Schreiner and Levy in Late Victorian Context

One of the first essays to link Schreiner and Levy appeared in 1890. Canadian novelist and science writer Grant Allen, best known for his 1895 novel The Woman Who Did, imagines “The Girl of the Future” in deeply contradictory terms, combining claims for feminism, socialism, and eugenics that reflect the political complexity of the fin de siècle. Allen cites Schreiner and Levy as examples of the perils of educating women, particularly because it will result in resistance to marriage and childbearing, and even seems to blame Levy's suicide on her schooling: “All life and spontaneity, to be sure, has been crushed out in the process; but no matter for that: our girls are now ‘highly cultivated.’ A few hundred pallid little Amy Levys sacrificed on the way are as nothing before the face of our fashionable Juggernaut.”Footnote ⁶ Allen goes on to outline an alternative form of education for women, but he is ultimately most invested in ideas of “free union” and eugenics, suggesting that women should bear and raise the children of multiple men (selected for their genetic superiority).

I highlight this problematic article because it sets the stage for pairing Schreiner and Levy as similarly engaged in resistance to Allen's parody of the “New Woman,” and to emphasize their common attempt to create a new vision and a new language for the “girl[s] of the future.” While Schreiner's politics are widely recognized and intensely debated (especially her evolving perspectives on race and imperialism), Levy is sometimes characterized as more attracted to aestheticism's primary focus on art. Reading Schreiner's early allegories alongside Levy's dramatic monologues, however, allows us to see the ways in which both authors use their creative writing to posit different kinds of queer futures and to reject the eugenicist and imperialist discourses of the late nineteenth century. Levy's attraction to other women is well documented; Carolyn Lake argues thoughtfully for reading her as a queer poet: “Levy's poetics and her politics of the minor engage lyrical modes that give voice to a pre-lesbian subject.”Footnote ⁷ Schreiner, by contrast, married a man and does not seem to have had same-sex relationships, but I am not the first to see in her writings a deep questioning of gender roles and heterosexuality for women.Footnote ⁸ Although they worked in different genres, both writers suggest models of community that are based not on marriage and reproduction but instead on same-sex connections and radical rethinkings of temporality and communication. Embracing the accusation that women might birth books rather than babies, they remake traditionally conservative or male generic forms to accommodate their most radical content.

In the rare cases when critics have discussed Schreiner and Levy together, it is only in biographical terms, as fellow New Woman writers in late nineteenth-century London.Footnote ⁹ I am the first to suggest that placing their literary texts in conversation reveals a shared vision of queer feminist community. One explanation for this common interest in alternative ideals of kinship is that each writer has a complex national and racial identity that helps account for the sense of otherness that permeates their creative output. Building on valuable readings of Schreiner's evolving views of race and colonialism—particularly Scott McCracken's strong argument that the allegories are anti-imperialist—I see a productive parallel to Levy's conflicted self-identity as an English Jew.Footnote ¹⁰ This shared experience as outsiders, which made both women hyperaware of their identities as “not quite” white women in England, helps explain why they resisted the eugenicist tendencies of their contemporaries and looked to alternative genres to address questions of gender, race, and sexuality in new ways.Footnote ¹¹

Schreiner and Levy's fraught relationship to Englishness is reflected in the ways they both invoke and transform the previous generation of Victorian women writers. Levy explicitly engages with George Eliot in her novel Reuben Sachs (1888), as she self-consciously explores what it means for a Jewish woman to (re)write the “Jewish novel” that Eliot attempts with Daniel Deronda (1876). Similarly, in The Story of an African Farm (1883), Schreiner may be said to rewrite Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) from the perspective of the creole woman (thus anticipating Jean Rhys), exploring what happens to women of English descent who do not leave their colonial homes. Her minimal representation of Black Africans in this novel, however, has rightly been criticized as racist. Later in this article I will suggest that Levy is also aware of Brontë's Bertha in her characterization of Medea, and that this highlights the connection she sees between ancient Greece and late Victorian politics. When Schreiner and Levy think back through their mothers, they are particularly attuned to othered characters whose stories deserve to be transformed and given new voice.

