A Woman’s Novel: Olive Schreiner,

Mona Caird, and Hélène Cixous’s

Écriture Féminine
Marina Cano, University of Limerick

Abstract
In the 1880s and 1890s, New Woman writers changed the face of
British society and British fiction through their sexually open works,
which critiqued old notions of marriage, and through their stylistic
experimentation, which announced the modernist novel. New Woman
scholarship has often studied their work in connection with that of
French feminists of the late twentieth century, such as Julia Kristeva,
Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. This article reconsiders the nature
of this connection through a close examination of novels by two of
the most popular New Woman authors, Mona Caird (1854–1932) and
Olive Schreiner (1855–1920). I read Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889)
and Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) through the lens
of Hélène Cixous’s theories of écriture féminine, or feminine writing, to
question the accusation of biological determinism which is frequently
directed at both groups of writers. By applying Cixous’s notions of
feminine aesthetics, bisexuality, and alterity to Caird and Schreiner,
my study provides the basis for a new understanding of their novels.
More generally, it complements and qualifies the connection between
the New Woman and so-called French feminism, thereby helping
produce a more complex framework to study the fin de siècle.
Keywords: New Woman, fiction, fin de siècle, écriture féminine, Olive
Schreiner, Mona Caird, Hélène Cixous

Victoriographies 9.1 (2019): 1–18

DOI: 10.3366/vic.2019.0323
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/vic
 Victoriographies

On or about January 1883, the character of the novel in English

changed. This date saw the publication of Olive Schreiner’s The Story
of an African Farm, and wide acclaim soon followed. In Cape Town,
the chemist would take no payment from its author; in London,
a military doctor described African Farm as ‘the most wonderful book
he ever read’ and jumped at the opportunity to meet Schreiner (Olive
Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 17 August 1885, Letter 108, Olive Schreiner
Letters). The Story of an African Farm inaugurated a fictional genre, the
New Woman novel, which produced over one hundred novels in the
next twenty years (Ledger 157–8). The New Woman was a highly
ambiguous figure at the turn of the nineteenth century: partly an actual
woman, partly a fictional archetype, and partly a fabrication of the
periodical press.1 Magazines such as Punch and the Cornhill Magazine
often depicted the New Woman as a masculine figure – in character,
style, and dress – therefore lacking the feminine qualities valued by the
Victorians. On and off the printed page, the New Woman opposed old
notions of marriage and childbearing and demanded greater equality
between the sexes. Her writings, in their mass appeal, contributed to the
sociopolitical changes that led to voting rights for women. In their
anticipation of the stylistic experimentation typical of the early twentieth
century (multiple voices, nonlinear structures, and psychologically
driven stories), these works helped shape the modernist novel of the
1920s and the modern novel of the later twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries.2
Despite its impact at the time of publication, New Woman fiction
was forgotten for the better part of the twentieth century, overshadowed
by the more radical figure of the suffragette. Since the 1970s and 1980s,
these writings have been brought back to public light thanks to the
arduous work of Elaine Showalter, Sally Ledger, Ann Ardis, Lyn Pykett,
and Ann Heilmann, among many others. Some of these scholars
illuminate the connection between New Women (writing in the 1880s
and 1890s) and French feminists (writing in the 1960s and 1970s).
Heilmann, the main exponent of this trend, has devoted two full volumes
to exploring these links. In New Woman Fiction (2000), Heilmann notes
the contextual similarities between the two fin de siècles (ideological
instability, the spirit of innovation, national and international crises)
to explain the conceptual connections between writers of the two eras
(their professional and educational endeavours, sexual revisionism, and
disapproval of patriarchal traditions). In her subsequent New Woman
Strategies (2004), she extends her argument to the stylistic parallels
between first-wave fiction and second-wave theory. Drawing on French
feminists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, Heilmann

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analyses Sarah Grand’s portrayal of femininity, Olive Schreiner’s use of

