The Nurturant Fantasies of Olive Schreiner

Abstract

In our society, at some time between the ages of seven and thirteen, the little boy who could achieve greater control over his life by playing daddy, Superman, or Bionic Man, or the little girl who could gain applause and admiration by assuming the role of a prima ballerina, famous aviator, or Wonder Woman, no longer acts out these roles. Sometimes a gesture or two lingers on in adulthood as an overt expression of the heroic model, but generally by adolescence, the role-player's yearnings have retreated to her imagination: her head alone enacts the desire.1 The impulses for a larger measure of control over our lives do not suddenly diminish with adulthood, nor do the scores of other impulses which kindle fantasy. While we do know something about types and styles of fantasy, the contents of fantasies as sources for understanding the interaction between social attitudes and the individual psyche within a given time and space have rarely been studied. The following examination of feminist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), reveals a clear link between her nurturant fantasies and the social attitudes of her time.2 Schreiner, who was brought up in a respectable mid-Victorian home, found that childhood fantasies did not endear her to those around her.3 Raised in a stern, conventional Evangelical home on the periphery of British civilization--a South African missionary outpost--Olive Schreiner began making up stories at the precocious age of three or four, vigorously pacing the homestead while talking to herself, engrossed in an imaginative world all her own. Schreiner's making-up was solitary and exceedingly private; if a sibling or household servant overheard her tales she was outraged. She accurately perceived the mocking amusement of her family and household servants in response to her intensity, and suffered from their frequent allusions to her oddity.4 Shreiner's fantasy life did not abate in later childhood or adulthood. In a letter to her close friend, the late-Victorian