Thesis--University of the Witwatersrand. "Part IV was added after presentation of the Thesis." / Bibliography: p. 65-69.

Thesis--University of the Witwatersrand. "Part IV was added after presentation of the Thesis." / Bibliography: p. 65-69.

Olive Schreiner's fiction is best understood in the context of her colonial situation : she experienced central Victorian spiritual dilemmas and social constrictions, but refracted through a rural colonial culture. A complex position of power and powerlessness, superiority and inferiority, individual assertiveness and self- abnegation, is the crux of her fictional world. Her formative years were spent within a culturally deprived rural environment in a dependent position as servant/governess, yet her reading gave her access to leading Victorian intellectuals who were trying to create a new synthesis out of the conflict between Darwin's revolutionary theory and faith in a God-given and unquestionable order, between science and faith, between a new spirit of 'realistic' enquiry and Christian dogma. The problem for the colonial novelist is similar to that of the provincial novelist : the writer seeking intellectual stimulus and cultural enrichment at the metropolitan centre often has to forego a sense of community, and a youthful emotional bond with a nourishing, indigenous landscape, frequently the original source of a sense of spiritual harmony and an underlying order in the universe itself. The colonial novelist thus expresses a tragic breach between individual and community, and a sense of irreconcilable needs. This process is best exemplified in the careers of women, because the difficulty in finding a suitable partner, and a fulfilling marriage, exemplifies the radical problem of reconciling nature and nurture, instinct and social convention. Solitariness, and death, can become the conditions of integrity. Nevertheless, Schreiner's analysis of social problems becomes more detailed and incisive as she develops, and social reform offers a way out of a doomed conflict. Schreiner's childhood reading of the Bible and her evangelical inheritance were crucial to her life and fiction. In both a spirit of charity and self-sacrifice was central, and contended with a popular Victorian view of Darwinism which saw nature as a struggle for survival, a competition between the 'fittest' in which power would be decisive. Schreiner's visionary optimism about moral and social progress was checked by a sense of natural cruelty, historical repetition and decadence, and the early influence of the doctrine of 'original sin'. Schreiner saw her fiction as having a social mission, but the mission could only be accomplished by a novelist true to her individual vision, and expressing her 'self' by aesthetic means. A novel should grow 'organically' from the artist's individual vision, and thus be analogous to a living and unfolding natural world, developing according to its awn inherent laws. Schreiner understood Art and Nature as complementary orders. Her theory of art is thorough and internally consistent : writing should be simple, sensuous, and passionate, and should reconcile social function and artistic design. The power and directness of colonial art reunited her with the Victorian metropolitan centre, though she experienced Victorian social issues in a particular, intensified form in South Africa. Nevertheless, her reponse to South African landscapes, her sense of its 'will to live' at the same time stimulated her own power of creativity, which would counter the stultifying effects of rural isolation and the social restraints on, and exploitation of uneducated women. Schreiner's spirit of militancy and a reliance on the individual conscience stemmed from her evangelical forebears, though she translated their religious non-conformism into social protest in the South African context. Her family was part of the missionary wing of Imperialism and at the same time part of the current of liberalism and enlightenment which clashed with a conservative slave-owning society in South Africa. Her own fiction expresses the plight of the 'slave' in a sequence of metaphorical transformations. The figures of the child, the young women, the servant, the convict, the slave, the prostitute, the black man and the black women interrelate and modify a simple portrait of victimization. Her fiction also draws on the homiletic tradition of evangelical literature,which used deathbed scenes as the carriers of a moral message. Schreiner's writing displays a characteristically Victorian range of non-fiction and fiction, pamphlets, letters, diaries satires, dream-visions, autobiographical fragments, and ambitious full-Iength novels. Her writing displays the Victorian concern with autobiographical and confessional literature as well as direct political and social intervention in a corrupt society. She shaped her life more and more consciously into a variety of narrative forms, from erotic fantasies and escapist to more outwardly-directed satirical and reformist fiction. Her early experience of homelessness economic and social dependence on strangers, as well as sexual vulnerability to men, was crucial in her formative experience. But here, too, she overcame a tendency toward masochism and narcissistic self-reflection to portray a women whose survival and growth expressed the strong side of Schreiner's vigorous and mature feminism. Schreiner's fictions, from the fragment "Diamond Fields" and the youthful Undine, to the early 'masterpiece' The Story of an African Farm, to the political satire Trooper Peter Halket and the encyclopedic though unfinished From Man to Man, display great narrative fertility, and an ability to modify and develop her own characteristic themes, images, and characters. An early multiplication of female victims gave way to the rich oppositions and multiple different-sex protagonists of African Farm, and the concentration yet divergence of the double-female protagonist situation of From Man to Man. All of her fictions move along a spectrum from protest to vision, realism to dream/allegory, and she inverts - and adapts the proportions in accordance with the aims of each particular work. Her fiction shows variety, creative richness, yet a growing economy of means and artistic control of genre. Her development as a novelist was away from a narcissitic focus on the self as victim towards a commitment to suffering forms of life outside the self. She also displayed a growing commitment to the social analysis of human suffering, and to South Africa as the crucible in which she had been formed, as a landscape which offered her an image of harmony to set against social malfunction, and as the strongest source of her own creativity. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1985.

