiner espouses the mystical point of
view of the Transcendentalists, who believed that “Inner Light [wasthe] natural endowment of the human mind,”52 regardless of sex, gen-
d i l i Whil h i l l i h i
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al realm, Waldo transcends the material and becomes all spirit and, as
such, embodies the “soul of the whole.”53 Lyndall’s comment exempli-
fies Swedenborg’s perspective that “‘in the spiritual world, we change
sexes every moment.’”54
The two characters are also connected in that their ability to cre-ate is destroyed by external circumstances. Waldo creates a sheep-
shearing machine that (in a maternal allusion) takes nine months to
make. When the evil Bonaparte Blenkins begins praising his machine
just before he destroys it, the narrator observes: “there was never a
parent who heard deception in the voice that praised his child—his
first-born.”55 This destruction of “offspring” is allied to Spencer’s no-
tion of the survival of the fittest (of which Schreiner was critical) when,
just after Blenkins’s actions, Waldo observes a beetle who was “hard at
work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all
the morning: but Doss [Waldo’s dog] broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s
hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could
tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an
ending in nothing.”56 Just as the beetle strives and works, only to be
destroyed and forgotten, Lyndall and Waldo strive to achieve happi-
ness and fulfillment, only to meet a similar fate.
Similarly, Lyndall’s creation, a child she conceives with her stranger,
dies. Just as Waldo’s creation cannot survive in a world too cruel to
understand his ideal, neither can Lyndall nor her baby survive in a
world in which women are branded. Where Lyndall differs from Waldo
immensely is in her inability to love her creation, thereby suggesting
that Waldo represents the positive counterpart to that part of herself
unable to feel affection. Monsman argues that Lyndall instinctively
feels something for her baby—she tries to warm its cold feet—but her
inability even to kiss the child suggests that “the child is a symbol of
women’s subjection, threatening to reduce Lyndall from freedom to themale stereotype of a woman who bears and raises children.”57 Although
Lyndall has at length discussed her ideal of regenerative love, as the
“‘sunlight [that] falls on a torpid winter world [and in] its whole dead
crust a throbbing yearning wakes,’”58 she is unable to respond emo-
tionally because she has spent “so much time … resisting entrapment
that in the end she has no resources left for a self less, regenerative
love.”59 Although Schreiner uses Lyndall to express the importance of
maternity in differentiating and elevating the feminine, Lyndall andher child are destroyed by their social environment. Waldo becomes
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gender categories. Yet neither he nor the recipients of his care sur-
vive in their environment. Therefore, Schreiner’s ideal of regenera-
tive transcendence through maternal creation is represented as being
impossible in her current social setting. Without an evolved society
that accepts and advocates nonhierarchical connection between menand women, maternity can become stif ling and oppressive. Although
Schreiner does portray a somewhat positive nurturing figure in the
transformed Gregory Rose (who becomes figured as a hybrid gender
and nurtures Lyndall when she is sick and dying), her use of maternal
essentialism as a way to elevate women seems to apply only theoreti-
cally through Lyndall’s argument that maternity is the “‘mightiest and
noblest of human work.’”60 Lyndall herself is unable to achieve love or
transcendence through her maternity.
Schreiner’s portrayal of failed maternity is strategic in two ways.
First, by endowing male characters with nominal maternal success and
showing a female character to be unable to achieve the same, Schreiner
effectively dissolves the argument of a woman’s natural function so
often used to keep women in the private sphere. Second, Schreiner in-
vokes, yet also criticizes, a Spencerian notion of survival of the fittest.
In this way, she reveals that both Lyndall and Waldo, neither of whom
is content to simply live in the “knowable” world, are destroyed because
they cannot adapt to their conventional environments.61 Yet because
both characters carry the weight of Schreiner’s idealistic vision of the
future, the novel condemns such laissez-faire social Darwinism as an
inadequate model of societal transformation, a critique she will make
explicit in From Man to Man.
Through Lyndall’s criticisms of patriarchal culture, Schreiner is
also creating her own female-centered version of Transcendentalism.
Throughout the novel, Transcendentalist notions of the unity of all
things and the possibility of transcendence through nature, not con- ventional religion, articulate the influence of such authors as Emerson.
