Abstract
This interview article engages Angelo Fick, Jade Munslow Ong, and Valerie Stevens in current perspectives on Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man, published in a new edition by Dorothy Driver and UCT Press in 2015. These interviews point towards a renewed interest in Schreiner and From Man to Man. They highlight how Schreiner scholarship is heading in fresh directions, as current thought on From Man to Man, and Driver’s edition, spark interest in ecocriticism, animal studies, intersectionality, alternative takes on race, intimacy, and relations in her work, and the broader role of white writers in discussions of decolonization.
Keywords
The following interviews were conducted via email from January to July 2018 for the purpose of engaging with a variety of scholarly responses to Olive Schreiner’s novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — (1926), in the current moment. From Man to Man is a key text in Schreiner’s oeuvre, a novel she worked on for much of her life but which was left unfinished when she died in 1920. It is within this text that many of her ideas about female liberation, gender relations, and race relations developed over time and reached maturity — indeed, the novel has been deemed the “embodiment of Schreiner’s mature political vision”, and we might add, her social vision as well (UCT Digital Collections, 2015: n.p.). It stands as a key text for Schreiner scholarship, South African literature, and Victorian literature as a whole, and remains a critical resource for interrogating representations of Darwinian thought, social Darwinism, and gender and race relations in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. 1
Dorothy Driver’s new edition of From Man to Man (University of Cape Town Press, 2015) has triggered a desire to gauge current thought on the novel. Through Driver’s editorial interventions, historical research, and meticulous attention to detail, she has produced an edition which, in her own words, is “worthier of Schreiner than the first edition, and one closer to [Schreiner’s] original aims” (Driver, 2015b: x). This new edition, therefore, not only provides an opportunity for the casual reader to encounter the novel, but also for the scholar to engage with it under new conditions. In this article, thus, we set out to gather the views of a selection of contemporary academics on the importance of From Man to Man today, its place in Schreiner scholarship and wider nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature in English, and the aspects of the novel the interviewees found particularly intriguing or pertinent to discuss in relation to the current moment(s).
Driver’s edition, through its methods and choices in editing and through the new information it includes, also urges its reader to ask questions concerning Schreiner’s writing process, the unfinished state of the text, the South African specificity of the novel, and its racial politics. In recent years, some new takes on the text have emerged, placing it, for example, within the context of an expanded notion of modernism (Munslow Ong, 2018; Snaith, 2014), in readings of lesbian primitivism (Hackett, 2004) and ecofeminism (Stevens, 2018), or as a product of transnational and transracial exchange (Lewis, 2014). This interview article, prompted by the republication of the novel, raises questions that aim to build upon these previous readings and, most importantly, elucidate the value of reading and studying From Man to Man in the present day.
These interviews speak to and against each other and make clear the different perspectives on similar questions that From Man to Man invites. The interviewees often view issues of gender and race in parallel or as intertwined in From Man to Man. Angelo Fick argues that while Schreiner’s take on colonial ideas of gender is progressive, critics should be cautious of reading the novel as progressive on matters of race outside of its contemporary moment. He further questions whether she even achieves a progressive critique of race within the context of her time. Jade Munslow Ong in turn argues that the inclusion of the black servant Clartje’s name, which Driver has unearthed, can trigger an expanded, and perhaps more progressive, reading of the entwinement of gender and racial politics in From Man to Man, and suggests that the novel’s main contribution to feminist thought lies in its intersectionality. Valerie Stevens then approaches the question from the perspective of “allies” and sees the novel’s relevance in how it presents “ally-ship” between characters of different gender, class, and race.
The interviewees place From Man to Man within larger literary, cultural, and critical contexts. Ong and Fick both consider the novel in relation to the broad context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, thinking for example about the text’s engagement with modernism and with female characters in British Victorian novels. Fick further situates From Man to Man within the history of white Anglophone South African writing, simultaneously stressing the importance of reading Schreiner’s text in the present, to “resist the flattening out of South African cultural history in reductionist, binary terms as a history of victimizers and victims”. The interviewees provide fresh angles on issues well explored in From Man to Man, such as Stevens’ analysis of intimacies that extend beyond the heterosexual to those of sister-love and human–animal relations. In an innovative turn for Schreiner criticism, Ong and Stevens explore the ways in which animal studies and ecocriticism can help raise new points in relation to From Man to Man, made all the clearer through Driver’s various botanical annotations in the new edition.
Read together, these interviews highlight the novel directions that Schreiner scholarship is heading in. There are many facets of Schreiner’s writing, and From Man to Man in particular, that have yet to be studied. Ong makes one such observation, encouraging scholars to read Schreiner using the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism. With the interviews that follow, our hope is to provide creative discussions of From Man to Man, show the worth of reading this text in our present moment, and stimulate further scholarly enquiry of this significant novel.
What is the value of a new edition of From Man to Man right now? How do you perceive of the social vision that Schreiner presents in the novel and how does it speak, or not, to a current decolonial and anti-racist moment?
