ESC: English Studies in Canada

FIGURES IN A GROUND: AN ECOFEMINIST STUDY OF OLIVE SCHREINER’S THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM ANDREW MCMURRY Indiana University . . . figures in a ground, from which they could not be separated. Sheila Watson I take as my epigraph the enigmatic comment by the author of The Double Hook, that enduring Canadian novel about the lives of a few men and women of the remote Cariboo country of interior British Columbia. Watson, in the process of writing this novel, discovered that she could not talk about her characters apart from the land they inhabited: the people, to Watson, were in some crucial way manifestations of the land, and the land was an instance of its people.1 Like Watson’s, Olive Schreiner’s figures in The Story of an African Farm seem inseparable from their ground. The ground in this case is the veld of South Africa, the figures its denizens: Germans, English, Boers, “Kaffirs,” and Hottentots, men and women, children and adults— but also animals and plants, rocks and dirt. In Schreiner’s novel, everything has meaning and everything can assign meaning; thus, dogs can think, watches can speak, rocks and sticks tell stories. All of the pieces of the world are significant and themselves signify, that is, make signs. In a sign-saturated world such as this, in which meaning is not the exclusive property or activity of humans, where does a “figure” (a trope for one who tropes) leave off and the “ground” (a trope for what is thought not to trope) begin? Can one really draw a fine between the cultural/linguistic/natural hybrid that is a “ground” and the “material-semiotic actors” (Haraway 200) who are constrained by that ground yet also compose it? What these questions ultimately frame is the dialectic between a powerful world view based on man controlling (his) objects, and another, alternative vision, barely named, and yet to have much effect on the first. There are three aspects of The Story of an African Farm that surface as pertinent to establishing some possible contours of this latter vision: 1) Figures appear from and disappear into the land. This is explicit. The land lends to the figures their origins and their ends, and accretes to them their meanings while they live. The accretion of meaning is achieved 431 metonymicaUy and non-hierarchically, by what we might call the “side­ ways” connection of figures with their environment. The figures may accept or reject this association, but, Schreiner seems to say, they can­ not ignore it. Without the omnipresence of the ground the figures would be transparent; the ground provides both the backdrop and the illumi­ nation by which the figures are seen. 2) The physical ground becomes crucial to figures’ existence because the metaphysical “ground” is bereft of meaning and is unsustaining. There­ fore, human figures must bind to the physical ground, must literally be in it, or else despair for lack of spiritual nourishment. For Schreiner, “na­ ture” acts as a kind of final resting place for all the various metaphors that have tried in vain to explain existence. 3) The category of gender is relevant to both figures and the ground. For figures, gender plays out generally along well-trodden paths of domi­ nation and subjugation. For the ground, its domination parallels or is even prefigured by that same domination of males over females. But Schreiner will confuse and conflate genders, opening the possibility of a ground where figures can coexist in relationships not based on sexual hierarchy. My analysis of these three aspects of the text will be shaped by what may be termed an ecofeminist perspective. Although I will discuss this term more fully later on, a brief preview here will be useful. At its root, ecofeminism recognizes that man’s domination of woman is directly related to his domi­ nation of nature. Precisely how the two forms of domination are related has been the subject of much theoretical speculation, the fruits of which have helped reconfigure both feminism and environmental philosophy. We shall see that, as The Story of an African Farm works to problematize gender roles, it simultaneously valorizes nature as the new psycho-spiritual ground and...