Where her vision differs from Emerson’s is through the crucial incor-
poration of the physical, specifically maternal, body. Through Lyndall,
Schreiner criticizes the Transcendentalist view of masculine creation
advocated by Emerson in his essay “The American Scholar.” In a con-
versation with Waldo, Lyndall protests:
“They say, ‘God sends the little babies.’ Of all the dastardly revolting lies
men tell to suit themselves, I hate that most.… Men do not say God sendsthe books, or the newspaper articles, or the machines they make; and then
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In this statement, Lyndall is critical of two different perspectives on
procreation. First, she wishes to return the ideal of divine creation to
the maternal body, thereby denying the “man of genius” his Transcen-
dental “birth,” as implied by Emerson in his assertion that man must
create in order to feel the “pure efflux of the Deity.”63
Second, she iscritical of parents who rely on the theory of divine creation as a way
to avoid taking responsibility for their children. If the materiality of
procreation is denied, society lapses into unloving, unnurturing chaos,
driven only by personal existence, not by a sense of unity and connec-
tion.
Similarly, at the end of the novel, when Waldo learns of Lyndall’s
death, he paces in agony and then hears “the Transcendentalist’s high
answer.”64 Waldo is supposed to be comforted by the idea of the spirit’s
superiority to the body, but he is not. A disembodied voice speaks to
him and says:
“What have you to do with flesh, the gross and miserable garment in which
spirit hides itself? You shall see her again. But the hand, the foot, the
forehead you loved, you shall see no more. The loves, the fears, the frail-
ties that are born with the flesh, with the flesh they shall die. Let them
die! There is that in man that cannot die—a seed, a germ, an embryo, a
spiritual essence. Higher than she was on earth, as the tree is higher than
the seed, the man than the embryo, so shall you behold her; changed, glori-fied!”65
Interestingly, the Transcendentalist’s high answer (whose mention
of the “miserable garment” echoes Carlyle in Sartor Resartus) seems
contradictory. If the “spiritual essence,” which is supposed to be the
superior element underneath the “garment,” is allied with a “seed,” an
“embryo,” and a “germ,” how can the “tree” and the “man” be higher in
the hereafter? This inconsistency emphasizes Schreiner’s combinato-
rial rhetoric, which praises both the “spiritual essence” and the mate-rial, maternal “embryo.” To the unnamed voice, Waldo replies: “‘I want
no angel, only she; no holier, no better, with all her sins upon her, so
give her me or give me nothing.’”66 In his renunciation of the disembod-
ied ideal of Emersonian Transcendentalism, Waldo has disavowed the
privilege of the spiritual over the material.
Even in his death, Waldo is allied with the material world: he sits
on the ground and as “the mother hen was at work still among the
stones,… the chickens had climbed about him, and were perching on
him.”67 Thinking he is only sleeping, Em leaves a glass of milk for
him when he awakes “but the chickens ” the narrator relates “were
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cant. First, because they are part of the natural world, associated with
the land on the farm, they exemplify Waldo’s comforting thought that
“Nature enfolds you”69 after death. Second, chickens, as domesticated
fowl, epitomize a harsh counterpart to the “white bird of truth” in “The
Hunter” allegory. As opposed to the ideal of a life spent striving afterenlightenment in the form of the white bird, in reality, people like Lyn-
dall and Waldo are often crushed underneath the weight of social con-
vention, just as a domesticated bird, like the chicken, is unable to fly
and is recognized by humans as only of use in relation to the workings
of the farm. Third, chickens, as they encompass the progression from
embryo to egg to bird, emphasize maternity, albeit maternity that is
often exploited for monetary gain. Finally, in collapsing the hierarchy
of human and animal by acknowledging the chickens’ greater wisdom,
Schreiner’s animist perspective dissolves hierarchical dualisms.
From Man to Man: The Strength of Mother-Love
In her most extended polemic on nature, motherhood, and unity,
Schreiner fully articulates her version of evolutionary theory in From
Man to Man (published posthumously in 1926). While her vision of
the unity underlying all nature is derived from Spencer, she is highly
critical of his theory of the survival of the fittest. For her, genuine prog-
ress is the direct result of nurturing or what she calls “mother-love.”In representing her protagonist, Rebekah, as an unwomanly, well-read
woman who writes on the subjects of philosophy, religion, and science,
she creates an ideal of the androgynous mind, a mind that Virginia
Woolf, interpreting Coleridge, calls “creative, incandescent and undi-
vided.”70 Yet in From Man to Man, Rebekah also successfully nurtures
her children and creates independent wealth through her “nurturing”
of vegetation on a farm.
