Towards a genealogy of intellectual life: Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm

Sanders, Mark

This intel[l]ect is a good thing but it is not every thing. Olive Schreiner, "Journal: Rattel's Hoek," July 1876

Like her female contemporaries in Victorian England, when Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) contemplated participation in intellectual life, she found it not only dominated by men in fact, but also imagined as male sociality. At certain institutional nodes, this hegemonic imagining developed into a conception of the intellectual life modeled upon love between men. At nineteenth-century Oxford, as is well known, liberal university reformers mobilized under the banner of a secular Hellenism. This Hellenism, with Benjamin Jowett its main proponent, was subsequently taken up by J.A. Symonds, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, who, as Linda Dowling has shown, drew from Plato's dialogues to identify the life of the mind with male homosexual eroticism. Styled after ancient Greek paiderastia, as an affective model for the intellectual life it appeared to do little to facilitate participation by women.

Juxtaposing modern Europe and ancient Greece, Schreiner's later writing tacitly protests this foreclosure. Footnoting Jowett's translation of Plato's Symposium in Woman and Labour (1911) Schreiner attributes the decline of Greek civilization to the marginalization of women from public life, their consequent intellectual etiolation, and its effects on the education of young children. Drawing upon Jowett's commentary to the Symposium, Schreiner writes that "[t]he abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon the highest plane was one, and the most serious result, of this severance" (Woman 85). Although Jowett alludes to "the greatest evil of Greek life" (Plato 534), he never reduces the erotic to the sexual, and takes care to underline that, among the Greeks, homoeroticism was not an abnormal institution.' If Schreiner's feminist historicism in Woman and Labour reads as anti-homosexual and reflects the sexualization and pathologizing of the "homosexual" which took place late in the nineteenth century, then in The Story of an African Farm (1883), by contrast, a "Hellenist" ideology is strongly present. In that earlier work, its presence is neither protested nor questioned. That is because, in Schreiner's novel, the ideology is enabling for the "woman"-who is represented by a character who is not female but male, and who enables a certain separation, from sexuality in a narrowly biological sense, of the eroticism Schreiner herself associates with the intellectual life.

As readers we recover in fragments how, when Schreiner figures her own entry as a young woman into intellectual life, it is not through the female protagonist Lyndall but through the boy, Waldo Farber, the subject of "love glances" toward an unnamed male Stranger who leaves him with a book. Although in principle leaving no place for the woman, the masculine erotic model is used cryptically by Schreiner in order to figure female intellectual agency and erotic autonomy. "Hellenist" masculine erotics, as Michel Foucault shows, also generates the more enduring topoi of intellect and intellectual life as "disembodied." Schreiner's cryptic figuring of female agency is articulated to intellectual "disembodiment" in her novel, the preface to its second edition, and, in a more ambivalent way, in her later story, "The Buddhist Priest's Wife." When we assemble and decipher the autobiographical and fictional fragments, we find not simply a borrowing of Hellenist conceptions of intellectual life, be they of Victorian Oxford or of Athens, but another genealogy for the life of the mind as disembodied activity. This is where autobiography and fiction converge in the complexity of Schreiner's text and in its function in her self-presentation as a writer. Read with an eye to its manipulation of narrative time, at an autobiographical level The Story of an African Farm negotiates the question of intellectual influence, particularly Schreiner's debts to Emerson and Spencer. The reading I propose simultaneously yields something larger than an author coming to terms with her influences. With the boy Waldo's quasi-erotic initiation into intellectual life more "imaginable" in terms of a displaced erotic genealogy of the topos of intellectual disembodiment, his attendant "feminization" for the Stranger's gaze suggests that this topos could, without displacing Foucault's male genealogy of intellectual life, also be assigned a genealogy in the entry of women into intellectual life, in defiance of the social inscription of the female body in reproduction.

In The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault explains how, in ancient Greece, philosophy as the disinterested pursuit of truth had its beginnings in rules regulating erotic concourse between men and boys. This Greek ethos prescribed that once the boy showed physical signs of maturity the love relation between man and boy transform itself into friendship. What it demanded was "the ... conversion-an ethically necessary and socially useful one-of the bond of love ... into a relation of friendship, of philia" (Foucault 201). Whereas the boy's body was the "right object" of the erotic relation, the signs of manhood it inevitably displayed dictated a shift away from it as an object of desire towards the development of "philia, i.e., an affinity of character and mode of life, a sharing of thoughts and existence, mutual benevolence" (Foucault 201). It is thus in Plato's Symposium, the locus classicus of this thinking, that, though the body is not "excluded," the love of boys is taught to take truth as its ultimate and proper object: "beyond the appearances of the object, love is a relation to truth" (Foucault 239). Born out of a problematization of desire in terms of an opposition of body and soul, and a subordination of body to soul, this displacement of the object of erotic love renders the genesis of "philosophy" complete. Read with an eye to more recent history, Foucault's account implies that, from Greek antiquity onwards, to engage in "philosophy"-and, in a wider sense, to participate in intellectual life-would have come to entail a sundering of mind and body. Men would henceforth come to intellectual life, not whole, but as "disembodied" intellects or spirits.

Being of masculine genealogy, can this figuring of intellectual life work for women? Tracing the emergence of an ethical problematization of desire in male homoerotics, does the genealogy set out by Foucault do more than remap a history which both excludes women from the public space of intellectual life and precludes an active female sexuality? To pose such questions directly touches the debate among late twentieth-century feminists on the usefulness of Foucault's history of sexuality for feminist critique. The works of Olive Schreiner can be read as anticipating the question, as Frances Bartkowski frames it, of whether Foucault's genealogies "reproduce and produce as history the patriarchal history of sexuality," or whether this "study of love among men" leads to "a notion of reciprocity ... [that] begins to draw women into the world of men for a political and sexual economy that becomes recognizable as one that shapes the early modern world" (47, 54).2 A generalized reciprocity such as this may produce positionalities that resemble and are complicit in positions determined by repressive patriarchal power but, nevertheless, are not reducible to them.3

To judge from Schreiner's early work, intellectual women can be seen as having been aided by the possibility of presenting the life of the mind as disembodied, of detaching, in a manner of speaking, mind from body, intellectual from sexual life. Although such a representation of the life of the mind may appear to resemble the topos received from ancient Greece, it is crucial to bear in mind that women take part in intellectual life against the social norm-in the face of the reproductive inscription of female sexuality. One might interpret Schreiner's assertions of intellectual disembodiment as anticipating an expected "transformation" between man and woman comparable to that between man and boy. The transformation would in that case be from "mistress" or potential "wife" and "mother" to friend, from the sphere of the sexual-defined socially as the reproductive-to that of the intellectual. The young women of Schreiner's novel, prepared for motherhood, are not groomed as intellectuals. In contrast to the metamorphosis Foucault tracks in the Greek regulation of man-boy relations, a metamorphosis of this kind subverts rather than obeys the norm governing social relations between men and women.

