Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM” by  Olive Schreiner (first published 1883)

           

I have two reasons for writing about The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner (1855-1920).

            First, I have often considered writing about books which everybody once read and that seemed on their way to becoming canonical, but which have subsequently dropped firmly out of canon. I was once told by an elderly South African colleague that The Story of an African Farm was required reading in South African high schools; but I somehow doubt that this is still the case for one very obvious reason, to which I will return in due course. At any rate, though it still has its admirers, though it is often reprinted, and though articles are still written about it by academics, The Story of an African Farm is scarcely likely to now be called a masterpiece, as it once was.

            Second, before I got around to reading The Story of an African Farm, all I knew about it was that the author was South African and had, for her day, very advanced feminist ideas. Hence I imagined the book would be a sober, realistic account of life on a South African farm, perhaps showing the toils and travails of women in that place and time. To my surprise I found it to be far from realistic. Indeed much of it can only be described as melodrama, with highly theatrical dialogue even for the late Victorian age in which it was written. And when it is not being melodrama, it is so didactic that it amounts to a series of sermons aimed at the reader. Olive Schreiner certainly had many valid issues to raise, and we can only sympathise with much that she had to say. In her mid-twenties when she wrote the novel, she was living in an age when it was still not considered proper for a woman to speak out frankly on matters of religious belief, marriage and the relationship of the sexes.  Indeed, she and her publishers agreed that the first edition of the novel appear under a masculine pseudonym (“Ralph Iron”). But this context does not alter the fact that the novel is both melodramatic and painfully preachy.

            The Story of an African Farm is set in the 1860s and 1870s , mainly on a remote farm in what was then Britain’s Cape Colony. It was written before the two Boer Wars, in which the British Empire grabbed what had been the two separate Afrikaner republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Characters in the novel sometimes refer to those two territories as places to flee to.

            The novel is divided into two almost separable parts.

Two young girls, Em and Lyndall, are orphans living with their step-mother the old “Boer woman”, as she is often called, Tant’ [i.e. Auntie] Sannie. The plump woman is devoutly religious; a Calvinist who reads the Bible literally. But she is robust, has already outlived two or three husbands, and has a practical attitude to such matters as courtship. One marries a man to provide continuity and a helpmate in running a farm – not for any romantic reason. Also on the farm in a gentle and thoughtful old German man, Otto Farber, generally known as “the German overseer”, who has as literalist a view of the Bible as Tant’ Sannie but has a much more forgiving temperment. His son Waldo is about the same age as the two girls.

            The three young people Em, Lyndall and Waldo are the focus of the story. Their characters are painted in broad strokes. Em is clearly the compliant little girl, looking forward to growing up, marrying and raising a family – the model of conventional domesticity. But the more forceful Lyndall is from an early age a rebel – and she is also, apparently, Olive Schreiner’s idealised portrait of herself (the maiden name of the author’s mother was Lyndall). Lyndall questions everything, does not readily accept what adults say, and is very sceptical of religious belief. She (apparently instinctively) has a materialist attitude towards the world and believes that being informed and learning about physical realities are the most important things in life. As she says in childhood: “There is nothing helps in this world but to be wise and to know everything – to be clever.” (Part 1, Chapter 2) Her attitude is consistent throughout the novel, right up to her death, as a young adult, towards the end of the novel, when “She died… with her knee unbent, with her hand unraised, with a prayer unuttered, in the pride of her intellect and the strength of her youth. She loved and she was loved; but she said no prayer to God; she cried for no mercy; she repented of no sin!”  (Part 2, Chapter 13) What she embraces is a form of Positivism – the 19^th century creed which said that science alone can answer all moral, ethical and social questions. As for young Waldo, he alternates between periods of intense, almost mystical, religious belief and intense rejection of the God he has been taught about.

            Thus are the characters neatly set up for us – and frankly without much nuance in the characterisation.

