Abstract
In her final unfinished novel, From Man to Man or, not of Perhaps Only —, Olive Schreiner features women as both possessors and possessed. This article explores the dual and often interwoven character of ownership as presented in the novel. My analysis highlights the interaction of racial, gender, and social class dynamics in shaping the power of women to possess property, including property in their and others’ bodies, as well as the circumstances of being possessed within the historical context of Schreiner’s lifetime. This discussion culminates with an investigation of how this theme affirms and alters hypotheses about the failure of Schreiner to complete her novel.
Rebekah slept with Sartje — a little, yellow-brown, frizzle-haired girl she had adopted five years before as a little baby and treated in all ways as her own child, except that it was taught to call her mistress. Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only —
The above quote appears in Olive Schreiner’s last and unfinished novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only —, (henceforth in the text abbreviated to From Man to Man and in citations FMM, when referring to the new edition by Dorothy Driver, 2015). Rebekah, the novel’s protagonist, is a white British South African woman and Sartje, her white British husband Frank’s offspring through sexual intercourse with a black African servant. These two female characters figure prominently in Schreiner’s treatment of possession in the novel. Rebekah’s de facto adoption of Sartje would have been highly unusual in its time (the novel was composed over a series of decades, the final extant manuscript dated 1911). In fact, transracial adoption was not legal until 1991 (Bilodeau, 2015: 3). Though Rebekah treats Sartje with the same respect and love as she treats her white children, racial hierarchy and control are embedded in Rebekah’s training of Sartje to refer to her not as mother but as mistress. Further, as a result of Rebekah’s submission to Frank’s racist insistence, Sartje can only join her older siblings at the dinner table when Frank is away from home (Schreiner, 2015: 359). Note that Rebekah’s reference in the above quotation to Sartje as “it” does not reflect racial objectification of her, since Rebekah also refers to white children as “it”.
Rebekah’s insistence on Sartje’s calling her mistress may correspond to Schreiner’s ambivalence over what she calls the “half-caste population” of South Africa. In Schreiner’s essays “The Problem of Slavery” (n.d.) and “Note B: The Value of Human Varieties” (1901), among her published writings collected in Thoughts on South Africa, Schreiner is warmly sympathetic to mixed-race South Africans, viewing them as unjustly rejected by both white and black communities and perhaps representing a superior population to either white or black people; at the same time, she claims scientific research may demonstrate that the offspring of “miscegenation” are the same or inferior to their white and black parents. Throughout her essays Schreiner, with some exceptions, maintains a primarily environmentalist position, in other words the sources of individual traits and behaviours are not inborn and inherited but formed by family and the cultural milieu of a particular time and place. Yet Schreiner also asserts that “Bantu” women are by nature superior to “Hottentot” women (Schreiner, 1923: 122–127, 130–144, 384–386).
In regards to racial terminology, such as “Bantu” and “Hottentot”, this article follows editor Dorothy Driver’s rationale for preserving the novel’s racial and ethnic terminology, offensive to our ears now, but thereby preserving “the historical flavour of the original” (Driver, 2015: xi). Driver’s position, which I find convincing, emerges in a context of considerable debate over racial terminology (Voss, 2011: See also Krebs, 2004 and Stanley, 2002). She allows, though, that Schreiner would have welcomed later generations’ critiques of her word choices (Driver, 2015: xi–xii). To signal the dated, derogatory, or fallacious nature of Schreiner’s descriptions of individuals, I will apply quotation marks, for example, “Kaffir” and “Hottentot”. Khoikhoi has replaced the European- imposed term, “Hottentot”, frequently applied by Schreiner to certain South Africans.
Rebekah, identifying as a possessor in expecting Sartje to call her mistress, appears, however, in From Man to Man as both a possessor and a possessed woman, as do other female characters in this novel. This article examines and interprets not only the novel’s racialized notions of possession but also the sexual and gender assumptions that contribute to women’s condition as possessors and as possessed. Females as possessed and as possessors in the realms of self, of others, of space and of objects appear in multiple and contradictory ways throughout Schreiner’s writings. The dual competing meanings of this article’s title, “possessing women”, are explored primarily through the lens of white British women, the novel’s central female personalities. At the same time, the colonial and racist dispossession of Africans, compounded for black women by their subordinate status as a result of both white and black patriarchy, do not entirely strip black women of agency and possession. I will address that, too.
My article is organized as follows: After prefatory remarks about racial dispossession I launch into my discussion of female ownership in From Man to Man through Schreiner’s presentation of possession through a child’s experience independent of race, gender, and social class considerations. Furthering this discussion, I also treat the relationship between possessing objects and possessing one’s self. I view self-possession as self-affirming autonomy, owning one’s body, thoughts, and feelings. This sequence leads me to an analysis of the primarily socio-economic features of female possession implicit and explicit in the novel, incorporating, in the process of my analysis, differences of race, class, and gender. I then shift focus to the novel’s predominantly gendered aspects of possessing women, applying a similar integrated analysis. Finally, I consider how the two competitive endings to the unfinished novel as juxtaposed in Driver’s new edition of the novel shed light on my overall topic.