Fiction, Autobiography, and Influence in The Story of an African Farm

The feminist bildungsroman typically regarded as the founding work of the South African novel in English, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm mobilizes a narrative of intellectual "disembodiment" in the two stories of Lyndall and Waldo. Both the stories present their protagonists with possibilities of connection, finally unrealized, with respective "Strangers" (DuPlessis 22). The trajectory of the story of the colonial orphan Lyndall, whom Elaine Showalter describes as the English novel's "first wholly serious feminist heroine" (Literature 199), reveals how the entry of women into intellectual life can be at odds with the reproductive inscription of female sexuality. In order to resist this destiny, Lyndall thwarts desire. She will not marry her lover since, though moved by him sexually and pregnant by him, she sees no hope of intellectual companionship: "You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch" (African Farm 222). The story of Waldo Farber, introspective son of the Farm's overseer, brings its protagonist near to the broaching of intellectual friendship, only to leave expectations of it unfulfilled. One day Waldo encounters, passing by the Farm, a Stranger, who interprets a wood-carving he has fashioned for his father's grave by telling him an allegory of a "Hunter" who sacrifices his life on a long and lonely quest for truth. He departs, leaving Waldo a book, "a centre round which to hang [his] ideas" (African Farm 161). The exchange is Waldo's first moment of genuine intellectual reciprocity, and marks his initiation into intellectual life. The Stranger finds the flashes of Waldo's eyes "more thirsty and desiring than the love-glances of a woman" (153). The scene would appear, then, to hint at the roots of the norm for intellectual exchange uncovered by Foucault. If so, the fact that the scene does not involve Lyndall, and that the character Waldo is a boy, plays out in the novel the difference between the paths into intellectual life taken by the young man and the young woman. Hinting at its displacement as "philosophy," a disinterested and self-sacrificing quest for truth, the story of the young man can entertain an eroticism. By contrast, since an expression of sexuality risks launching its protagonist into the social circuit of reproduction, the story of the young woman seeking her way in intellectual life strives to avoid it.

In terms of the textuality of her own life, Waldo is Olive Schreiner, his initiation into intellectual life declaredly a fictionalization of hers. As Schreiner informs Havelock Ellis, the chapter "Waldo's Stranger" represents a pivotal event in her autobiography. One winter night in 1871, a young colonial official, Willie Bertram, stopped over at the rural mission station at Hermon in the Cape Colony where she was living with an aunt. When he departed, Bertram left the 16-yearold Schreiner a copy of Herbert Spencer's First Principles (1862), a magisterial reconciling of religion and science, which alleviated her youthful unbelief: "He lent me Spencer's 'First Principles.' I always think that when Christianity burst on the dark Roman world it was what that book was to me" (Schreiner, "Other Self" 39).4 As she explains, "The book that the Stranger gives to Waldo was intended to be Spencer's 'First Principles"' ("Other Self' 39)5 Bertram and his book mark the freethinking Olive Schreiner's entry into intellectual life away from her orthodox upbringing as a missionary's daughters It is thus fair to read "Waldo's Stranger" as Olive Schreiner's intellectual rite of passage, as, biographically speaking, an exchange between a young woman and an older man that has been rendered as the quasi-erotic encounter between an adolescent boy and a man. As such, the meeting of Waldo and his Stranger not only spells out the divergences between male and female intellectual trajectories. Interpreted in the light of Schreiner's autobiography, and in juxtaposition with the story of Lyndall, the episode also reveals how a young woman might imagine and enact, even as she claims a certain disembodiedness, an eroticism she does not associate with reproductive life. The Story of an African Farm locates that displaced sphere of eroticism between man and boy.

In Schreiner's novel, autobiography and fiction converge at those junctures where intellectual influence is at issue. The stories of both Lyndall and Waldo end in irresolution. This reinforces the idea, to be gained from the preface to the novel's second edition, that, in addition to narrating divergent trajectories for its male and female protagonists, another less overt purpose of the novel is to stage an assertion of intellectual independence free of influence. The preface, signed with the male pseudonym of Ralph Iron, declares its author unbound by colonial literary formulae, and it stresses the divergence in roles of the two Strangers in the vocabulary of intellectual debt. Distinct from Lyndall's Stranger, the "husband or lover," Waldo's Stranger is referred to as "the mere stimulator of thought" (African Farm 23). Applied to him in juxtaposition to Lyndall's Stranger, the epithet of "stimulator" is one of approbation. But it is also ironic. The "mere" undercuts the Stranger's role, making him only a "stimulator." The epithet also points to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Schreiner elsewhere praises as the source of "stimulation" that "makes thoughts live & throb" ("Other Self" 369). The offices of Herbert Spencer, her actual influence, whose book Bertram brings, are by contrast sublimated; in her correspondence, he is referred to as a "doctor" who once set a broken leg. It is through the names Ralph Iron and Waldo and the stimulating Stranger that Emerson's name emerges as a cryptogram for Schreiner's authorial persona. In association with a sexual imagery of "stimulation," her investment in his name suggests the will to play down influence (that of Spencer in particular), and a striving to assert "self-reliance" and intellectual agency. It works at the same time to bring to expression a female eroticism not tied to a biographical trajectory of wifehood and motherhood.

"The mere stimulator of thought"

Still signing herself Ralph Iron in the preface to the second edition of The Story of an African Farm (1883), Olive Schreiner responds to reviewers of the first edition in a coded feminist statement on the intellectual life. Critics commonly concentrate on Ralph Iron's assertions of autonomy as a colonial writer from received literary and intellectual forms (Gray; Jacobson). There are certainly parallels between such assertions and the way in which early feminist thinkers such as Schreiner sought to break with systems of belief that marginalized women.7 The anti-imperialist and feminist initiatives are nevertheless discontinuous and not wholly assimilable $ Along with his resistance to writing "a history of wild adventure," Iron offers a feminist response to gendering in narrative formulae.

