Narrative Decomposition for Utopian (Re-)Composition: The New (Wo)Man in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man

This article seeks to investigate Olive Schreiner’s representations of the Woman and Man Questions in her unfinished and posthumously published novel, From Man to Man. By examining her narrative deconstruction, presented in the Prelude, the interludes, and an unfinished dialogue that functioned as what may be called the postlude, the essay explores Schreiner’s meticulous venture in recomposing her ideality of the New Man alongside the New Woman, manifested in the form of platonic lovers mutually embracing an aestheticism that crosses the boundaries of sex, space, time, and intellectual/literary ideologies. In so doing, the essay aims to illuminate Schreiner’s attempt, albeit futile, to map out her fictional utopian heterosexuality as envisioned in her feminist treatise, Woman and Labor.