From Man to Man has a profound interest in what we currently term “allies”. Drummond, the New Man, is an ally for the novel’s oppressed protagonist, Rebekah, the New Woman, evidenced in his acknowledgement of his privilege and his attempt to use it on behalf of Rebekah to search for her “fallen” sister, Bertie (Schreiner, 2015/1926: 392). 2 Rebekah in turn is an ally for her adopted mixed-race child, Sartje, born of her husband’s affair with a servant. Relatedly, Rebekah tries to raise her sons to be better men than their father, less willing to oppress women and particularly women of colour. She teaches her boys that they should strive to be remembered as follows: “This strong man’s hand was always stretched out to cover those feebler; this great man’s body never sought good or pleasure for itself at the price of something weaker” (381). We can certainly read into this paternalistic and hierarchical thinking Rebekah encouraging her sons to be benevolent white men for their own moral good, and dismiss Schreiner as a “white feminist” who elsewhere deployed racial and ethnic stereotypes. But we can also follow editor Dorothy Driver’s “hospitable, even generous, reading” that focuses on “signs of transformation” (2015b: xliii) to see Rebekah, like Schreiner herself, as a flawed but ambitious ally, striving to improve her own thinking and for gender, class, and racial equality.
How does reading From Man to Man add to our understanding of Schreiner’s feminist (New Woman) thoughts?
A novel in which the heterosexual intimacies of Rebekah and Bertie fail miserably, From Man to Man presents a series of valuable alternative intimacies: with racial others, including Rebekah’s adoption of Sartje; between sisters; with nature, such as the farm that Rebekah purchases and works to provide her financial and emotional independence from her unfaithful husband, Frank; and animals, exemplified in Bertie mothering kittens. Romantic relationships between men and women are unsuccessful in Schreiner’s novels because they are marred by gender expectations and women’s economic dependency on men. If we agree with Sharon Marcus that the erotic can, but does not necessarily, include the sexual, and that erotic bonds “involve intensified affect and sensual pleasure [… and] can exist between two people or between a person and an object, image, or text” (2007: 114), we see eroticization in various instances throughout From Man to Man outside of couplings between men and women.
Perhaps the most persistent intimacy represented in From Man to Man is between sisters, since the novel is filled with instances of Rebekah and Bertie caressing each other as they lie in bed. The prelude, “The Child’s Day”, highlights the embodied bond joining Rebekah and Bertie that keeps returning at intervals throughout the novel, this prelude closing with the little mother and Ayah allowing Rebekah to hold her baby sister: “[Rebekah] slipped her hand under the shawl till she found the baby’s hand; she clasped her fingers softly into its tiny fingers, and held them. With the other hand she tried to draw its body up close against her” (41). In this first passage where the sisters come together, the interweaving of their lives and bodies comes to the fore when Ayah tries to take the baby away from her sister: “she found the hands of the sisters so interlocked, and the arm of the elder sister so closely round the younger, that she could not remove it without awaking both” (41). The intimacy intensifies when, as adults, Bertie “clasped her large beautifully shaped white arms round Rebekah’s little body […] She laid her head against Rebekah’s breast and nestled to her like a little child. Rebekah pressed her lips on the bare white shoulder” (119). One might say that many of these alternative intimacies lead to no better outcomes than traditional marriage — Bertie’s link to Rebekah does not save her from being seduced, passed from man to man, and, based on the endings of the novel presented in the appendix, an early death as Rebekah has “her arms round her” (424). However, Schreiner did not read the projected death scene as tragic: “[T]o me, there is nothing sad, nothing depressing in that scene […] It is not the death of the individual that is the sad thing in human life, but the death of the ideal” (424). And one of the ideals that survives in this passage is the embodied connection between Bertie and Rebekah, a feminist possibility for meaningful relationships beyond marriage and motherhood.
You refer to Bertie’s mothering of kittens, so what part do animals play in the social vision Schreiner attempts to create in From Man to Man?
Schreiner ties the experience of animals, good and bad, to her social vision about the treatment of women, which we see in her representation of alternative intimacies and domestic relationships between humans and animals, as well as in their shared experience of masculinized violence and conquest. Schreiner builds on a long animal welfare tradition in which (masculinized) violence against animals signals a bad (male) character. 3 While “the Jew” is the most grotesquely brutal, evidenced when he kills Bertie’s kittens upon believing her to be unfaithful to him (340), Rebekah’s husband, Frank, demonstrates a more insidious form of cruelty in his persistent hunting and fishing trips throughout the novel. Rebekah likens Frank’s sexual conquests to his sport: “What if there is something irresistible in your nature which compels you to feel that the woman who has once wholly given herself to you is a dead bird, a fish, through whose gills you have put your fingers?” (247). In this passage, Rebekah equates sex with death, penetration with violence, but she also notes that if Frank tames rather than kills the wild animal/woman he becomes bored with her and moves on (248–49). Schreiner is careful to highlight that Frank’s brother and Bertie’s would-be husband, John-Ferdinand, is less violent in his behaviour towards women and animals: “The little mother feared he must feel lonely, and offered him the gun to go out shooting; but he said he never hunted; and she felt ashamed, as if she had offered him something wrong” (75). However, his moral judgements are still damaging: just as his refusal embarrasses the mother, his quiet condemnation of Bertie’s past brings about her shame.
While the novel presents men violently using animals for hunting, it also explores a model where animals are not just at human disposal. From the time that she is a child, Rebekah conceptualizes human–animal relationships in a way that combines care with consent. She builds a mouse house to give the creatures a domestic space (2–3), but though “[h]alf, she expected the mice to come […] half, she knew they never would!” (3). Sometimes the desire to nurture an animal is best realized in leaving it alone: the mouse house remains uninhabited, and Rebekah does not tell her family that she spotted a snake because that would have caused the animal’s death (30). Animals should be left untouched if they do not come to the human and they cannot be treated with kindness. Counter to Frank hunting his prey, Rebekah fantasizes that “a fish should creep up to me and glide between my feet and over them, not fearing me”, and her response is one of sensual elation: “I should stand still shivering with delight every time its beautiful body touched me […] and [it would] lie with its slow palpitating beautiful belly on my hand in the water and let me feel it” (246). Though different from Rebekah’s description of Frank treating women like the fish he catches, this encounter is also embodied and eroticized, with Frank’s finger prodding replaced by Rebekah’s hand caressing. The vital distinction is that the animal must choose to come to the human. Because the animal does not choose to so engage with Rebekah, her dream remains an unrealized ideal. Just as Rebekah’s vision of human–animal bonds privileges consent, nurturance, and freedom from male violence and possession, so too is this her desire for relationships between men and women.
From Man to Man abounds with natural and botanical references. Driver’s edition offers further information on the flora and fauna in the novel. How could scholars draw on ecocriticism to expand their readings of From Man to Man?
Driver’s attention to Schreiner’s natural and botanical references helps to highlight the positioning of From Man to Man as a distinctly South African novel, one that sees nature as more vibrant in South Africa than in England, and Schreiner as a proto-ecofeminist thinker. Scholars, including Andrew McMurry (1994), Rebecca Stott (2002), and myself (Stevens, 2018), have read Schreiner from an ecofeminist perspective. 4 Schreiner uses the natural environment as a symbolic force in describing Bertie’s failed relationships, her loves, and lovers. Bertie plants a garden with Percy Lawrie, the tutor who seduces and immediately abandons her (61). The tutor planting seeds in the land evokes the idea that the manipulation of nature is comparable to his coercive sexual relationship with Bertie. He also paints flowers with mottos, including one “with a border of roses and lilies, and on it the motto, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’” (60). Here the artificial flowers point to the deceptively attractive character of their creator. The closest Bertie comes to an ideal union with nature and man is when she meets with John-Ferdinand in his outdoor “little parlour” (79), decorated with flowers. However, when he learns of her past sexual relationship with Percy Lawrie, he leaves the garden with her and makes it clear that he no longer wishes to marry her.
Like a plant transplanted from its natural environment, Bertie fails to thrive when she goes with “the Jew” to London, moving there to avoid going home and the rumours of her “fallen” state. In the English city, plants become one example among many of artifice and commodification. 5 Plant life usually appears either in the form of cut flowers used for decorations (304) or in representations on things, such as “[t]he soft double-piled carpet [with] pink roses in it” (302). The lines between living/natural things and commodities are further blurred when Bertie names her kittens Holly, Larkspur, and Rose (329) and “made three little satin quilts with the flower of each kitten embroidered on it in silks” (330). Schreiner links the hopelessness of Bertie’s experience as a kept woman with violence against plants. When the cousin of “the Jew” meets Bertie, he notices her “flower-like white face” and the arrangement of “very beautiful” cut flowers (333). Here, the flowers are still beautiful, but dead, much as Bertie herself is a barely living ornament for the pleasure of “the Jew”, deteriorating in his home.
What relevance do you think this new edition of From Man to Man has to the casual reader?
As the novel was published in South Africa by University of Cape Town Press in 2015, Driver’s edition of From Man to Man is still difficult to access for a reader in the United States; with the text not available for purchase, I was dependent on interlibrary loan to get my copy. Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (2008/1883) is consistently available to a broad audience in a number of well-researched and affordable editions. This ready obtainability means that scholars and general readers have guided access to the text. Given From Man to Man’s unfinished state at the time of Schreiner’s death and the questionable editorial decisions made by her widower S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, this novel is perhaps more in need of a scholarly apparatus that attempts to draw attention to the editorial decisions that were neither made nor endorsed by Schreiner. Driver emphasizes that From Man to Man is a living text, unceasingly revised by Schreiner during her life, changed by a number of editors, and interpreted by a variety of readers after her death. In getting closer to being the definitive version of the novel than any that came before, Driver’s edition reminds us that a final version is an impossibility.
