Abstract
Olive Schreiner’s social and political attitudes have received considerable attention, but less attention has been paid to the formal strategies of her writing. Her representation of indigenous plant-life adds to our understanding of the political significance of her writing. This essay responds to some of the comments made in this issue to my edition of From Man to Man (2015). Arguing that Schreiner’s interest in the locational identity of her main character, Rebekah, and of the novel itself, can be understood through the concept of proprioceptivity, the essay shows Schreiner’s increasing interest in recognizing and shaping an indigenous environment as the locus for her vision of social change. The change Schreiner has From Man to Man envisage is most likely to be realized on African ground. If, in her earlier novel, The Story of an African Farm, the stones speak to Waldo, in this novel, it is the plants that speak.
It is now generally if not universally accepted that, by the time of her death in 1920, Olive Schreiner was one of the boldest and most far-sighted white critics of contemporary colonialist and industrial racist capitalism the Cape Colony had seen. Her growing understanding of the violent history of colonial warfare, of black South Africans’ social conditions, and of overweening white self-interest transformed her into a radical thinker whose anti-racism informed her anti-imperialist, socialist, and feminist views. Her social and political attitudes have received considerable attention, but less attention has been paid to the formal strategies of her writing. One of these strategies — her representation of indigenous plant-life — provides the topic of this essay, and in turn adds to our understanding of the political significance of her writing. Following the invitation from the editors of this special issue to respond to some of the comments published in this issue on my edition of From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — (generous comments which I have much appreciated), I take up Jade Munslow Ong’s welcome remarks on the annotations I provided in the edition on Schreiner’s references to indigenous plants. As Ong notes, this is a new topic in Schreiner criticism, and I am glad of the opportunity to expand on my annotations in the hopes of encouraging even further discussion, and perhaps even of encouraging further ecofeminist discussion, as Valerie Stevens (49) usefully suggests.
On the topic of plant-life generally, Ong rightly registers the fact that it is not only the indigenous that interests Schreiner. Schreiner’s writing makes multiple references to the rose, for instance, as Ong exemplifies by quoting From Man to Man, specifically the allegorical use of the rose made by Rebekah, the central character, as she meditates on what is needed for social advance. For Rebekah, the “tender, feathery” shoots of the “rose tree” will have “fallen and broken” by the end of summer, because “they have shot out too far before their fellow branches” (Schreiner, 2015/1926: 154). 1 Rebekah’s point is that “an abnormally nourished class” (symbolized by these long shoots) cannot continue to flourish while “unsupported by any vital connection with the classes below them or the nations around” (153–154; emphasis added; see Ong, this issue: 58).
Ong does not quote the last, stressed, phrase, but I include it on account of its relevance not only to Rebekah’s social and political concerns but also to the mode of her thinking. The novel offers at this point a small reading lesson in allegory, showing it not simply as a polysemic form more complex than any one-to-one relation between sign and symbol might offer (do the “fellow branches” refer to “the classes below” or to “the nations around”?) but also as a discursive strategy that must deal with the ready-made meanings that language produces (the reference to “classes below” carries a judgement absent from “nations around”). Moreover, to designate the “other” to the rose bush’s “tender, feathery” shoots, Rebekah’s allegory refers to “fellow branches”. However, this “other” is of course part of the bush itself, which signifies a wholeness that contradicts standard ideas of otherness.
Rebekah’s allegory shifts from the rose bush to settle on the body of a tortoise, whose head can reach only so far while its hind legs continue to stick in the mud; then to a human mass, as in an army, whose rear lags behind; and then to the individual, if symbolic, human body, whose “head and heart can ultimately move no further than the feet can carry them” (154). Allegory is literally a speaking otherwise (agoreúin and állos being Greek for to speak and other or beyond, respectively), or, as Ong usefully expands in her book Olive Schreiner and African Modernism, “the etymology of allegory signals that it is both a representational and social act, inviting an interpretation that considers both the role of the Other speaking and speaking about the Other” (2018: 11; emphasis in original). However, for Schreiner’s Rebekah, to allegorize is to speak of the other as already a part of the whole, whether this whole is allegorized as a rose bush, a tortoise, a human mass, or an individual body. In other words, Rebekah thinks or dreams or speaks from a position capable of imagining a social wholeness or harmony, where there is an equivalent and mutually nourishing social growth between all social parts. It remains, of course, to portray such a world, which first of all involves its location.
Elsewhere in the novel, where Rebekah dreams of various forms of otherness as smoothly amalgamated into a unified body at once male and female, mother and husband, adult and child (186–187), the site of her dreaming is specified as an African “hut”; she is lying on mats on the ground (187). Here readers may recall Waldo in The Story of an African Farm, sitting in a cave that houses Bushman paintings and speaking of the capacity to dream. His dreaming — or philosophizing (they are the same in Schreiner’s view, as Rebekah exemplifies in From Man to Man) — is in this case located with such certainty in a regional history as to allow Waldo to say, speaking of the stones, “it is I who am thinking […] but it seems as though it were they who were talking” (1971/1883: 50). In this instance, the local, indigenous world affords him his proprioceptivity, the sense he has of his body in space, which is different at this point from Lyndall’s, who refuses to share his perspective. This difference between the two is mirrored in the limited commonality of Rebekah and Bertie in From Man to Man, what Joyce Avrech Berkman refers to as the “limits of sisterly love” (Berkman, 2021: 39). Proprioceptivity constitutes the position from which anyone is able to think, speak, and dream (for discussion of proprioceptivity, see Bal, 1997; Driver, 2017; Silverman, 1996; Wicomb, 2005). Rebekah’s rose is not, in itself, indigenous, any more than is the fern palm frond that affords Rebekah a similar allegory (151), unless one recalls the way Diogenes in Undine roots her rose cutting and perhaps naturalizes it (Schreiner, 1972/1928: 310, 305). However, in Rebekah’s other thinking, as indeed in the dream she has from an African hut, the ground that Schreiner progressively creates is indigenous ground, as if an African environment offers Rebekah the appropriate proprioceptivity for her vision of social harmony.