Strongly opposed to the notion of the survival of the fittest, Rebekahassociates the successful future of an infant (animal or human) to the
materiality of the mother’s body and nurturing. She begins describing
insects and mammals as they feed and encourage their young. In fact,
it is the “unself-conscious reason we call instinct” that propels most
nurturing,
“till love becomes incarnate in the female mammal feeding her young
from her breast—this is my blood which I give for the life of the world—
through all nature, life and growth and evolution are possible only because
of mother-love. Touch this, lay one cold finger on it and still it in the heart
of the female, and, in fifty years, life in all its higher forms on the planet
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Not only does Schreiner make explicit the connection between a moth-
er’s role (of any species) in social evolution, her emphasis on the ma-
ternal body in relation to biblical allusion is purposeful. Schreiner’s
paraphrase of Christ’s words to his apostles (“This is my body given
for you”72
) signals her remobilization of a biblical text. By associat-ing Christ’s words with Rebekah, the mother, Schreiner effectively
secularizes the Christian ideal of sacrifice and redemption and liter-
alizes the importance of the female body in saving society. Therefore,
the female (animal and human), maternal body becomes imbued with
the power for change; rather than Christian transubstantiation, the
maternal body is representative of social change through mother-love.
Through Rebekah, Schreiner overturns the dualism of spirit and body.
Although, according to Rebekah, mother-love determines the success
of any life, animal or human, she is careful to note that it goes far
beyond the physical acts of birth and early nurturing. In fact, argues
Rebekah, “you may almost estimate the height of development in the
creature by the amount of mother-love.”73 In allying mother-love with
higher intellectual development, she is challenging both the gendered
mind/body dualism and the notion that women are underdeveloped in
comparison with men (thereby less civilized and more childlike). The
ultimate creation, according to Rebekah, is that accomplished by the
artist, which she argues is the “fount and core of life in all ages.”74 By
linking maternity and artistic creativity along the same continuum of
creation, Schreiner emphasizes the feminine as the foundation of both
the physical and intellectual worlds.
Rebekah also uses the image of a tree as an example of the power of
creation that cannot be explained nor controlled by social discourses or
customs. Schreiner’s continued use of an arboreal symbol in relation to
maternal figures, associating maternity and creation with knowledge
and power, indicates a refinement of her ability to reconcile the mate-rial and the ideal, the body and the mind. Pruning and other external
actions (representing social discourses and actions) may produce cer-
tain ends, she notes, but they fail “utterly to account for the tree whose
essential life and essence lie in its power of growth; of reproducing
itself. All the pruning and cutting off in the world can never account
for the fundamental mystery of one bud becoming a flower…. Pruning
is a process which creates and produces nothing new.”75 Representing
“essential life” and the “fundamental mystery” of creation, the tree isinextricably connected to the maternal body. Rather than associating
k l d i h l ( d h f h li l ) S h i
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uses the tree to represent knowledge in the natural realm as a symbol
for the creative, female body. The inability for pruning to produce any-
thing new also points to Schreiner’s repeated criticism of removing the
biological body from creation, as was often done in metaphors of male
artistic creation. By using the tree as a symbol of maternal creation,Schreiner is also associating womanhood with strength, which was
typically considered a quintessentially masculine trait. In addition,
the association of the maternal body with a tree furthers Schreiner’s
animistic association of human and plant.