Nowhere is this incompleteness more evident than in the novel’s ending (or lack thereof). Cronwright-Schreiner tacked onto the final extant chapter his account of what Schreiner related to him about “how this novel was to end” (427), making it seem as though Schreiner had a firm plan but just did not have time to write the ideas down (see, for example, the 1982 Virago edition). Driver adds an 1886 letter from Schreiner to Karl Pearson, wisely putting Schreiner’s words before those of her husband, showing that Schreiner had been labouring over the ending for many years before her 1920 death. Moreover, Driver puts both Schreiner’s letter to Pearson and Cronwright-Schreiner’s description of the novel’s unwritten conclusion in an appendix clearly separate from the text proper. My hope is that the openness of the text, rather than serving as a source of frustration, empowers the casual reader to self-consciously engage with the novel and its quest for meaning, and not depend on the author to propose the answers to the many questions that the novel asks.
What is your opinion of the novel’s treatment of identity (e.g., race, gender, class)?
There is a tension between Schreiner’s utopian political vision, perhaps most clearly articulated in Rebekah’s long and frenetic polemic in “Raindrops in the Avenue” (141–86) and the poetics in the rest of the novel. Rebekah envisions equality between men and women, as between “races” in a distant future, a vision she outlines in her interaction with her sons and Sartje in “Fireflies in the Dark” (359–65). In From Man to Man, however, Schreiner seems unable to realize that vision in her rendition of black subjects as fully human.
The exploration of the feminine subject position in the colonial enterprise must be noted for its complexity. The text interrogates the constraints of Victorian colonial tropes, both for women and men, partly because of its investment in the science mania of the nineteenth century. As such, the novel offers a look back into the nineteenth-century colonial period in what would become South Africa, as well as a utopian vision of a future in which the tropes and stereotypes through which subjectivity is engendered in that colonial project can be imagined differently.
That said, as much as Schreiner attempts to write new subject positions for white women and men — as Frank summarizes Rebekah’s political position, “men should teach women and women should teach men. What difference does it make? — But it’s not the Garden of Eden yet!” (50) — her writing struggles to have a similarly forward-looking approach to the figuration of “race”. The hierarchies of the colonial gaze remain intact in the descriptions of the farm inhabitants. Rural idyll, “a quiet, monotonous life”, is ordered from “the farmer himself, the little mother, the children, with a score of Hottentot and Kaffir [sic] servants”, before the narration shifts to wild animals, and then the landscape itself. Servants on the farm remain unnamed, often un-individuated, with the exception of Griet, Bertie’s servant-slave, whose function is tied to her noble savagery: dedication to a mistress, however misguided the actions (43–44).
While Schreiner explores the rights of white women as owners and managers of property, as in the long letter Rebekah writes to Frank about their troubled marriage and her financial independence through her acquisition of a small farm (201–54), she does not take the same critical interest in the position of indigenous men and women as property. The closest she comes to this lies in Rebekah’s fellow-feeling for a black woman who chose to commit suicide rather than live in the polygamy her husband had presumably forced upon her, which fellow-feeling recalls the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition. The consciousness of servants is only figured insofar as this is related to the position of the white subjects of the narrative; one thinks of the exasperated sighs of “Old Ayah”, or the free-indirect discourse by which we are given access to Griet’s thought processes.
What lives these black subjects live beyond the white gaze remain almost inconsequential not only to the plot, but to a narratorial gaze which often dwells on the life in and of the landscape. In White Writing, J. M. Coetzee noted this as a feature of early South African Anglophone writing, including Schreiner’s (1988: 61–66; 78). In his “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech”, Coetzee (1992: 97) also noted the propensity in white South African discourse to profess love for the land insofar as it is depopulated of the indigenes, a discursive figuration necessary to the justification of colonial conquest.
Schreiner departs from this general trope by insisting on the presence of black people in that landscape, and figuring their presence as labour, even though they do not quite rise to the level of subjects with complex interiority; they are ancillary to the white lives figured at the heart of the novel, and intrude only insofar as their presence is required to reflect something about those white subjects. Griet’s antipathy towards and distrust of Veronica Grey turns out to be a canny insight into the English woman’s treachery. As such, she can be seen to act out what Rebekah suspects but cannot act on, despite, if not because of, her scientifically minded interest in the world at large, her passion for botany and geology, for books and intellectual pursuits. Schreiner offers a range of feminine subject positions for white women, many of them refigurations of tropes from nineteenth-century English novels. The “little mother” is half Mrs Bennet and half Lady Bertram; Rebekah seems to have made the colonial equivalent of Dorothea Brooke’s and Isabel Archer’s tragic choice — marrying unsuitably and finding herself ensnared in an odd relationship with Frank’s Casaubon-Osmond; Bertie herself seems a descendant of the wayward younger sisters epitomized by Julia Bertram and Lydia Bennet; and Veronica Grey herself is half Mary Crawford, half Caroline Bingley, while Mrs Drummond is reminiscent of Mrs Norris.
