Mimesis, metaphor and representation: Holding out an olive branch to the emergent schreiner canon [1]

Women's History Review

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 27-50

  Stanley, Liz ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247726183     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020100200278     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: a particular history of the senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. xiii-xiv
2. Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: photography and autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 1
3. Nancy Miller, Public Statements, Private Lives: academic memoirs for the nineties, Signs, 22 (1997), pp. 981-1015
4. Kenneth Plummer, Documents of Life: an introduction to the problems and literature of a humanistic method (London: Allen & Unwin, 1993)
5. Personal Narratives Group (Eds), Interpreting Women's Lives: feminist theory and personal narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
6. See here Liz Stanley, Biography as Microscope or Kaleidoscope? The Case of Hannah Cullwick's Relationship with Arthur Munby, Women's Studies International Forum, 10 (1987), pp. 19-31, for a discussion of the 'spotlight' approach and its alternatives
7. Greg Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), p. 200
8. and underpinned the late 1970s and 1980s attention to autobiography (and to a much lesser extent biography) in feminist work. For a number of excellent collections setting out the ground here, see Teresa Iles (Ed.), All Sides of the Subject: women and biography (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992)
9. Julia Swindells (Ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995)
10. Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson (Eds), Getting a Life: everyday uses of autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
11. Sidonie Smith & Julia Watson (Eds), Women, Autobiography, Theory: a reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998)
12. Pauline Polkey (Ed.), Women's Lives into Print: the theory, practice and writing of feminist auto/biography (London, Macmillan, 1999)
13. Pauline Polkey & Alison Donnell (Eds), Representing Lives: women and auto/biography (London: Macmillan, 2000)
14. Olive Schreiner was the foremost feminist writer and theorist of her age. Her key publications range across a number of genres and are internally marked by heteroglossia, and include: The Story of An African Farm (London: Chapman & Hall, 1883)
15. Dreams (London: Unwin, 1890)
16. Dream Life and Real Life. A Little African Story (London: Unwin, 1893)
17. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (London: Unwin, 1897)
18. Woman and Labour (London: Unwin, 1911)
19. Thoughts on South Africa (London: Unwin, 1923)
20. Stories, Dreams and Allegories (London: Unwin, 1923)
21. From Man to Man; or, perhaps only... (London: Unwin, 1926)
22. Undine (London and New York: Benn, 1929). My research has involved work in all the major archive collections
23. James Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: the play of tropes in culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
24. By 'feminist auto/biography' I mean an epistemologically-oriented concern with the intellectual and other ramifications of the shifting boundaries between self and other, present and past, writing and reading, fact and fiction, within the oral, visual and written texts that are 'biographies' and 'autobiographies' in both their formal and usually either textual or visual variants as well as in their everyday incarnations. Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: the theory and practice of feminist auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) contains my major theoretical statement about this idea and a set of exemplars which show it in action; for other uses
25. see Stanley, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick (London: Virago Press; and New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984)
26. The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davidson (London: The Women's Press, 1987)
27. From 'Self-Made Women' to 'Women's Made-Selves'? Audit Selves, Simulation and Surveillance in the Rise of Public Woman', in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury & Penny Summerfield (Eds), The Self-Made Woman (London: Routledge, 1999)
28. Is There Life in the Contact Zone? Auto/Biographical Practices and the Field of Representation in Writing Past Lives, in Pauline Polkey & Alison Donnell (Eds), Representing Lives: women and autobiography (London: Macmillan, 2000)
29. and, with particular relevance to this present discussion, Olive Schreiner, Woman of Ideas (London: Sage, 2001)
30. Indeed, I would argue they arise in work on 'other lives' in the present as well, and have argued this elsewhere (including in Liz Stanley & Sue Wise, Breaking Out Again (London, Routledge, 1993)
31. On the idea of a 'problematic', see David Morgan & Liz Stanley (Eds), Debates in Sociology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993)
32. See here Joan Hoff, Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis, Women's History Review, 3 (1994), pp. 149-168