Rebekah herself represents both mother and artist and comes clos-
est to what Schreiner terms a “virile woman” in Woman and Labour
(1911): an embodiment of both sameness and difference, emphasizing
the androgynous pairing of masculine virility and womanhood, but also
venerating woman as mother through the lesser-known definition of
“virile” as “nubile.” From Man to Man, argues Carolyn Burdett, “sug-
gests that maternity is indispensable as a means to express the values
of patient creativity.”76 Correspondingly, maternal identity and its cre-
ative association become “central to the process of rethinking an ethi-
cal vision of ‘progress.’”77 A mother to four biological children and one
adopted (the product of her husband’s affair with the maid), Rebekah’s
creativity as an artist is utterly bound to her maternal identity, just
as her physical study is adjacent to her children’s room. She is often
inspired when she is with her children; her writing is both framed by
maternal moments and metaphorically linked to birth. One of the ar-
guments in Rebekah’s essay on evolution comes to her “when she had
taken her children for their walk in the pine woods.”78 Significantly,
her children (products of maternal creation) and the natural world (ex-
emplified by the often-used tree, symbolizing knowledge and connec-
tion) are shown to be crucial to her intellectual productivity. At several
points in her lengthy polemic on evolution, she “stopped suddenly atthe door to the children’s room, and, half opening it, stood listening to
hear if they were asleep.”79 Just as she was in the midst of her argu-
ment about united human advance, she “thought she suddenly heard
the baby stir. She threw her pen down on the table and took up the
lamp, went to the next room and bent over his cot…. Then she tucked
the cover in at the back of his neck and went back.”80 After each of the
maternal moments, she returns to her study and continues to write.
Heilmann argues that these moments represent how “marriage andmotherhood have taken a heavy toll on her creative energy,”81 but in-
d d th t l t h i th ti b t
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ternal and artistic creation. The fact that these moments occur when
Rebekah is engaged in writing her dissertation on evolution as recog-
nition of unity (rather than survival and competition) also highlights
Schreiner’s emphasis on a more inclusive and nurturing vision of prog-
ress.Similarly, in her long discussion with Mr. Drummond (Schreiner’s
version of the ideal New Man) at the end of the novel, Rebekah invokes
images of art as child and artistic creation as labour. In reference to the
act of completing a work, she observes: “‘it is now severed from him; the
cord is cut;… the child is weaned.’”82 Similarly, an artist wishing for
her work to be beautiful and to inspire others is, for Rebekah, the same
as a mother during childbirth who thinks “perhaps it will live on when
I am gone and be the beautiful and the good to others.”83 When, during
the conversation with Mr. Drummond, Rebekah wonders whether duty
had impeded her from “‘giving birth’” to some of her ideas, Mr. Drum-
mond is quick to respond by noting that “‘no art, no creative thought can
be greater all round than the creature from whom it takes its birth.’”84
Use of the childbirth metaphor for creativity is fraught with contro-
versy, as Susan Stanford Friedman has demonstrated. “The paradox
of the childbirth metaphor,” Friedman argues, “is that its contextual
resonance is fundamentally at odds with the very comparison it makes.
While the metaphor draws together mind and body, word and womb, it
also evokes the sexual division of labor upon which Western patriarchy
is founded.”85 In her use of the childbirth metaphor, Schreiner is call-
ing attention to sexual differences, while at the same time allying mind
and body in a subversion of such hierarchies. Thus, Schreiner’s use of
maternal essentialism promotes both positive, evolutionary progress
and artistic genius as being rooted in the feminine.
Not only does Rebekah represent maternal creation, she also pos-
sesses an androgynous mind, one that, in Woolf’s definition, encom-passes masculinity and femininity and is “actually creative, incandes-
cent and undivided.”86 Through her actions and her writings, Rebekah
promotes both the maternal and the androgynous. Her study is filled
with philosophical and scientific books (notably Darwin) and fossils
that “were all the intellectual intercourse she had ever known.”87 One
striking image that encapsulates this fusion is the existence of the only
two decorations in Rebekah’s study: “over the door leading to the chil-
dren’s bedroom was tacked the picture of the Madonna…. It was theonly ornament the room held except the little statue of Hercules in the
”88 Th M d h id li d i h l
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vision of maternity, is balanced by Herakles, the epitome of masculine
strength (if not also jealousy, promiscuity, and murderous rage). Each of
these icons exemplifies extreme stereotypes of femininity and mascu-
linity, respectively. The Madonna is self-sacrificing, pure, and motherly;
Herakles is strong, violent, and self-indulgent. Rebekah is intellectual,as indicated by her books and fossils; she is maternal, signified by the
picture of the Madonna; and she is strong, represented by the statue
of Herakles. By portraying Rebekah as a human hybrid, incorporating
the positive aspects of each gender, Schreiner illustrates the advantage
of androgyny. While Rebekah is criticized for being “mannish” and not
a “sweet womanly woman”89 like her mother, she comes close to repre-
senting Schreiner’s notion of the “perfect human creature.”90
In her article on evolution, Rebekah envisions a “‘personal ideal
reached only in a relationship in which the mind fully shared with the
body and in which the best in each half [of men and women] united into
the perfect human creature.’”91 Instead of the image of the androgyne
representing inversion and threatening chaos, as it did for many crit-
ics of the New Woman, Rebekah’s androgynous vision is heralded as
the ideal to which society should strive. Furthermore, Rebekah’s vision
contests Spencer’s theory of evolution in that, according to Spencer,
the greater the differentiation among organisms, the greater the evo-
lutionary progress.
