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The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art
In this paper I discuss the relation between Olive Schreiner's social context and the form of her fictional writing. It is not intended as an interpretation of her work but rather represents a preliminary sketch of the social and political discourses which structured her environment. I suggest that...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Department of English Language and Literature
2016
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| _version_ | 1867613676928761856 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Green, Louise |
| author2 | Higgins, John |
| author_browse | Green, Louise Higgins, John |
| author_facet | Higgins, John Green, Louise |
| author_sort | Green, Louise |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | In this paper I discuss the relation between Olive Schreiner's social context and the form of her fictional writing. It is not intended as an interpretation of her work but rather represents a preliminary sketch of the social and political discourses which structured her environment. I suggest that for Olive Schreiner writing is not a means of representing a given reality. Instead writing itself is a constitutive act through which she attempts to articulate a subject which expresses the conflicts and contradictions of its social and political location. In the first section of the paper, I discuss Olive Schreiner's position as a woman in relation to the literary canon. I argue that the social discourses of femininity in the late nineteenth century attempted to exclude women from the realm of cultural and intellectual production. Looking at the work of Herbert Spencer, the influential social philosopher who used scientific principles as the basis for his ideas about social order, I analyse the way in which Olive Schreiner rewrites his theory in order to make a space for women as cultural producers. In the second section I look at the dominant forms of the novel available to Olive Schreiner. The dominant mode of representation for metropolitan writers was the realist novel and women writers such as George Eliot found it an extremely effective way of articulating their experiences. The other significant form of writing for Olive Schreiner was the colonial adventure story, the most popular way, in the nineteenth century, of representing the colonial space. I suggest that Olive Schreiner's rejection of both these forms and her choice of the allegorical mode, can be understood in terms of the specificity of her position as a colonial woman writer. In the third section, I focus more closely on one of Olive Schreiner's texts, The Story of an African Farm in an attempt to illustrate how allegory allows Olive Schreiner to reorder the unstable colonial space. Both realism and the adventure novel, I argue, assume a coherent and unified self. The colonial context, I suggest problematises this sense of self as individualist agent and in the figure of Lyndall I see the limits of the reflective self as a means of interacting with the colonial situation. Bibliography: pages 68-69. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/18827 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:39:56.655Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2016 |
| publishDateRange | 2016 |
| publishDateSort | 2016 |
| publisher | Department of English Language and Literature |
| publisherStr | Department of English Language and Literature |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/18827 The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art Green, Louise Higgins, John Driver, Dorothy Literary Studies In this paper I discuss the relation between Olive Schreiner's social context and the form of her fictional writing. It is not intended as an interpretation of her work but rather represents a preliminary sketch of the social and political discourses which structured her environment. I suggest that for Olive Schreiner writing is not a means of representing a given reality. Instead writing itself is a constitutive act through which she attempts to articulate a subject which expresses the conflicts and contradictions of its social and political location. In the first section of the paper, I discuss Olive Schreiner's position as a woman in relation to the literary canon. I argue that the social discourses of femininity in the late nineteenth century attempted to exclude women from the realm of cultural and intellectual production. Looking at the work of Herbert Spencer, the influential social philosopher who used scientific principles as the basis for his ideas about social order, I analyse the way in which Olive Schreiner rewrites his theory in order to make a space for women as cultural producers. In the second section I look at the dominant forms of the novel available to Olive Schreiner. The dominant mode of representation for metropolitan writers was the realist novel and women writers such as George Eliot found it an extremely effective way of articulating their experiences. The other significant form of writing for Olive Schreiner was the colonial adventure story, the most popular way, in the nineteenth century, of representing the colonial space. I suggest that Olive Schreiner's rejection of both these forms and her choice of the allegorical mode, can be understood in terms of the specificity of her position as a colonial woman writer. In the third section, I focus more closely on one of Olive Schreiner's texts, The Story of an African Farm in an attempt to illustrate how allegory allows Olive Schreiner to reorder the unstable colonial space. Both realism and the adventure novel, I argue, assume a coherent and unified self. The colonial context, I suggest problematises this sense of self as individualist agent and in the figure of Lyndall I see the limits of the reflective self as a means of interacting with the colonial situation. Bibliography: pages 68-69. 2016-04-12T14:39:40Z 2016-04-12T14:39:40Z 1994 Master Thesis Masters MA http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18827 eng application/pdf Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | Literary Studies Green, Louise The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art |
| title_full | The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art |
| title_fullStr | The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art |
| title_full_unstemmed | The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art |
| title_short | The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art |
| title_sort | unhealed wound olive schreiner s expressive art |
| topic | Literary Studies |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18827 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT greenlouise theunhealedwoundoliveschreinersexpressiveart AT greenlouise unhealedwoundoliveschreinersexpressiveart |