Gender Politics and the Gothic in Karel Schoeman's This Life

Abstract

Summary Karel Schoeman's This Life (published as Hierdie lewe in 1993; translated into English in 2005), like other post-apartheid novels recently published by Afrikaansspeaking authors, considers the past and the future of the Afrikaner people. It is alsomarkedly Gothic in style and content: violence, fear, death, and suffering permeate the tale, whose mood is elegiac. I argue, following a proposition by Gerald Gaylard that “[The] melodrama of the Gothic can be seen as a characteristically modern... artistic mode... [that] points beyond itself to the chance, the uncanny, irrational, horrific and sublime in modern life”, that Schoeman's particular use of Gothic conventions in This Life to represent gender relations on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South African farm, and given his concern in this and his other writings about the past and future of the Afrikaner people as well as the role of the artist within the South African context, the representation of the narrator in This Life and the gendered climate within which she lives may be read as revealing Schoeman's anxieties about the post-apartheid future of Afrikaner culture. Schoeman's yearning for a lost paradise in his anti-pastoral This Life generates a Gothic gloom that encompasses the abjectness of the “good” feminine principle and the destructive power of the “bad” Mother, and that is a manifestation of his anger and sorrow, not only at the loss of the idyll but the original falsity of that idyll. I also argue that, although Schoeman uses his narrator to expose the patriarchal silencing and marginalisation of women, the protest on behalf of women made in this novel is diluted by the writer's linking, in conventional, patriarchal terms, of the narrator's body with the land and its fertility, and by his emphasising that the blame for the desiccation of Afrikaner cultural life rests with a woman, Mother.