This is not to suggest Schreiner is derivative; on the contrary, her rendition of white women is directedly related to the nineteenth-century English novel’s figuration of women, from Jane Austen through Henry James. What Schreiner engenders is the specific colonial context which constrains and enables the choices of her white women characters. The claustrophobia and marginality of colonial farm life which Rebekah outlines to John-Ferdinand is also part confessional. For an intellectual of Schreiner’s prowess, living on the edge of empire’s reach meant precisely the condition of marginality which Rebekah articulates, and from which she seeks refuge in her study. Rebekah’s study also becomes her refuge from the exigencies of her compromised marriage, not least in the figure of Sartje, Frank’s progeny with their truculent house servant. Additionally, it would seem significant that, given the period in which Schreiner wrote From Man to Man (the late 1800s to early 1900s), the fictional child, Sartje, shares a name with another figure on whose body colonial discourse established gendered racial difference, the “Hottentot Venus” Saartje Baartman.
Bertie’s descent from indulged daughter to fallen woman is linked with Schreiner’s critique of the fall from rural distemper to urban self-destruction. Rebekah outlines Bertie’s unsuitability for the vicissitudes of the patriarchal world when she confronts John-Ferdinand about his intentions. But far from being prurient, Schreiner’s critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois colonial masculinity is clear: the cousin-brothers are two sides of the same problem. Frank insists on marital sanctity despite his profligate conduct, while John-Ferdinand whose Puritanical view of Bertie’s seduction by her tutor as “sin” sets in motion her exile from the farm and eventual death.
If, as your response suggests, Schreiner’s utopian vision for racial equality fails in her portrayal of black characters, how could we read her treatment of issues such as “white peril” and the position of the mixed-raced child in the family?
Schreiner’s depiction of the black characters in From Man to Man remains embroiled in the politics of her times, even and perhaps especially when she strains to explode the tropes and stereotypes by which alterity from whiteness is figured. In attempting to temper the outright and vulgar racism her son Frank learns from his father, Rebekah clarifies that “Sartje is not a black nigger [sic] any more than she is a pure white child” (419). In her outline of her dream of extraterrestrial life forms who could judge white people as those white people judge the rest of the world, Rebekah attempts to guide her sons into a critique of the vulgar masculine racism which they have learned from their father (and Schreiner perhaps attempts to get her readers “possessively invested” 6 in white supremacy to begin to see their own position as “raced”, and relative, and thus to place themselves into the positions of inferiority which white supremacy assigns its imagined others). However, when questioned about how this dream ends, whether she could imagine an overcoming of the dream-oppression, she falters and admits “I do not know … The dream ends there” (423).
That all this happens in the presence of Sartje, who is figured as “not understanding, what was said but feeling she was being discussed in some way not wholly to her advantage” (417), again signals Schreiner’s awareness of the limits of her powers. She can relay the interiority of the thoughts of the boys, but stops short of giving similar access to whatever may be the interiority of Sartje. In that respect, Sartje is much like her mother, the servant-woman whose sexual relations with Frank are so pivotal in the breakdown of Rebekah’s marriage. That the dream-vision remains trapped in the white supremacist hierarchies of her time — only a “race” of beings even “whiter” than colonial white subjects and possessed of superior technology could be used to think of better “race relations” — may have been progressive inside the homologies of white colonial discourse in Schreiner’s time. However, contemporary readers and critics, especially those of postmillennial postapartheid South Africa, are likely to take a more critical and less celebratory view of the novel’s investment in miscegenation as a critique of white supremacy. This is also true of its possessive investment in the reification of “race” and the construction of notions of “race” purity, or such reification by current critics reproducing those now delegitimated conceptions of “race” and racialized difference.
Despite the rather generous reading Dorothy Driver (2015b) offers of Schreiner’s engagement with “race” and power, the figuration of those characters who are not white in From Man to Man, while potentially progressive in relation to mainstream white colonial tropes and stereotypes, are afforded little complexity and humanity. Additionally, in the wake of the interventions of critical race theory across the late twentieth century, criticism which imagines a progressive political project in From Man to Man beyond Schreiner’s own time, inside the terms in which her novel critiques her context, may find a much more interrogatory critical audience in the present. This is because of the critiques of such a liberal politics in late apartheid South Africa, and the abject failure such views would represent in the wake of postmillennial critiques of some of the debates around the “rainbow nation” in the early postapartheid period. Schreiner’s refiguration of the threat of black sexuality as a problem for whiteness may well be progressive, but she seems not to have been able to push beyond that insight and imbuing her black characters with the humanity she affords to the white characters.
