Walking the nation in The Story of an African Farm

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My intention is not in any way to justify or elide the fact that through their excursive walking, the Boers displaced indigenous southern Africans and reinscribed indigenous understandings and mappings of the landscape. Instead, my point is to emphasize how important walking was to Schreiner’s notion of nation-building and give context to why Waldo is both the most capable excursive walker and nation-builder in the novel – two roles that I argue in the rest of the essay are intertwined.

2 On The Story of an African Farm as a New Woman Novel, see McClintock (1995), Showalter (1993), Bristow (1992), O’Neill (2003), Sanders (2000), Lerner (1983), and Robbins (2003). Richardson (2006) argues that the novel should be considered both a New Woman Novel and a colonial adventure novel, two subgenres engaged “in an active dialog that results in their convergence around key discursive sites” (2). For Richardson, Schreiner utilizes the familiar topologies of adventure fiction to narrate Lyndall’s quest to achieve autonomy: Lyndall is a “lone actor who must go her own way” (79), striving through a majestic but unforgiving landscape and conquering enemies through spiritual and intellectual, rather than physical, dominance.

3 Lyndall’s sense of suffocation in the colonial space is remarked upon by Chrisman (1995), who writes that for Schreiner, “the colonial space provides no opportunity for women’s spiritual or social liberation, but rather, their suffocation” (51). Chrisman notes, however, that Schreiner nevertheless identifies the colonial space with the “positive values of pre-industrial labour, self-sufficiency and self-determination” – values “exemplified in the Boer or at times in the black African people” (51). Although the colonial space is not a “site of potential regeneration for white women” – and thus, Lyndall does not survive there – it is a space with potential for unification of disparate populations through a connection to the land, and thus, rife with possibility for cultivation by a Wordsworthian walker.

4 Shapple (2004) writes that Waldo sees himself as the spiritual descendent of the San Bushmen, connected to these ancestors through his appreciation of their art: “Waldo emerges within the narrative’s aesthetic and ethnological discourses as a model home-grown artist whose grotesque wood carvings represent a form of primitive resistance to European capitalism […]. The connections established between the works of San painters and colonial artists thus ultimately displace one kind of indigenous art with another, once the San have, ostensibly, disappeared” (80). Waldo’s kindred claim on the San is undoubtedly an act of colonial appropriation; however, he is the only character, of any race or ethnicity, who appreciates the San’s art. Alternatively, Fong (2020) argues that the novel’s indigenous art exceeds all colonial inscription, including Waldo’s: “These San visual practices […] become a screen for Waldo’s projection of his own fantasies and anxieties. But they also metonymically gesture to the presence of a dynamic and living culture that exists among the Khoisan characters who inhabit the world of the text and that exceeds both Waldo’s and the narrator’s framing of it” (430).

5 Esty (2007) has also commented on walking’s recursive character in the novel, especially as it relates to Waldo. He writes, “Waldo expires after a brief frontier episode of inner and outer harmony and remains everywhere a walking figure of nondevelopmental time” (419). For Esty, Waldo’s inability to get anywhere, despite all the walking he seems to do, is a synecdoche for the novel’s “refusal or incapacity to narrate growth” (422) – a refusal applicable to all the main characters, the farm, and fin de siècle feminism and South African nationalism.

6 Conversely, Kucich (2002) has argued that Schreiner saw an affinity between the Boers and the English middle class (those living in South Africa, as well as a subset of those in England that Schreiner called “the ethically-developed class”), rather than the Boers and indigenous Black South Africans. Kucich writes that Schreiner linked the Boers and middle-class English through “a network of psychological and cultural values” (97) founded on three major qualities: the ability to “endure martyrdom,” the “capacity for self-denial or self-sacrifice,” and the desire for freedom and autonomy from arbitrary political rule (98). For Kucich, it is upon these middle-class values, rather than, as I have argued, a felt closeness and intimate knowledge with the land as figured through Waldo’s excursive walking, that Schreiner believed the modern nation of South Africa must be built.

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Vivian Kao

Vivian Kao is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication at Lawrence Technological University. Her research and teaching interests include literature of the nineteenth-century British empire, film and media studies, and writing pedagogy. Her publications include Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel (Palgrave 2020) and articles in Genre, Literature and Film Quarterly, Kipling Journal, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Pedagogy.