Indeed, the novel reflects self-consciously on its role in this regard when the child Rebekah refers to the alien nature of the only books she possesses through which she might learn about her immediate world. Her “Geology” and “Botany” were “written for people in England, and the plants and rocks and fossils mentioned she could not find in Africa” (137). Generations later, the young protagonist in Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days would similarly complain about the quality of children’s books delivered by a British imperial tradition, which failed to provide “a book in which I myself was recognisable” (1983/1981: 20). Just as The Lying Days comes to function as a novel in which the main character becomes recognizable to herself, so too does From Man to Man come to function, inter alia, as Rebekah’s “Botany”, the key site of her proprioceptivity. Schreiner was less concerned than was Gordimer with her main character’s sense of self. Her greater interest is in her character’s — and the novel’s — locational identity. Rebekah needs an indigenous environment from which to dream of, and shape, social change, and the social change that Schreiner has From Man to Man envisage is most likely to be realized on African ground. In African Farm, the stones speak; in From Man to Man, it is the plants that speak.
To open up discussion on Schreiner’s poetics of plants in relation to a politics of location is not simply to assert the novel’s interest in what it means to live and write and dream in an African rather than a European world. Instead, it is to claim Africa as the necessary bedrock of transformative dreaming, for only out of Africa (that is, the Africa that Schreiner imagines) does there emerge, for Schreiner, the possibility of progress based on social equality, a possibility from which modern Europe had already diverged in its marked dependence on gender difference. Schreiner’s Woman and Labour, being drafted alongside From Man to Man, prepares us for this claim through Schreiner’s distress at white middle-class female parasitism and its potential social effects. In contrast, Schreiner felt guided by a figure she conceptualized as her “person of genius”, a black woman, perhaps a composite figure developed out of several women Schreiner had met. This “person of genius” propelled Schreiner’s thinking about repairing what she saw as a modern European imbalance between individualism and social commitment. The latter, she felt, was to be found among women — labouring women, decidedly not parasites — in rural African communities (see Driver, 2015: xxx–xxxiii). Schreiner did not set her fiction in a rural African community — her major subject matter was white South African culture — but she incorporates references to indigeneity into From Man to Man in a way that brings her white characters closer to that world.
Schreiner made increasing use of indigenous botanical references through her writing career and did so increasingly insistently, in order to invite her readers into a localized world as a locus of possible change. A major intention of my botanical annotations, which draw attention to the botanical references often simply by footnoting their scientific, Latin names (not included in this essay, but useful for foreign readers and possible translations), was to alert readers to the plethora of such references. A major difference between Schreiner’s earlier writing and From Man to Man is not simply the way in which the indigenous plant specification signals greater recognition of an African world as distinct from a European world and, on occasion, an African world prior to and apart from European colonization. It is the way in which the latter novel develops such botanical imagery in a more clearly revisionist social and political direction. The imagery is not simply allegorical; it delineates a material world, which is the world from which Rebekah, and Schreiner through her, comes to conceptualize what needs to change. To test this thesis, it is useful to offer some comparative comment relating From Man to Man to the earlier writing.
Indigeneity in Schreiner’s early fiction
Undine, Schreiner’s first written novel (although the last to be published), opens on the word “Karoo”: “Karoo, red sand, great mounds of round iron stones, and bushes never very beautiful to look at and now almost burned to the ground by the blazing summer sun” (Schreiner, 1972/1928: 1). Undine is set partly in England, but once the eponymous character has returned to the Cape Colony, the text names a variety of indigenous plants: “wild asparagus”, “maiden-hair fern” (South Africa has six indigenous species), and the “great clumps of elephants-food and coonie” (Schreiner, 1972/1928: 277, 278, 276) that are now seen to cover the hills rather than the undifferentiated “bushes” of Undine’s opening scene. The local name, elephants’ food (also known as elephant’s plant or spekboom for its succulence; spek is Afrikaans for bacon or pork), draws marked attention to this localized world as no generalized reference or Latin name could do. So too does “coonie”, the name of a tree, kunee, which would have been unfamiliar to all Schreiner’s readers except the most local.