allegory, and Mona Caird’s revision of mythology.3
The main argument of scholars reading New Woman fiction
through the lens of French feminism is that writers of the 1880s
can be seen as foremothers of the women’s movement of the 1970s.
For Heilmann, New Woman authors anticipate French feminist
concepts of mimicry, femininity, self-reflexivity, libidinality, and perfor-
mativity. Similarly, Lynn Pykett applies Luce Irigaray’s notion of mimicry
(women’s strategy to overplay and thus expose male discourse) to short
stories by New Woman writer George Egerton. Pykett concludes that,
through her subversive mimicry of masculine forms, Egerton depicts
a primitive world where women appear in closer connection with
nature. Heilmann, in turn, sees performativity as the key to New Woman
fiction, since it is through their stylistic experimentation and their
devising of new, typically feminine, ways of writing that authors such
as Grand, Schreiner and Caird advanced their feminist claims at the
turn of the nineteenth century.
Although this scholarship has considerably illuminated the relation
between 1880s and 1970s feminism, there remain important questions
to be addressed for a fuller understanding of this connection. The
prevailing critical consensus is that the two feminist cohorts were guided
by theories of biological determinism, according to which the origin
of cultural and behavioural differences lies in physiological factors.
Pykett maintains that late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses
are both firmly rooted within the notion of binaries (men/women,
masculine/feminine, good/bad) (208), and Heilmann identifies
parallels between Egerton’s and Cixous’s conflation of femininity and
motherhood (New Woman Fiction 154). For others, New Woman fiction is
in conversation, and often in agreement, with late-nineteenth-century
theories of eugenics and hereditary degeneration, which asserted
that character and personality are deducible from one’s body, and that
these are inevitably transmitted from parent to child.4
Responding to the pioneering contributions of Heilmann and
others, this essay re-examines the connections between the New Woman
and French feminism. It questions the general essentialist paradigm
associated with first- and second-wave feminism to produce a more
nuanced understanding of the New Woman phenomenon and the New
Woman novel – and of the history of the woman’s novel, by extension.
This is conducted through a close examination of novels by two of the
most popular New Woman authors, Mona Caird (1854–1932) and Olive
Schreiner (1855–1920). Journalist and novelist Mona Caird is remem-
bered as the author of a controversial article on the failure of marriage

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(‘Marriage’) that elicited over 27,000 responses sent to the Daily Telegraph
in 1888. Her novel The Wing of Azrael (1889), which I examine in the first
part of this paper, has recently been reproduced in the first modern
edition, and in this sense my work will participate in the process of
restoring it to view.5 Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883),
analysed in the second half of my essay, needs little introduction. It is
regularly cited as the first feminist novel and Schreiner as a forerunner
and ‘high priestess’ of the twentieth-century woman’s novel (Stead 64).6
The Wing of Azrael and The Story of an African Farm are analysed
through the prism of Hélène Cixous’s feminist theories. New Woman
criticism has tended to group all feminists working in France in the 1970s
under one label, ‘French feminism’. Yet the writers normally associated
with this term (Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous) have never conceived of
themselves as a group, and have followed different career paths.7 Julia
Kristeva is a linguist; Luce Irigaray is a psychoanalyst, trained under
Jacques Lacan; and Hélène Cixous is a creative writer, as well as a
philosopher.8 It is this double identity, as novelist and theorist, together
with her extensive attention to the process of (female) literary creation,
that makes Cixous the obvious choice for my project. The foreshadowing
of Cixousian écriture féminine, or feminine writing, in The Wing of Azrael
and The Story of an African Farm confirms earlier arguments about the
connections between 1880s and 1970s feminism; but, I argue, this also
leads us to question general, fixed notions of gender, biology, and binary
thinking at the fin de siècle.
In 2019 Cixous might seem to have been superseded by later
feminists, such as Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, and interest in the
New Woman and French feminism to have been replaced by studies of
race and postcolonialism in New Woman fiction (see, for example,
Beetham and Heilmann; O’Toole). Yet the work of Cixous has never
gone out of fashion. She has continued to publish, and still publishes, an
average of two or three books a year. A Jew of German origin, born in
Algeria while it was still a French colony, Cixous and her work might at
first appear to be all but indifferent to discourses of race and power.9
Quite the contrary, her writing is a critique of all forms of oppression and
a celebration of love, difference, and plurality – all quite relevant in the
current age of post-truth politics and increasing exclusions. And nowhere
is this so obvious as in her notion of écriture féminine, or feminine writing.

Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael

Hélène Cixous maintains that women have traditionally operated within
man’s discourse, which tends to be organised around binary oppositions:

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 Schreiner, Caird, and Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

day/night, man/woman, sun/moon, mind/body, and so on. In her

celebrated essay ‘Sorties: Out and Out’, Cixous attempts to reconcep-
tualise the oppositions that oppress women: to break this pattern, woman
must ‘make up her own tongue’ by reconnecting with her body (95–6).
This is écriture féminine, whereby woman will write her body and ‘make
up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes, and rhetorics,
orders and codes’ (94). Écriture féminine is eminently experimental:
it aims to create a new language outside traditional male dialectics
that will effect the liberation of the oppressed/female. Cixous’s own
definition of ‘a woman’s coming to writing’ defies grammatical
hierarchies, rules of textual formatting and strict divisions between
poetry and prose:

A Woman’s Coming to Writing:

Who
Invisible, foreign, secret, hidden, mysterious, black, forbidden
Am I… (‘Sorties’ 69)