Iron affirms the art of the painter who paints from life, defending it from those who call for the predictable satisfactions of dramatic closure: "Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method.... But there is another method-the method of the life we all lead.... Life may be painted according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other"(African Farm 23). Iron's critical exercise negotiates a crossing of sexual and intellectual exchange that Schreiner's ironic gender masquerade attempts to manage. As Ralph Iron, Schreiner addresses a readership's "feeling that a man should not appear upon the scene, and then disappear, leaving behind him no more substantial trace than a mere book; that he should return later on as husband or lover, to fill some more important part than that of the mere stimulator of thought" (23). In advocating a man's part as "the mere stimulator of thought," the bringer of the book, Iron also advocates the woman's. The Story of an African Farm's first Stranger who appears to Waldo and leaves with him a book is not the man who appears at the Farm later in the novel as Lyndall's lover. By not reappearing as Lyndall's Stranger, Waldo's Stranger fails to complete the romance or marriage plot. Failing also to complete the plot of intellectual companionship, he does not return at all, and when Waldo encounters him in town years later, the Stranger does not acknowledge him (24243). Iron's insistence on the Stranger's book, as he corrects metropolitan critical opinion, and his ironic emphasis on intellectual stimulation resist the canons of criticism to which he alludes. If that were all they were doing, there would be no obvious reason for Schreiner to leave unfinished the plot of intellectual companionship between Waldo and his Stranger. Fraternal homosociality would have been perfectly acceptable.9 But Iron not only mocks the critics, he also diminishes the "mere book" and "mere" stimulation "of thought." This double irony suggests the force of further motives. Waldo plays the woman's part when this performance is related, if not, as Schreiner claims, to "the life we all lead," then to the life she as a woman writes for herself.

Schreiner was an avid reader of Emerson, as Ralph Iron, Waldo, and Em (Lyndall's cousin), commemorate (Showalter, Literature 199). The American author's name connects Schreiner's preface and novel with remarks made in her letters on the subject of influence. "[Emerson's] value," she wrote Havelock Ellis, "is that of stimulation[.] He brings no new thought-when he does it is worthless-but he makes all thoughts live & throb which is the work of true genius" ("Other Self" 369).10 Like Waldo's Stranger, Emerson's stimulation of thought is quasi-erotic: "he makes all thoughts live & throb." Yet in Schreiner's vocabulary, "stimulation" is also associated with the assertion of intellectual autonomy: Emerson "brings no new thought." As a feminist, Schreiner brings the same vocabulary to bear on the usefulness of a learned male author for "The Woman's Question." Schreiner concludes her 1889 review of Karl Pearson's The Ethic of Free

Thought, a work she finds "stimulative and suggestive," with words that simultaneously entertain intellectual collaboration and assert intellectual selfsufficiency: "We think with the writer, he does not think for us" ("Professor Pearson")." Schreiner often implies a relationship for women between intellectual and socio-sexual autonomy. This is the overdetermined meaning of "mere stimulator of thought." Whereas the lover and the stimulator of thought are not as distinct from each other as Ralph Iron would wish, we nevertheless need to make sense of why-despite associating intellectual and sexual life-Schreiner might want to declare them separate. "The Buddhist Priest's Wife" gives us some further clues.

"The Buddhist Priest's Wife"

Thoughts, Schreiner's remarks on Emerson imply, may be vitalized during fleeting exchanges between sexed partners. Women share "the intellectual life" with men on condition that "sex" in the narrow sense be avoided and sexual distinctness be reduced.12 This condition creates a double bind because distinctness and difference are required for mental stimulation. The predicament finds a provisional but equivocal resolution in Schreiner's later story, "The Buddhist Priest's Wife" (c.1891-92). A woman says her farewells to a male intellectual companion and admirer. She is off to India, so her admirer jokes, to become the wife of a Buddhist priest."3 The title character's words of farewell identify a degree of social liberty in the "intellectual life," but, if sexual difference is vital to mental activity, those words appear to Attenuate the life of the mind by separating it from that of the body. "Intellectually we may both be alike," she tells her male interlocutor, "the more abstract and intellectual, the more alike we are. The nearer you approach to the personal and sexual, the more different we are.... That's the beauty of the intellect and intellectual life to a woman, that she drops her shackles a little; and that is why she shrinks from sex so" (Schreiner, Stories 72, 73-74; emphasis added). By asserting the possibility of intellectual alikeness, the Buddhist Priest's Wife would appear to neutralize both sexual difference and the process of intellectual quickening that depends on that difference. Social equality-here, indeed a limited social equality-depends on asserting alikeness, despite the fact that sexual distinctness and separateness are essential for the thinker. When the Buddhist Priest's Wife represents "men's and women's natures" as a large area of intellectual congruency and continuity, does she retract her emphasis on similitude?:

"If I were to represent men's and women's natures," she said, "by a diagram, I would take two circular discs; the right side of each I should paint bright red; then I would shade the red away till in a spot on the left edge it became blue in the one and green in the other. That spot represents sex, and the nearer you come to it, the more the two discs differ in colour. Well then, if you turn them so that the red sides touch, they seem to be exactly alike, but if you turn them so that the green and blue paint form their point of contact, they will seem to be entirely unlike. That's why you notice the brutal, sensual men invariably believe women are entirely different from men, another species of creature; and very cultured, intellectual men sometimes believe that we are exactly alike." (Stories 72)

The diagram is, when turned, two diagrams. The one asserts sameness between the sexes, the other difference. Rotated, they represent two perspectives, neither of which is wholly self-sufficient, but each of which represents the perspective from a different rung on the evolutionary scale. The brutal, sensual man sees women one way, and the cultured, intellectual man sees them another. The imagined diagram is not simply a theory of sexual difference but the means of negotiating a double bind. The Buddhist Priest's Wife employs it to ward off her suitor, who, although apparently one of the "cultured, intellectual men," is in fact unable to integrate intellectual and sexual congress. He wants "a home and a wife and children" and anticipates "go[ing] to America to look for [a wife]." As the Buddhist Priest's Wife tells him, the woman he marries "must ... not [have] too strongly marked an individuality... but ... must second you in a thoroughly rational manner" (Stories 69-71). The diagram negotiates the double bind (female difference inscribed reproductively; intellectual life disembodied as masculine sameness) by generating two distinct entities. Sustaining the life of the intellect, while also dealing with the masculinist conformity demanded by the institutionalized set of social practices that constitute "intellectual life," condemns the intellectual to at once assert alikeness but act out difference.

Posing as a man but taking the woman's part: this is in effect the role played by Ralph Iron and Waldo in The Story of an African Farm and in Olive Schreiner's own self-presentation. The frame narrative of "The Buddhist Priest's Wife," set eight years later, has its narrator contemplate the woman's dead body. In this way, Schreiner suggests that so long as the man cannot integrate intellectual and sexual life "disembodiment" will spell death for the woman. The intellectual life as disembodied activity is therefore no alternative at all to the normative female trajectory, which is imagined by and for the man as "a home and a wife and children."

