Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism

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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-

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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



K NECHTEL : SCHREINER

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

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ELT 53 : 3 2010

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-




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




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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ELT 53 : 3 2010

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




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 conventional 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

i h d h th i h ld d th ’t h l it Wh d th




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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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




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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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




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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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-




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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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-




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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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.”




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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


56. Ibid., 112.

57. Monsman, 73. 58. Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm, 221.

59 M 73





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.


63. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 86.


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.


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.


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.


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



ELT 53 : 3 2010

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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Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism

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