In a move beyond androgyny towards animism, Rebekah’s theory of
the connectedness of all organisms emphasizes unity. She contrasts the
“old Christian conception [of the] Universe [as] a thing in shreds and
patches and unconnected parts”92 with the new conception, which con-
sists of
long unbroken lines of connection. Between spirit that beats within me
and body through which it acts, between mind and matter, between man
and beast, between beast and plant and plant and earth, between the lifethat has been and the life that is, I am able to see nowhere a sharp line of
severance, but a great, pulsating, always interacting whole.93
This ideal places Schreiner (via Rebekah) firmly within the Transcen-
dentalist view of the universe as being connected through the divine
presence in nature. Instead of sanctioning the violence at the heart
of typical evolutionary theories that advocate survival of the fittest,
Rebekah promotes the “universal substance of life” and the “moving
original power [that] is always this stretching-out, uniting, creativeforce.”94 If all beings are part of the great social organism, and are in-
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trinsically connected, there can be no inequality or discursive violence
on the basis of difference—human, plant, or animal.95
Schreiner’s repeated blurring of the boundaries between human,
plant, and animal rather than simply subverting conventional gender
roles points to a dissolution of humanist identity that accords with herpantheistic view of existence. As soon as identity is released from the
constraints of humanist categories, the androgyny she at times reveres
becomes a disembodied or idealized androgyny that seeks to unify at
an even deeper level. This connection recalls Spencer’s assertion that
the “deepest truths we can reach are simply statements of the widest
uniformities.”96 Therefore, her pantheistic feminism pushes the limits
of traditional binaries but always attends to the importance of mater-
nal nurturing.
Similarly, in analyzing the classes of nations such as Egypt, India,
and Persia, Rebekah ponders “‘what had they resembled but the long,
thin, tender, feathery, green shoots which our small rose trees some-
times send out in spring, rising far into the air [but they will die if] they
have shot out too far before their fellow branches.’”97 Again, Schreiner
invokes the image of tree branches and shoots to emphasize the con-
nections between the natural and social worlds. Vegetation becomes for
Schreiner an effective motif for conveying the interconnectedness of all
living things and the animist dissolution of hierarchical dualisms.
“A Dream of Wild Bees”:
Pages “Luminous with Manifold Allusion”
For Schreiner, allegories offered a powerful literary form through
which she could express emotion and effectively convey her arguments.
In particular, allegories epitomize Emerson’s view of the creative mind
in “The American Scholar.” “When the mind is braced,” Emerson argues,
“by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes
luminous with manifold allusion.”98 Her focus on allegory as the sole
medium in “A Dream of Wild Bees” renders this story exemplary of Em-
erson’s creative ideal. In a letter to Havelock Ellis, Schreiner outlines
her belief in the power of the allegory (or what she comes to call po-
etry, as opposed to fiction, in the novel form). In reference to her never-
completed introduction to the life of Mary Wollstonecraft,99 Schreiner
observes, “there are six or seven allegories in it; I’ve tried to keep them
out, but I can’t. I have come to the conclusion that only poetry is truth.That other forms are parts of truth, but as soon as representation has
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all parts, then it is poetry. As soon as there is the form and the spirit …
then there is poetry, or the living reality.”100
Schreiner’s theory of allegory embodies her combinatorial rhetoric:
she stresses the need to incorporate “form” and “spirit.” In conversation
with Symons she professes that allegory is pure symbol and the essenceof art.101 This association of allegory with symbol signals Schreiner’s
Romantic influence. In Romantic theories of art, the symbol is the only
possibility for combining the artist’s inner truth and the external world
of representation. For Schreiner, only when the material and the ideal
merge can the reader attain or understand “truth,” thus reaffirming
her feminism, which includes both Transcendentalism (often disem-
bodied) and evolutionary theory (focused on the material).