            Most of Part One (and here comes the broad melodrama) concerns the arrival on the farm of Bonaparte Blenkins, an Irishman, presented in caricature stage-Irish terms. He is very obviously a boaster and a liar. He claims to be an experienced world traveller and tells Munchausen-like stories of his exploits. It is clear to us that he is also a hypocrite who, in order to weasel his way into Tant’ Sannie’s graces, pretends to be devoutly religious. He even takes over from the local preacher, but the author makes it plain that he is accepted as such only because he has a gullible congregation. When he preaches, she says of his sermon:  “There hung over it that inscrutable charm which hovers forever for the human intellect over the incomprehensible and shadowy.” (Part 1, Chapter 5) He does, however, know how to play the bigot, which is very acceptable to backblock Calvinists. Schreiner describes his law thus: “Whenever you come into contact with any book, person, or opinion of which you absolutely comprehend nothing, declare that book person or opinion to be immoral. Bespatter it, vituperate against it, strongly insist that any man or woman harbouring it is a fool or a knave, or both. Carefully abstain from studying it. Do all that in you lies to annihilate that book, person, or opinion.” (Part 1, Chapter 11)

            The problem with all this is that he is such an improbable figure – half melodramatic villain, half vaudeville comic – that it is hard to believe in him and hard to believe that any real adults would be taken in by him. He schemes to take over Tant’ Sannie’s farm, perhaps by marrying her, and gains power over her by discrediting other people. By false accusations he gets the harmless old “German overseer” run off the farm. Like the hiss-able villain that he is, he stamps on, and destroys, the model of an engine that young Waldo has spent ages designing. He accuses Waldo of theft, and even flogs the boy. He has the two girls locked up, and so on. His downfall (no point in explaining it) is the result of an improbable event of the sort that would certainly have appeared in a stage melodrama. A character just happens to overhear him saying… etc. etc. etc.

            Thus Part One ends with Bonaparte Blenkins sent on his way in disgrace, order restored to the farm, and shallow religion having been satirised to the author’s satisfaction.

            The longer Part Two begins three years later, when the children are young adults, and we now have a tsunami of sermons.

            All of the very long Chapter 1 of Part 2 chronicles the teenage religious crisis of Waldo. He moves from belief in the imposed Calvinist harshness of a vindictive Old Testament God; to love for a very personalised version of the gentle Jesus of the New Testament; to a vague sense of a self-devised God as the general spirit of all that is good…. And then even that fades away to a conviction that as God’s existence is so dependent on our feelings, then God must really be a figment of the human imagination and hence does not exist. Yet, perforce, he still has some of his old conditioned religious feelings. The author proclaims that his whole experience is a liberation from ignorance. As she comments, in case we haven’t got the point: “When a soul breaks free from the arms of a superstition, bits of the talons and claws break themselves off in him.” (Part 2, Chapter 1)

            But just when we have taken all this in, we are clobbered with another equally long chapter in which all the anti-theist arguments are repeated by an unnamed English “stranger” who, at great length, lectures Waldo. He spins a long, tedious and obviously allegorical story about rising above the Valley of Superstition and entering the clear daylight of Truth. He claims an immutable morality exists without the need of God to prop it up. Thus he preaches to Waldo: “We have been taught all right and wrong originate in the will of an irresponsible being. It is some time before we see how the inexorable ‘Thou shalt and shalt not’ are carved into the nature of things…” (Part 2, Chapter 2) Apparently this “stranger” is an apostle of the Positivism of Herbert Spencer (not that that name is invoked) and believes that God is redundant and “Nature” itself will show each of us how we should behave. One might, incidentally, note an obvious flaw in his reasoning, although Olive Schreiner doesn’t seem to notice it; for the “stranger” also says “…who wrongs another clouds his own sun; and… who sins in secret stands accused and condemned before the one Judge who deals eternal justice – his own all-knowing self.” (Part 2, Chapter 2) In other words, we as individuals are the only arbiters of right and wrong – which might be a comfy thing to think if we ignore the existence of the criminal, the mentally-unbalanced and the plain evil, and assume that everybody has had a benign upbringing.