With regard to racial dispossession, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015) underscores the racial and gender privilege and damage of the white possessive. She describes colonizing governments as follows: “The regulatory mechanisms of these nation-states are extremely busy reaffirming and reproducing this possessiveness (white) through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession, ranging from the refusal of Indigenous sovereignty to overregulated piecemeal concessions” (2015: xi). Moreton-Robinson argues that possession, as the foundation of property, requires physical occupation and the will, the right, and the desire to possess. She adds, white colonizers and colonists view their identity in terms of property-owning beings. She highlights gender difference, however, noting that the masculine thrust to possess property and bear arms is fundamental to white male racial identity (2015: xix). As she further observes, since most women have limited rights to possess property, let alone bear arms, “from the sixteenth century onward race and gender divided humans into three categories: owning property, becoming propertyless and being property” (2015: xxiii).
Such classification is crystal clear in an exchange late in From Man to Man when Rebekah’s son, Frank, named after his father, voices the prevalent attitudes of white male colonizers of Africa and Africans in his initial response to Rebekah’s morality tale about the evils of racism. He declares that he will never walk with Sartje in public again, because the other boys make fun of him for “[w]alking with a nigger-girl!” (Schreiner, FMM: 359). Rebekah recoils from Frank’s language, denounces the boys as cruel and evil, and posits a situation in which white-faced aliens with more advanced technologies land on earth and deem all earthlings “savages” and “The Inferior Races” (Schreiner, 2015: 362, 363). Though Rebekah’s aliens are protective of the environment and of animals, hold higher standards of cleanliness and espouse nonviolence, they, however, are also colonizers and desire to subdue and possess earthlings as their servants. Frank retorts he would have driven these aliens out, rhetorically asking: “[w]hat business had they coming here where we were here first? It was our world!” (Schreiner, 2015: 363). His claim of his right to possess the world, in this case South Africa, ignoring the fact that white colonists ruled previously occupied land, epitomizes Moreton-Robinson’s categories of the white possessive.
Having charted above the theoretical, semantic, and organizational categories of this article, I now thread through these the theme of self-possession, but not in the sense of being possessed by one’s inner demons or being god-possessed or possessing another’s psyche. Being possessed by inner psychological forces does enter my analysis, though only as products of material forms of possession. A discussion, for example, of women’s psychological power over others through modes of gossip would call for a separate article. Neither do I discuss Schreiner’s biographical search for self-ownership. That search, however, is reflected in her literary characters and discussed at length in my critical study of Schreiner (Berkman, 1989: see especially the opening chapter).
Possessions and self-ownership
The matter of who owns what and how is a fundamental experience shaping childhood development. Learning what is mine, what is yours, what is shared is often a difficult experience for children. In the opening section of From Man to Man, Old Ayah, described as a “Hottentot” servant, reproaches young Rebekah for entering the house’s spare room where her stillborn sister was covered with two sheets on top of a table and fondly touching her: “What would your mother say if she knew you’d been in here playing with that blessed baby? You naughty child, how dared you touch it!” Rebekah replies, “It’s mine: I found it!” (Schreiner, 2015: 9; emphasis in original). Rebekah’s mother had given birth to twins. One twin died; the other lived, and Rebekah transferred her affection to the surviving twin, Baby-Bertie. Later, Rebekah sees her mother nursing Baby-Bertie and asks: “It’s your little baby?” (Schreiner, 2015: 38; emphasis in original). Her mother asserts personal ownership by initially rejecting Rebekah’s desire to sleep with Baby-Bertie, firmly stating, “You can’t have the baby” (Schreiner, 2015: 40). Her mother relents after Rebekah assures her that she wants only to love and teach it. Finally, her mother allows her to sleep with Baby-Bertie, which Rebekah does, with her and the baby’s hands entwined.
As Schreiner demonstrates, being a possessing female, is not necessarily negative for women. Rather, it depends upon the possessor’s motives and the possession’s nature and purpose. This potentially positive view emerges vividly in Rebekah’s differentiation between her husband’s quest to possess animals and people and Rebekah’s outlook. Rebekah endorses certain forms of possession, but not others: she lambasts her husband for his desire to capture, dominate, and claim bragging rights, while she seeks to mother or nurture. She contrasts Frank’s interest in wild animals as objects to hunt and capture with her longing for another kind of possession that is compassionate and non-violent. She wants to own an empathic connection with another; she wants to own that kind of experience: “I also had a passion for wild animals; but it has been to possess them and know they knew me and wanted me” (Schreiner, 2015: 246). Her rejoinder to Frank pointedly forefronts the possessive pronoun, “mine”:
The supreme moment for me is not when I kill or conquer a living thing, but the moment its eye and mine meet and a line of connection is formed between me and the life that is in it. It knows and understands me and we are united by something within us. Then it is mine; and I want it. (Schreiner, 2015: 246–247; emphasis added)
For Schreiner and for Rebekah the possession of space and objects is often vital to a woman’s wellbeing. Young and adult Rebekah has a bedroom of her own. Schreiner through Rebekah prizes a private place to which women can retreat and feel relative freedom, whether or not that private place was her personal property. Rebekah does not have legal possession of private space until she buys her own farm. But throughout her life, she has a room of her own, Virginia Woolf’s precondition of possession for female autonomy. The importance of such space appears early in Schreiner’s novel when at age five Rebekah composes stories about an island, a little house, filled with books and an empty shelf for them, all hers! She adds “and there was a microscope on the table like her father’s; which she was never allowed to touch; but this one was hers!” (Schreiner, 2015: 14). Note how deprivation of ownership incites Rebekah’s rectifying fantasies.