Another Genealogy of Intellectual Life

Given the pessimism of "The Buddhist Priest's Wife," can we say that the early Schreiner's woman intellectual speculates and even capitalizes on a complicity that marginalizes women by admitting them to intellectual life only insofar as they are the same as "men"? Perhaps. There may be room, though, for another hypothesis: namely, that Schreiner supplements the masculinist version of intellectual life with a feminizing narrative of sexual danger. Schreiner's representation of the stimulator of thought as separate from the husband or lover, the mind as distinct from the body, can be interpreted as stemming not from the normative conversion of an erotic man-boy relation but from a position marginal to the institutionalized practices of intellectual life. In contrast to the position mapped out by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, the position I have in mind is historically specific to women.

Foucault shows that a historically specific problematization of erotic relations gives rise to a virtually universal model of intellectual exchange: "With the Greeks ... reflection on the reciprocal ties between access to truth and sexual austerity seems to have been developed primarily in connection with the love of boys" (Foucault 230). What does this genealogy of intellectual life help us learn from Olive Schreiner? On the one hand, Schreiner lived and wrote at a time when it was common for intellectual life and intellectual friendship of a public kind to be coded as masculine."4 It is thus possible to read her Buddhist Priest's Wife's exclusion of the erotic from the intellectual friendship of women and men as adapting a topos for male-male relations handed down from the Greeks, one designed to regulate behavior between boys and men.15 Since women enter intellectual life in violation of a social norm which inscribes female sexuality in reproduction, this adaptation, and the admission of an eroticism not linked to reproduction, would be transgressive in and of itself. The dynamics of the interchange between Waldo and his Stranger, at a time when the love of boys is no longer widely socially sanctioned, would be an exposure of the unacknowledged male homoeroticism actually fueling normative intellectual relations. On the other hand, it is also quite possible that Schreiner's presentation in "The Buddhist Priest's Wife" of friendship as intellectual alikeness functions as a cover story for more familiar anxieties exacerbated by the man's restrictive notion of marriage as "a home and a wife and children." The preface to The Story of an African Farm separates lover and teacher by setting the two Strangers apart. Without assimilating the two figures, the novel itself allows us to think that intellectual and physical exchange can be continuous. The concern here is not that the boy will become a man and, according to Greek convention, render certain types of conduct unacceptable. Another life course faces Schreiner's young woman. When that course entails the social regulation of her sexual life in reproduction, the young woman's entry into intellectual life will necessarily be seen as transgressive. Since intellectual and physical exchange are in practice continuous, however, that transgressive entry implies contact with men and therefore risks a return to the prescribed life course of pregnancy and/or marriage. If the life of the mind must be held separate, against the man, from the life of the body in order to avoid reinscription in sexual reproduction, then the "masculine" topos of the disembodied intellect or spirit can be given another genealogy. In entering intellectual life contrary to patriarchal norms, women in turn can be seen as consolidating another norm, which, although "feminine," combines old and new genealogies for topoi of disembodiment.

As the research of Helen Bradford shows, Schreiner's novels are acutely concerned about young women becoming pregnant. The social disgrace of unwedded pregnancy and the dangers of abortion are occasions for anxiety in novels about female participation in intellectual life."6 Along with the threat of sexual violence, such sources of anxiety not only motivate narrative resolutions in the form of separation of mind and body.17 As I show in the next three sections, these anxieties give rise to the claim that a male intellectual companion is neither a lover nor potential husband but a mere stimulator of thought. Emerging from Victorian commonplaces about female sexual conduct, this narrative solution comes to structure all intellectual exchange; it is, among other things, the way in which Schreiner figures an "anxiety of influence." To the extent that intellectual exchange is imagined to lead to risks and consequences of sexual congress specific to women, and to the degree that women undergo an imagined separation of mind and body, when men fail to integrate sexual and intellectual life, intellectual life itself undergoes feminization in this novel. It is in this context that Schreiner represents the pragmatic suspension of sexual difference customary in intellectual life as a provisional albeit ambiguous strategy in "The Buddhist Priest's Wife." It is also in this context that during the previous decade Schreiner herself could script Waldo as boy "beloved" and secure herself by proxy against the man as lover. The role of this gender masquerade in Schreiner's negotiations of intellectual influence is integrally related to her novel's arrangement of narrative time.

"Waldo's Stranger," "Lyndall's Stranger," and "Times and Seasons"

The preface to the second edition of The Story of an African Farm not only distinguishes between the characters of Waldo's Stranger and Lyndall's Stranger, but draws a firm line between their roles. The stimulator of thought, Ralph Iron insists, is not the lover. Against the grain of the preface, the episode entitled "Lyndall's Stranger" stages a powerful link between intellectual friendship and sexual intimacy. Lyndall will not marry her Stranger on the grounds that her attraction to him is entirely physical:

"If you do love me," he asked her, "why will you not marry me?"

"Because, if I had been married to you for a year, I should have come to my senses, and seen that your hands and your voice are like the hands and the voice of any other man .... You call into activity one part of my nature; there is a higher part that you know nothing of, that you never touch. If I married you, afterwards it would arise and assert itself, and I should hate you always, as I do now sometimes." (African Farm 222)

Lyndall does not say exactly what the "higher part" of her nature is. She keeps it in reserve. The novel, however, gives us the Stranger's response to her words as a mixture of paraphrase and desire. Taunting Lyndall, he associates the higher part of her nature with intellect and spirit, an association that only heightens his attraction to her:

"I like you when you grow metaphysical and analytical," he said, leaning his face upon his hand. "Go a little further in your analysis; say, 'I love you with the right ventricle of my heart, but not the left, and with the left auricle of my heart, but not the right; and, this being the case, my affection for you is not of a duly elevated, intellectual, and spiritual nature.' I like you when you get philosophical."

She looked quietly at him; he was trying to turn her own weapons against her. (222)

His taunts framed with desire-"I like you ..."-the Stranger is, to Lyndall's mind, trying to subvert the very rule that she normally uses as a practical measure to keep male ardor at a distance. If the higher part of her nature is indeed her intellect as the Stranger assumes, his "love" of her mind means that for her the intellectual life can no longer be a refuge from physical desire. That being the case, she prefers to withdraw into reticence.