            So, in these two chapters, we have trudged through over fifty pages of pure polemic. But there is much more to come.

            In Part 2, Chapter 4, Lyndall returns from four years at boarding school and she has blossomed into a full-grown, platform feminist. She lectures Waldo (poor Waldo!) on the desirable state of marriage: “Marriage for love is the beautifullest external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.” (Part 2, Chapter 4) She lectures him on what will be the status of women and men when her desired Utopia dawns “…when that time comes, when love is no more bought and sold, when it is not a means of making bread, when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent labour, then love will come to her, a strange sudden sweetness breaking in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but found.” (Part 2, Chapter 4) Reading this now, one is surprised only that she does not discuss women’s suffrage or women’s role in public life.

Let me make it clear, I am not ridiculing or belittling Lyndall’s ideas in themselves. Most of them would now be accepted as a non-threatening norm. But I am ridiculing the manner in which they are presented. The real characters disappear to become mere walking ideas. Reading them is very much like listening to those dreaded mouthpiece characters who sound off in George Bernard Shaw’s plays with all the ideas that GBS himself wants to express (see on this blog comments on Shaw’s MajorBarbara). I will spare you my account of Part 2, Chapter 8, in which Lyndall converses with a newly-arrived Englishman, Gregory Rose, like a member of a debating team, on the desirable state of marriage. Or, for yet more didacticism, consider the long letter that Waldo writes in Part 2, Chapter 11, to Lyndall, spelling out his feelings.

Nor does the melodrama let up. I sense a certain wish-fulfilment element in the way in which Lyndall, the Olive Schreiner surrogate character, comes to be loved by three separate men – a “stranger” and Gregory Rose and Waldo – so that she can test her ideas on each. I try to restrain my laughter when Gregory Rose disguises himself as a woman so that he can enter a hospital and nurse Lyndall when she is dying after giving birth to a short-lived baby. Yes, I am aware that academic expositors have made up ingenious explanations for this sequence – it is the first-wave feminist author consciously creating a “New Man” who is caring and nurturing in a way that rough sod-breaking farmers and pioneers are not. But it still reads as improbable melodrama.

And yet and yet and yet…. After all my conscious demolition of this dated book, I admit that parts of it have a raw power, despite outbreaks of grandiose rhetoric of the sort that agnostics used to devise when trying to find a substitute for religious terms. There is a real and vivid sense of the desolation and remoteness of the sunburnt farm and the loneliness of isolated characters who long for intellectual company that is not available. Despite the melodrama there are moments of truth. It is easy to see why The Story of an African Farm was once a sensation and it is easy to see why some teenagers might still think it impressive.

BUT alas, we at last come to the reason that this novel is now unlikely to be set as a text in high schools. At least in The Story of an African Farm, in her view of the future liberation of the world and the liberation of the sexes, Olive Schreiner has overlooked one major matter – and that is the matter of race. I have argued before on this blog (see the posting on Joseph Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness) that we should not cut ourselves off from writings of an earlier age that express views, or prejudices, different from our own. But the undertone of dismissiveness towards (black) Africans is both unmistakable and pervasive in The Story of an African Farm. No black African is a major character in the novel and throughout the text, we have the casual appearance of such comments as “the small woolly head of a nigger showed itself” (Part 1, Chapter 6) or the description of a black woman as “a sullen, ill-looking woman, with lips hideously protruding” (Part 1, Chapter 8). A landlady remarks of a black child “Left the door open, but a darkey will be a darkey and never carries a head on its shoulders like other folks”  (Part 2, Chapter 12).