Undine’s opening scene, given in broad brushstrokes, is not dissimilar to the scene that will later open African Farm, with its “stunted ‘karroo’ bushes a few inches high” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 35). Gradually, however, the bushes in Undine — “never very beautiful to look at” — come to be seen through more attentive and appreciative eyes. The first shift comes after the little orphaned child is transported from the Cape Colony to live with her grandparents in England, where she is filled with longing for home: “the dew lying on the English grass” could never be “as lovely as the great drops that used to stand trembling on the bushes and silvery ice-plants among the stones of the koppie” (Schreiner, 1972/1928: 97). Here, once again, is a reference to the generic unbeautiful “bushes” of the opening passage, but the immediate mention of ice-plants takes us more closely into the local, partly through their being named, partly through the detail provided, and partly through the investment of feeling. Ice-plants, which provide a succulent perennial groundcover with daisy-like flowers, are so-called because the flowers and leaves shimmer in the light as if covered by frost or ice-crystals. Reading about them in this way, seeing “the great drops that [seemed to] stand trembling” on the leaves, we feel ourselves present at this moment of their naming, as if in the very act of their creation. So, too, in African Farm, which opens with “the full African moon” touching the milk-bushes with “a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 35). Near the end of the novel, Waldo is “thrilled” to see how the sun illumines “every little crystal cell” of an ice-plant leaf (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 298). And so too towards the end of Schreiner’s last-written novel, From Man to Man: when dawn comes to Cradock, “the little ice plant in the crevice of the rock at your feet glittered in every crystal drop” (268). In these examples, Schreiner’s African environment is established as a contrast to the ideal but also as a potential locus for it.
And then Schreiner’s first publication (if not her very first writing) was a magazine story published in 1881 and later produced in book form, Dream Life and Real Life; A Little African Story (1893), using the story’s title. The story gives a stronger sense of the particularity of the Karoo vegetation than occurs at the start of Undine. It names the “milk-bush” (Schreiner, 1893: 13 and passim), the “wild asparagus”, of which there are many indigenous varieties (Schreiner, 1893: 28 and passim), and the non-indigenous “prickly pears” (Schreiner, 1893: 28 and passim). The prickly pear was introduced to the Karoo in 1880 and is now considered an invasive alien. However, their preponderance in the Karoo and the Eastern Cape more generally may well have made it seem indigenous.
“Dream Life and Real Life” does not specifically name the “thorny ‘Karroo’ bushes” (Schreiner, 1893: 13) which From Man to Man will know as “thorn trees” (p. 2), but uses the term “karroo-bushes” when showing ‘the moonlight on them’ (Schreiner, 1893: 22). However, the indigenous plant the story repeatedly foregrounds is the kiepersol, whose “delicious” mashed-up root provides valuable sustenance to the little runaway slave (Schreiner, 1893: 29–30). With their “pointed” and “palm-like” leaves “clearly cut out against the night sky” (Schreiner, 1893: 36, 26), and standing in contrast to the “dark shadows” of the willows and rocks as well, the kiepersol trees seem ambiguous sentinels within the story, both guarding against and pointing to the dangers of the world around. Signalling the contrast between shadows and moonlight, they also indicate the contrast between reality and dream, “here” and “there” (Schreiner, 1893: 36), the known and the unknown. These are contrasts Schreiner negotiates throughout her writing career, incorporating them into an increasingly sensitive and nuanced mode of representation.
The “coonie” referred to in Undine is absent from African Farm, but when it enters Thoughts on South Africa, it is described as “a vast creeper-like tree, whose interlaced branches […] touch the ground everywhere, forming beehive-shaped masses, looking like immense Kaffir huts” (Schreiner, 1992/1923: 32–33). Like the medicinal references scattered — albeit sparsely — through From Man to Man, such a reference suddenly expands upon its readers’ imagination: others live in this place, there are other histories to consider. The kunee is twice portrayed in From Man to Man as part of the tangled landscape where John-Ferdinand first courts and then abandons Bertie (77, 101). I will return to these incidents later.
The use of an indigenous plant to expand either the reader’s or a character’s perspective is an even more crucial feature of African Farm, where the “Times and Seasons” section shows Waldo as a child in a spiritual crisis that will issue, finally, in his learning to look properly at the local world. Waldo initially feels that to worship Nature is to worship God; as the text puts it, the act of worship is to “kiss one little purple flower that He had made” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 147). As the child’s vision matures, it shifts first into despair and then into another way of looking, where first the rocks and then the plants play a crucial part. This other way of looking is to see the rocks not as “a blur of brown” but as existing in geological time, their “bands of smooth grey and red methodically overlying each other” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 151–152). When Waldo looks at plant-life anew, his way of looking becomes synchronic as well as diachronic. Focusing on the indigenous “bitto flower” (Schreiner’s variant of bietou, a local osteospermum), Waldo thinks to himself: the bitto flower has been for us a mere blur of yellow; [but now] we find its heart composed of a hundred perfect flowers, the homes of the tiny black people with red stripes, who move in and out of their little yellow city. (Schreiner, 1971/1883:152)
(It would of course be crude to read the anthropomorphism as a reference to actual people not least because of the “red stripes” and the “yellow city”. The figuration simply indicates Waldo’s general capacity to attend to other lives, in this case beetles’ lives, and the other worlds thus inhabited, via close attention to the local world.)
