Dream time and anti-imperialism in the writings of Olive Schreiner

Abstract

This article explores how Olive Schreiner utilizes politicized modernist aesthetics, specifically the manipulation of time through allegory and dream, to resist structures of empire. The claim that Schreiner’s work should be received and analysed as modernist builds on recent work in global modernist studies that views modernisms as multiple, and occurring across various temporalities and geographies, whilst responding to the drive in postcolonial studies to reshape modernism with an awareness of empire. Analysis of the repetitive dream cycles within and across Schreiner’s texts reveals how she disrupts the conventional chronologies and associated ideologies introduced by colonizers in South Africa in ways that can be interpreted as modernist. Beginning with close readings of the opening scenes in the novels Undine: A Queer Little Child (written 1870s) and The Story of an African Farm (1883), the article then considers the role of alternative temporalities associated with dreams in the short allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1887), to suggest that Schreiner’s “dream time” offers a form of postcolonial resistance to the imposed “imperial clock time” of life under colonial rule.

Keywords:

• Olive Schreiner
• time
• modernism
• dream
• allegory
• postcolonial

Notes

1. Olive Schreiner began writing Undine: A Queer Little Child in 1873 and likely abandoned the text some time before 1877. She never intended to publish the novel, and it remained incomplete at the time of her death in 1920. It is possible that her husband, Samuel Cron Cronwright-Schreiner, modified the manuscript in now unknown ways, before publishing it in 1929. The Story of An African Farm was also written in the 1870s. Schreiner took the manuscript with her to England in 1881, where it was published in 1883. “Three Dreams in a Desert” was first published in 1887, and reprinted in the collection Dreams (1890).

2. Anna Snaith (2014, 36–66) provides a welcome recent attempt to consider the anti-colonialism of Schreiner’s final novel, From Man to Man (1926), in a modernist context.

3. It is significant to note that Schreiner once told her husband that she intended to write “The Hunter” (the central allegory that appears in African Farm) “on the bones of a sheep’s head” (1973, 147). A slightly edited version of “The Hunter” was later reprinted in Dreams (1890).

4. Schreiner’s Undine shares her name with an Ancient Greek water nymph, and an “undine” is another term for a water elf or spirit, closely associated with the mermaid.

5. The term “postcoloniality” is used here because it retains “resistant pressure and agency” and recognizes the complexity of “interminglings of structural forces with local, personal experience” (Young 2001, 57).