33. and for the debate in Women's History Review, 1996, vol. 5, no. 1: June Purvis, Women's History and Post-Structuralism, pp. 5-7; Susan Kingsley Kent, Mistrials and Diatribulations, pp. 9-18
34. Caroline Ramazanoglu, Unravelling Postmodern Paralysis, pp. 19-23; Joan Hoff, A Reply to My Critics, pp. 25-30
35. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, pp. xiii-xiv
36. See here Liz Stanley, Encountering the Imperial and Colonial Past Through Olive Schreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, Women's Writing, 7 (2000), pp. 197-219
37. Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra: a trilogy (London: Cape, 1932)
38. Samuel 'Cron' Cronwright-Schreiner to Betty Molteno, 12 February 1921, Manuscripts & Archives Department, University of Cape Town
39. Rob Stones, Sociological Reasoning (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 176
40. One thinks here of the many attempts of August Strinberg to achieve the perfect likeness of himself, one which would be quintessential; on this, see Rugg, Picturing Ourselves
41. Samuel 'Cron' Cronwright-Schreiner, The Life of Olive Schreiner (London: Fisher Unwin, 1924)
42. I am using this term broadly here, to encompass not only a 'look/see' attribution of meaning, but also acts of incomprehension and misrepresentation as well. In the case of Olive Schreiner, the latter is emblematically represented by Cronwright-Schreiner's The Life of Olive Schreiner, which systematically misrepresented, and his The Letters of Olive Schreiner (London: Fisher Unwin, 1924), which systematically bowdlerised what was included and suppressed, or more usually destroyed, what was not
43. James Fernandez (Ed.), Beyond Metaphor: the theory of tropes in anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991)
44. See here chapter 7 of Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, pp. 181-213
45. Gordon Haight, George Eliot: a biography (London, Clarendon Press, 1968)
46. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Dr. Arnold, Florence Nightingale, General Gordon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1934)
47. Jean Grimshaw, Philosophy and the Feminist Imagination, paper presented at 'Transformations', Feminist Theory Conference, University of Lancaster, 1997
48. Stanley, 'Is There Life in the Contact Zone?'; and Stanley, Olive Schreiner
49. Thus, Cronwright-Schreiner claimed Olive Schreiner exaggerated; this is repeated by Ruth First & Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (London: Andre Deutsch, 1980)
50. drawing on his account; and through twenty years of secondary referencing this appears 'as fact' in Sally Ledger's discussion in her The New Woman: fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
51. Cronwright-Schreiner, The Life of Olive Schreiner
52. See here Virginia Woolf, Olive Schreiner, in Virginia Woolf Women and Writing (Introduced by Michele Barrett; London: The Women's Press, 1925/1979), pp. 180-183) drawing upon Cronwright-Schreiner's The Letters of Olive Schreiner
53. See here Ruth First & Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner, drawing on Marion Friedmann's Olive Schreiner, a Study in Latent Meanings (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand, 1955)
54. See here, for instance, Nadine Gordimer's The Prison-House of Colonialism: review of First & Scott's Olive Schreiner in Carol Barash (Ed.), An Olive Schreiner Reader (London: Pandora Press, 1987, reprinted from the Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1980), pp. 221-227
55. See here, for instance, Carol Barash, Virile Womanhood: Olive Schreiner's fantasies of a master race, Women's Studies International Forum, 9 (1986), pp. 333-340
56. See here, for instance, Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century, vol. 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
57. See here, for instance, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Fictions of the Female Self: Charlotte Bronte, Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield (London: Macmillan, 1991)
58. See here, for instance, Carolyn Burdett, Thrown Together: Olive Schreiner, writing and politics, in Kate Campbell (Ed.) Critical Feminism: argument in the discipline (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), pp. 107-121
59. See here, for instance, Sally Ledger, The New Woman
60. Liz Stanley, How Olive Schreiner Vanished, Leaving Behind Only Her Asthmatic Personality, Studies in Sexual Politics, no. 8 (Manchester: Sociology Department, University of Manchester, 1985)
61. When Schreiner's own writing is looked at, typically this does not involve tracing her changing ideas over the more than forty years of her writing life, but instead focusing on one or two quotations from a text divorced from the context in which it was written and read. For a contrary approach, see Stanley, 'Encountering the Imperial and Colonial Past through Olive Schreiner's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland'
62. Dening, Performances, p. 197
63. Ledger, The New Woman, pp. 74, 75, 80-81
64. This is a view argued in my introduction to Liz Stanley, Feminist Praxis (London: Routledge, 1990) and in the introduction David Morgan and I wrote to Debates in Sociology. It is also brilliantly argued in relation to history by Michel de Certeau in The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975/1988)