Much more occurs in Schreiner’s poetics of plants than mere localized naming, then, important though this is. The reflective quality attributed to indigenous plants, usually in the moonlight, accords them a spiritual agency besides their nurturing, medicinal or protective qualities. African Farm, which also opens with a generalized, even stereotypical Karoo scene, but which (unlike Undine) almost immediately begins to specify the plants, also adds that particular reflective quality already noted in “Dream Life and Real Life”. In African Farm, the “milk-bushes with their long finger-like leaves were touched with a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 35), and “on the very summit [of the kopje] a clump of prickly-pears lifted their thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moon-light on their broad fleshy leaves” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 35). Such references in African Farm are specifically geared to Schreiner’s spiritual awakening to the life-force running through and connecting all things (a spiritual awakening which has been much discussed by critics as derived partly from her reading of Herbert Spencer), and, importantly, the references stress the spirituality embedded in the local (Romanticism has a place in Africa, after all!). Yet in From Man to Man, the connection between all things is not primarily concentrated into a reflective, one-to-one relation between the real and the ideal, nor does it simply manifest as a generalized interest in social harmony that preserves existing social gradations, as occurs so strongly at certain points in African Farm, despite that novel’s own political commitments and its magnificent ironies. The connections, or interconnections, have political ramifications, and these are more diffuse and nuanced, as suggested earlier, than allegory typically provides. One of Schreiner’s strategies was to blend different worlds.
Schreiner’s early narrative fragment “Diamond Fields” distinguishes the “bush world” from the “up-country […] Karroo and grass veldt” (1974: 23); it is a place where the cock-o-veets sing in the still forest all day and the monkey ropes hang from the trees, and jasmine and geranium grow in open spaces, and mosses and ferns by the water, and the white clematis from the trees. (1974: 24)
In this early work, the described scene is near the sea, in the “old Colony” (Schreiner, 1974: 23). It remains idyllic, but the old woman remembering it also recalls a childhood horror nearby: a young boy beats a monkey “as though the monkey’s little backbone” would break (Schreiner, 1974: 27) and all the other children laugh around. Some idyllic botanical features enter African Farm through Waldo’s dreaming, where he imagines a world quite different from the Karoo he inhabits in reality: in “the narrow forest that ran between the mountains and the sea the air was rich with the scent of the honey-creeper that hung from dark green bushes” (Schreiner, 1971/1883: 285). “Honey-creeper” is Schreiner’s apparently idiosyncratic name for wild clematis, the indigenous climber of “Diamond Fields”; it bears masses of small, white, sweet-scented flowers in late summer and autumn. From Man to Man will draw on, expand, and complicate this bush world.
From Man to Man or Perhaps Only —
The Karoo scenery in From Man to Man opens not with the reflection of moonlight on the leaves and branches of milk-bushes and prickly pears, as in African Farm, but with the reflection of sunlight: “the thorn trees in the flat below were already shimmering in the sunlight” (2). While the shift to sunlight is certainly significant, it is the plant reference that must take our attention here.
The figure of the thorn tree has a strong presence through much of the novel. Although the farm that stands as the novel’s part setting cultivates orange trees, peach trees, and pear trees (these are consistent with Karoo cultivation, such fruit trees having been imported during the 1800s and with hybrid varieties local to the region sometimes developing), the name given to the farm is “Thorn Kloof”. Schreiner used this name as a title for one of the drafts that eventually went into From Man to Man (Schoeman, 1991: 387). Yet key episodes that occur around the farm are set in a landscape considerably more like the “bush world” distinguished in Schreiner’s early narrative fragment “Diamond Fields” (this fed into Undine), which depicts a world of indigenous plenitude: maidenhair fern (which has six indigenous species); moss; monkey ropes (probably what is commonly known as wild grape), whose rope-like stems can reach to the top of 20-metre trees and loop across them, providing a strong sense of cover; and jasmine, also known as starry wild jasmine, which is so profuse in the Eastern Cape that it often clumps like a shrub, which is why From Man to Man will sometimes refer to “jasmine shrubs”.
As Karel Schoeman (1991: 104) notes, much of Schreiner’s bush landscape is drawn from Healdtown in the Eastern Cape, where the author lived from 1861 to 1865, from the age of five or six to nine or ten years old. The loveliness of Healdtown, he adds, helped Schreiner blot out the memory of her childhood’s “bitter and dark” days (qtd. in Schoeman, 1991: 104). Yet Schreiner’s landscape descriptions tell a more complex tale. Shelter, perhaps even protectiveness, is often a key characteristic, as well as density and resilience, but so is conflict, resistance, and even threat.
For one thing, that the lived Karoo landscape is either an Eastern Cape landscape or a cultivated landscape within the Karoo evokes associations as much with English South African settlers as with the Boer. For another, the various walks that the characters make through this highly particularized landscape either seem to involve a crossing between the harsher Karoo landscape and the bush world of the Eastern Cape or an occasional blending of the two, and the emphatic mention of indigenous vegetation develops particular significance in relation to this combined or blended Anglo-Boer world. And then the figurative qualities accorded some of the botanical features sometimes transfer themselves, poetically, from one event to another, so that otherwise separate or even apparently disparate events take on similar political implications, specifically regarding gender and perhaps sometimes regarding race.