Equally in Rebekah’s childhood bedroom at her parents’ home in Thorn Kloof, her marital home in Cape Town or in her own home in Matjesfontein, she reserves a private study that reinforces her identity and self-possession. 1 She treasures all that is hers: she has a tall wooden cabinet filled with her fossils, insects, microscope, and a tiny statue of Hercules. Another of her possessions is a wall with three small bookshelves on which are books, all but one being used copies, of poetry, science, history, and travel. She takes particular pleasure in her new copy of Darwin’s Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication bound in calf. On another wall, she has another three shelves that contain science primers and school books, which her mother purchased for her with money from drying peaches. Rebekah gives detailed descriptions of many of her books. Tellingly, she stores with them her own writings and her father’s History of the Ancient World. These items flesh out Rebekah’s intellectual identity and interests (Schreiner, 2015: 136–140, 150). We see how all of these material and special possessions creatively serve her inner autonomy. Rebekah succeeds in making her own space outside her home too, most specifically a “koppje”, a small hill on the South African karoo. Rebekah’s possession of space and objects are basic to her identity, to her sense of self, to her self-possession.
It is useful to note that property ownership was a major goal in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American women’s movement. We can appreciate Rebekah and Schreiner’s quest for personal space when we ask: what can a woman own? A woman’s legal and actual inability to own property and to call most of their possessions their own contributed greatly to women’s dependency, vulnerability, and lack of freedom. It was also this drive to own property that divided liberal feminists from those socialists who envisioned a society of collective ownership.
Socio-economic foundations of possessing women
Rebekah’s pride and success in securing private space and objects, however, are not innocent and do have a history. At the beginning of Chapter 1, Schreiner describes Rebekah’s homestead and inhabitants, and the beautiful landscape that surrounds them, uncritically. She lists Rebekah’s father, “the farmer himself, the little mother, their children, with a score of Hottentot and Kaffir servants” (Schreiner, 2015: 43). Their property is “tucked away among the ribs of a mountain in the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope” (Schreiner, 2015: 43). Their house is large enough for Rebekah to have her own bedroom as well as a spare guest room. Neither Schreiner as authorial observer nor Rebekah consider the origins of Rebekah’s family ownership of this land and house, nor how it happened that Rebekah’s parents as well as her aunt and uncle had “Hottentot” and “Kaffir” servants. Apart from her sense of acute isolation and her flat observation of the illiteracy of most Dutch and English inhabitants in the area Rebekah expresses only love for her home, shorn of historical context. Similarly, Schreiner’s vivid depiction of Rebekah and Frank’s married home in a suburb (Rondebosch) of Cape Town is no less shorn (Schreiner, 2015: 112–113). In general, the properties of family members and friends lack any account of origins.
After her marriage to Frank, through money Rebekah’s father had given her as a wedding gift — which she possessed under her own name, arranged via an ante-nuptial contract — Rebekah buys her own property in Matjesfontein, a little fruit and wine farm with a house and a garden, within a half day’s trip from Cape Town (Schreiner, 2015: 120–121; see also Driver’s footnote 17). She retreats there with her children when her husband is upcountry on a shooting trip. Eventually, when she separates from Frank, she spends her time there more fully. Although Frank had scorned Rebekah’s property purchase, the legal arrangements spare him any debts she might accrue. In time he comes to see the arrangement as profitable, saving the costs of taking the family on vacation to the seaside and also supplying the fruit and vegetables for the family without financial cost. Rebekah enjoys a white middle-class racial privilege denied most African women, even many white women.
Rebekah’s white middle-class privilege extends to domestic servants as well. Certainly, Rebekah’s family’s servants, among them Old Ayah, Mietje, and Griet, and later her own servants, did not possess comparable property. While poor white women, such as rural (Boer) women, still did considerable housework and outdoor labour, most arduous labour throughout South Africa fell to black Africans, the “Hottentot” and “Kaffir” servants in From Man to Man. Rebekah engages in strenuous and quite unconventional “mannish” physical labour for a middle-class white woman — repairing the roof, plastering and white-washing the walls, planting and grafting trees and vines, and studying wine-making — but Schreiner observes, crucially, that Rebekah has assistance. For example, Rebekah hires an old German and his wife and a “coloured boy” at her fruit and vine farm (Schreiner, 2015: 121). Later she mentions bringing to the farm her old “Malay” cook, the cook’s husband and son (Schreiner, 2015: 238). Rebekah does not discuss her relationship with them, nor does Schreiner delve, through implication or detail, into what these four helpers do or how Rebekah pays or treats them, or of their lives outside hers or her parents’ home and farm. Other than the names of five family servants (Old Ayah, Mietje, Clartie, Dorcas, and Griet), servants have no names. 2 They are ethnically identified in general, for example the “Malay” cook, or simply nameless as “she”: “She called to the girl in the kitchen to go and see who it was. The girl came back and said it was the gentleman” (Schreiner, 2015: 397).
Though female African servants in the novel are treated as if they are possessions by their white employers, they experience varying degrees of autonomy and power over others. Old Ayah can berate child Rebekah as naughty, mad, and wild. On multiple occasions, she verbally insults Rebekah. When Rebekah does not eat the food she gives her, Old Ayah, snaps “Why didn’t you eat your dinner, little white face?” (Schreiner, 2015: 34). At another point Old Ayah, intensely frustrated by Rebekah’s behaviour, bursts out “God only does know what possesses this child” (Schreiner, 2015: 37). Old Ayah exercises an authority over a child that she could never exert over a white adult. As a “Hottentot”, Old Ayah looks down on “Kaffir” women and men. She, as Rebekah’s mother’s personal servant, assumes leadership over the “Kaffir” maids who work in the kitchen, scolding them and reserving the power to strike them (Schreiner, 2015: 95–96). Of course, Old Ayah does not own the “Kaffir” servants, but she possesses a derivative power of ownership through her position in the household.