Schreiner's novel narrates the difficulty of keeping sexual and intellectual life separate for purposes of sustaining the normative fiction of disembodied intellectuality. It is also a feminist commentary on that disembodied separation, an object lesson that there may be more to the idea of a separation of mind and body in friendship than a longing for spiritual or intellectual transcendence 18 As previously noted, Foucault assigns the Platonic eclipse of the body a genealogy stemming from an anxiety associated with the maturation of the eromenos, the boy-beloved. For Schreiner's female characters, the attempt to remove the life of the body from the sphere of intellectual exchange appears to function as a way of imagining the avoidance of negative consequences, among them the bond of unwanted marriage associated with becoming pregnant. "I cannot be tied," Lyndall says (223). As their conversation suggests, the fact that Lyndall is carrying a child or fears she might be is the reason for the Stranger's offer of marriage; "I believe," Lyndall says to the Stranger, "that when you ask me to marry you you are performing the most generous act you have ever performed in the course of your life, or ever will" (223). The novel proffers several other tacit signs that before Lyndall leaves the Farm forever she is pregnant or at least believes that she is." When intellectual and sexual life take place on a continuum, a pragmatic measure is required to hold them apart. Declaring mind and body separate is such a measure.

Staging the mind as disembodied, Schreiner's novel not only acts to secure the woman from pregnancy and/or marriage when she interacts with male teachers and intellectual companions. The novel goes further. By claiming, so to speak, that what was conceived mentally was the work of the woman alone, Schreiner effectively excludes the man, not only in his role as lover or husband, but also as influence or "stimulator" to the intellect. Influence is minimized in The Story of an African Farm not only by eliminating or reducing the role of the man, but also by establishing the originality of Waldo's ideas through a manipulation of narrative time. Schreiner establishes the intellectual originality of her proxy male protagonist by placing "Waldo's Stranger," the episode of the coming of the book, just after "Times and Seasons," a lyrical episode comprising meditations on the "soul's life" attributed to Waldo. Curiously, the thoughts in "Times and Seasons," though in place before the Stranger arrives, resemble those which the Stranger and his book bring. By characterizing the Stranger as "mere stimulator of thought," the preface asks us to conclude that whereas his coming is momentous-"`All my life I have longed to see you,' the boy said" (158)-the Stranger remains only a catalyst. Waldo's musings in "Times and Seasons," though indeed unripe, preexist the Stranger's arrival. The temporal arrangement of the episodes allows readers to think that, whereas the Stranger (like Emerson) is a vital stimulus to thought, the thoughts stimulated-in this case, those in "Times and Seasons"-would always have been the thinker's very own.

Schreiner, Spencer, and Bertram

The "seasons" of "[t]he soul's life" are "periods not found in any calendar" (African Farm 127). The chapter's seven divisions tell a story of infancy, religious doubting in childhood, and modified recovery of faith through pseudo-science (cf. Schoeman 110). Schreiner can be read as giving form to the idea from Spencer's First Principles that "Religion and Science" are reconcilable, provided that the adherents of each see them as only partially expressing a greater underlying truth (Spencer 3-25); there need be no conflict between religion and science writ large if each is viewed as "a constituent of the great whole" (Spencer 21). Spencer helps Schreiner to imagine an intellectual departure from Christian orthodoxy which does not lead to mere atheism but instead to an affirmation of "truth." This is the "philosophical" gesture par excellence, one that brackets both the problem of influence and that posed by the physical presence of and desire for another human being. In other words, Spencer, like Waldo's Stranger, if he comes, comes to stimulate thoughts, not to seduce and to subordinate the thinker to his authority. Spencer's book allows Schreiner to write a novel of ideas that, while strongly "Spencerian," is at the same time an intellectual autobiography that minimizes the role of influence, Spencer's included. In a nutshell, Spencer advocates transcendent truth against religious and even scientific authority. If the thinker apprehends truth, it is of secondary importance whether that truth is "his" or "hers" and whether it happens also to be a truth revealed by Religion or Science. What is relevant for Spencer is whether or not authority usurps the place of truth. Schreiner both acknowledges and minimizes the contribution of the Stranger and his book. Registered through the character of Waldo, such ambivalence about influence constantly dogs Schreiner's self-presentation as a writer.

Spencer's place in Olive Schreiner's intellectual autobiography is unrivaled. As we noted, Schreiner borrowed a copy of his First Principles in 1871 from Willie Bertram and fictionalized that intellectual rite of passage in "Waldo's Stranger" (see Schoeman 190-95). As far as anyone is aware, though, Schreiner never says (and Ellis never asks) why she stages the giving of the book in The Story of an African Farm as an encounter between men. Although Schreiner writes from out of a tradition that figures intellectual friendship as a relation between "males," her insistence on the necessity of sexual difference for intellectual exchange alters the traditional topos. Though choreographed as an exchange between men, sexual difference, even the desire of the woman, enter into the transaction: Waldo, like Ralph Iron, takes the woman's part.

Revealing some of the social motivations for imposing a separation of mind and body, the facts of Olive Schreiner's biography enjoin us to interpret the gendered displacements in The Story of an African Farm as indications of a larger formation governing intellectual life. Hamilton Hope, Schreiner's cousin's husband, sent a letter to her with Willie Bertram, which concludes with a piece of familial advice: "Don't get spooney on him. He's very intellectual they say" (CronwrightSchreiner 81). The homoerotic exchange between Waldo and his Stranger may thus function as a cover for patriarchal anxieties as well as for the way in which a young woman might negotiate their strictures. The anxieties are at least two. Hope's two sentences, extracted by S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner before he destroyed the original letter, could be read as hinting either that the "very intellectual" Willie Bertram is not interested in women, or that he is a sexual threat to the young Schreiner, who would be seduced by his intellectuality. (CronwrightSchreiner, Schreiner's husband and first biographer, who never knew Bertram, appears to favor the second reading, eliding the fact that Schreiner saw Bertram subsequent to the night at Hermon [Schoeman 190]).20 Given that Schreiner masquerades as Waldo, there are at least two possible motives for the incomplete plot of homosocial friendship between Waldo and his Stranger. First, the boy (Waldo) is actually a young woman. Because she wants to be independent, this woman will not bind herself to a man (Waldo's Stranger). Second, the man (the Stranger), whether he is interested in women or not, has no desire for the boy (Waldo) who is a woman, even though she desires him. It is against both the patriarchal injunction and its subversion that the character of Waldo, who receives the Stranger's book, plays out Schreiner's self-presentation as a writer and her ambivalent attitude to influence. Admitting eroticism without conjugal commitment, Waldo obviates a conventional resolution of the plot in marriage. As Waldo, Schreiner can also "get spooney" on the Stranger/ Bertram, yet cast him not as her major influence but as "the mere stimulator of thought."