Mona Caird’s novel The Wing of Azrael (1889) exhibits early traces of this
type of ‘[i]nvisible, foreign, [and] secret’ writing that Cixous would call
écriture féminine eighty years later. The Wing of Azrael is the story of Viola
Sedley from childhood to young adulthood and marriage. Rebellious
by nature, Viola is tamed by her pious mother, whose own unfailing
submission to her husband only serves to accentuate his tyrannical
tendencies. The patriarch, Mr. Sedley, demands that young Viola save
the family finances by marrying into the neighbouring aristocratic
family, the Dendraiths. Despite her antipathy for Philip Dendraith, and
her knowledge of his sadistic tendencies (she had witnessed his cruelty
to animals), Viola cannot refuse to fulfil her filial duties and ends
up trapped in a marriage of misery and abuse. Philip soon becomes
her jailer, but when her old admirer Harry Lancaster reappears, the
temptation to seek an escape becomes too strong.
The limited literary criticism surrounding The Wing of Azrael
has focused, quite rightly, on its forceful complaint against matrimony.
Its modern editor, Alexandra Warwick, emphasises the sociopolitical
context in which the novel was published (the Whitechapel murders
by Jack the Ripper and the matrimonial acts of 1857–84), and claims
that this is a novel in the tradition of fictional realism, with no
commitment to stylistic innovation (Warwick xi). Yet, in the original
preface, Caird forcefully criticises ‘novels with a purpose’, and insists
that the novelist is primarily an artist ‘selecting images of reality
which group themselves after a certain fashion’ (x). Although at

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first sight The Wing of Azrael is not revolutionary in its feminist

aesthetics, or in the way it seems to group its images, I argue that
the typically mid-Victorian beginning – reported by an omniscient,
aloof, and presumably male narrator – evolves towards a more
complex narrative mode that emphasises the liminality of the boundaries
between woman’s inner and outer realities and reconnects with the
female body. Such an uneven scale of feminist formal experimentation
makes The Wing of Azrael an ideal work in which to witness the gestation
of feminine writing.
The first volume of The Wing of Azrael largely belongs to the art of
realist fiction, traditionally regarded as masculine.10 It opens with the
child Viola’s metaphysical meditations:
How had Thought prevailed against that Nothingness, risen out of its
heart, if it were not some real thing stronger than all? Viola could not have
expressed these Questions in words; but her ideas, preceding language
(though so intimately related to it), stretched out into regions where
she could find no answer, and where no answer was to be found.
Conceptions of God, Nature, Destiny, were running riot in the child’s
consciousness, her strict religious training raising questions without giving
solutions. (10)

The traditional omniscient narrator interprets this passage for

the reader, since Viola ‘could not have expressed these Questions
in words’ – hence, the need for the (male?) narrator to report her
thoughts in an orderly and coherent way. There is an obvious
inconsistency between form and content. Whereas Viola’s acquired
notions about the world are ‘running riot’, language is heavily controlled
in the fragment: commas, semi-colons, and full stops rigidly delimit
phrases, clauses, and sentences, handing them ready-made to the
reader and presenting language as a well-structured hierarchy. The
potential that is lost here is the full exploration of Viola’s ‘ideas,
preceding language (though so intimately related to it)’. A more
experimental opening would have attempted to convey Viola’s
pre-Oedipal thoughts in disjointed, ungrammatical child language.
The first half of The Wing of Azrael may seem too conservative in
aesthetic and gender terms, hardly achieving that hybridity of form
and genre Cixous calls for, and Caird implies in her preface. The second
half, however, moves toward a less strictly controlled narrative,
where Viola’s inner tumults begin to surface through the prose. On
his return to Upton, Viola’s former suitor Harry Lancaster befriends
a Mrs. Lincoln. The true New Woman of the novel, Mrs. Lincoln has
recently abandoned her abusive husband and now lives independently.

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 Schreiner, Caird, and Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

When Viola inadvertently spies on them one evening, walking along the
seashore, her jealousy is notably aroused:

She [Viola] was dimly conscious of the stirring wind and the unresting
sea-sound, dimly conscious of the golden glow that began to light up the
sky. The waves sounded hoarse and desperate. Deeper and deeper grew
the blood-red stain upon the waters, and the land seemed to have caught
fire. The swiftest cloud-streaks were overtaken and their cool white turned
into gold. (219)