In relation to our current moment, from what critical perspectives do you think it is most pertinent to read Schreiner and From Man to Man?
Schreiner’s incomplete novel remains a vital text for understanding the ways in which white Anglophone South African writing, as defined by Coetzee — “generated by people no longer European, not yet African” (1988: 11) — attempts to carve out an indigenous idiom, but also, a specific local concern separate, though inextricable, from the culture and concerns of the “mother country”, Britain. It is an ambivalent text which is possessively invested in the colonial tropes by which raciological difference is constructed. It is also critical of some of that thinking. For instance, Frank’s “sweet tenor” does not disguise the deictic distance Schreiner constructs in her narration of his presence on the farm just before marrying Rebekah, an early sign of what is to come later when they return to the city. The echoes between Frank, her husband, and Frank, her son, in their propensity for using the term “nigger” to refer to black subjects is especially noteworthy.
Reading or rereading From Man to Man in postmillennial postapartheid South Africa is not merely an archaeological exercise, to see how “race” and gender were figured in the past. Reading the novel now allows for significant insight into current tropes and stereotypes of “race”, gender, sexuality, and class, and their histories of representation in South Africa, as well as contemporary renditions of the colonial enterprise as monolithic. This insight may help resist the flattening out of South African cultural history in reductionist, binary terms as a history of victimizers and victims, and frame it instead as a complex history of discursively figured and variously contested and contestatory engagements.
How does the new edition of From Man to Man expand readings of Schreiner?
There is much to praise in the new edition of From Man to Man, but for me the most striking aspect of Driver’s work is the new light she sheds on two peripheral characters, Rebekah’s adopted daughter, Sartje, and Sartje’s biological mother, Clartje. Although the latter appears in all published versions of the text as an unnamed coloured “servant girl” (254), 7 Driver reveals in both the introduction to the novel and a separate article that the 1886–1887 manuscript fragments of From Man to Man accord this character a name (2015a: 29; 2015b: xxiv). It is actually somewhat surprising that the name does not survive in later drafts given that Clartje plays a central role in the action of the novel: the protagonist, Rebekah, ends the intimate aspects of her relationship with Frank when she discovers his sexual exploitation of Clartje.
When Rebekah approaches Clartje to discuss her discovery, she is met with the defiant question: “Wat wil jij hê?” (“What do you want?”) (255). The associated footnote, written by Schreiner, explains that the use of the pronoun “jij” is intended as “the most extreme insult when applied to a superior” because “[i]t is used only to children or servants” (255). In the face of this reversal of the usual dynamics of power, “Rebekah stood silent; all she had determined to say passed from her” (255). Whilst this scene is often used to support the argument that Schreiner is unable to express solidarity between women across boundaries of race (Snaith, 2014: 56; Blair, 2003: 608), an alternative reading is not only possible, but positively enriched, by Driver’s interpretation of the meaning of Clartje’s name as “(‘it is finished’?)” (2015a: 29). Although Rebekah stands in silence, a moment of recognition passes between the two women: “as Rebekah looked at her, Rebekah knew that it was with that girl even as it was with herself that day” (255). Both are pregnant with Frank’s children, and both immediately end their relationships with him. Clartje does this by running away, and Rebekah severs all sexual and emotional ties, though she remains his wife. In this sense Clartje’s name is particularly evocative, because her departure from the text represents an end to Frank’s sexual exploitation of women within and outside of marriage, and an end to the white exploitation of a black African worker: “it is finished”. At a domestic level then, Clartje instigates the dissolution of unequal power relations that Schreiner wanted to eliminate from society at large. This reading of the scene might be strengthened even further by introducing one more onomastic possibility: as “’tje” is a diminutive suffix, Clartje’s name is not only suggestive of her inferior status in the colonial household and relationship with Frank, but also provides an etymological connection to the Dutch name “Klara” meaning “bright” or “clear”. These positive connotations point to Clartje’s central role in offering a new clarity of perspective on sexual and racial inequalities in colonial South Africa, and the barriers to communication that need to be overcome in order to achieve a more equitable society.
The final point I want to make about the discovery of the name Clartje is that it enables an expanded reading of the gendered and racial politics of From Man to Man, because cross-generational doubling expressed through names operates as a vital site of meaning creation in the novel. For example, Frank Senior’s racial prejudices are reproduced in his son, Frank Junior, and Baby Bertie is in a sense reincarnated in improved form as her nephew, Bertie, who “[recalls] the aunt who had never seen him and whose name he bore; but there was a still dreaminess in the eyes that hers had never known” (354). Although Sartje does not inherit her biological mother’s name in full, the echoing rhyme in Clartje and Sartje indicates their connected role in challenging the colonial conventions that sustain sexism and racism. In the introduction to the novel, Driver proposes this idea too, observing how “Sartje points forwards to a different kind of future, indicating (without representing) a dream of social progress” (2015b: xxxv). Thus, where Clartje and Rebekah gesture towards, rather than fully express, their solidarity, Sartje and her half-brothers are, in Driver’s words, “stage[d] for a future plot that might involve very different inter-racial cross-gender relations” (2015b: xxxiv).
