This Nation Which Is Not One: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

Abstract

When Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) places this ironized paraphrase of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) in the mouth of her ‘New Woman’ Lyndall, she invites us to wonder not only what new kind of woman or man might emerge from such meditations, but also what new ‘nation’. Set in the middle to late nineteenth century, what form of governance might grow from the three childhoods in South Africa with which Schreiner opens her famous novel, The Story of an African Farm (first published by London’s Chapman & Hall in 1883): those of Em, the sympathetic but conventionally cautious daughter of a farm-owning Boer widow; Waldo, the dreamy, inventive son of a German overseer; and Lyndall, the strong-minded, orphaned daughter of an Englishman and stepdaughter of the unsympathetic Afrikaaner matriarch, Tant Sannie? For Schreiner and Tocqueville, a nation’s development mirrors that of its people, and as Tocqueville explains in the passage from which Schreiner chose the epigraph for her novel, a nation’s development is determined in its cradles. Schreiner quotes only Tocqueville’s Wordsworthian remarks on childhood: