Valuable Failure as a Unifying Principle in The Story of an African Farm

THE DEATH of Olive Schreiner’s New Woman heroine Lyndall has long vexed critics. Though she becomes the feminist mouthpiece for the author, she seemingly does not embody Schreiner’s ideals regarding a woman’s place in the world. Elaine Showalter laments: “Why does she give long speeches about the oppression of women and the need for women to work and yet behave with such fatal passivity?”¹ Laurence Lerner goes so far as to argue that Lyndall’s death “is a most unfeminist way to die.”² The concern over the contradiction between Lyndall’s feminist voice and seemingly unfeminist death carries into analyses of the novel as a whole. Ruth Robbins explains: “this is a political novel whose ‘message’ is hard to discern. It is clear that Schreiner had an explicitly feminist agenda.… At the same time, however, it does not tell its readers what to think in anything approaching a clear way.”³ While Lyndall’s death has been read alternately as a struggle between freedom and love, as an act of defiance and martyrdom, and as a contrast to Schreiner’s ideals, this discussion neglects to address how Lyndall’s death might be a failure in itself, but a valuable one that Schreiner envisions as an important and necessary step toward feminist progress.⁴

While critics provide important analyses of Lyndall’s and Schreiner’s work, they do not reflect the full complexities of Lyndall’s death and Schreiner’s feminist vision. By situating The Story of an African Farm alongside Schreiner’s allegories, short fiction, and gender treatise Woman and Labour, Lyndall’s life and death are contextualized as one of many examples Schreiner puts forward in her writings regarding the significance of failure. Lyndall fits within a broader picture Schreiner paints concerning the nature of political work and the pioneers who strike out on new paths toward freedom and equality. We will investigate these claims using Schreiner’s allegories and political writings as a lens for rereading the complexities of African Farm. After laying out her ideas regarding valuable failures and the costs of political work, the central allegory in African Farm, “The Hunter,” will be reexamined; it is a metafictional interpretative frame for reading Lyndall’s life and death. The allegory, contextualized by Schreiner’s broader politics and aesthetics, provides a different way of viewing Lyndall’s significance. Schreiner does not provide her readers with a clear message as previous Victorian writers might have, but she urges her readers through the allegory to cultivate an awareness of the significance of sacrifice for a greater cause. The feminist ideas that previous critics have found lacking in The Story of an African Farm occur beyond the ending, if readers situate Lyndall’s life and death—and especially her perceived failures—as steps in a lengthy process.

Schreiner’s Conception of “Valuable Failures”

While critics often emphasize the theme of self-sacrifice in Schreiner’s writing, they overlook or undervalue the role of failure, what can be termed a “valuable failure.” John Kucich and Scott McCracken, for instance, both discuss Schreiner’s presentation of individuals sacrificing for the collective good, but they neglect to account for Schreiner’s insistence on the importance of failure as part of those initial sacrifices.⁵ For Schreiner, both failures and successes contribute to the progress of a movement. A valuable failure reinterprets sacrifice and defeat as necessary and productive for a better future. It accounts for the invisible work and suffering of individuals striving to achieve political goals. A failing act might appear to be simply a loss or a waste, but Schreiner asserts those acts create something tangible within the broader collective. They open up possibilities for others to follow and go further; they are steps on the way to progress, even if they are sometimes missteps. In this way, failures can be interpreted as valuable rather than simply as wasteful or destructive.

Schreiner’s allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1887) and her political treatise on gender, Woman and Labour (1911), best articulate the concept of a valuable failure. Both...