The Colonial African Heroine in the Writing of Olive Schreiner, Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer
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WHITE EVE IN THE "PETRIFIED GARDEN": THE COLONIAL AFRICAN HEROINE IN THE WRITING OF OLIVE SCHREINER, ISAK DINESEN, DORIS LESSING AND NADINE GORDIMER By ROBIN ELLEN VISEL B.A. The City College of the City University of New York, 197 M.A. The University of British Columbia, 1977 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA November 1987 © Robin Ellen Visel, 1987 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 DE-6(3/81) ii ABSTRACT Olive Schreiner, writing in the tradition of George Eliot and the Brontes, was an isolated yet original figure who opened up new directions in women's fiction. In her novels, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) she developed a feminist critique of colonialism that was based on her own coming-of-age as a writer in South Africa. Schreiner's work inspired and influenced Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, who have pursued their visions of the colonial African heroine in changing forms which nevertheless consciously hark back to the "mother novel." Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937), Lessing's Martha Quest (1952) and Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953) are in a sense revisions of Schreiner's Story of an African Farm. These texts, together with later novels by Lessing and Gordimer (such as Shikasta and Burger's Daughter, 1979) and key short stories by the four writers, form a body of writing I call the "African Farm" texts. Written in different colonial countries—South Africa, Kenya and Rhodesia—in response to different historical circumstances, from different ideological and aesthetic stances, the "African Farm" fictions depict the problematic situation of the white African heroine who is alienated both from white colonial society and from black Africa. Through her own rebellion against patriarchal mores as she struggles to define herself as an artistic, intellectual woman in a hostile environment, she uncovers the connections between patriarchy and racism under colonialism. She begins to identify with the black Africans in their oppression and their iii incipient struggle for independence; however she cannot shed her white inheritance of privilege and guilt. Just as colonial society (the white "African Farm") becomes for her a desert, a cemetery, a false, barren, "petrified garden," so black Africa becomes its idealized counterpart: a fertile realm of harmony and possibility, the true Garden of Eden from which she, as White Eve, is exiled. I trace the "African Farm" theme and imagery through the work of other white Southern African writers, such as J.M. Coetzee, whose stark, poetic, post• modernist novels can be read as a coda to the realistic fiction of the four women writers. Finally, I look at the post-"African Farm" texts of such transitional writers as Bessie Head, whose novels of black Africa preserve a suggestive link with Schreiner. iv Table of Contents Page Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Acknowledgements vi Chapter One - Introduction: Stories of an African Farm .... 1 A Mother Novel and Its Daughters 1 The Colonial Heroine in the Context of the Female Bildungsroman 12 The Colonial Heroine in the Context of White African Literature 19 Chapter Two - Olive Schreiner: Eve Divided 37 The Story of an African Farm 37 From Man to Man 53 Chapter Three - Isak Dinesen: Eve as Adam 69 Out of Africa 69 Shadows on the Grass 79 Dinesen and Schreiner 81 Chapter Four - Lessing and Gordimer: Two Contemporaries and a Problematic Inheritance 90 Chapter Five - Doris Lessing: Eve in Exile 97 Lessing and Her Precursors 97 The Grass is Singing 106 Martha Quest 110 To Shikasta and Beyond 126 The Problem of "Exile" in Lessing's Fiction 136 V Chapter Six - Nadine Gordimer: Eve Bears Witness 146 The Lying Days 153 The Conservationist 169 Burger's Daughter 179 Chapter Seven - Conclusion: From the "African Farm" to Azania 205 "Dream Life and Real Life" 207 "Kitosch's Story" 210 Lessing and Gordimer 212 "The Old Chief Mshlanga" and The Myth of White Eve 214 "Is there Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?" 223 On the Black African Farm: July's People 226 A Sport of Nature: Azania Unfurled 236 Replanting the "Petrified Garden": Recent Developments in Southern African Fiction 240 Works Cited and Selected List of Works Consulted 251 Acknowledgements I would like thank Professor Patricia Merivale for her continued advice and support, without which I could not have successfully completed this project. I am also indebted to Professors Diana Brydon and Craig Tapping whose perceptive comments improved the final version. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Jonathan and Elsie Visel, and my husband, Yorgos Papatheodorou. 1 Chapter One Introduction: Stories of an African Farm A Mother Novel and its Daughters Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm has shaped the white colonial literary vision of Africa. Schreiner's African farm is a setting for human brutality amid harsh natural beauty, a setting of open vistas which oppress the spirit and imprison the body. It is a despoiled Paradise which symbolically rejects its colonists. Through her autobiographical heroines Schreiner challenges the inequities of colonial society from a feminist stance, becoming conscious in her later work of the racial subtext of the "African Farm" story. Her successors, isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer, develop the problematic of the white woman in black Africa: the heroine who rejects the patriarchal and racist premises of colonial society only to find herself doubly exiled, from what she perceives as the false Paradise of the whites and the true Eden of the blacks. Schreiner, Dinesen, Lessing and Gordimer describe different colonial societies from the perspective of their different nationalities, generations, classes, political views and literary styles. Schreiner, Lessing and Gordimer, who grew up in what were, respectively, the Cape Colony, the Colony of Southern Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa, can be classified as white African writers. Dinesen, who spent 2 seventeen years in the Protectorate/ later the colony, of British East Africa or Kenya, is an expatriate writer whose vision of Africa reflects her European origins. The connection among these four writers is the relation of Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937), Lessing's Martha Quest (1952), and Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953) to Schreiner's auto• biographical masterpiece, The Story of an African Farm (1883). Schreiner, Dinesen, Lessing and Gordimer share a geographical, historical, and literary connection which, I hope to prove, is more significant than their differences. Each of them is white and female, and lived in a British colony or territory in Africa, or—in the case of Nadine Gordimer—continues to live in the Republic of South Africa, a country still struggling to emerge from its colonial past. Each of them began to write in geographical isolation and in some degree of cultural isolation from the mainstream of English literature; each strove to describe a landscape and a society first described by Olive Schreiner in African Farm, from a female point of view first exemplified in Schreiner's heroine, Lyndall. It is generally accepted in feminist literary criticism that the relationship between female writers of different generations is less fraught with jealousy and hostility than is the relation between male writers. Whereas the male writer supposedly battles to overthrow his predecessor in order to assert his identity and to create something new, the female writer is more likely to find in her predecessor a mentor whose work inspires and encourages her own efforts.! Rather than 3 feeling oppressed by the weight of the literary tradition from which she springs, she feels heartened by the example of that small body of women who have stepped outside their allotted roles to become creative artists. Thus the emphasis in women's literary history is less on disruption than on continuity, less on negative than on positive influence.2 This emphasis on the continuity of women's literature is all the more appropriate when we are dealing with a small group of related authors who have in common a mother-novel, a prototype for their writing about Africa. Each of the early autobiographical novels and the memoir with which this thesis is chiefly concerned bears a direct relation to that first story of an African farm; each of the later writers pays tribute to and acknowledges the influence of Schreiner's pioneering text, which is both a cornerstone of feminist fiction^ and the founding text of Southern African fiction in English.4 The Story of an African Farm has had such a powerful influence on other writers because it is an original and courageous work of art poignantly flawed by the young artist's unashamed passion and her—only partly deliberate—ignorance of the fictional conventions. Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as "one half of a great writer; a diamond marred by a flaw" ("Olive Schreiner").5 African Farm is a near-great novel, which, far from being a daunting precedent, invites improvement, embellishment, rewriting.