            At one point in the text, Schreiner seems to imply that racism is an attribute of the undereducated. She presents Tant’ Sannie as a woman with a narrow, Bible-literalist mentality, and says of her, when a religious meeting is being set up: “The Kaffir servants were not there because Tant’ Sannie held they were descended from the apes, and needed no salvation. But the rest were gathered for the Sunday service, and waited the officiator.” (Part 1, Chapter 5) This could be read as a condemnation of racism. And yet later in the novel, Schreiner’s mouthpiece, Lyndall herself, seeing a black man in the distance, muses “Will his race melt away in the collision with a higher? Are the men of the future to see his bones only in museums – a vestige of one link that spanned between the dog and the white man?” (Part 2, Chapter 8). Even an agnostic, Positivist, first-wave feminist takes it for granted that Africans are innately inferior to Europeans. Indeed I could go further and say that particularly an agnostic Positivist of the late nineteenth century would harbour such ideas. Whether or not it was Darwin’s intention, the popularisation of the theory of evolution by natural selection immediately unleashed the idea that some races were “less evolved” than others and therefore inferior. This was the accepted “scientific” view of the age. (See on this blog Angela Saini’s Superior– The Return of Race Science). I am encouraged in making these remarks by my knowledge that a much greater South African writer – Nadine Gordimer -  said that while Schreiner’s feminism in The Story of an African Farm is not to be despised, it is ironical that she spoke of liberation but ignored the key moral issue in South Africa: the subjugation of a large African population to a powerful white minority.

I could add, by the way, that in The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner’s racial and cultural prejudices are not confined to black Africans. Why, after all, make the villain of the first part of the novel an Irishman, if not to play to the Anglo prejudice that the Irish are both charming and devious? Why are the “Boer” (Afrikaner) characters in the novel depicted, in the main, as less sophisticated than the Anglo characters? (See, for example, Part 2, Chapter 6, “A Boer Wedding”, where an Afrikaner celebration is clearly not to the taste of the Anglo characters.) Again, I am aware of the attempts of some academics to interpret the character of Waldo as a surrogate for black Africans, or as the young Schreiner making a protest against prejudice in the only way that would have been acceptable to the reading public of her day. But this strikes me as a desperate ploy to distance the author from prejudices she clearly held when writing this novel.

In fairness to Oliver Schreiner, I have to note that she did not hold fast to her racial prejudices throughout her life. She opposed the two wars the British Empire fought to take over the Boer Republics (and their mineral resources). For a short time she admired the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes (who greatly admired The Story of an African Farm) – but she broke with him when he advocated harsh punishments for African prisoners. She later modified (but did not completely abandon) her assumptions on white superiority.

But I am commenting here on The Story of an African Farm, and not on later developments in the author’s life. All the way through reading this novel, I kept thinking “This is not really the story of an African farm. If it were, it would tell us more about the people doing the everyday labour and fetching and carrying – namely those marginalised Africans.”

So, melodramatic, didactic, preachy and blind to one major reality, this is not a masterpiece of world literature. It is a novel of great historical interest, with vivid descriptions of landscape, moments of insight, much overblown rhetoric and the expression of many real concerns related to women at the time it was written. In other words, it is a period piece.

Genuinely Grotesque Footnote: If old novels express attitudes that are no longer acceptable, they are usually sanitised or completely revised when they are turned into films. One of the most grotesque examples would have to be the 2004 South African film version of The Story of an African Farm. Completely omitting the second half of the novel, where agnosticism and feminism take over the narrative, the film told only the story of Bonaparte Blenkins and his plotting against the “old German overseer” and the three pre-pubescent children Lyndall, Em and Waldo. In effect it became a children’s movie about a bad man foiled by children, and was marketed as such in the United States, being retitled (I’m not kidding!) Bustin’ Bonaparte. It also removed the novel’s implicit racism by making Waldo a little black African boy, romping happily with the two white girls. Described by some as a “post-apartheid” version of the novel, it was apparently a box-office success in South Africa itself. It figures. Most countries prefer to see sanitised versions of their past.