For instance, when in Chapter II, “A Wild-flower Garden in the Bush”, we read the destruction of the garden planted by Bertie and her English tutor as a sign of the violence done to Bertie as well as Bertie’s displaced revenge or self-destruction, it may also seem — since no agent is named, and given the repeated connections made a little later in the text between Bertie and indigenous plants — that the text keeps open the possibility of enraged reaction at colonial pillage, all the more so once we become aware of the dislike articulated by Griet, Bertie’s young protective servant, for another Englishman, John-Ferdinand. And, although Bertie and her tutor’s walks “up in the bush” and “in the kloof” (61, 63) are not portrayed in detail, we are led to believe that Bertie and John-Ferdinand’s walks “in the bush up the kloof” (77) take them to the same place, which then opens up other parallels between the two kinds of relations, as if the very space starts to speak.
The novel provides three symbolically loaded descriptions of Bertie and John-Ferdinand’s walks: the first walk, the set of habitual walks, and then the final walk when Bertie tells her courting cousin about the sexual violation and he turns against her. The first description is the fullest, and, while giving an even greater sense of plenitude than offered in the “memory-scape” in “Diamond Fields”, it repeats the plants referred to there: honey creeper (clematis), monkey ropes, jasmine, fern, and geranium. The mere “geranium” in “Diamond Fields” (Schreiner, 1974: 24), by which Schreiner means pelargonium, now expands in From Man to Man into “tiny mountain geraniums”, “small, sweet-scented mountain geranium with its tiny pale blossoms”, as well as the scarlet geranium (77). Schreiner adds the indigenous nam-nams and sweet-henries (again, either a local or idiosyncratic name for plumbago), thorn trees, kunees, and “Kaffir-bean trees”. In present-day South Africa, the last-mentioned tree has a less derogatory name, Karoo boerboon, foregrounding the bean (the Afrikaans is boon) on account of the large flat seeds. Schreiner notes the tree’s local medicinal use, thus incorporating into the scenic description a hint of indigenous African existence and agency. Moreover, the very names of the “kunee” and the “nam-nam” (which derive from the Khoi terms !Kunee and !num-!num, respectively) add to the sense of indigeneity.
While this description echoes to different degrees the plant descriptions in the two comparable scenes mentioned earlier in “Diamond Fields” and African Farm, although creating a greater sense of plenitude and indigeneity, the more significant echo (at least in the present discussion) occurs within the novel, not only connecting the two courtships but also drawing in a walk conducted by John-Ferdinand and Rebekah, where Rebekah wishes to check on John-Ferdinand’s relation to Bertie. Almost imperceptible reverberations and reverberations-with-a-difference draw attention to a network of power relations linking the events. It is as if Schreiner’s very attention to indigenous plant-life creates this set of meanings, locating her in a landscape, or a world, through which her writing uncovers connections between different forms of oppression and exploitation, even beyond the figurative implications of Bertie’s violation.
First of all, the parallel created between Bertie’s two early encounters with men, the English tutor and the English suitor, makes a strong claim about the connection between forms of oppression and exploitation and the interdependencies of power. While the tutor’s physical betrayal of Bertie is not scenically presented, John-Ferdinand’s moral betrayal of her, which is not physically violent, is accompanied by references to the “crushed leaves of the tiny mountain geraniums” (79) and “crushed geranium” (100). A second parallel is created through the association John-Ferdinand makes between Bertie and the “delicate blue leaves and the spirally curled buds” (79) of the plumbago rather than the more resilient scarlet geranium (the Eastern Cape equivalent, one might say, of the English rose). Schreiner’s footnote drives her point home: the plumbago flowers “curl up if roughly touched or plucked” (79, n. 21); even after the first walk Bertie and John-Ferdinand have together, the “sweet-henry on [Bertie’s] breast was curled up” (80). The moral betrayal is like the rape.
Moreover, John-Ferdinand’s treatment of Bertie leaves nature itself as damaged and even outraged — “The leaves of the plumbago bushes on either side [of the path] hung flaccid and curled, and even the asparagus branches drooped, waiting for the storm that must come later” (100) — and the “great thunderstorm” (101) does not revive Bertie as the storm had after her first betrayal. The atmosphere is like death: the “Kaffir beans” have “fallen”, and the couple walk over “dried sticks” (100). The text thus conflates and contrasts the two different betrayals by these two differently powerful men. Moreover, Bertie’s skirt is torn “from top to bottom” by an “outstretched branch of mimosa” (101) as she runs from John-Ferdinand’s judgement on her “sin”, making manifest this man’s cruel response to Bertie’s admission and proclaiming this second betrayal as the more brutal of the two.
As in postcolonial theory, then, nature, like the Empire, strikes or speaks back. So, too, in the meeting between John-Ferdinand and Bertie’s older sister Rebekah, when she requests he walk with her to discuss his intentions towards Bertie, whom Rebekah (belatedly) wishes to protect. Rebekah has no idea of the trouble that is afoot, even though “the thorns in the mimosa trees pecked at” them as they passed (84). Their walk leads through “love-grass and chickweed and widows” (84–85). Together, the plants create an atmosphere of invasion and reactive threat. Chickweed is native to Europe but was introduced into South Africa during the 1700s, with some species being naturalized in South Africa; the indigenous lovegrass is so-called on account of its heart-shaped spikelets, although it is technically not a lovegrass (lovegrass is native to the Americas instead); and the widow, the common blackjack, is an alien weed, its small slender black seeds having tiny claws at one end. Schreiner gives the name “widows” to the seeds themselves: “the black widows shaken from bushes as they passed sticking fast to her skirts and to his black trousers” (88). The three plants with their sequence of names may either suggest the passage of a woman’s life that is soon to be truncated, as for Bertie, or else signify the standard trajectory for women of the time, including Rebekah, or both.