This passage is very different from that quoted above. It possesses a

special musical quality, achieved through the repetition and alliteration
of the phoneme /s/, which mimics the sound of the sea: ‘sea-sound’,
‘sky’, ‘waves’, ‘sounded’, ‘desperate’. Through the abundance of
coordinated phrases (‘deeper and deeper’, ‘hoarse and desperate’),
this passage echoes the lapping of the waves, and anticipates Cixous’s
attempt to recapture the waves, floods, and outbursts of ‘this body
that has been worse than confiscated’ (Cixous, ‘Sorties’ 97). The
mounting waves are a symptom of Viola’s newly awakened jealousy
and desire. Through form and content, the novel conveys how her
mind and body have finally ‘caught fire’. Whereas the first episode
merely told the reader of Viola’s passionate nature, this one allows
her temperament to emerge stylistically, thereby connecting the reader
with the ‘unheard-of songs’ of Viola’s body (Cixous, ‘Laugh’ 876).
The greatest leap from the established realist tradition appears in
volume three of the novel, which records Viola’s attempt to abandon
Philip and her subsequent murder of her husband, whom Viola stabs
when he frustrates this attempt. The intensity of Viola’s reconnection
with her body becomes obvious during the final family party, where
Philip forces Viola to wear her wedding dress. A clear symbol of his
ownership, the dress has an increasingly suffocating effect on Viola as
the evening advances. When one of the guests compliments Mrs. Sedley
on her daughter’s appearance, Viola feels how ‘(It clasped her
close, burning, burning – )’ (Caird, Wing 234). Perhaps not reaching
the level of experimentation characteristic of Cixous, this passage
shows Caird reshaping literary tradition through her unconventional
use of repetition and ellipsis. Caird juxtaposes Viola’s inner and outer
reality, the guest’s superficial comments and their effect on the heroine.
When a few minutes later Harry, his mother, and his sister are
announced, Viola looses all linguistic control: struggling to answer her
companion’s trivial enquiries, the heroine disjointedly mumbles
‘Hunting; no – I – not hunting, – I don’t care for hunting, – very
much’ (235). This hesitation suggests Viola’s breathing difficulties, a

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response to seeing Harry shortly before their planned elopement

and what she perceives as the strangling effect of her dress. There is
a pointed contrast between the narrator’s earlier articulate rendition
of Viola’s thoughts and the loss of conventional speech patterns here,
as Viola shakes off the late-Victorian patriarchal institution of
matrimony.
The last chapters of The Wing of Azrael contain some of the best
examples of early écriture féminine in the history of women’s writing. Viola
has agreed to elope with Harry after much coaxing, but they must wait
for Philip’s scheduled visit to London. Following their amorous
encounter on the beach (Viola’s first experience of sexual pleasure),
the heroine is terrified that the scheme might fail:
As her eyes continued gazing into the dusk, a strange change seemed to
come over the face of the waters, and she felt herself thrill with nameless
horror. This great grey tossing ocean appeared to be moving rapidly
from west to east in volumes indescribably vast, as if it were being sucked
away by some distant whirlpool; and it went sweeping on and on, with
dreadful steady swiftness, till of a sudden it came to the edge of a
bottomless abyss, into which it rushed headlong with a wild roar, dragging
after it the waters from all the seas and all the rivers in the world. And as it
fell down and down into the black Infinite, the awful roar gradually died
away, and the water fell and fell in perfect darkness and perfect
silence – for ever! (285)

This poetic passage exposes Caird’s final abandonment of the

narratorial control typical of traditional realist fiction. Her sentences
are unusually long, the central one encompassing six coordinate and
subordinate clauses. Such complex syntactic assemblage, where clauses
are randomly accumulated rather than ordered hierarchically, can be
read as a rejection of the established linguistic structures that Cixous
would rethink in the 1970s. This collection of phrases and clauses mimic
again the motion of the sea, and drag the reader into the text, just as the
ocean ‘drag[s] after it the waters from all the seas and rivers’.
The ending of The Wing of Azrael expands on the cyclicality
of Caird’s feminine writing. Viola’s murder of her husband when he
cruelly frustrates the elopement is a repetition of an earlier scene in the
novel. As a child, Viola had nearly killed Philip by pushing him out of
the window when he tortured her dog (46–52). By the end of the novel,
the murder is finally accomplished in the appropriately named
‘Death Chamber’, where centuries earlier, one of Philip’s ancestors
had killed his wife. As Patricia Murphy notes, Viola’s act constitutes a
reversal and rewriting of patriarchal history, which is transferred to a

