Between man, woman and dog: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

Abstract

The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and the dog Doss, the paper tracks the way in which the dog refracts not only the relation between human and animal but also a range of other relations in the novel, social and metaphysical. Reading the novel and its late nineteenth-century contexts of thought from the retrospective standpoint of the present – a hermeneutic position that is itself the site of a split signification – the paper considers the dog good to think with.

Keywords:

• Schreiner
• colonialism
• difference
• animality
• sociality
• signification

Notes

¹ Coetzee, White Writing, 4.

² Knechtel, “Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism,” 259.

³ Woodward, Animal Gaze, 96–101.

⁴ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 19.

⁵ Ibid., 70.

⁶ Ibid., 259.

⁷ Ibid., 217.

⁸ Ibid., 79.

⁹ Ibid., 90.

¹⁰ Ibid., 150.

¹¹ Ibid., 64.

¹² Ibid., 294.

¹³ Ibid., 174.

¹⁴ Ibid., 200.

¹⁵ Ibid., 128.

¹⁶ Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, 18.

¹⁷ Esty, “The Colonial Bildungsroman”.

¹⁸ Pechey, “The Story of an African Farm”.

¹⁹ Woodward, “Social Subjects,” 238.

²⁰ Gilson, “Zones of Indiscernibility,” 98.

²¹ Ibid., 102.

²² Beaulieu, “Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought,” 71.

²³ Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics.

²⁴ Lacan, My Teaching, 36.

²⁵ Deleuze and Guattari, “Becoming-Animal,” 277.

²⁶ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 216–17.

²⁷ Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, 74.

²⁸ Ibid., 81.

²⁹ Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” 80–1.

³⁰ Ibid., 82.

³¹ Agamben, The Open, 36.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Ibid., 37.

³⁵ Ibid., 38.

³⁶ Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 63.

³⁷ Mitchell, “Heidegger’s Later Thinking of Animality,” 74–5.

³⁸ Ibid., 80.

³⁹ Ibid., 81.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 234.

⁴² Ibid., 281.

⁴³ Ibid., 233.

⁴⁴ Agamben, The Open, 27.

⁴⁵ Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 76–9.

⁴⁶ Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 695.

⁴⁷ Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?”, 123.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 125.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 128.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 126.

⁵¹ Ibid., 128–9.

⁵² Ibid., 128.

⁵³ Woodward, “Social Subjects,” 240–1.

⁵⁴ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 282–9.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 137–50.

⁵⁶ Schreiner, Letter to Isie Smuts, 24 May 1905.

⁵⁷ Lacan, Transference, 178–9.

⁵⁸ Stingl, “What is a phantasm?”.

⁵⁹ Ong, Oliver Schreiner and African Modernism, 35.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 3–6.

⁶² Ibid., 15.

⁶³ Ibid., 80.

⁶⁴ Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 686.

⁶⁵ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 19.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 97.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 132–3.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 248.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 290–1.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 298–300.

⁷¹ Ibid., 153.

⁷² Ibid., 139–49.

⁷³ Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 20.

⁷⁴ Calarco, “Heidegger’s Zoontology,” 29; 27.

⁷⁵ Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 177.

⁷⁶ Agamben, The Open, 59, 62.

⁷⁷ Elden, “Heidegger’s Animals,” 279.

⁷⁸ Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 74.

⁷⁹ Schreiner, Story of an African Farm, 212.

⁸⁰ Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion,” 11.

⁸¹ Ibid., 3.

⁸² Ibid., 45.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Beaulieu, “Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought,” 71.

⁸⁵ Deleuze and Guattari, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,” 293.