Visual landscapes and sensual settings in Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

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Notes on Contributor

Anne Summers recently received her Ph.D. in English from Stony Brook University, where her research focused on the relationship between perception, desire, and materiality in the Victorian novel. Her larger research interests include visual culture, feminist theory, and nineteenth-century depictions of environment. She has published previous work on aesthetics and the supernatural in Vernon Lee.

Notes

1 I choose to use this spelling, rather than the popular “karoo” to mirror the spelling used most frequently in Schreiner’s personal letters.

2 Unlike my own reading of visual perception and sensual landscape, Knechtel centers her reading on the relationship between human/nonhuman interconnection and the maternal, claiming that Schreiner makes “strategic use of maternal essentialism,” in an effort to highlight the problematic social limitations that prevent her characters from fully participating in a space of maternal creation (260). Freeman focuses more specifically on the “dissolution” of Lyndall’s body as a metaphor for a “fluid, emergent” relationship between human characters and the South African landscape (19).

3 See Brilmyer, “Plasticity, Form and the Matter of Character” for additional discussion of the role of materiality in the production of character in the Victorian novel (2015, 62).

4 Feminist science scholar Karen Barad’s depiction of the fluid boundaries of the material world in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) proves useful for unpacking Schreiner’s engagements with the visual. Barad writes of materiality and meaning as bound up in a series of active entanglements and recognizes the two entities as mutually dependent and constantly in relation. Following Barad, we can see the boundary of the seeing body in Schreiner as more of a hazy, indeterminate endpoint than a clear line of demarcation.

5 See Murphy (92).

6 Such depictions reveal a conceptualization of the body as perpetually renegotiating, integrating, and changing. Schreiner thus offers a vision of the body reminiscent of William A. Cohen’s recent investigations of sensory experience in a wider network of Victorian writers, including Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte (2009, 86).

7 We can also glimpse Schreiner’s engagement with Romanticism. For instance, Coleridge offers a similar meditation on a joyful extension of self into the material world in “The Eolian Harp,” (1796) writing

O! the one Life within us and abroad/ Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, /A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,/ Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—/ Methinks, it should have been impossible /Not to love all things in a world so filled.

8 Schreiner explains this in her letter to Ellis on the 28^th of March, 1884 (1884, lines 21–22).

9 See Deborah L. Shapple and Anne McClintock for extended readings of the cave paintings. Shapple discusses the postcolonial implications of the paintings, as Waldo’s attention to the cave painters highlights their cultural erasure and the larger colonial exploitation of the land (2004, 79–80). McClintock reminds us that while Schreiner certainly includes a visual record of these cave paintings in the novel, the majority of the text ignores the sensory and subjective experiences of racial minorities, exposing the limited range of Schreiner’s feminist vision (1995, 258).

10 See also Barad (2007, 60).

11 See Knechtel for an additional reading of this scene.

12 According to Murphy, Lyndall’s illness causes a “pre-Oedipal regression,” allowing “Lyndall [to] return to a psychologically bisexual state marked by multiplicity and mutability. Such a conception of bisexuality breaks apart phallocentric binary oppositions” (95).