Although the path is overgrown and the weeds under the willows are plentiful in the landscape where Rebekah and John-Ferdinand walk, gone is the overall impression of fertile abundance, as well as shelter (however intruded upon), that the earlier bush landscape provides. With Bertie as their common interest, Rebekah leads John-Ferdinand towards the “little mound” that marks the burial site of Bertie’s still-born twin sister (85). Of course, the word “mound”, like the word “moss”, has other implications as well, so that readers will suddenly feel birth and death uncannily conflate in that mossy feminine place. In the earlier scene, in the “parlour” Bertie and John-Ferdinand come to, he breaks “a branch of scarlet geranium” to leave clear “a little mound covered with fern and moss” that Bertie sits on (78, 79), perhaps presaging the kinder, post-marital sex act he might have in mind, but nonetheless also predicting another kind of stillbirth. Although Rebekah sees Bertie not as a spray of vulnerable plumbago ready to “curl up” but as a magnificent aloe, she nonetheless knows that “an aloe has one flower, once; if you cut that down, nothing more comes” (86). It appears that John-Ferdinand has satisfied Rebekah about his everlasting love for Bertie, but the landscape description has told another tale. Uncannily, too, “little dried catkins” (87) from the willow float down onto Rebekah’s and John-Ferdinand’s heads, mock confetti that denies John-Ferdinand’s steadfastness (he once proclaimed love for Rebekah). When Rebekah and John-Ferdinand pass through the thorn trees on their return to the farmhouse, there is no mention of the glint of sunlight on the thorns, only the “white tent of a cart” (88), which brings yet another dangerous intruder onto the farm.
In contrast, for Bertie and John-Ferdinand in their earlier scene, “the dew [from the thorn tree branches] rained on you, and the long beams of the early sun made [the drops] sparkle like a shower of diamonds” (81). But this is the last of that light, for them. Fierce though the sunlight comes to be that day, the only sign the thorn trees bear is the non-reflective “tiny rag of white muslin with its blue bow” hanging from the tip of a thorn (101). In Schreiner’s eyes, the white and blue would signify nothing more than a treacherous ideal, an aspect of the Christian doctrine she departed from as a child, which is the Christian doctrine John-Ferdinand so hypocritically adheres to. Instead of glittering white light reflected onto thorns from either the sun or the moon, the thorn trees’ “wet leaves” come into focus, reflecting the sunset’s red light, “a bloody pall of crimson” (67). It is hard not to read the reference here as a relieving bloodletting, as Helen Bradford (1995: 634) suggests (see Driver, 2015: 344, n. 21), even without accepting all the turns of her biographical reading. However, it is surely the case that the recurring landscape is biographically charged with a traumatic event in Schreiner’s life that can only be speculative but that may have both driven and limited much of her writing in a manner that lies psychically far beyond the present discussion about locational identity. Not for nothing did Schreiner at one stage draft part of this novel under the title “Wrecked” (Driver, 2015: 429). Yet, to take the discussion back towards the poetics of plants, the slippage in Schreiner’s writing from the glittering white light on thorn trees or prickly pear leaves that signifies a glimpse of the ideal to the “bloody pall of crimson” and “the rag of white muslin” carries alongside it, and in contrast, another set of slippages that occur across all her writing but are in some cases foregrounded in From Man to Man: from sharp thorns to soft thorns, from dry thorns to “wet leaves”, from reflecting light to “dark trees”, and to beans and seeds, references to the matrix of an alternative world. The latter figuration is drawn into the text in so imperceptible a fashion that it might seem unreasonable to claim it as a thematic; nonetheless, in Schreiner’s unfinished text, where there is already evidence of piecemeal but assertive alteration in her final draft, one may reasonably speculate on the basis of small hints.
For Schreiner, one of the manifestations of the real that interrupts the ideal is, as already suggested, the sequential violation of women: in Bertie’s case, raped, betrayed, cast out; and (as one might further pursue) in Rebekah’s case, first married, then betrayed; as well as in Rebekah’s domestic worker’s case, first employed, then seduced, then cast off. However, the text also hints at other kinds of intrusions into or perversions of an ideal relating to the different worlds Schreiner draws on for her portrayal. Her shift from a Karoo landscape into that of the Eastern Cape, which matches the shift made in African Farm from a Boer to an English farm (see Pechey, 1983); the substitution the novel makes when the “wild-flower garden” (59) becomes the “little square room” in the bush or “the little parlour in the bush” (78, 82); and the continual references to an indigenous world that sometimes explicitly or implicitly include a Xhosa and a Khoi world — all these suggest a set of other historical referents regarding invasion and betrayal, hinted at through the botanical references but not foregrounded in the text. The pristinely beautiful world of the South African landscape might once have offered a different kind of future from the one Schreiner was watching unfold through (as she sees it) the entry of the English and the gentrification of a Boer world. The fundamental perversion of the truth between women and men might otherwise have been rectified, and the white colonial takeover of the land and the near obliteration of indigenous culture might have found their reversal. This is not to suggest that Schreiner sees the indigenous world as ideal; simply that glimpses of the ideal may be found in this indigenous world. The voice of indigeneity persists quite audibly through her novel in the inheritance of names and in medicinal plant knowledge, with the indigenous land continually brought to our attention through the references to its plant-life.
