When The Story of an African Farm was published in 1883, the title gave no indication to readers what the complex scope of the novel was really about.
Written by South African governess, Olive Schreiner, the book's crux ran along the controversal: the oppression of women, feminism, the existance of God, anti-imperialism, the bizarre transformation of one the novel's characters (not Lyndall) into a transvestite. It goes on and on. The novel was written when the belief of agnosticism was in the early stages of being in 'vogue.' Also interesting, Darwin's Origin of the Species had been published for some time, and the theory had rooted itself in many areas of society.
This was not the traditional Victorian novel that was written in the old English 'bonne bouche' manner on par with Jane Eyre or Emma. The prose of the novel has a broken up fluidity to it; it is not grandiloquent; it is in fact, quite brutal, edgy. As Elaine Showalter writes in the excellent introduction to the Bantam Classic edition, "Readers expecting the structured plot of a typical three-volume Victorian novel were startled by the oddity of African Farm, with its poetic, allegorical, and distinct passages, and its defiance of narrative and sexual conventions." With that clearly explained, it is not a surprise that it shocked old, priggish Englanders with their stiff upper lips and staunch, conservative manners, nor is it shocking that the Church of England called the novel "blasphemous."
African Farm details the lives of three key characters: Waldo, Em and Lyndall. The latter character is the one who seems to bring up the key issues that made the novel controversal. Lyndall is always described as 'little,' 'delicate,' 'like a doll,' 'a flower.' However, she is the one who refuses to marry (with one minor exception to the rule) until a social equilibrium is established between men and women. She desires equality between the sexes, and is willing to suffer for it. And she does, more than what is expected. Odd as it may seem, but considering the period in which the novel was written, the character of Lyndall really had to be physically 'feminized' in order to make up for her strongly held convictions of being a 'total' woman and not 'half' a woman.
If any person reads the novel, the character of Lyndall needs (from my view) special attention, for she questions the values of men, women who accepted the standard, religion and the social hierarchy in which she was born. Her questions seem like cartels, challenges. Why can't she have a job? Why can't she be educated or independent without the stigma 'weirdo' unflinchingly attached to her? Why must she be dubbed 'strange?' The reader must always ask why when reading this book. The three characters, Lyndall especially, endure a lot of hardship, a hardship that mirrored the very author's life, i.e. her cold and distant upbringing, the religious retraints placed on her life as well as the life-clenching grasp that old norms had on women of that period. African Farm was Olive Schreiner's liberty, her freedom from the societal choke hold.
In conclusion, the novel is not one of grace and patrician dogma. It is not a book of nice ladies and gentlemen sitting under the African sun near exotic, wild flowers sipping tea and participating in intellectual banter. No, it is an underscored work of literature where ideas of human aspiration and ecumenical desires are explored under a blazing sun and burnt, sandy plain.
