Virile womanhood: Olive Schreiner's narratives of a master race

Olive Schreiner's enormously successful novels, as well as her feminist tract Woman and Labor (1911), enact conflicts between ideologies of motherhood and the desire for female independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a white woman from Southern Africa, Schreiner feels affinities with both colonial rulers and colonized people of South Africa; her writing uses myths of transcultural motherhood to mediate between these opposed political positions. The allegorical endings of Schreiner's narratives are at odds with the complexities of gender and sexuality imagined in her powerful prose.