Spencer, Emerson, and Schreiner's Self-Presentation as a Writer

Since he has already "read Spencer," Waldo, the subject of the meditative recollections of "Times and Seasons," is ready for the mental stimulation of the Stranger. Coming to Waldo after "Times and Seasons," the narrative encourages readers to think that the Stranger's ideas are nothing new, that, although it is proffered as "gospel," the "mere book" he leaves behind only lends Waldo's musings a more organized character:21

"It may be of some help to you," he said carelessly. "It was a gospel to me when I first fell on it. You must not expect too much, but it may give you a centre round which to hang your ideas, instead of letting them lie about in a confusion that makes the head ache. We of this generation are not designed to eat and be satisfied as our fathers were; we must be content to go hungry." (160-61)

Although the book is an organizer, then, the ideas that it organizes will always have been Waldo's. A minimum of collaboration is desirable for entry into intellectual life. Any more, and the stimulation of intellectual life will magnify the bonds of social life. Embraced too avidly, the book may become "a gospel." The implications of Schreiner's narrative solution make more sense when, like Ralph Iron, Waldo is read as assuming a woman's part, and "stimulation" is taken as code for desire tangential to the circuit of reproduction. This is not to say, of course, that all "stimulation" escapes control. The "centre around which to hang [one's] ideas" may be a phallic signifier which not only brings order to mental confusion but binds the thinker. These ambiguities are played out in Schreiner's self-presentation between the figures of Spencer, who "give[s] ... a centre," and Emerson, "who brings no new thought." Waldo's Stranger is a fictionalized Willie Bertram. As "stimulator of thought," he shares an epithet with Emerson. But the actual Bertram episode, as Schreiner tells Ellis, involved a readerly transaction with Herbert Spencer.22 Though he is perhaps her major influence, bringing light into the dark world of her freethinking adolescence, curiously enough, Spencer's name does not feature in her authorial persona, which she fashions cryptically from the name of R.W. Emerson: Ralph (Iron) Waldo (Schreiner) Emerson (Stranger). Let us try to explore why.

What does Schreiner have to say about Spencer's influence? How does she figure it? Soon after the young Havelock Ellis guesses at Spencer's attendance, Schreiner replies to one of his queries:

You ask me whether Spencer is to me what he was. If one has a broken leg & a doctor sets it; when once it is set one may be said to have no more need of the doctor, never the-less one always walks on his leg. I think that is how it is with regard to myself & Herbert Spencer. I have read all his works once, some three & four times, now I read him no more. He helped me to believe in a unity underlying all nature; that was a great thing, but he has nothing else to give me now. ("Other Self' 43)23

The remarks on Emerson and Spencer reveal Olive Schreiner's attitude to inquiries about her influences. As a woman writer from the colonial periphery making a name in the London metropole, she vigorously asserted the authenticity of her work24 and resisted the appetite of popular journalists for biographical trivia. Schreiner also acknowledges the importance and value of "stimulation" and "help" (Cronwright-Schreiner 295ff). In acknowledging this help, she necessarily distinguished Spencer from Emerson, whose credo of "Self-Reliance" demands a more resolute independence from the thinker than Spencer's reconciliation of religion and pseudo-science. In the light of the preface to The Story of an African Farm, however, Spencer turns out to serve Schreiner better than Emerson, because she wants both to claim originality and to acknowledge debt. As a Spencerian, it would be senseless to own or to attribute ownership to ideas (ideas, for Spencer, being merely "symbolic" intimations of truth). In her remarks to Ellis about Spencer, there is, to be sure, a sexual element. Not a particularly erotic one-Spencer she found less "stimulating" than Emerson or Pearson ("Other Self" 439)-it is sexual in the sense that, as Schreiner's ampersands indicate, a man's part is required to complete a process of mental vitalization: "You ask me whether Spencer is to me what he was.... that is how it is with regard to myself & Herbert Spencer.... he has nothing else to give me now." Just as she places "Times and Seasons" before the arrival of Waldo's Stranger and gives Waldo the thoughts the Stranger is to "bring," Schreiner attempts to solve the problem of influence by situating the leg-setting scene in the past. The claim that "never theless one always walks on his leg" (emphasis added) not only registers the doctor's restoration of the patient's motor faculty, but also leaves command of that faculty undecided. At the moment Schreiner attempts to differentiate doctor from patient, the ambiguous pronoun appears to admit a more profound debt.21 The leg may not only generically be "his," belonging to "one," but may indeed be that of the doctor. Where Emerson's name and epithet, "stimulator," seems to foster intellectual autonomy and erotic agency, Spencer's presence-by way of the ambiguous "his leg"-is associated in the letter with dependence and subordination. Just as in socio-sexual terms, desire can lead to the bond of marriage, acknowledgment of Spencer's irreplaceable influence-which Schreiner does not want to deny-entails the risk of submission to male intellectual authority. Where her letters recognize both Emerson and Spencer by name, Schreiner's novel admits, albeit indirectly, only the less important though "stimulating" influence of Emerson.

Towards a Twofold Genealogy

In The Story of an African Farm, the arrangement of narrative time in Waldo's story works both to acknowledge and to minimize influence, while a fiction of "disembodiedness" helps Lyndall imagine a zone of social and intellectual selfsufficiency linked with an eroticism not confined to reproduction. Read in the light of Schreiner's autobiography, these elements converge in "Waldo's Stranger" as Schreiner "masquerades" as a boy. It is in that episode that the larger implications of Schreiner's intricate weave of fiction and autobiography become apparent.

In The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner speaks through the male characters of Ralph Iron and Waldo Farber. Her men can also, as it were, become women?6 In "Waldo's Stranger," Waldo is feminized and the Stranger is, reciprocally, the object of his gaze. While homoerotic, the process of intellectual stimulation in "Waldo's Stranger" depends, as it does in a number of Schreiner's texts, on sexual difference. Though the two protagonists are male, this difference is conceived as that between male and female, a duality with which Schreiner nearly always begins. The man excites the "woman": "At every word the stranger spoke the fellow's eyes flashed back on him-yes, and yes, and yes! The stranger smiled. It was almost worth the trouble of exerting oneself, even on a lazy afternoon, to win those passionate flashes, more thirsty and desiring than the love-glances of a woman" (152-53). But the exchange is not figured simply as one between male and female. In the quasi-homoerotic space in which the episode takes place, Waldo's looks are "more thirsty and desiring than the love-glances of a woman" (emphasis added). This generates the possibility that the scene is neither one between men (Waldo is no longer a man), nor, to be sure, one between a man and a woman (Waldo is "more ... than ... [a] woman"), but instead puts into play another organization of sexual differences. Opening such other possibilities may encourage a powerful misogyny. To the Stranger, Waldo's being more than a woman implies that being a woman is unworthy. "Habits," he tells Waldo as he is about to ride off, "feed on the intellect like a woman sapping energy, hope, creative power, all that makes a man higher than a beast-leaving only the power to yearn, to regret, and to sink lower in the abyss" (African Farm 160). Associated with male homosexuality, and transposed into social terms, this is the abased womanhood which, in Woman and Labour, contributes to the end of Hellenic civilization.2717