In time, Baby-Bertie herself possesses a personal servant, “Griet, the little Bushman girl”, whom Bertie receives “from her [Griet’s] drunken mother a little while before for a pair of old shoes and a bottle of wine” (Schreiner, 2015: 69). Schreiner describes Griet as tormenting the “Kaffir” maids, yet also as a figure of considerable vivacity and endearing impishness. Griet, too, possesses privilege over the “Kaffir” maids. On rare occasions, Schreiner presents Old Ayah’s and Griet’s views, for example when Old Ayah, as initially all members of the household, except Griet, likes Veronica Grey, whose insincerity and manipulative ways only Griet can see. Griet, being very attached to Baby-Bertie, quickly senses any danger to her (Schreiner, 2015: Chapter X).
Apart from Schreiner’s enlisting Griet as a sensitive observer, Schreiner offers only passing attention to domestic servants. Griet, of course, does not possess the right to express her thoughts. With infrequent exceptions, as in Old Ayah’s words to young Rebekah, we gain no sense of servants’ experiences and feelings. If we include women’s capacity to speak and the power of their words, whether through gossip (as in the case of Veronica Grey and Mrs Drummond) or direct address, as a form of strength possessed, the female servants have limited power within the novel. Schreiner had intended to tackle the topic of domestic service in her original draft of Woman and Labour, but much of the notes for the original draft were destroyed during the South African War (1899–1902). The published Woman and Labour (1911), however, examines domestic service, as does Rebekah in From Man to Man, as part of their excoriating analysis of the exploitation of female employment in general (Berkman, 1989: 139). Rebekah and Schreiner in their brilliant disquisitions on race, class, and gender never examine the consequences for their own servants of their servants’ lack of the relatively privileged status of their employers.
Schreiner and Rebekah, to be sure, are not oblivious to the fact that exploited workers, including domestic servants, enable the privileges and possession of the middle and upper classes. Indeed, in various passages in From Man to Man Rebekah eloquently attacks white racist arrogance and drive for wealth at the expense of others, asking
[a]re we not in our vanity like the parvenu, who, having wrung wealth out of the labour of others and surrounded himself by the results of all human toil and knowledge, stands in his gorgeous room filled with the works of art and use of all nations and, with his hands in his pockets and his full belly, looks round with infinite satisfaction at what he has accumulated about him, and says, “All these are mine.” (Schreiner, 2015: 164)
In Schreiner’s allegory, “I Thought I Stood”, a woman is denied entrance to Heaven because she is unaware of her guilty abuse of working-class women. In another allegory, “The Sunlight Lay across My Bed”, feasting and intoxicated women and men are oblivious to the hardships endured by the common toilers who constructed the building in which the privileged indulge themselves (Berkman, 1989: 138).
Unlike Rebekah, Schreiner does question the system of private property. She is quite conscious that the system of private ownership is not a universal phenomenon. She notes that for the “Bantus” who found private possession “morally repugnant” (Schreiner, 1923: 113), British imperialism forced them to adopt the system of private property. Apart, however, from these occasional observations and her various critiques of capitalism, especially of forced and ill-paid labour, of the mining magnates of the Diamond Industry in South Africa, and the pervasive influence of capitalism in England’s imperial thrust, Schreiner never offers a coherent critique of capitalism or of the theory of private property, for the very reason I earlier suggested. She viewed women’s possession of private property, at least in her era, as essential to their wellbeing.
Although Schreiner is an idealist, she and Rebekah can also be quite realistic when considering the communal ideal of shared possessions. For them it is a global dream far in the future. Rebekah argues the impossibility for one nation alone to institute complete social democracy, since nations’ interaction with other nations would in time cause the socialist nation to disintegrate and revert to inequalities. That state “would inevitably be overcome by the wanting and miserable products in other societies where a lower moral standard prevailed” (Schreiner, 2015: 155). She observes:
The man who dreams today that the seeking of material good for himself alone is an evil, who persistently shares all he has with his fellows, is not necessarily a fool dreaming of that which never has been or will be; he is simply dreaming of that which will be perfectly attainable when the dream dominates his fellows and all give and share. (Schreiner, 2015: 156)
Gender foundations of possessing women: prostitution, love, and marriage
If we shift to viewing possessing women through more gendered lenses, property and possession appear in a different guise. Linda Gordon in her classic study of the history of reproductive rights titles her book The Moral Property of Women (2007). She argues that women’s bodies are their possessions, no one else’s. The pioneering document on property in our own body is John Locke’s eighteenth-century analysis of human property rights Two Treatises of Government (1668). Although Locke failed to consider the importance and impact of including women and people of colour in his analysis, his ringing words are potentially elastic: “every man has a Property in their own Person” (Locke, 1668/1968: 29–30). Historically, women’s reproductive capacity has been treated as the property of men. Women’s bodies’ ability to reproduce was a profitable commodity. All women’s bodies were subject to male control through sexual services and labouring in fields and factories. Black women’s bodies were the most extreme example of loss of female bodily self-ownership. Indeed, Schreiner somersaulted the common late nineteenth-century shibboleth of the “Black Peril”. Rather than black men threatening the bodies of white women, the reality was “White Peril”, violence by white men against black women’s bodies. Frank’s ability to exert sexual power over his black servant represented the behaviour of countless white colonialists.