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 Schreiner, Caird, and Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

system of feminine cycles (Murphy 183). Viola stabs her husband with a
sixteenth-century dagger (Harry’s wedding present), which Philip insists
on confiscating. An obvious phallic symbol, the dagger is an ironic
element in the novel that intimates that Viola kills patriarchy with its
own weapons.
When Harry discovers the murder, he is horrified, and a
disappointed Viola decides to leave Upton on her own after rejecting
Harry’s attempts to ‘save her’. Rambling along the shore chased by
her lover, Viola presumably commits suicide by jumping off a cliff, as
indeed the ending has generally been understood (Heilmann, New
Woman Strategies 182; Murphy 187; Žabicka 17). Yet the fact that the
closing paragraph of the novel largely embraces a primitive form of
feminine writing intimates a more optimistic conclusion. Patricia
Murphy reads Viola’s murder of her husband as a sign of defeat,
and her presumed suicide as the appropriate closing of the novel (187).
I argue, however, that this murder unleashes a journey into the primal or
pre-Oedipal realm. ‘The scene was obliterated’, the novel concludes,
‘darkness everywhere; over the interminable uplands, in their profound
solitude, in the shrouded heavens, and over the sea: pitch-black,
rayless, impenetrable darkness’ (Caird, Wing 312). This ‘impenetrable
darkness’ suggests a return to the maternal womb, and the surrounding
sea being the amniotic liquid that envelops Viola. For Cixous, ‘The
womb is all the world. The child is made from all sides. Throughout
months, years. It is not me, it is at the crossing of my thinking
body and the flux of living events that the thing is secreted’ (Cixous,
Stigmata 119). The punctuation of Caird’s final sentence (her irregular
use of commas, colons, and semi-colons) and her unfinished list of
adjectives contribute to this sense of flux and living, which imply that
Viola’s life, like feminine writing and the feminine self, is after all
open-ended.

Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) is also part
of this cycle of feminine writing. Set in the rural South Africa of the
1860s, the novel portrays the childhood and early adulthood of Em,
Lyndall, and Waldo. The three live on the farm of the book’s title under
the care of Em’s Boer stepmother, Tant’ Sannie, and the German
overseer, Otto Faber (Waldo’s father). This peaceful atmosphere is upset
by the arrival of Bonaparte Blenkins, a charlatan who tries to seize the
farm by any means possible, including driving Otto to an early death.
Lyndall, the novel’s New Woman, is the only one who systematically

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rebels against abuse and injustice, as a child (challenging Tant’ Sannie

and Bonaparte) and as an adult (by leaving the farm and getting
entangled in an illicit romance).
In African Farm, feminine writing is repeatedly associated
with Waldo Farber, and that challenges the fault line of biological
essentialism ascribed to New Woman fiction. In Part One of the novel,
Bonaparte Blenkins whips Waldo under the false allegation that he has
stolen some dried peaches, and then locks him in the fuel-house
overnight:
Ah, it was going to end at last. Nothing lasts forever, not even the night.
How was it he had never thought of that before? For in all that long dark
night he had been very strong, had never been tired, never felt pain, had
run on and on, up and down, up and down; he had not dared to stand still,
and he had not known it would end. He had been so strong, that when he
struck his head with all his force upon the stone wall it did not stun him nor
pain him – only made him laugh. That was a dreadful night [….] He
prayed aloud, very loud, and he got no answer; when he listened it was all
quite quiet.

[….]

That was a long wild night, and wild thoughts came and went in it; but they
left their marks behind them forever […] And now the dawn was coming,
and at last he was very tired. He shivered and tried to draw the shirt up over
his shoulders. They were getting stiff. He had never known they were cut in
the night. He looked up at the white light that came in through the hole at
the top of the door and shuddered. Then he turned his face back to the
ground and slept again. (92–3)

After being whipped by Bonaparte, Waldo’s connection to the body,

and therefore his feminine voice in Cixousian parlance, intensify.
Refusing the grammatical rules of masculine discourse, Waldo joins
his sentences with coordinating conjunctions, customarily connecting
phrases and clauses: ‘And now the dawn was coming, and at last
he was very tired.’ The repetitions in Waldo’s stream of consciousness
(‘never’, ‘wild’, ‘up and down’) reveal the qualities of his feminine
voice: if Bonaparte’s whip, like Viola’s dagger, signifies the phallus,
Waldo’s rebellion through his ‘wild’ language and behaviour (striking
his own head against the wall) overturns patriarchal linguistic and
power structures. The passage reflects his upset mental state:
the numerous repetitions suggest that Waldo’s mind, after
undergoing severe shock, can hardly produce conventionally coherent
thought.