Do you think From Man to Man speaks at all to current debates on decolonization, or can be taught as part of a decolonized curriculum?
Whilst my initial response to both questions is yes, I think it is fair to say that the novel has not yet played a major role in either context. The Schreiner text most frequently assigned to reading lists is The Story of an African Farm and, in UK universities at least, it tends to appear on Victorian literature modules as an example of New Woman fiction or empire writing, or otherwise on specialist modules dealing with African or South African literature. Whilst it remains important to read Schreiner in both of these contexts, neither approach could feasibly be said to “decolonize the curriculum”, particularly when Schreiner is taken as the sole or primary representative of feminist, African, or colonial writing. Black South African writers of the early twentieth century such as Solomon Plaatje, R. R. R. Dhlomo, and H. I. E. Dhlomo rarely feature on any UK university courses, though, like Schreiner, they deal with issues of empire, race, and gender using experimental literary forms. I am not proposing here that replacing Schreiner with Plaatje or either of the Dhlomo brothers would in any way deal with the issue of “decolonizing the curriculum” or adequately acknowledge the importance and influence of literature by early black African writers. Rather, I use these examples to point out that a much larger-scale overhaul of educational systems and content must be pursued to avoid both tokenistic inclusions of African writers on English Literature courses, and the endless production of “alternative canons” that do little to challenge the status quo.
Although there are many possible reasons why From Man to Man has not yet played a significant role in the debates around decolonization and curriculum content, for the sake of brevity I would like to offer just one: the early context of writing. As South Africa endured a uniquely prolonged colonial condition — arguably extending from the 1652 arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck until the first democratic elections of 1994 — the experience of colonization, and debates on decolonization, are not part of a distant imperial past. They remain ongoing issues, and so readers of South African literature need not look as far back as the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries to encounter historical causes for the inequality, violence, and trauma experienced in the present. In this sense, From Man to Man may yet have a role to play in “decolonizing the curriculum” by providing a more expansive view of the connected legacies of anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and feminist struggles in South Africa. As I have already suggested however, adding this text to a reading list will not solve the problem. Instead we would need to pursue a new politics of teaching invested in attentive and sensitive diachronic approaches to the study of imperial history and global literatures at all levels of education.
Would you classify From Man to Man as a modernist text? How does From Man to Man fit into the broader spatial and temporal redefinitions of modernism that are underway at the moment?
This is the topic of my book, so yes, I do think that Schreiner is a modernist writer and From Man to Man is a modernist text! Of course this is not a commonly-held view of Schreiner’s work, as her fiction is typically read in the context of a literary–historical narrative that requires the realism of the Victorian period to be superseded by the modernism of the early twentieth century, resulting in descriptions of her as either post-Victorian or proto-modernist (Burdett, 2001: 9; Esty, 2012: 74; Lewis, 2003: 17; Shapple Spillman, 2012: 191; Stanley, 2002: 12). The Eurocentric nature of this genealogy is rarely questioned, yet by considering Schreiner’s novels outside of this framework it becomes possible to perceive an alternative line of development in which Anglophone South African literature is inaugurated as modernism (by Schreiner, Plaatje, H. I. E. Dhlomo, and others), and broadly persists as modernism, even as realistic and autobiographical forms began to dominate at midcentury as a way of bearing witness to the brutality of the apartheid regime.
The evidence for my argument that From Man to Man is a modernist text is threefold, based on the conceptual and contextual frameworks of the novel, its form, and its influence on later writers. To begin with, From Man to Man addresses the same issues explored by Euro-American modernist writing of the twentieth century, including imperial expansion, women’s rights, sexual politics, the development of the new sciences including evolutionary theories, new technologies and transport, the emergence of capitalism as the dominant global economic system … the list goes on. Not only this, but the novel responds to these issues using fragmented narrative forms, including leaps of time and space, letters too long to have been written in one night, a female writer seated in “a room of one’s own” scribbling journal entries that combine creative and evolutionary themes, and a dream sequence in which the female writer turns into a man. It is telling that many of these elements recur in later modernist texts, including in the work of writers familiar with Schreiner’s novels. For example, Virginia Woolf reviewed Cronwright-Schreiner’s edited collection of Schreiner’s letters in 1925, in which she implies that she has read some of Schreiner’s fiction (most likely The Story of an African Farm). While I have yet to find evidence that Woolf read From Man to Man, it may be more than coincidence that Schreiner’s novel, and Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929) explore the lives of female writers, the relationship between creativity and androgyny, and include gender-shifting protagonists. Another example of Schreiner’s influence on English literary modernism is even easier to trace, as D. H. Lawrence in 1910 records reading The Story of an African Farm, which influenced his creation of the Stranger in “The Saga” (an early draft of The Trespasser (1912)). Meanwhile, in The Rainbow (1915), Ursula Brangwen and Maggie Schofield read Schreiner’s Woman and Labour whilst working at the Brinsley Street School. I think that these lines of influence can be used to challenge the Euro-originary narrative of literary modernism, because they introduce the possibility that canonical English modernism is in fact indebted to earlier, African modernist forms.