In diverse writings, Schreiner illuminated the participation of white women in “White Peril”, as she underscored the intersectionality of the possessive dynamics of race, gender, and social class. Through male ownership of women’s bodies, more affluent women benefited, both from being provided a continuing supply of domestic labour, to such marketplace services as their dress makers, milliners, beauticians, and so forth. In effect, male possession of women’s bodies not only enhanced male power more generally but expanded the material benefits of middle- and upper-class women, whom Schreiner regarded as parasites and prostitutes of one kind or another. In Woman and Labour, especially, Schreiner often voices her anger at the insensitivity of middle-class women to the causes of prostitution. Schreiner pointed out that
[it] has invariably been by feeding on this wealth, the result of forced or ill-paid labour, that the female of the dominant race or class has in the past lost her activity and has come to exist purely through passive performance of her sexual functions. (Schreiner, 1911: 98)
In the same vein, Schreiner speculates that “probably three-fourths of the sexual unions in our modern European societies, whether in the illegal or recognized legal forms, are dominated by or largely influenced by the sex purchasing of the male” (Schreiner, 1911: 252–253). This reality was integral to Victorian socialist and feminist critiques of prostitution, spotlighting even legally married women as kept women.
In From Man to Man the issue of prostitution is graphically and painfully presented through the life of Baby-Bertie. She grows up in a society where marriage is the only path for most women’s survival, material security, and societal respect. Marriage enables childbearing and economic protection of offspring. But, in Victorian British society, one permeated by the sexual double standard, a woman’s hopes for marriage flounder if a woman’s sexual purity is sullied. Baby-Bertie, seduced by her tutor, becomes ostracized as a “fallen woman”. Her chances for a legal marriage or even a menial job are slim. For Baby-Bertie, and many women in similar cultural and economic circumstances, prostitution became a desperate alternative. Baby-Bertie, lacking respectable options, accepts the protection of a wealthy Jew and moves with him to London. The Jew, for many South Africans, represented men active in the South African diamond industry, either as diggers or as capitalists. The Jew became the symbol of the diamond capitalist (Driver, 2015: xxiv and see Berkman, 2006: 82–88, 102, 161). Baby-Bertie’s Jew in particular is a key figure in From to Man to Man. Distressingly, Schreiner deploys this stereotype, though scholars document Schreiner’s highly positive attitudes to Jews as well (Driver, 2015: xxiv. See my discussion of the Jewish stereotype in the novel. Berkman, 1989: 82–88, 102, 161). The Jew, akin to most servants in the novel, for example the “Malay” cook, has no name and is simply referred to as “the Jew”. Likewise, the son of his cousin who is an appealing character in the novel is also unnamed. As the story unfolds, the prostitution of Baby-Bertie is unusual, in that, though the Jew wants Baby-Bertie as his possession, he is not interested in possessing her sexually or requiring other kinds of labour. The Jew, like other men with consorts, lavishes her with possessions (Schreiner, 2015: 298–334). He gives her a beautiful room of her own (a clever irony), myriad luxuries, and three pet cats. In fact, she is more of a material possessor than Rebekah. “The Jew”, a jealous and possessive protector, nevertheless owns Baby-Bertie. He does not want her to speak with people who lack his approval or to give away money or other items of worth to the poor. When she attends a play that features female dancers nearly naked, she learns to her horror that these women are paid for titillating their male audience. As she discovers the many ways she is confined physically and socially, her mind is possessed with fears; she becomes obese and sinks into acute depression and paranoia. Eventually, “the Jew” casts Baby-Bertie out after he comes to believe, wrongly, that the handsome son of his cousin had entered Baby-Bertie’s room at her invitation.
Sadly, Baby-Bertie lacks the self-possession or independently-owned possessions to defy the sexual conventions of the day and reveal to Rebekah or anyone else in her family the reasons for her fleeing South Africa and living in London as a kept woman (Berkman, 1989: 136). From childhood, her self-esteem was wobbly. Her inner colonization in the sense of internalizing oppressive ideas of virtuous womanhood is deep, not unlike what Rebekah describes of many of the colonized in Africa. In her parable to her children about the invading aliens, Rebekah laments that though most of the inhabitants died in warfare with the aliens, “a more awful fate overtook us. Because they despised us, we began to despise ourselves!” (Schreiner, 2015: 364; emphasis in original).
Although the connections between gender, race, economics, sexual double standard, and possession are transparent in the condition of prostitution, the interplay between gender and heterosexual love with issues of possession appear in From Man to Man as more complicated, murkier. Schreiner presents love as a risk to both inner and outer self-possession. Baby-Bertie exemplifies the risk of needing and wanting love even in the most general sense. “Rebekah, I like so to be loved!”, she says (Schreiner, 2015: 84). This longing makes her susceptible to her tutor’s seduction. It makes her anxious about disapproval from everyone, including her family and society more generally. Although Rebekah is not as needy as Baby-Bertie — her intellectual passions and possessions form a buffer — she too seeks a heterosexual loving marriage, one that is monogamous. It is clear that monogamy and possession are interwoven. Rebekah describes her monogamous commitment to Frank: “My one love! My own love! My only love!” (Schreiner, 2015: 58). Such a love for Schreiner and Rebekah involves the woman’s choice to cede her entire being to her husband. Rebekah declares that Frank possesses more than her body: “it’s her brain, it’s her intellect, it’s her whole life! He puts his hand in among the finest cords of her being and rends and tears them if he will . . . or he puts his hand on them gently, and draws out all the music and makes them strong” (Schreiner, 2015: 229). The latter happy fate was not to be Rebekah’s. Upon discovering her husband’s infidelity and becoming utterly stunned, she heard in her brain only the words of patriarchal possession, “‘The father of your children! — the lord of your body! — the owner of your life!’” (Schreiner, 2015: 233).