This study constitutes an inquiry into how Olive Schreiner‟s peripheral position as a colonial woman writer enabled her rewriting of feminine identity, specifically her subversion of Victorian feminine stereotypes. I focus particular attention on three novels: The Story of an African Farm (1890), and the posthumously published From Man to Man (1926) and Undine (1929). I employ a feminist literary approach to examine how Schreiner‟s hybrid identity as a British South African enabled her revisioning of femininity. If Schreiner is situated within the context of her time, it can be demonstrated that her negotiations of feminine identity are influenced by her dual intellectual and cultural heritage. On the one hand, she can be situated within a British tradition of women‟s writing – in particular, the New Woman fiction which emerged in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, she can be situated within a nascent South African literary tradition – and demonstrates prototypically post-colonial concerns. Schreiner‟s writing style develops out of her colonial heritage and her experiences as a woman living in a patriarchal society. The resultant voice subverts the narrative traditions of the metropolitan novel in an attempt to articulate an alternative view of femininity. I examine in detail how Schreiner undermines and subverts Victorian stereotypes, and focus particular attention on the „fallen woman‟ and the „mother-figure‟. She attempts to challenge conventional Victorian conceptions of femininity by erasing the binary between the „angel‟ and the „whore‟ in order to create a New Woman. In Undine and The Story of an African Farm the full realisation of this New Woman is deferred, since both protagonists die, but From Man to Man is more nuanced, particularly in its emphasis on economic empowerment for women. Schreiner also destabilises traditional notions of motherhood, in order to offer glimpses of an alternative maternal role. It is my contention that, in her depiction of mother-figures and (un)fallen women, Schreiner challenges stock Victorian notions of femininity and, in the process, creates a space in which new possibilities for women can be imagined and negotiated.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 280-290). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Orientador: Robert Wayne Andrew Slenes / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-15T02:15:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Gomes_RaquelGryszczenkoAlves_M.pdf: 1752359 bytes, checksum: 3e33e35f8962c9d619d450b209d8717e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Resumo: Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855-1920), literata sul-africana de origem anglófona, é hoje lembrada essencialmente por sua contribuição para o campo dos estudos de gênero e sexualidade, bem como por seu romance de estréia - The Story of an African Farm, publicado em 1883. Centramos nossa análise no período de expansão econômico-territorial sul-africana - aqui delimitado entre os anos 1880 e 1902 - para apreender o diálogo da escrita de Schreiner com os impactos da política imperialista britânica nas relações entre ingleses e bôeres; ingleses e nativos e nativos e bôeres. É também neste período que a literata começa a articular sua idéia de nação sul-africana e assume uma política de combate à exploração do nativo pelo sistema capitalista, além de estruturar um discurso de apoio ao bôer. Para tanto, à leitura de The Story of an African Farm associamos também o estudo de obras que receberam até então pouco destaque: Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) e Thoughts on South Africa (1923*). / Abstract: Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855-1920), South African writer of anglophone origin, is nowadays remembered primarily for her contribution to the field of gender and sexuality studies, as well as for her debut novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883). Focusing our analysis on the economic expansion of South African territory - period delimited here between years 1880-1902 - we intend to explore the dialog of her writings with the impacts of British imperialist policy in the relations between British and the Boers, British and natives and between natives and Boers. It is also during this period that the literate begins to articulate her idea of a South African nation and engages herself in a policy to combat the exploitation of the native by the capitalist system, besides articulating a speech in support of the Boer cause. Therefore, to the reading of The Story of an African Farm we also associated the study of some works that received little attention so far: Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) and Thoughts on South Africa (1923*). / Mestrado / Historia Social / Mestre em História

