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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/9047 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Wilhelm, Cherry Ann. |
| Contributors | Voss, Tony. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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