In a curious combination of choosing to resist possession and accepting possession, Rebekah is torn between her loyalty to her husband and her ideals of love and mutuality. She tells Frank, “I am not a woman speaking to a man who owns her, before whom she trembles; we are two free souls looking at each other” (Schreiner, 2015: 243). Rebekah, unlike Schreiner, does not offer her views on an ideal heterosexual marriage other than in her insistence that in addition to “passionate tenderness” the relationship must be fully honest and truthful: “The highest sacrament of love we thirst for between our two souls is an almighty sincerity; if there is not this, then for us love’s holy of holies is defamed” (Schreiner, 2015: 147). In Schreiner’s other writings, especially in Woman and Labour and Dreams, she sets forth the nature and lives of New Women and New Men (terms in common usage for late nineteenth-century progressive-minded and unconventional women and men forging new forms of gender identity and relationships). Schreiner envisions men and women who join in matrimony to enable the best in each of them to unfold and who both enjoy economic independence, can buy and own property equally, and participate in the body politic as equals. Rare among feminists of her time, Schreiner advocated equal sharing of the “physical and moral” tasks of child rearing, but failed to spell out what this involved (Berkman, 1989: 154, citing Schreiner’s letter to Betty Molteno, 11 October 1896, included in Rive, 1988: 291). As Driver rightly emphasizes, Schreiner wanted relationships with men “untrammeled by the idea of ownership” (Driver, 2015: xix, invoking Schreiner’s letter to Karl Pearson, 4, April 1886. See Driver, 2015: 440).
Rebekah in From Man to Man vacillates, however, on whether to end her marriage to Frank after she discovers his infidelity. Initially, Rebekah, sensitive to his potential need for her, articulates that she would do anything for her beloved if he held her tightly. At one point in her letter to Frank, she asks herself why she does not leave him. She hears the voices of
old ancestresses of mine who for millions of years have followed the man over steppes and through deserts . . . which to-day cries out to us, “Follow — follow — till he sets you free! […] something cries out in me, “If he should need me! — If he should want me! — If I am good for him!” (Schreiner, 2015: 241)
The power of Victorian gender socialization possesses Rebekah, as it does Bertie. She concedes that if his deepest love and passion is for another woman, she could let him go, and she presents Frank with three options — divorce, separation, or a truthful, faithful marriage (Schreiner, 2015: 244). If he chooses the latter and honours their monogamous bond, “[t]hen, if you still wish to possess me, I will live with you; as long as you are loyal to me I will be loyal to you; I will bear children for you. I will forget the past; never by a word or a sign shall I retrieve it” (Schreiner, 2015: 244; emphasis added). Frank, though, recognizes that he no longer possesses Rebekah, concluding that “the net was broken, that the bird was out!” (Schreiner, 2015: 259).
In an interesting angle on Rebekah’s choice, Schreiner, in a letter to Karl Pearson written before she revised From Man to Man, explains to him that for her character Drummond, who esteems and loves Rebekah, to leave his hollow marriage is no model for Rebekah leaving her hollow marriage:
he is right to leave his wife, but she is not to leave her husband. However clearly we may see the abstract right and truth, there is always this — our duty to the human beings nearest us in our place and time and country.” (Schreiner, 10 July 1886, in Driver, 2015: 422)
The initial response of Rebekah changes after Schreiner revised her novel. Rebekah, on the day following Frank’s refusal to read her letter to him, recognizes that her marriage is beyond rescue. After her fourth baby is born, she moves to her farm with her children, though no legal divorce takes place. She also continues to live at her Cape Town home, and occasionally Frank is there with her, since he rejects divorce as a social embarrassment (Schreiner, 2015: 380–389). In short, Rebekah allows for women to choose to be possessed if the marital relationship justifies it, but she also urges that lacking an honest and reciprocal marriage, women should repudiate being possessed. This choice is easier for Rebekah than for most women because she has possessions of her own to assure her and her offspring’s survival and independence. Rebekah, at this point in the novel, is heeding Schreiner’s sage in Schreiner’s allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1890). The sage exhorts women to turn away from their male loved ones, who metaphorically suck on their breasts, even if in consequence their breasts should bleed (Schreiner, 1916/1890: 66).
In her published nonfiction, Schreiner, though she supports diverse intimate connections, including interracial marriage and same-sex intimacy, still upholds the ideal of heterosexual monogamy. Although vigorous critiques of monogamy appeared in writings throughout nineteenth-century England, Schreiner did not extend her exploration of women possessed and possessing to the question of monogamy. She did not support free love, a position espoused by many of her closest English friends, affiliated, as she was, with the Fellowship of New Life. (This organization, flourishing in England during the early 1880s, was committed to frank and searching intellectual discussion of a wide range of social, cultural, and political issues [Schreiner, 1911: 19]). In her opposition to free love, Schreiner remained concerned that free love would promote promiscuity and sex obsession; both would threaten her ideal of love as an integrated mental, emotional, psychic, as well as sexual ideal. Anything less than this ideal would seriously limit women’s possibility for a fully loving bond. As a result, women’s self-possession would be partial at best.
