Stage Irish and Boorish Boers

Abstract

Although Olive Schreiner features in most literary criticism as a champion of the disenfranchised, her portrayal of ethnic differences is inflected by transatlantic racial politics. The Irish and Boers in The Story of an African Farm conform to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of race and citizenship not only in southern Africa but also in the United States. Schreiner’s interest in Emerson and Carlyle, her dislike of rigid religious doctrines, and her vocal feminism account for the one-dimensionality of her Irish and Boer characters in her early work. This essay describes the enlarged geography of Bonaparte Blenkins – the influences that place the Irish–South African connections in Schreiner’s writing within, among other things, the context of racialization of the Irish in the late nineteenth-century United States.

Keywords:

• Boer
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo
• Schreiner, Olive
• South Africa
• stage Irish
• US racial politics

Notes

1 Therese Moriarty (2012) reports in the Irish Times that “Margaret Conner of the Irish Women’s Franchise League based her talk to Dublin socialists and two articles in the Irish Citizen on Schreiner’s book”.

2 For criticism of Schreiner and race, see Bradford (2004), McClintock (1992, 1995), Barash (1989), Berkman (1989), Lenta (1987), Gorak (1992), Chrisman (2000), Levy (1996).

3 For more on Schreiner’s philosophy and travels, see First and Scott (1980) and Thurman (1973).

4 When the connections between Emerson and Schreiner are examined, it is through the framework of Emerson’s transcendentalism and Schreiner’s appropriation of his understanding of Nature, as in Mizoguchi (2016).

5 Krebs (1997) cites, among other things, an 1866 leader in The Times and Schreiner’s own discussion of the Taal in “The Boer” (119–120).

6 Curtis reprinted and analyzed nineteenth-century Punch cartoons of simianized and degenerate Irish in his book Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1997) and other publications. He discussed the manufactured otherness of the Irish, a “race” often compared to monkeys or syphilitic patients.

7 For an extensive discussion of the Irish in caricature in the colonial press, see De Nie (2004) and Curtis (1997).

8 Several critical studies, including Foster (1995), explore these representations of the Irish in journalism and fiction.

9 I discuss the racialization of the Irish in detail in Szczeszak-Brewer (2010). The Boers were caricatured in European publications, especially during the Boer wars. The French press often presented the Boers in concentration camps in ways akin to common representations of the starving Irish – as emaciated, immobile shadows of people. One example is a drawing by Jean Veber (1874–1894) entitled “Les camps de Reconcentration”.

10 O’Dowd’s fabricated claims are included in O’Dowd (2017). Among numerous responses to the myth of the Irish slave is the open letter signed by eighty-two Irish studies scholars to The Irish Central, Irish Examiner and Scientific American, pointing out the dangerous misinformation about the topic in the media (2016). See also Costello (2016) and Hogan (2016).

11 For more on the scholarly refutation of the Irish slave myth, see Akenson (1997) Stack (2017), Rodgers (2007) and Hogan (2016).

12 In Ulysses, published several decades after The Story of an African Farm, the Citizen recounts a list of Irish heroes, which includes Cuchulin but also Captain Nemo, Adam and Eve, Michelangelo, and Dante Alighieri.

13 Schreiner’s letters are available at the University of Cape Town archives and the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

14 Since that sentence is followed by “If the Germans had done in Alsace what we have done in India we should all rise up with a howl”, I assume that the “we” means “the British” in this context.

15 The letter is available at the National Library of South Africa (NLSA), Cape Town, but has also been transcribed for the Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) project.

16 John Leech’s 1849 Punch cartoon “The English Labourer’s Burden” is reminiscent of other nineteenth-century cartoons depicting black people propped up by white colonial officers.

17 For more on the subject of religion, capitalism, and land dispossession, see Hall (2004), van den Berghe (1967), and Murray (1989).

18 See, for example, Krueger, Karbiener, and Stade (2003).

19 Berkman (1989) confirms that

By the time she completed African Farm she had devoured not only the writings of Mill, Spencer, and Emerson but – to list her most frequently cited authors – those of Plato, Shelley, Gibbon, Spinoza, Thoreau, Coleridge, Ruskin, Carlyle, Lecky, Goethe, and Heine. (20)

Berkman says that Schreiner did not read a lot of conservative thinkers, but she did value Carlyle, and by the time the novel was completed she “had devoured not only the writings of Mill, Spencer, and Emerson” but also, among others, Darwin, Carlyle, and Huxley (20). Berkman admits that many of Schreiner’s favorite authors “upheld notions of white and male privilege” (20–21), and that she was interested in “the spirit of their works” more than their content (21).