“A Dream of Wild Bees,” the reader is told in a parenthetical inclu-sion under the title, was “written as a letter for a friend,”102 Karl Pear-
son. “The contours of Pearson’s eugenicism,” argues Laura Chrisman,
“were … based on a notion of biological determinism, the genetic im-
mutability of ‘stock,’ a sexism and racism which constructed the white
male body as the source and shape of the social totality.”103 Schreiner
was critical of Pearson’s ideal of state-supported, child-bearing women,
a plan more redolent of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” than the Webbs’
socialist goals. Berkman argues that Schreiner perhaps “feared such
support would lock women into childbearing roles.”104 “Possibly,” con-
tinues Berkman, “she discerned the buds of [Pearson’s] later eugenic
zeal to promote the breeding of white Anglo-Saxons.”105 In “A Dream
of Wild Bees,” Schreiner resists both Pearson’s biological determinism
and, more generally, the possibility of objective, scientific truth. Karl
Pearson made the connection between eugenics and citizen-building
explicit in his 1894 article “Woman and Labour.” Pearson advocates
state support for mothers during childbearing years. Without such
support, “the race [will] degenerate if greater and greater stress bebrought to force woman during the years of child-bearing into active
and unlimited competition with man.”106 Schreiner uses a pregnant
woman as the focus of the text, mirrored by the Queen Bee, both of
whom are shown to structure and productively influence their respec-
tive societies in ways that their male counterparts cannot.
The center of this allegory is domestic and maternal: the pregnant
mother sits darning and listening to her eight children’s voices. Male
drone bees fly around her head until she drifts off to sleep and imag-ines that the bees “lengthened themselves out and became human crea-
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of unity. In this dream, the humanized bees come to the mother offering
her unborn child different future successes in the form of “classical al-
legorical personification-devices”108 such as Health, Wealth, and Fame.
As opposed to Pearson’s brand of eugenics, which posits that a child’s
future is determined by genetics, Schreiner’s mother is portrayed hold-ing the ultimate control in determining the future success of her baby.
When the final bee offers an unnamed ideal in the form of “‘a great land
[with] mountain tops burning gold,’”109 the mother asks “‘is it real?’” to
which the bee replies: “‘what is real?’”110 This questioning of the status
of reality becomes a critique of the possibility of scientific truth and
objectivity in the context of eugenics. If “real” becomes a fluid category,
as it does when the bee tells the unborn child its reward is that “‘the
ideal shall be real to thee,’”111 then any kind of “truth” must also be
subjective. This allegory enacts a specific critique of Pearson’s eugenics
and, more generally, it attacks the widely accepted scientific logic that
had so often defined women as being inferior under the guise of truth
telling. In its transformative move from ideal to real, the allegory also
signals a play on the impossibility of representation itself. Just as the
Romantics heralded the power of the symbol to fuse the artist’s inner
ideas and the outer world of language and representation, so too does
this allegory suggest that this kind of fusion is the true gift to the child
who will enter into the world.
Similarly, the pregnant mother is implicitly allied with the unmen-
tioned queen bee to which the male drones belong. “Bee-life,” explains
Burdett, “gives an ironic twist to the organization of human produc-
tion and reproduction implied by Pearsonian eugenics. In the former,
males do no work; they exist for the possibility of fertilizing the queen
bee around whom all the hive operates.”112 The ironic reversal is that
instead of the females existing for the purposes of reproduction, as so
many scientific theories insisted, it is the males who wait to fertilizeand are secondary to the queen. Schreiner was extremely critical of
what she called “sexual parasitism,” where women existed simply as
passive bearers of children (she offers a more specific critique of such
behaviour in Woman and Labour). This pregnant mother, however, is
shown to be actively fashioning her child’s future in a way that the
male drones and, by extension, human males are unable to do, thereby
adding an element of female superiority via maternal essentialism.
