The New Woman and the New Man as Androgynous in The Story of an African Farm
Faculty Sponsor
Ingrid Ranum, Gonzaga University
Research Project Abstract
Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm is often noted as “the first New Woman novel” for its female protagonist’s adventuring outside the domestic sphere, but it redefines masculinity just as much as it redefines femininity due to the way that the two are understood in conjunction (Richardson 114). Schreiner does more than redefine the two specific genders: she strives to unravel the cultural understanding of gender as binary and static. In order to do so, she blends traits traditionally masculine and feminine in the three nontraditional characters of Lyndall, Waldo, and Gregory. Schreiner herself, in her 1911 Woman and Labour calls this remodeling “a great movement of the sexes towards each other.” In this paper, I will examine the ways in which these three characters perform and mix gender as well as their relationships in order to understand Schreiner’s contribution to the New Woman movement with this novel.
Session Number
SS9
Location
Weyerhaeuser 305
Abstract Number
SS9-c
The New Woman and the New Man as Androgynous in The Story of an African Farm
Weyerhaeuser 305
Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm is often noted as “the first New Woman novel” for its female protagonist’s adventuring outside the domestic sphere, but it redefines masculinity just as much as it redefines femininity due to the way that the two are understood in conjunction (Richardson 114). Schreiner does more than redefine the two specific genders: she strives to unravel the cultural understanding of gender as binary and static. In order to do so, she blends traits traditionally masculine and feminine in the three nontraditional characters of Lyndall, Waldo, and Gregory. Schreiner herself, in her 1911 Woman and Labour calls this remodeling “a great movement of the sexes towards each other.” In this paper, I will examine the ways in which these three characters perform and mix gender as well as their relationships in order to understand Schreiner’s contribution to the New Woman movement with this novel.
