Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (review)

Carolyn Burdett's compactly argued Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of Olive Schreiner studies. As with Laura Chrisman's recent Rereading the Imperial Romance, Burdett makes a strong case that Schreiner's writing allows us to see how significant apparently marginal colonial spaces were in shaping late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. Specifically, Burdett shows how contemporary discourses of evolution and progress, with their accompanying theories of gender, maternity, race, and degeneration, inflicted an ironic kind of progress on late nineteenth-century South Africa that involved massive physical, psychological, political, economic, and environmental disruption. Ushering in the new century, the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 stood for Schreiner as a model of the way in which "progress" in England might manifest itself in South Africa as a "black-winged harbinger of death" (173). Schreiner herself, although serially disappointed in every cause she championed and painfully accurate in her pessimistic prophecies for twentieth-century South Africa, "never abandoned the task of trying to call into being something better" (174). Burdett very effectively brings out the tension between Schreiner's healing, woman-centered, future-oriented vision and the male-dominated discourses available to her to describe the violent, hurly-burly present of the world she experienced.

Very clearly organized, Burdett's book takes the reader through all of Schreiner's major published works (including those published posthumously), moving from a brief account of her earliest-completed novel, Undine, to her nonfictional interventions into contemporary South African politics in the first decade of the twentieth century. Throughout, the writer does an excellent job contextualizing both the metropolitan literary/intellectual atmosphere, and local southern African political and military history. As a result she is able to present with great lucidity the trajectory of Schreiner's thought that steadily grew more and more resistant to the type of progress associated in South Africa with capitalism in the guise of the mining industry and with imperialism in the guise of British expansion. Moreover, Burdett links and mixes these wider historical issues with some telling close reading. Far from considering The Story of an African Farm, for instance, as a novel of colonial isolation (because its landscape representation seems to be marked by vacancy and because its setting remains firmly on the farm itself), Burdett picks up on textual details concerning ostrich farming and diamonds in order to show how skillfully Schreiner has embedded clues about the economic position of the farm vis-à-vis metropolitan markets. Similarly, in a fine chapter on the novella Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, Burdett not only sets the political and historical scene but makes a persuasive case for the subtle writerly skills Schreiner displays in this powerful excoriation of Rhodes's brutal expansionism. In particular, Burdett points out how consciously Schreiner manipulates rhetorical strategies of audience in Trooper Peter so that "while the text is explicit in its condemnation of male aggression, it also implicitly addresses a female audience concerned with progress for women in the West, and challenges that audience about its own complicity with what happens, in the name of progress, elsewhere" (123). It is a mark of Olive Schreiner's continued significance that many of those challenges still remain relevant.