“The Dawn of Civilization”, which Schreiner (2003) wrote in 1920, describes a spiritual–political awakening she remembers as having experienced when she was nine years old (this was when she lived in Healdtown): I seemed to see a world in which creatures no more hated and crushed, in which the strong helped the weak, and men understood each other, and forgave each other, and did not try to crush others, but to help. (2003: 142)
Burdened by the knowledge that “[i]n my native country dark men were killed and their lands taken from them by white men armed with superior weapons” (Schreiner, 2003: 142) and by other everyday manifestations of suffering, as reflected, for instance, in the prison-gang workers “going past to work on the roads”, she watched the dawn light turn the landscape “bright gold” and “the dewdrop” into “diamonds” (Schreiner, 2003: 142). These metaphorical transformations — dawn light into gold, dewdrops into diamonds — metaphorically reverse the actual extraction of gold and diamonds from the earth that lies at the basis of the industrial capitalism Schreiner so rued. However futile the metaphorical reversals — symbolic actions do not change material conditions — the images themselves re-engage with the systems of value through which meaning and worth are assigned in the world. They also add to the rich intellectual ecology of indigeneity that has been endowed with plenitude and unassailable perfection and assertive rejection, countering the economy of extraction and consumption and thus forming the bedrock of Schreiner’s mature politics and ethics.
As mentioned earlier, “Thorn Kloof” was an early title for the book that became From Man to Man. The thorn tree is a crucial figurative image in the novel as well as a botanical presence, used in metaphors to signify human growth, resilience, and adaptation. It also marks the passage of time through its carefully noted “seasonal changes” (Eve, 2003: 232). It is remarkable, then, that by the time the manuscript of From Man to Man was typed in 1911, Schreiner also used the thorn tree to mark the movement of space and chose for this purpose a different kind of thorn tree, the camel thorn. She also changed the title on her typescript from “From Man to Man” to “The Camel Thorn”.
Although some specimens may be found as far south as Kimberley in the Cape, the camel thorn is considerably more common in Botswana and the western areas of Zimbabwe and Namibia, and indigenous to Angola, southwest Mozambique, Zambia, and Swaziland. Rebekah refers to its location as “up-country on the great plains” (374). Its preferred habitat is dry and deep desert sand, such as that which characterizes the Kalahari and Namib deserts. The name derives from early colonists’ confusion between the Dutch words kameelperd (“giraffe”) and kameel (“camel”). Schreiner might have called the tree giraffe thorn instead, but the word “camel” takes our minds further north than the word “giraffe” would.
Towards the end of the novel, after Rebekah has been telling stories to her children about the rest of Africa — “ant heaps” as high almost as a man (374) are another marker of her imaginative shift north — her eldest son Charles rushes to her excitedly to tell her he has passed on these stories to Rebekah’s friend Mr Drummond, who has told similar stories in turn. Drummond has travelled for 18 months in a waggon through Africa (see 405–406). He is presented contradictorily in the novel (see Driver, 2014: 139–140), but his storytelling to the children about the land of giant ant heaps and camel thorns adds weight to Schreiner’s apparent interest in allowing her fictional landscape to depart from the white-dominated south.
We may take this shift, I suggest, as a sign coming to Schreiner from the continent of Africa, a beckoning from Africa to its southern tip, an invitation that the south should look to the centre and the north, as if it need no longer take its measure and its metaphors only from Europe. What lessons there are for the south from the countries to the north of it are not made explicit in the novel, but we may consider Drummond’s “Africa” as a land not yet ruined by industrial capitalism, not yet disordered by the depredations that Cecil John Rhodes brought to Matabeleland and Mashonaland. The ant heap in Rebekah’s allegory functions as a sign of a land that has not yet been conquered as a European possession (see 374). The land Drummond speaks of is a space where he can feel free (402), and where inspiration lies in the form of a “Bushman skull” (406), just as for Schreiner in real life the “Bushman skull” has freed her imagination (450, 455, 464), and just as fossils from an African past have suggested to Rebekah a creative life-force that will one day be retrieved, and that will, as in the case of the dicynodont, “come out to see the sunshine it once loved” (400). Again, there are undertones here that readers will wish to problematize, as in Schreiner’s developmental thinking. Yet the imagery of death is countered by the idea of new lives unfolding, including that of Sartje, the child born of the union between Rebekah’s husband and the domestic servant. (Angelo Fick in this issue is right to comment on this “ambivalent” novel’s only partial entrapment in colonial discourse, although he might not agree that it takes Sartje “beyond the white gaze” (Fick, in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 51) in according her more dreams than her white foster-mother is capable of.).
