'White writing' from the Veld: Female voices of Southern Africa, 1877--1952 (Zimbabwe, Mary Ann, Lady Barker, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing)

This dissertation discusses three Anglo authors living in and writing about Southern Africa between the years 1877 and 1952. The uneven trajectory from high colonialism, to nationhood (South Africa in 1910; Rhodesia in 1923), and finally to the official policy of apartheid in South Africa in 1948 thus outlines the temporal frame of this dissertation.; In “‘Woman’ as sign in the South African colonial enterprise,” Dorothy Driver asserts that “South African colonial history is a story that has focused almost exclusively on men” (3). By focusing on key female colonial authors this dissertation responds to Driver's call to consider the “meaning” of these women, and the significance of their literary, historical, and cultural contributions. The thematic and formal concerns of this work are domesticity and genre. Anchoring my analysis in these areas, I argue that the authors under consideration—Lady Mary Anne Barker, Olive Schreiner, and Doris Lessing—comprise a neglected strand in a genealogy of English literature of Southern Africa. My discussion of genre foregrounds gender and national identity as structural impediments that greatly problematize the ways in which these women articulate their colonial experiences. More generally, I ask questions about how to situate these authors in a literary tradition that has historically privileged masculine, and masculinist, narratives.; The central thematic interest of this dissertation is domesticity, and more peripherally motherhood, in British Southern Africa. Just as discourses of domesticity have historically operated as a conduit through which ideologies of family and national character were preserved and contested in England, these same discourses—albeit often in muted forms—served as a means by which imperial ideology was similarly endorsed and challenged in the colonies. This dissertation highlights how pivotal representations of domesticity in the texts under consideration shape a “new” type of colonial femininity.