M.A. (English) / The fallen woman is the central figure in much of the fiction written in Britain during the nineteenth century, and she frequently reappears in colonial writing. In this study, fictional interpretations of the English victorian stereotype of the fallen woman in The story of an African Farm and From Man to Man by Olive Schreiner and in The Beadle by Pauline smith are examined. The first chapter of this dissertation is an attempt to establish the fallen woman's classic stereotypical qualities as exhibited in five British novels. Location in their historical context explains the subtle changes in metropolitan attitudes towards women in general, and fallen women in particular, brought about by the advent of organisations designed for the protection of young girls and the assertion of women's rights. Analysis reveals certain clearly defined conventional trends in characterisation, plot and imagery. The novels studied are Ruth (1853) by Mrs.Gaskell, Adam Bede (1859) by George Eliot, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by George Meredith, East Lynne (1861) by Mrs. Henry Wood, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) by Thoma~ Hardy. In chapter two, the close interrelation between the predominant Western conceptions of manhood, colonialism, and racism is examined and an explanation given for the exaggeration in the colonies of the dual role of woman - as chaste angel or fallen devil. Examples of the social engineering undertaken in tribal or chieftainly patriarchies in Southern Africa and by the British Imperial administration at the turn of the century are given. The strong link between the oppression of blacks and women is illustrated. Dutch hierarchical notions of social caste and attitudes to women, which were in place when the British arrived, are discussed. The rapid internalisation of white male attitudes towards women of other races as reflected in the writing of white women in South Africa is then shown. Texts examined are The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas (1793 - 1803), edited by A.M. Lewin Robinson, Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from The Cape edited by John Purves, Sophie Levisseur: Memories, edited by Karel Schoeman, AVictorian Lady at the Cape (1849 -1851) edited by Alan F. Hattersley, Charlotte Moor's Marina de la Rey (i903), W.P.Livingstone's Christina Forsyth of Fingoland, the Story of the Loneliest Woman in Africa (circa 1911), Gertrude Page's The Pathway, and A Sketch of Women's Work (1893) edited by Lady Loch. It becomes evident in Saul Solomon's collection of letters entitled The contagious Diseases Act : Its operation at the Cape of Good Hope (1897), in G. Emily Conybeare's treatise entitled Womenly Women and Social Purity (1892) and in the Reverend C. Spoetstra's open letter to the editor of the Volksstem, published as a booklet under the title Delicate Matters (1896), that feminists, Members of the Cape Legislature, and clergymen were opposed to the double standard against women enshrined in Cape statutes. The reasons for their opposition are discussed. The character of the Afrikaner patriarchy which predominated at the turn of the century and into the early years of the twentieth century is described, and reasons suggested for the more mystical and sacrificial approach of this group towards the fallen woman as detected in the Reverend Spoetstra's letter. Having outlined the distortion of British attitudes towards women in South Africa in chapter two, I then examine the fictional interpretations of the fallen woman in Olive Schreiner's novels The story of an African Farm and From Man to Man. Her treatment of this character is related to the British stereotypes and to the influence of colonial attitudes to women and race already established. Biographical details and facts related to the composition of From Man to Man, which are of value in determining why the novelist chose, or was compelled, to represent her characters in the way she did, are studied. A progression of ideas regarding female autonomy and independence is traced in her novels by means of close textual analysis. The chapter ends with an evaluation of Schreiner's attitude to race and racism and of Schreiner's colonial version of a fate of women.

The 'colony' in Olive Schreiner‟s fiction and non-fiction is a place or space, I shall argue, that is both dynamic and complex. The comings and goings, the stories, of the 'characters' in the space are not reducible to the division of indigene/settler. This dissertation takes as its starting point a still prevalent view that Schreiner's literary achievement displays a typical 'colonial blindness' in matters of dispossession and resistance: that the colonial person has little connection to his/her material surrounds. In reaction to what I regard as a binary language of response, my focus is on what I refer to as 'margins' in Schreiner's writings: that is, to apparently tangential incidents which add complexity to the conception of colony and, by extension, to that of the colonial novel. My argument is that in her treatment of a colony of diverse, conflicting stories, which are told in both fictional and non-fictional forms, Schreiner challenged the dichotomous language of colonialism (in its sharp delineations between indigene and settler) and imbued her times (1880s-1920s) with visionary potential: a potential that continues to have import where the reductive categories of indigene and settler retain purchase even in postcolonial times. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1998? / Bibliography (leaves 281-294).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 302-315).