Moreover, although Drummond is probably Scots rather than English (this is an important distinction in the history of imperialism and colonial mis-education), many readers will find it problematic to think of him, a man from abroad, as the bearer of a liberatory sign. Schreiner’s ironic distance from both Rebekah and Drummond is often hard to discern (Berkman’s essay opens up interesting discussion in this regard): Drummond with his “coloured boy” in tow, and with his gatherings of African artefacts for European museums. However, Drummond is also a travelling figure not confined to the drawing rooms or glee clubs and drinking clubs that Rebekah’s husband frequents; he is deeply bronzed, with dark tightly curling hair, a man of both action and vision. In several ways, he stands as the kind of figure that would fit Rebekah’s dream of being at once man and woman, adult and child, and his sleeping in the long grass seems to be a match for her imagined night in a hut. Just as Schreiner uses the adopted child to take us beyond the limits of Rebekah’s imagination and power, so too does she use Drummond — the man who has seen the camel thorns of Central Africa, who has spent “more than two years” on an island “with no white people” (395), who has worn “only a cotton cloth about him” (395), who scoffs at the class constraints of the hypocritical English world of the Cape, and whom Rebekah figuratively places in the position of the indigenous Britons invaded by the Picts and Scots (395).
However, Schreiner pulls back from the new title. Her changed wording, “Perhaps Only —” recalls the importance of shadows in the novel, and their ultimate unreadability. Yet there is much that Schreiner’s readers may also feel certain of regarding her thinking about South Africa’s potential, as, for instance, in one of the lessons Rebekah tries to teach her children: “Out there in my garden”, she said softly, “there are flowers of all kinds growing — tall queen lilies and roses and pinks and violets and little brown ranunculuses — and I love them all. But if the tall queen lilies were to say, ‘We must reign here alone, all the others must die to give place to us’, I do not know, but I think I might say, ‘Is it not perhaps then best you should go?’” (379)
Assuming that some South African readers may read indigeneity as figured here allegorically in the “little brown ranunculuses”, and thus bearing all the patronization we are already familiar with in Schreiner’s representations, Rebekah’s point is about all those many-hued others to the “tall queen lilies”. The argument is geared to the rejection of exclusivity and supremacy; the projected soil is hospitable to all that grows in it. Domination is the danger, for it subdues and redirects to its own purpose, or even annihilates, those qualities threatening to its own existence. In an imagined debate with a Social Darwinist on the social qualities she found in the “little Bushman”, which a Social Darwinist would not have imagined as making any contribution at all to an existing civilization, Rebekah asks, “What if I see in that little untaught savage the root out of which ultimately the noblest blossom of the human tree shall draw its strength?” (Schreiner, 2015: 160). Again, we are confronted with Schreiner’s developmental thinking: she habitually used the concept “little” for those still evolving, as in Rebekah’s “little mother” and “Baby-Bertie”, but without racial discrimination, for in Undine there is mention of “ragged little savages, one white and the rest black” (Schreiner, 1972/1928: 291). Her botanical wording returns us to the image referred to at the start of this essay: the “tender, feathery” shoots of the rose bush that lack “vital connection” with “the classes below” and “the nations around” (153). In Schreiner’s writing, the idea of social progress that draws from all that is seen to work best in all forms of humankind is continually at work: the root of the human tree spreads across and draws from all classes and all nations.
From Man to Man was written over several decades, with Schreiner apparently combining earlier drafts of different fictions, sometimes expanding, sometimes reducing, tinkering with existing text, which means that the final work, which remained unfinished, may well have been composed of different layerings from different writing times, as Liz Stanley (this issue) so usefully stresses (15). Since the bulk of the manuscript was destroyed, and since the few manuscripts that remain cannot with any certainty be designated as first or final drafts, only the most speculative account is possible. While the botanical imagery allows the novel to assume a clearer political direction involving a complex of connections, it must remain open to question how much more Schreiner might have changed if she had seen the remaining manuscripts into typed form and revised it the way her first chapters were revised.
Even so, the intersectional connectivity between the different kinds of exploitation and oppression the African world has had to confront and survive considerably expands on any understanding of Schreiner’s sense of the unity between all things. The latter has been minimized and sentimentalized but is more complex than often thought. Anne McClintock’s otherwise compelling reading of Schreiner in her biographical essay faults Schreiner, wrongly to my mind, for a “mystical monism” “at odds with the social history of racial and gender difference that shaped her experience” (1992: 440). Obviously, no writer can fully reflect that social history, but Schreiner’s poetics of plants inaugurates in South African written literature its first glimpse of the dense web of interacting power relations imported into an indigenous world and interfering with its own organic social process.
Moreover, the expressiveness of the natural imagery or what I have called the poetics of plants accords an agency to nature as part of the social world, rejecting the idea of nature as a passive recipient, as the standard dualism of nature and culture would have it. To use terms from Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, Schreiner’s plants may well read largely as “the hapless bearers of symbolic projection” rather than part of a social force, an “actor-network” (2005: 10, 46) in which plants also participate as agents. Yet in two ways we may indeed think of Schreiner’s indigenous plants as agents. First of all, the native land speaks back through its plants. Second, the more Schreiner focused on them, and the more she showed their medicinal and other uses, the more she — as writing subject — develops a sense of plant-life not so much reaching towards an ideal, as the earlier images suggested, but as representing a world being invaded, violated, betrayed, and degraded, while also retaining an inherent ideal. Schreiner’s invocations of indigeneity themselves serve as agents in her writing process, encouraging her not simply to rewrite the white South African position on African soil but also to open up the imagination into a future that whites would not themselves manage to create, and a different sense of the social in which new forms of subjectivity can thrive.