Women are marginal to the spectacle of intellectual exchange in "Waldo's Stranger." However, when interpreted as the fictional presentation of an exchange between a woman and man (Schreiner and Bertram), the episode can be understood, as can "The Buddhist Priest's Wife," to address an anxiety about sexual intimacy and the baneful consequences it could hold for young, unmarried Victorian women. The narrative, as novel and autobiography, appears to admit an active female sexuality apart from the reproductive sphere. Figured as homoerotic and male, this erotic sexuality exposes a twofold genealogy for the forms of intellectual life. The episode of "Waldo's Stranger" suggests that the universal model for intellectual exchange-inter alia, the separation of mind and body, the privileging of mind over body, the "anxiety of influence"-can, in a way akin to Foucault's story of the beginnings of "philosophy" in Greek homoerotics, be assigned a genealogy in more modern norms pertaining to female sexual conduct. Both genealogies, one must not forget, depend ultimately on a depressed value being assigned to women, who are also invariably associated with the body rather than the mind (see Spelman). Nevertheless, what remains significant about The Story of an African Farm is that it does not call upon us simply to replace a masculine with a feminine genealogy of intellectual life. In the act of making Waldo the intellectual woman's proxy, the novel articulates what resonates in intellectual life today: two sexual genealogies of disembodiment in all the intimacy of their articulation.

I would like to thank Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Neville Hoad, and Isabel Balseiro for their comments on early versions of this essay. The quotation from Olive Schreiner's journal in the epigraph appears by kind permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

On this care, see Dowling 75. Schreiner's construal can be compared with the actual wording of the passage in Jowett to which she alludes: "There were many, doubtless, to whom the love of the fair mind was the noblest form of friendship ... and who deemed the friendship of man with man to be higher than the love of woman, because altogether separated from the bodily appetites. The existence of such attachments may be reasonably attributed to the inferiority and seclusion of woman, and the want of a real family or social life and parental influence in Hellenic cities; and they were encouraged by the practice of gymnastic exercises, by the meetings of political clubs, and by the tie of military companionship" (Plato 535). On the other

hand, as Dowling observes, "Jowett's deep sense of Plato's undying philosophical power ... would express in compelling terms the present significance of the Greek past to the Victorians, doing so even at the occasional cost of misrepresenting that past. Of this cost the salient example would always be Jowett's imperturbable transposition of Plato's remarks about the Greek love of boys to Victorian men's love of women: 'We may raise the same question in another form; as Jowett said of the specifically homoerotic questions raised in the Phaedrus, 'Is marriage preferable with or without love?"' (Dowling 74; the embedded quotation can be found in Plato 406).

2 According to Lois McNay, "Foucault's idea of practices of the self [in The History of Sexuality] parallels developments in the feminist analysis of women's oppression that seek to avoid positing women as powerless victims of patriarchal structures of domination.... [it] ... brings Foucault's work closer to the non-reductive analyses of women's social status proposed by recent feminist theory" (66).

3 Arguing that any account of productive power must also take repression into account, Judith Butler "take[s] issue with Foucault's account of the repressive hypothesis as merely an instance of juridical power, and argue[s] that such an account does not address the ways in which 'repression operates as a modality of productive power"; "[a]lthough Foucault distinguishes between juridical and productive models of power in The History of Sexuality, Volume One ... the two models presuppose each other" (22, 244n6).

4 The letter is dated 28 March 1884. See also 251, 435.

5 See also Cronwright-Schreiner 80-84.

6 Her father, Gottlob Schreiner, worked for the London Missionary Society. As the novel makes clear, Olive Schreiner's analogy with Christianity and Rome does not indicate a restoration of Christian piety, but rather the pseudo-scientific overcoming of an agonizing period of rebellion and incapacity to affirm anything (African Farm 127-43).

Louise Green explores some of the feminist implications of Schreiner's eschewal of the adventure genre.

Schreiner never entertains the entry of black South Africans into colonial intellectual life in her early works. As Lenta points out, "The dependence of whites in all areas of their lives on black labour is faithfully recorded [in The Story of an African Farm], as faithfully recorded as the sense of the author and her characters that these suppliers of labour are inevitably excluded from the social and intellectual life of whites" (25; cf. McClintock). When Blacks are not totally excluded, in Schreiner's later works, it is in terms of their capacity for assimilating white "civilization"; for example, in the journalistic Thoughts on South Africa (1923; written 1890-1901), "[The Chuana] takes to modern civilization with an ease that is astonishing, and his desire for learning is intense" (99). In what is apparently her sole reference to the intellectual achievements of black women, Schreiner adds in a footnote: "So considerable is the aptitude for abstract study displayed by the Bantu, that there are cases in which even Bantu females, preparing for the matriculation examination of the Cape University, are found not to be inferior to the average male Europeans sharing the same course of study" (Thoughts 127). Nor does Schreiner credit black South Africans with ah intellectual life of their own. Africans, supposed by nineteenth-century race theory to embody fewer stages of evolution than Europeans, are not credited with an ability for science or philosophy, but they can produce art. Perhaps alluding to the South African researches of philologist Wilhelm Bleek (1827-1875) (see Dubow 78ff), Schreiner grants that "[t]he language [the Bantu] speak is of a perfect construction, lending itself largely to figurative and poetical forms, yet capable of giving great precision to exact thought" (Thoughts 98). The dichotomy between art, and philosophy and science might help to account for Waldo's childhood reverence for the Bushman (San) cavepainter (African Farm 42-43), who is not presumed to have pursued truth (like Waldo's father), or truth and beauty (as does Waldo himself). The early Schreiner would appear to have subscribed to the view that the almost total disappearance of the San in the period and Karoo region in which she set The Story of an African Farm, is an outcome, not of the depredations of colonial whites, but of an inexorable evolutionary process (cf. Lenta 19).

9 I allude to Sedgwick's argument that, in contrast to the "lesbian continuum" identified by Adrienne Rich, the sphere of "homosexual" desire between men is discontinuous with other spheres of sanctioned "homosocial" desire, such as "male bonding" and intellectual collaboration (Sedgwick 1-3).