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 Schreiner, Caird, and Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

The connection between language and the body is noticeable in

this passage. Cixous equates the female text and the female body:

Text, my body: traversed by lilting flows; listen to me […] it is the ryth-me

that laughs you; the one intimately addressed who makes all metaphors, all
body(?) – bodies(?) – possible and desirable, who is no more describable
than god, soul, or the Other; the part of you that puts space between
yourself and pushes you to inscribe your woman’s style in language.
(‘Sorties’ 95)

Without attaining this level of experimentation, Schreiner’s text

possesses a certain ‘ryth-me’ too. Its poetic quality emerges in the
passage quoted above through alliteration, anaphora and parallelism:
‘quite quiet’, ‘he had been very strong, had never been tired’, ‘had run
on and on’. These repetitions and coordinated pairs convey the dizziness
that Waldo must feel after pushing his head through the wall. They add
to the ‘ryth-me’ of the text – that is, the textual rhythm that corresponds
to bodily pulses – implying a rocking movement, as if Waldo were trying
to console himself after torture.
Cixous is interested in ‘the Other’ and ‘all body(?) – bodies(?)’, not
only the female body: unity and inclusion, rather than exclusion, are
central to her philosophy (‘Sorties’ 95). This is the core argument
against habitual accusations of biological determinism – according
to which character and personality are determined by one’s body.
True, for Cixous, the possibility of motherhood makes a woman
generally more open to the Other – the Other being that which
cannot be theorised, because it is ‘elsewhere, outside: absolutely other.
It doesn’t settle down’ (71). Cixous revels in woman’s reproductive
capacity, noting that woman ‘writes in white ink’, for there is ‘always
within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk’ (‘Laugh’ 881).
There ‘always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced
by the other’ (881). Although these claims seem to be the basis for her
alleged essentialism, to accuse Cixous of biological determinism is to
simplify the subtleties of her philosophy. For Cixous, men are also
capable of écriture féminine, for there are men ‘able to love love’, and
‘therefore, to love others, to want them’ (Cixous 881). Some of her main
examples of feminine writing come, in fact, from texts written by men:
notably, Franz Kafka, Jean Genet, James Joyce (the subject of her
doctoral thesis) and William Shakespeare, whom she calls ‘that
being-of-a-thousand-beings’ (‘Sorties’ 98).
Similarly, in The Story of an African Farm, feminine writing is
frequently associated with male characters, which disrupts the notion
that biology is destiny and adds one more layer to the radicalism of

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Schreiner’s writing.11 As the character with the greatest openness

towards the Other, Waldo Farber is a good example of bisexuality as
defined by Cixous. Bisexuality, Cixous’s ideal, is
the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and
insistent in different ways according to the individual, the nonexclusion of
difference or of a sex, and starting with this ‘permission’ one gives oneself,
the multiplication of the effects of desire’s inscription on every part of the
body and the other body. (Cixous, ‘Sorties’ 85)

This illustrates the impossibility of making straightforward claims

about Cixous: experimentation, philosophy, bisexuality, the body, and
the Other are all interconnected in her work. For historical reasons,
woman tends to be more bisexual than man, or what is the same, more
receptive towards the Other: ‘[I]n a certain way woman is bisexual – man
having been trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality
[b]y insisting on the primacy of the phallus and implementing it’
(‘Sorties’ 85). The reason behind gender differences seems more
cultural than biological here.
The Story of an African Farm resonates with Cixous’s idea that the
best writing is neither male nor female, but feminine, which is not
exclusive to woman. Waldo’s bisexuality is a policy of nonexclusion, and
the presence of the Other within him remains constant throughout
the novel. When the children Waldo, Em, and Lyndall sit under a rock
decorated with old Bushman paintings, Waldo feels as if ‘the stones were
talking with you’, and imagines the story of the Bushman artist, ‘who was
different from the rest […] He worked hard, very hard, to find the juice
to make the paint; and then he found this place where the rocks hang
over, and he painted them. To us they are only strange things, that make
us laugh; but to him they were very beautiful’ (15–16). Passages like this,
which exemplify Waldo’s/Schreiner’s sympathy for the oppressed and
their openness toward the Other, contradict the frequent charge that
the author supported British imperialism.12 Like the Bushman, Waldo
possesses some artistic pretensions: at fourteen, he designs a shearing
machine, ‘his first-born’ (Schreiner 73). When Bonaparte cynically
praises the machine, Waldo feels that ‘[h]ere was one who liked the thing
that had been created in him’. Whereas Lyndall seems to lack all
maternal instinct (176), later claiming not to want her baby, Waldo loves
his creations, which incidentally take nine months to complete, ‘as one
of necessity loves what has been born of him, whether of the flesh
or spirit’ (73). By associating metaphors of motherhood with a male
character, the novel challenges the biological determinism of the
so-called maternal instinct.

