McClintock 1995

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. Routledge,1995.

Ch 7: Olive Schreiner

• 259: The publication in Britain of her novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), won her overnight fame, the admiration of some of the great luminaries of her time and the distinction of being the first colonial writer to be widely acclaimed in Britain.
• 265: When the family lived near Cradock, one of the garrison towns strung along the northern frontier, Schreiner was allowed to rifle at will through the local, privately endowed library, a freedom not available to many white girls of her time and certainly not to African women or men.
• 278: For Schreiner, the clock is a grotesque fetish of Victorian industrial progress: mechanical, mundane, deadly. If male colonials extolled the redemptive fetish of clock-time, for Schreiner the missionary bell tolls death; the clock, like the multiplication table, the ancient arithmetic, the Latin grammar, offers only the cold algebra of reason. For Schreiner, the colonial fetish for rational time and progress is a macabre aberration of the spirit. The soul, however, "has seasons of its own; periods not found in any calendar." The singular struggle of Schreiner's novel, indeed the struggle of much of Schreiner's life, is to render an alternative, redemptive calendar of the soul.
• 279: For Waldo, books, like nature, reveal "the presence of God." Books offer the delirious, imperial promise of knowing the final secrets of the world: "why the crystals grow in such beautiful shapes, why lightning runs to the iron, why black people are black." Books offer Waldo, as they did Schreiner, a refuge from cosmic abandonment and the scourge of loneliness; books reveal men and women to whom not only "kopjes" and stones were calling out imperatively, "What are we and how came we here? Understand and know us," but to whom "the old, old relations between man and man...could not be made still and forgotten...So he was not alone, not alone."
• 279-80 Schreiner and Walter Benjamin on allegory