10 From a letter dated 8 July 1885.

11 On January 19, 1888, Schreiner writes to Ellis, "Fisher Unwin has sent me K.P.'s book. I am pretty well satisfied with it. The power of the book lies in its STIMULATING quality. That is the power which it has. It is the peculiarity of Pearson's mind that he stimulates almost to agony; it is not at all the result of my knowing him that makes me feel this, it was this quality which attracted me to him. Someone has said that the power of stimulating thought & feeling is the power of genius. Only genius can do it, but all genius doesn't do it. Mill does, Spencer doesn't to the same extent. Geothe [sic] does; Shiller [sic] does; Shiller [sic] does not at all. Whitman & Browning do, Tennyson does not at all. I personally prize the stimulaters [sic] most, I like a book you can only read a few pages of & then you have to throw it down[,] you have so many thoughts of your own. I have never fully analyzed what this stimulating power is but it is possibly only to a very complex nature, & is the result of their seeing things with something of that wonderful real complexity that exists in life. If I were dieing [sic] Pearson could stimulate me into getting up to work. This is his power, this is his value & the curious thing is he never understands it himself" ("Other Self" 439).

12 Barsby relates this more closely to the question of friendship between men and women: "it is only in escaping from the social meaning accorded sexual difference that friendship between men and women becomes a possibility, and in turn it is this possibility of friendship, as opposed to relations governed always by the 'sex-purchasing power' of men, that offers the 'only escape from the suffering which sexual relationships now inflict"'" (Barsby 32; the embedded quotation is from Schreiner, Olive Schreiner Letters 75).

13 "But," as Showalter observes, "Buddhist priests do not have wives" (Anarchy 58).

14 "[I]ntellectual life, like so much else in Victorian culture and society, was divided into 'public' and 'private' spheres: the public sphere was male and signified intellectual leadership of the nation and the empire; the private sphere was female and signified intellectual cultivation of civilized discourse" (David 9).

15 First and Scott note that "[als a writer, ... or as a polemicist within South Africa, Olive Schreiner was almost inevitably a 'man,' given the distribution of roles within the culture." They go on to conclude, with a finality that I cannot endorse, that "[s]he found it impossible to ['live like a man, but like a woman as well'] successfully. Her sexual identity was split, and there was no way for her as a woman to integrate the powerful, aspiring part of herself (the 'masculine')" (335).

16 In Schreiner's posthumously published and unfinished novel From Man to Man (1926), rumors of the character Baby-Bertie's affair at the age of 15 with her male tutor, and subsequent pregnancy, precipitate her ruin (81, 96-97, 167, 234, 326-27). Rebekah, the "sensual" BabyBertie's "intellectual" sister, marries a rich man she does not love in order to gain financial independence, but her writing is confined to a diary, kept in a tiny room subdivided from the bedroom of her four children. For Schreiner, marriage, at least without mutual "sympathy," is not a solution for the intellectual woman either (cf. Olive Schreiner Letters 91-94).

17 As a teenager, Schreiner went out to work, first as a shop assistant and then as governess to the children of various farmers. Some of her references to the first situation indicate sexual harassment (see First and Scott 72; Schoeman 312-15). Schreiner later writes: "I was the only girl I ever heard of as living five years as governess among the Boers without getting into some sort of sexual trouble" (qtd. in Schoeman 315).

18 "When I am with you," Lyndall tells Waldo, "I never know that I am a woman and you are man; I only know that we are both things that think. Other men when I am with them, whether I love them or not, they are mere bodies to me; but you are a spirit; I like you" (197).

19 In a prophetic dream, Lyndall's cousin Em sees a dead baby, and someone tells her: "It is Lyndall's baby." When Em tells Lyndall about her dream, she mutters to herself: "There are some wiser in their sleeping than in their waking" (219). In addition to Em's dream, there are times, as Bradford points out, when the text seems to tell us that Lyndall wants to abort her pregnancy. Riding wildly about in the farm buggy (African Farm 193; cf.186) is "an action all too recognizable to Victorian women" as an attempt to induce miscarriage (Bradford 635; cf. 639).

20 Cronwright-Schreiner destroyed many of the letters and journals that were the primary source material for his biography, and, as more recent biographers and scholars have shown from what survived, often distorted facts and events by the way he quoted from the documents. Cronwright has also been criticized for not writing about key figures in Schreiner's life, e.g., Karl Pearson. Considered by some to be vengeful and malicious, Cronwright's book has been the subject of systematic critical study by Liz Stanley (181-213).

21 Cronwright-Schreiner appears to read this back into the biography: "There can be no doubt that Olive herself would have reached the conclusions she came to on the mystery of life in any case, but with that qualification the influence the Stranger then had upon her, aiding her conclusions and defining the directions at that early age, was so great that I propose to tell all I know in detail" (Cronwright-Schreiner 80-81).

22 Willie Bertram is also supposed to have introduced Schreiner to Emerson's Essays (CronwrightSchreiner 82; Ellis, "Notes").

23 Letter, 10 April 1884. See also "Other Self" 439.

24 For example, Schreiner vehemently defended herself against accusations that George Meredith, as reader for Chapman and Hall, assisted her with the writing of The Story of an African Farm (Cronwright-Schreiner 153-56).

25 In a letter to Mrs. Francis Smith, 2 June 1908, Schreiner writes, "The influence of a Doctor over a woman is often just the same nature as that quite devilish influence which nurses so often get over the men they nurse, whom they draw into marrying them, and into the most terrible and compromising relations. One very curious thing about this relation between doctors and patients, and nurses and the men they nurse, is this-the extreme shortlivedness of the attraction if they ever recover full robust health" (Letters 280).

26 The other instance is the new farm overseer, Gregory Nazianzen Rose, whom Lyndall mocks for his wifeliness, and who dresses himself as a woman so as to attend Lyndall at her deathbed (African Farm 184, 251ff). In contrast to Waldo, however, Gregory's metamorphosis is not associated with the intellect.

27 "Increasingly, division and dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the male advanced in culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil while the female sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life, and thus was made ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could not bridge. The abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon the highest plane was one and the most serious result of this severance.... Man turned towards man; and parenthood, the divine gift of imparting human life, was severed from the loftiest and profoundest phases of human emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant and miserable life between the walls of her house, and Socrates lay in the Agora, discussing philosophy and morals with Alcibiades; and the race decayed at its core" (Woman 85-86).

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MARK SANDERS is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, forthcoming from Duke University Press, and his essays have appeared in Law Text Culture, Modern Fiction Studies, Interventions, and Diacritics.

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