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 Schreiner, Caird, and Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

A further example of bisexuality in the novel is the character

of Gregory Rose, the English farmer who rents half of the farm and
proposes to Em before falling desperately in love with Lyndall.
Characterised by his ‘fine nature’ and inverted female name (Rose
Gregory), the young Englishman does not conform to traditional
patterns of gender identity (141). Lyndall, sensitive to the feminine
quality in him, describes Gregory as ‘a man-woman’. When Gregory
passes the heroine on horseback, she tells Waldo, ‘[There goes] a
true woman – one born for the sphere that some women have to fill
without being born for it. How happy he would be sewing frills into his
little girl’s frocks, and how pretty he would look sitting in a parlour, with a
rough man making love to him!’ (164). Like Cixous, Schreiner shatters
the rigidity of gender: in the 1990s, Cixous would complain that we are
still living in a world of seemingly clear-cut differences, where ‘we
continue to say man and woman even though it doesn’t work’
(Three Steps 50). But, Cixous wonders, what happens if ‘we love a
woman who is a man inside’? ‘This means we love not a man exactly, but a
woman who is a man, which is not quite the same thing: it’s a woman who
is also a man, another species’. African Farm voices analogous gender
complexities when a man-woman (Gregory) first falls in love with a
woman-woman (Em) and later with a woman-man (Lyndall). The novel
thus allows for the existence of ‘another species’, challenging the
categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the same way that Cixous would one
hundred years later.
My discussion up to this point might give the impression that in
African Farm, écriture féminine revolves exclusively around male characters.
This is, however, not the case: although the clearest examples relate to
male characters (hence the novel’s subversion), feminine discourse is
sometimes associated with the heroine Lyndall. At Tant’ Sannie’s
wedding, Lyndall and Waldo, now adults, separate from the crowd and
listen to the music from a distance: ‘I like to feel that strange life beating
up against me’, says Lyndall; ‘I like to realise forms of life utterly unlike
mine’ (Schreiner 181). Whenever she feels oppressed, Lyndall continues,
she likes to imagine herself split into a number of unconnected beings:
a mediaeval monk with his string of beads pacing the quiet orchard, and
looking up from the grass at his feet to the heavy fruit-trees; little Malay
boys playing naked on a shining sea-beach; a Hindoo philosopher alone
under his banyan tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought
of God he may lose himself […] a martyr on the night of his death looking
through the narrow window to the sky, and feeling that already he has the
wings that shall bear him up […] a Kaffir witch-doctor seeking for herbs by
moonlight, while from the huts on the hillside come the sound of

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 Victoriographies

dogs barking, and the voices of women and children; a mother giving
bread-and-milk to her children in little wooden basins and singing the
evening song. I like to see it all; I feel it run through me – that life belongs to me;
it makes my little life larger, it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me
in. (181–2; emphasis added)
Lyndall can metamorphose into a seemingly endless number of selves,
from a medieval monk to a Roman martyr. Her identification with
indigenous peoples (the little Malay boys and the Kaffir witch-doctor)
undermines again the idea that Schreiner fully supported the imperialist
project. Through its heroine, African Farm sides with Indians and native
South Africans: there is a certain sympathy for and even envy of the
Malay boys playing naked on the shore, for they enjoy the freedom
denied to Lyndall as a young white woman. Likewise, the heroine
admires the Kaffir witch-doctor, who laboriously seeks his materials while
others sleep in their beds. Lyndall identifies with the oppressed (blacks,
Indians, women, children), and her sensitivity toward the Other
compares to Waldo’s – and Cixous’s.
As an example of écriture féminine, this passage shows how Schreiner
conflates daring subject matter and stylistic innovation. Lyndall’s long
catalogue of selves upsets the traditional grammatical structures that
limit sentence length to around four lines or twenty words. Schreiner’s
sentence is twenty-one lines long and nearly three hundred words (more
than half a page), as Lyndall’s lengthy description of her manifold
selves is contained in one sentence. Each self has several phrases and/or
clauses attached to it: ‘a Hindoo philosopher alone under his banyan
tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may
lose himself.’ This accumulation achieves a sense of flow and openness
that connects back to the body. Lyndall claims that she feels all this
life ‘run through me’, and, quite consistently, her sentence runs on
and on through the reader. If, according to Cixous, woman ‘doesn’t
hold still, she overflows’ (‘Sorties’ 91), this passage is a good example of
how the feminine writing of the New Woman overflows, of how it
possesses an uncontrolled quality that can overturn traditional male
syntactic structures.
By the end of The Story of an African Farm, there is a regression to
the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal stage – for as Cixous notes, ‘[w]riting in
the feminine is passing on what is cut out by the Symbolic, the voice
of the mother, passing on what is most archaic’ (‘Castration’ 54). Before
her death, Lyndall regresses to the mirror stage, followed by the
pre-Oedipal stage, in a reversal of the journey customarily undertaken
by young children. For Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage, where children
recognise their own image as theirs, is a stepping-stone in the subject’s