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the bee wasoften used to symbolize both fruitful labour and mediation between
h “ hl d h h l ”113 M i Th i i f h
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early- twentieth-century poetry of Michael Field, considers the bee
an amalgamation of Christian and pagan symbolism because of the
pollen-laden stamens of flowers being reimagined as the “golden rods”
of the paschal candles.114 While this combination provides a fusion of
divine and natural realms, Thain points out that “the bee was also re- vered and important in ancient and pagan Greece. The ancient Greek
poets were often named ‘bees’ … because of their noise and their ability
to produce sweetness.”115 In this regard, Schreiner’s hybrid bee-mother
also becomes an emblem of artistic creation, thereby undermining the
hierarchical association of women with the material realm to the exclu-
sion of the masculine privilege of mind.
Throughout her works, Schreiner surpasses a fusion of ideal and ma-
terial, androgynous and maternal. Schreiner’s repeated blurring of theboundaries between human, plant, and animal rather than reconciling
duality points to a dissolution of humanist identity that accords with
her pantheistic view of existence. Instead, her texts celebrate multi-
plicity and produce the tension necessary for social change. As such,
Schreiner’s open-ended fusion refuses simply to “resist exploitative
hierarchies only to promote the reversal of those hierarchies.”116 The
ethos that Schreiner envisions emphasizes a unity among all beings in
order to promote equality, though ever reliant on the maternal, thereby
highlighting the generative power of “mother-love.”
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Notes 1. In a letter dated 8 April 1884 to Havelock Ellis, Schreiner relates that Herbert Spencer “helped
me to believe in a unity underlying all nature; that was a great thing, but he has nothing else to give
me now.” Olive Schreiner Letters Volume 1: 1871–1899, Richard Rive, ed. (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 37.
2. In many ways I think Schreiner’s animist strategies promote a viewpoint similar to contem-porary posthumanists. While Schreiner does unify human, animal, and plant in order to overturn
hierarchical binaries, she always retains a sense of the human at the centre.
3. Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African
Colonialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 60.
4. I am using the term “pagan” in relation to animism to denote what Emma Restall-Orr calls “a
spiritual tradition founded on the power of nature” whereby the “tenets guide the individual not into
belief but into genuine experience.” See “The Ethics of Paganism,” in Pagan Visions for a Sustainable
Future, Ly de Angeles et al., eds. (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Press, 2005), 6. Dennis Denisoff explains:
“paganism’s difficulties with institutions that aim to establish universalizing truth claims and rigid
classificatory methodologies accord with its animist belief that all natural things (including flowers,
rocks, humans and insects) have forms of vitality that are worthy of respect. Pagan animism chal-
lenges the notion of ‘speciesism,’ the anthropocentric privileging of humans over other animals andlife forms.” See “The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats,” modernism/
modernity, 15.3 (2008), 434.
5. Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999), 88.
6. Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, or, Perhaps Only (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1926), 210.
7. Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia University Press,
2006), 9.
8. Ibid., xiv.
9. Ibid., xiv–xv.
10. Ibid., 183.
11. The Life of Olive Schreiner, Samuel C. Cronwright-Schreiner, ed. (London: Unwin, 1924), 187–
88.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836; New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1940), 5.
13. Ibid., 9.
14. Ibid., 13.
15. Ibid., 13.
16. Berkman, 60.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837), in Miscellanies (Boston: Phillips, Samp-
son and Company, 1856), 89.
18. Ibid., 80, 86.
19. Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (London: André Deutsch Limited, 1980), 53.
20. Letter from Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 28 March 1884. Olive Schreiner Letters Volume 1:
1871–1899, 36.
21. The Life of Olive Schreiner, 82.
22. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862; New York: American Publishers Corporation, 1867),
305.
23. Ibid., 466.
24. Ibid., 469. 25. Ibid., 373.
26 Ibid 407
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27. Many critics have attributed her pseudonym to Ralph Waldo Emerson. See Gerald Monsman,
Olive Schreiner’s Fiction: Landscape and Power (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991),
79–81.
28. Edward B. Aveling, “A Notable Book,” Progress: A Monthly Magazine of Advanced Thought, 2
(July–December 1883), 157.
29. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; Patricia O’Neill, ed. (1883; Peterborough: Broad-
view Press, 2003), 150.
30. Ibid., 151.
31. Ibid., 153.
32. Emerson, Nature, 5.
33. Ibid., 13.
34. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 153.