Rebekah’s love for her sister Baby-Bertie offers another perspective on the nature of love and possession. As presented earlier, from her baby sister’s earliest months Rebekah’s capacity for intense passionate connection is evident. After she learns that Baby-Bertie has left South Africa, she, if we accept Frank’s description, hires people to find her. Frank uses the word “possessed” for what he describes as Rebekah’s state of mind: “My wife’s possessed with the idea she’ll turn up here some day” (Schreiner, 2017: 389). She looks for her in disreputable places in Cape Town and Simon’s Town. She is so beset (Frank says “unhinged”) that she audio-hallucinates Baby-Bertie in South African locations. She imagines hearing her walk, her laugh.
Rebekah’s fierce determination to find Baby-Bertie, her profound love for her, signals perhaps one of many reasons Schreiner was unable to finish From Man to Man. A basic contradiction threads through the work. On the one hand, we have the sisters’ loving openness and Rebekah’s commitment to compassion and honesty and, on the other hand, a plot development premised upon melodramatic concealment and distance between the sisters. Perhaps, if Schreiner had given Baby-Bertie reflective moments to explain her reason for withholding the story of her seduction and the terror of social ostracism, or if Rebekah had tried to encourage Bertie’s revelation, the sisterly love would have served as a unifying force to the novel’s disparate elements and helped Schreiner reach her preferred conclusion to the novel (Berkman, 1989: 136, including footnote 27: 276).
In light of the power of social conventions and beliefs of her time, Baby-Bertie’s reluctance to confide in Rebekah is understandable. Rebekah’s reluctance, perhaps, reflects Schreiner’s appreciation for the power of traditional mores in late nineteenth-century British South Africa disabling even Rebekah, at certain points, in translating her liberated and progressive ideas into her behaviour and actions. But even mentally, Rebekah is not as progressive as Schreiner.
To be sure, Rebekah, as we have seen, is cognitively aware of the roots of prostitution, whether in or out of marriage, and she thinks clearly and cogently on many pressing theories and issues of her time, such as in her extended critiques of Social Darwinism, social class inequality, racial inequality, violence, and war, in her views on the fundamental organic unity of humankind and the nature of historical change and of artistic creation. Yet, she does not entertain ideals of non-possessive comradeship between married men and women in any extended fashion. In contrast, Schreiner does exactly that throughout her life in letters and especially in Woman and Labour. Rebekah certainly does present her feminist views regarding the relations of men and women in general, marriage apart. She offers, as one of many examples, that if in Greece women (indeed, all habitants) shared in the full civic rights of the state, possessed a stake in its material welfare and in its culture, then the Greek empire might have longer survived. She adds that no such society has ever existed (Schreiner, 2015: 153). Similarly, she compares the destructive consequences of Western norms about gender identity and behaviour with that of male caretaking of children within other societies and among animals, holding up the example of meerkats (Schreiner, 2015: 173). In an eloquent passage Rebekah focuses on the “Spirit of the Ages” whose name is “Humanity” advising a woman, bound by chains, to strike off her fetters, and emerge free (Schreiner, 2015: 185–186). Yet, Rebekah’s substantial inquiry into gender relations does not involve a probing of marital ideals and practices for the future. In sum, Rebekah is more a creature of her times than was Schreiner herself.
The two rival endings and possessing women
As a result of Dorothy Driver’s stellar new edition of From Man to Man readers not only can appreciate a carefully edited and annotated as well as brilliant critical analysis of the novel, based on new scholarship and contemporary literary, feminist, and race theory, but, too, ponder Schreiner’s intriguing remarks on possible endings to her unfinished novel. The earliest projected ending appears in Schreiner’s letter to Karl Pearson, composed in July 1886 (Driver, 2015: Appendix 1, to Karl Pearson on 10 July 1886. See Rive, 1988: 91–95, dating the letter as 9 July 1886). The second and later projected ending was published as an appended account at the end of Chapter XIII of the 1926 first printed edition of the novel (Driver, 2015: Cronwright-Schreiner version, 427–428). Driver investigates both endings and their genesis (Driver, 2015: Appendix 2). Driver observes that since Schreiner likely shaped her comments with sensitivity to Pearson and to her husband S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner’s responses, and, since, further, we do not know at what time(s) Cronwright-Schreiner learned of Schreiner’s planned endings, “[n]either of these projected endings can be taken as definitive” (Driver, 2015: x).
Importantly, Driver examines an array of possible reasons for Schreiner’s failure to complete the novel (Driver, 2015: xxi–xxii). She speculates that Schreiner’s concerns over racial oppression and eagerness to promote her egalitarian and humanitarian values through her writing and, too, her choice to undertake direct political activism led her to turn to more focused and/or less time consuming fictional and nonfiction projects. Her agonizing health problems, multiple marital and friendship demands and issues, and hostile reception of her earlier work further interfered with the novel’s completion. Finally, her views on racial and imperial issues evolved over time, adding instability to her narrative grip. My approach to the two rival endings will conform to, extend, and deviate from Driver’s splendid exploration. I discern inherent dilemmas in the very content of the novel, in Schreiner’s narrative unfolding, and her characterization, especially as it relates to Rebekah’s incomplete feminism and, perhaps, Schreiner’s as well.
