Olive Schreiner : women, nature, culture

This dissertation locates Olive Schreiner as a nineteenth-century colonial woman writer who challenges the traditional association of men with culture, and women with nature. In Schreiner's writing the oppression of women is situated within an understanding of the social construction of "woman" as closer to nature than man. Through the lives of her central female characters, Schreiner shows how this definition of "woman" works to position women as "other" to culture, both preventing their access to public power and marginalising their fully social activities within culture. Schreiner attempts to displace definitions of culture constituted through a system of binary oppositions which inevitably privilege masculinity as opposed to femininity by redefining culture in three distinct ways. The patriarchal conception culture as the sole preserve of men is rejected in Schreiner's demands for women's educational and legal equality, and for their right to economic independence. Conventional notions of culture are equally refused in Schreiner's stress on women's traditional domestic labour as essential to the very emergence and continuation of culture. Finally, the deconstruction of sexual difference as a fixed immutable category within Schreiner's writing exposes the definition of "woman" as socially constructed and legitimated. The contradictions and tensions within and between these demands illustrate the limits of Schreiner's feminist and socialist politics, and point to how her writing both challenges and articulates aspects of dominant nineteenth-century ideology. At the same time, such contradictions were vitally important in motivating Schreiner's on-going attempt to change radically the position of women within culture. Moreover, the co-existence of apparently conflicting demands within Schreiner's redefinition of culture suggests the terms of a resolution of the perennial problem within feminist discourse around competing claims for women's equality or for a recognition of their difference.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of English Language and Literature

Year dc:date.issued

1988

Author dc:creator

• Barsby, Tina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Driver, Dorothy

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20138

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/20138