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 Schreiner, Caird, and Cixous’s Écriture Féminine

psychic development that marks the entrance into the Symbolic, or the
realm of language and social regulation. However, the dying Lyndall, as a
child in the pre-Symbolic, does not recognise her own reflection: ‘the
white face on the pillow looked into the white face in the glass’
(Schreiner 252). This sense of self-alienation becomes even more
obvious when she addresses her image in the second person (‘We are
not afraid, you and I’), just before losing all power of speech at the
moment of death (‘She tried to speak to it, but she would never
speak again’).
This prelapsarian feminine writing, theorised in the late twentieth
century by Cixous, is budding in the fiction of the New Woman, such as
that of Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird. My essay then makes two main
contributions to studies of the New Woman and studies of the novel.
First, it opens up new interpretations of novels by two of the best-known
New Woman authors and helps us reconsider the complexities of the fin
de siècle. Applied to The Wing of Azrael and The Story of an African Farm,
Cixous’s ideas alert us to the inaccuracy of any unqualified or general
ascription of the New Woman to late-nineteenth-century evolutionary or
biologically deterministic thinking. These works subvert strict gender
binaries through their fluid portrayal of femininity and motherhood, as
not exclusively woman’s province, and through their foregrounding of
Otherness and bisexuality.
Second, my analysis adds to our understanding of the history of the
woman’s novel: it confirms and exposes further connections between
first- and second-wave feminism than had been previously identified
through the shared presence of écriture féminine. Despite the apparent
anachronism of reading novels from the 1880s through late-twentieth-
century theory, my evidence suggests that écriture féminine was discovered
and theorised, rather than invented, during the second wave of
feminism. This term was conceived in the 1970s to label a phenomenon
that was at least eighty years old already, and that has remained present
in fiction written by women ever since. By the late 2010s, women’s
writing has become the focus of university courses, conferences,
libraries, and academic appointments. ‘We are carriers of previous
generations’, Cixous sings, ‘we are, without knowing it, heirs, caretakers,
witnesses of known or unknown ancestors’ (Preface xx). Not always
acknowledged, écriture féminine seems to have been carried on into the
novel and studies in the novel in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. It is not a coincidence that Richardson and Willis titled their collection The New
Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. For a discussion of this fluid
identity, see Heilmann, New Woman Fiction (2–7).

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 Victoriographies

2. For a discussion of the links between New Woman fiction and Modernism, see Ardis;
Eldridge Miller; Murphy.
3. Pykett also hints at the affinity between writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. In her study of time and the fin de siècle, Time is of the Essence, Murphy
repeatedly draws on Kristeva’s essay ‘Women’s Time’.
4. See Richardson, Love and Eugenics, for a study of eugenics and the New Woman.
Richardson acknowledges Mona Caird’s liberalism in contrast to the pro-eugenic
inclinations of most other New Woman authors (Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Ellice
Hopkins, Jane Hume Clapperton).
5. In 2010, The Wing of Azrael was reedited for the first time since its original publication
in 1889, as part of the series New Woman Fiction, 1881–1899, edited by Carolyn W. de la
L. Oulton. Although interest in The Wing of Azrael is increasing (see, for example,
Surridge, Oulton), the novel remains little known and comparatively neglected.
6. Elaine Showalter famously described Lyndall, the heroine of African Farm, as ‘the first
wholly serious feminist heroine in the English novel’ (199).
7. Christine Delphy notes that French feminism is actually a construction of the
Anglo-American world, as what is generally thought of as French feminism has little to
do with the feminist scene in France, either practically or theoretically.
8. Cixous writes: ‘In my own tradition I have never conceived of poetic writing as
separate from philosophy. To me writing is the fastest and most efficient vehicle for
thought: it may be winged, galloping, four-wheeled, jet-propelled etc. – according to
the urgency’ (Preface xxi–xxii).
9. In her novel Reveries of the Wild Woman (2006), Cixous looks back on her childhood
and dramatises the experience of growing up in Algeria during the Vichy regime. For
instance, as a Jew, her father was prevented from practicing medicine and only
allowed to work as a podiatrist.
10. The gendering of realist fiction or the narrative voice is, of course, problematic.
Although the gender of the narrator can rarely be ascertained, the omniscient
narrator of realist fiction tends to be regarded as male. In The ‘Improper Feminine’,
Pykett refers to ‘the sage utterances of Eliot’s meditative, masculine narrators’, and
connects the traditional art of Victorian realism with a male voice (194). This is the
tact I am following here.
11. See Stanley on Schreiner’s social theory.
12. Some critics, such as Berkman, have highlighted Schreiner’s complicity with racial
supremacism. Others, such as Shapple, see Schreiner as an advocate of South African
independence, and African Farm as an expression of resistance to European
capitalism. Heilmann regards the discrepancy between Schreiner’s sympathy for
blacks and her stereotyped portrayal of black characters in her novels as part of the
racist colonial discourse of the time (New Woman Strategies 133).

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