Obviously, since Schreiner never wrote the final chapters of From Man to Man, we cannot know for certain what further intellectual and personal growth she envisioned for Rebekah and Bertie. Moreover, these two competitive endings carry different implicit meanings for Rebekah and/or Schreiner’s views on possessing women. To Karl Pearson, Schreiner confided that she planned for Rebekah to find “her prostitute sister” and talk to her about her dream of future transformed men and women. In this version, Baby-Bertie dies and Rebekah brings Baby-Bertie home to bury her, much to Frank’s disgust and concern about what others might think of a public burial of a prostitute. Rebekah boldly responds that she, too, has been a prostitute for 14 years in their marriage. In the next scene, Schreiner intended to depict Drummond dying in his beloved Kalahari Desert —his “kaffir” boy nearby. Schreiner did not reveal Drummond’s attitudes toward the boy and other Africans. Drummond dreams of Rebekah coming to lie at his side. We would then see Rebekah sitting alone at her home in the twilight holding the letter that reports Drummond’s departure. She realizes that she will not have a partner in creating societal change: “She sees before her her life’s work and his, that must be done by her alone now” (Driver, 2015, Appendix 1, to Karl Pearson, composed in July 1886: 426). In Schreiner’s final scene of this version, we have a heartening moment: still employing an object pronoun for a child, her youngest child asks her to take it to bed, but when Rebekah lifts it up, “it says it can walk” to which Rebekah responds, “No, I am not tired: I am very strong” (Driver, 2015: 426; and see Rive, 1988: 94).
Keeping in mind the issue of possessing women, I wonder whether, in the ending projected in her letter to Pearson, Schreiner imagined that Drummond might picture that Rebekah would leave her farm and other possessions to be with him. I consider Rebekah to have reached the point of self-possession to work actively to create social change without relying on a male partner. At the same time, Rebekah, out of parental overprotectiveness, is possibly undermining her child’s self-reliance by insisting that she can carry the child to be. If Rebekah views this child as the future new woman or new man, she appears to forget the importance of encouraging the child’s independence and self-possession.
If we now turn to Cronwright-Schreiner’s understanding of his wife’s intended conclusion of the novel, we learn that Drummond finds Baby-Bertie horribly diseased and dying in a brothel in Simon’s Town. Rebekah takes Baby-Bertie to her Cape Town home and does all she can to save her. As Baby-Bertie lies dying, Rebekah, in what Schreiner dubbed a “stroke oblique”, asks Baby-Bertie whether she wishes those assembled to pray for her. Since the malicious Mrs. Drummond is present, Baby-Bertie replies, “‘Let Mrs. Drummond pray […] she is a Christian’” (Driver, 2015: 427–428, a reprint from Cronwright-Schreiner’s “Note” in the original 1926 edition of the novel, 461–463).
Subsequently, Rebekah’s relationship with Drummond ripens into love and emotional intimacy, but, given Rebekah’s rejection of adultery, not sexual intimacy. Since Drummond will not divorce his wife (we do not know why, nor does Driver speculate on this matter), Rebekah leaves both Drummond and Frank and lives on her property in Matjesfontein with her children and Sartje. Here she finds familial love and as well as comfort in the extraordinary beauty of the landscape around her farm, especially, as she refers to in her letters, on “my koppje”.
The issues of possession that Cronwright-Schreiner’s ending raise are of no less of concern. To extend Driver’s analysis, we do not know whether Baby-Bertie desired to be buried somewhere, a choice over a different kind of home of one’s own, so to speak. Perhaps Baby-Bertie was comfortable in leaving the burial site decision to Rebekah and continue to disregard her right to self-possession. We know that early in her marriage, Schreiner was emphatically clear where she wanted to be buried. Whereas in the Pearson version, Rebekah is on her own because Drummond dies; in Schreiner’s husband’s version, Rebekah is on her own because she and Drummond decide to part forever. In this latter version, we do not have Rebekah vowing to struggle for her ideals. We do not know whether Rebekah will become a political activist and join others in working to change societal patterns of possessing women.
Both projected endings are fundamentally pessimistic. In neither ending is “sisterhood”, collective feminist activism, presented as a possibility for Rebekah, and in neither ending can Rebekah realize her marital ideals. In the sad outcomes of both projected endings, Rebekah finds some comfort and consolation in nature and perhaps some hope in her bonds with her children. The pessimism of both endings, though realistic in Rebekah’s circumstances, is not characteristic of Schreiner’s general outlook, and, yet, Schreiner wrote to Havelock Ellis in 1888 that “Rebekah is me” (Driver, 2015: 446, to Ellis, 25 January 1888). During the final decades of the nineteenth century, Schreiner, in both England and South Africa, joined women and men in movements for social and political change, participating, for example, in women’s suffrage and peace organizations. Although at times in her life ambivalent about plunging into the marketplace, occasionally torn between the pulls of direct political activism and literary work, she sustained the tension without repudiating either passion. Of course, her fiction, non-fiction, and correspondence served as an eloquent form of and time and geographic spanning inspiration to political activism (Berkman, 1989: 36).
Consequently, incorporating an angle of new interpretation, I find a provocative literary dimension of possession present in the relationship between Schreiner, as author, and Rebekah, as her fictional protagonist. Schreiner, despite her sense of fused identity with Rebekah, wonderfully did not possess Rebekah. Rebekah is her own person. In important ways, Schreiner, though as much a creature as creator of her times, is a much more liberated woman in both life and thought than her fictional doppelgänger. Fortunately, the reverse is true as well: neither did the very charismatic Rebekah possess Schreiner.
