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Chapter 3 - Malarial Feminisms

Olive Schreiner and the Allegories of Chronic Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2018

Jessica Howell
Affiliation:
Texas A & M University
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Summary

South African novelist Olive Schreiner suffered from lifelong health difficulties, including malaria. This chapter thinks critically about how to read her personal illness alongside her artistic production. It argues that Schreiner draws upon female colonial settlers’ lived experience of chronic malaria in order to form her critique of colonial medical logic, which is based on a ‘metonymy of exchange’ whereby colonial bodies and environments are epitomized by their productive value. This chapter traces how representations of malaria evolve in Schreiner's fiction. Her earliest work, Undine, depicts the corruption and risks of colonial capitalism in terms of ‘camp fever’. In Story on an African Farm, Schreiner breaks open the form of disease allegory to question colonial-meaning making. In her last novel, From Man to Man, Schreiner shows female characters allied with the traditionally ‘threatening’ aspects of the colonial environment, such as extreme heat and insects. The chapter argues that Schreiner’s project was timely and important, as the eradication of mosquitoes, specifically feminized mosquitoes, became central to colonial medical discourse in early-twentieth-century South Africa.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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  • Malarial Feminisms
  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
  • Online publication: 14 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693226.004
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  • Malarial Feminisms
  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
  • Online publication: 14 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693226.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Malarial Feminisms
  • Jessica Howell, Texas A & M University
  • Book: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire
  • Online publication: 14 December 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693226.004
Available formats
×