35. Ibid., 154.
36. For an extended discussion of doubling, see Gerald Monsman’s Olive Schreiner’s Fiction: Land-
scape and Power (1991).
37. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 184.
38. The choice of birds as examples here, and in the famous “The Hunter” allegory, calls attention to
Darwin’s The Descent of Man. “Discussing the mating habits of birds,” explains Daryl Ogden, “Darwin
encapsulates the roles played by most species in sexual selection: females choose, males are chosen.”
See The Language of the Eyes: Science, Sexuality and Female Vision in English Literature and Cul-
ture, 1690–1927 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 119.
39. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 184.
40. Ibid., 185–86.
41. Ibid., 186.
42. Ibid., 189.
43. Ibid., 185.
44. Ibid., 194.
45. Ibid., 189.
46. Ibid., 189.
47. Ibid., 189–90.
48. See Berkman, 20.
49. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 190.
50. Em, for example, a typical “womanly woman,” self-sacrificing and not intellectual in the same
way as Lyndall, survives and thrives in her environment. She is one of the few characters alive at the
end of the novel.
51. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 205.
52. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (1876; New
York: Harper & Row, 1965), 119.
53. Ibid., 239.
54. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Press,
1880), 105.
55. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 112.
56. Ibid., 112.
57. Monsman, 73. 58. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 221.
59 M 73
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60. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 189.
61. In her depiction of her characters’ demises, Schreiner anticipates the naturalism of Thomas
Hardy. In particular, Waldo and Lyndall are interesting precursors to Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead
in Jude the Obscure. For a more extended discussion of Schreiner’s similarities to Hardy, see Mons-
man, 166–85.
62. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 204.
63. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 86.
64. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 273.
65. Ibid., 273.
66. Ibid., 273.
67. Ibid., 283.
68. Ibid., 283.
69. Ibid., 281.
70. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 98.
71. Schreiner, From Man to Man, 210. 72. 1 Corinthians 11:24–26.
73. Schreiner, From Man to Man, 210.
74. Ibid., 214.
75. Ibid., 221.
76. Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), 107.
77. Ibid., 107.
78. Schreiner, From Man to Man, 188.
79. Ibid., 187. 80. Ibid., 192.
81. Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (New York:
Manchester University Press, 2004), 151.
82. Schreiner, From Man to Man, 473.
83. Ibid., 476–47.
84. Ibid., 478.
85. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Lit-
erary Discourse” in Speaking of Gender, Elaine Showalter, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1989), 75.
86. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 98.
87. Schreiner, From Man to Man, 175.
88. Ibid., 174.
89. Ibid., 158.
90. Ibid., 194.
91. Ibid., 194.
92. Ibid., 179.
93. Ibid., 181.
94. Ibid., 213.
95. Rebekah will make the same argument about the connectedness of all things in specific rela-tion to “race” near the end of the novel. After one of her sons uses a racial slur, she tells them a story
to make her point. In relation to different nationalities, she informs them “‘if we go far enough back
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thinker, the millionaire and the beggar, the warrior and the slave—we all stand huddled there; and,
as we peep over one another’s shoulders and bend to look in, we have still to whisper to what we see
there—‘Father!—Mother!’” ( From Man to Man, 427).
96. Spencer, 469.
97. Ibid., 191.
98. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 89. 99. For more information on this unfinished introduction, see Laura Chrisman, “Allegory, Feminist
Thought and the Dreams of Olive Schreiner,” in Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism,
Tony Brown, ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1990), 132–40.
100. Olive Schreiner Letters Volume 1: 1871–1899, Richard Rive, ed., 142.
101. The Life of Olive Schreiner, 185.
102. Olive Schreiner, Dreams (1890; London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1899), 9.
103. Chrisman, 145.
104. Berkman, 170.
105. Ibid., 170.
106. Karl Pearson, “Woman and Labour,” The Fortnightly Review, 61 (May 1894), 569–70.
107. Schreiner, Dreams, 90.
108. Chrisman, 145.
109. Schreiner, Dreams, 95.
110. Ibid., 96.
111. Ibid., 96.
112. Burdett, 84.
113. Marion Thain, “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007), 175.
114. Ibid., 175.
115. Ibid., 141.
116. Lorraine, 88.
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