What is the relevance of From Man to Man in the contemporary feminist climate?
I think that one of the key contributions that From Man to Man can make relates to intersectionality, because the feminism expressed in the novel is not solely a white middle-class concern. Of all of Schreiner’s novels, From Man to Man is the one that pays the closest attention to friendships across boundaries of gender and race as a way of connecting feminist and anti-racist struggles. The most obvious illustration of this appears in the penultimate chapter, “Fireflies in the Dark”, when Rebekah responds to her son Frank’s refusal to walk with his mixed-race half-sister by telling all of her children a number of allegories that connect feminist arguments to anti-imperialist and anti-racist themes.
A less obvious, but nevertheless interesting, example of Schreiner’s moves towards an intersectional feminism is the depiction of the relationship between Baby Bertie and her San maid, Griet. This relationship is best understood within the broader frame of Schreiner’s unique evolutionary theory because, although colonial logic dictates that the white woman Bertie should be superior in terms of race and class, it is in fact Griet who has the prophetic insight and self-sacrificing qualities that Schreiner believes exist in the highest forms of life (160). Griet rightly perceives that Veronica poses a threat to her beloved Bertie, and so attempts to drive Veronica away by putting a toad in her bath, spiking her food with foul-tasting ingredients, and killing her flowers. Bertie is eventually able to reciprocate Griet’s loyalty with her own expression of support, as Griet “narrowly escape[s] the force of old Ayah’s hand by Bertie’s intervention” (95–96). Although admittedly small-scale and not explicitly articulated, this unusual friendship delivers a message about the importance of female solidarity across boundaries of race and class, and thus provides a keynote that speaks directly to debates on intersectionality taking place in the contemporary feminist climate.
How could scholars draw on ecocriticism to expand their readings of From Man to Man?
Before I answer the question, I think it might be interesting to note that the plant that seems to feature most prominently in Schreiner’s writings is in fact a non-native species, the rose. It figures multiple times across her work, and is used to signal the loving and feminine qualities of the character Gregory Rose in The Story of an African Farm; operates as a symbol of female solidarity in the allegorical short story “The Woman’s Rose” (1891); and appears in a simile to explain an evolutionary theory in From Man to Man. In this last example, Rebekah records a diary entry in which she suggests that civilizations cultivating an “abnormally nourished class, unsupported by any vital connection with the classes beneath them […] [resemble] […] the long, thin, tender, feathery, green shoots which our small rose trees sometimes send out in spring, rising far into the air, but which we know long before the summer is over will have broken and fallen” (153–154).
The rose simile is used to advance the argument that societies that only promote dominant groups are doomed to fail, because true and continuous evolution — what Rebekah describes as “permanent advance” — can only be the result of the “united advance” of all living things (154). Indeed, there are many examples in which Schreiner draws on the readily available floriographic significance of the rose as a symbol of love. She then enriches this imagery with additional meanings to promote solidarity and harmony within and beyond boundaries of class and sex, and, as in the example above, to propose an evolutionary theory based on collective progression.
Whilst the various native species of plant life that appear in From Man to Man may not have the same elevated symbolic meanings as the rose in the context of Schreiner’s oeuvre, I think they remain important as expressions of indigeneity that have so far been overlooked by Schreiner scholars. Without the support of Driver’s notes, they are easily missed, particularly by international readers unfamiliar with South African flora and fauna. Driver’s insights into the role of native plants as sources of food and medicine in colonial South Africa thus invite further research on the social and functional roles of plants in Schreiner’s writings and beyond (37, n. 78; 72, n. 16; 92, n. 8).
Finally, I come to the question, which I think is a really important one. Whilst there are pockets of work (my own included) that use ecocritical and postcolonial ecocritical methodologies to discuss other of Schreiner’s texts, namely The Story of an African Farm, “The Adventures of Master Towser”, and Undine (McMurry, 1994; Munslow Ong, 2018; Woodward, 2008), From Man to Man has yet to be the focus of analysis of this kind. I hope that someone takes up this challenge, for the novel certainly has the potential to move discussions beyond the traditional parameters of Schreiner scholarship, which tend to associate Schreiner’s interest in her natural surroundings with her cosmological vision of a unified natural–spiritual world. 8 By understanding the political implications of Schreiner’s interest in animals and the environment in From Man to Man, and seeing these issues as co-constitutive parts of her political radicalism, new conclusions might emerge around the intersection of Schreiner’s feminism, anti-imperialism, and free thought with the currently underexplored aspects of her environmentalism and support for animal rights.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.