“A Striving and an Ending in Nothing”: Olive Schreiner and the Reproductive Politics of Empire

Dan Shea

Charles Kingsley announced in a lecture in 1858 that since “about four-fifths of the globe cannot be said as yet to be in anywise inhabited or cultivated, or in the state into which men could put it by a fair supply of population, and industry, and human intellect,” it is not merely England’s destiny, but indeed its “duty, one of the noblest duties, to help the increase of the English race as much as possible.” Throughout the nineteenth century, imperial rhetoric not only maintained, with Kingsley, that the English had a duty to reproduce themselves around the world for the good of the “English race,” but also warned that the success of the British empire ultimately rested upon Britons’ reproduction rates. As Anna Davin argues in “Imperialism and Motherhood,” such rhetoric cautioned that “[i]f the British population did not increase fast enough to fill the empty spaces of empire, others would.” Procreation became a means of competing for imperial territories during the late-Victorian period in particular, when, according to Barbara Brookes, “public rhetoric was loud and insistent on the need for more births for the good of the nation and the empire.”

The South African-born feminist and New Woman novelist Olive Schreiner understood that the imperial project’s reproductive drive demanded that British women, particularly those in the colonies, concede to a daunting reproductive effort at the behest of the empire. In this essay I read Schreiner’s 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm as a feminist critique of the reproductive politics of imperialism. Depicting imperialism as a specifically masculine reproductive endeavor (a departure from the common depictions showing the cold Queen Mother who, in Robert Southey’s words, “cast her swarms” of progeny onto foreign shores), Schreiner emphasizes the strain put on the women of the colonies whose social value was determined by their willingness to produce the robust sons required for global and “racial” dominance. In The Story of an African Farm, considered the first novel in English written by a South African, Schreiner resists this imperial reproductive demand with her depictions of rampant reproductive failures among her English characters in South Africa. Dotted with veiled abortion attempts and stillborn children as well figurative reproductive failures such as destroyed or unpublished manuscripts and discarded artistic offspring, Schreiner’s novel offers not only a critique of Victorian women’s confining social status, but of the imperial project which relied upon women’s continued subjugation.