Even as they engage with these dominant Victorian novelists, however, I suggest that Schreiner and Levy may do their most radical political work in the genres of allegory and dramatic monologue. For Schreiner, the obvious contrast is that the allegories are not limited by the requirements of naturalist representation.Footnote ¹² While African Farm stretches the boundaries of the realist novel, the allegories are almost literally boundaryless, moving through abstracted landscapes from Italy to Africa to other universes, and unconcerned with linear or finite temporal frames. Levy's monologues, by contrast, are set in definite times and places, but those settings are literary and historical, and thus quite distinct from the contemporary London of her novels. Speaking through these ancient women, Levy seems freed to enact a different kind of commentary on her own surroundings. In concert with their fellow New Woman writers, Schreiner and Levy contribute to the proliferation of literary forms beyond the novel that characterizes their late Victorian moment.

In her influential 2006 study, Affective Communities, Leela Gandhi champions the “immature” and idealistic anticolonial political movements that emerged in late Victorian London: “The precise energies of the individuals and subcultures I examine accrued in the main from innovative border crossing, visible in small, defiant flights from the fetters of belonging toward the unknown destinations of radical alterity.”Footnote ¹³ Despite the differences in genre, I suggest that Schreiner and Levy, themselves literally “immature” when they composed these early works, can best be understood as members of that rich community of radical visionaries, as they make creative use of questions of audience, temporality, and queer relations to establish new ways of weaving together aesthetics and politics in late Victorian London.

“Three Dreams in a Desert” and “Xantippe”

Schreiner, six years older than Levy, arrives in London for the first time in 1881, with the completed manuscript of her first novel, The Story of an African Farm. This novel includes a version of the allegory “The Hunter,” later republished in Dreams. At the same time Levy, about to become a student at Newnham College, Cambridge, writes “Xantippe,” one of her earliest and best-known poems, first published in 1881, and composes “Medea” the following year. Given their almost simultaneous emergence as New Woman writers in England, I am not claiming the direct influence of Levy's poetry on Schreiner's allegories, but rather arguing that they draw on overlapping artistic and political communities to create works that reflect and help define a queer feminist vision.

In Dreams, the allegorical form seems to free Schreiner to pose questions about gender, nation, and race in an abstract and almost “homeless” space, just as Levy's Greek poems are distinct from the later texts set in her contemporary London home. Despite the origins of “The Hunter” and “Three Dreams” as embedded in longer works, their appearance in the collection disengages them from the requirements of realism, and their symbolic modes of representation allows them to address a wide range of questions about power, gender, and ethics. Much of Dreams was written as Schreiner traveled on the continent, and she requested that each piece be labeled with its place of composition and dated when she began writing them: “These Dreams are printed in the order in which they were written. In the case of two there was a lapse of some years between the writing of the first and last parts; these are placed according to the date of the first part” (57).Footnote ¹⁴ These details, as well as the epigraph, “To a small girl-child, who may live to grasp somewhat of that which for us is yet sight, not touch” (57), together suggest a nomadic, future-directed orientation, one that stresses Schreiner's mobility and the originating inspiration for each allegory, rather than moments of closure. This is a liberating homelessness, freeing her to imagine wholly other worlds, in contrast to the web of affiliation and oppression that characterizes Schreiner's South African fiction.

The fifth allegory in Dreams, “Three Dreams in a Desert,” is one of Schreiner's best-known feminist texts. Originally meant to be part of her nonfiction work Woman and Labour (1911), it illustrates her own often-quoted defense of allegorical writing: “by throwing a thing into the form of an allegory I can condense five or six pages into one, with no loss but a great gain to clearness.”Footnote ¹⁵ Building on the valuable early readings of McCracken and Laura Chrisman, here I will focus especially on the second and third dreams and their resonance with Levy's “Xantippe.”Footnote ¹⁶ Giving voice to Socrates’ “shrewish” wife, Xanthippe, Levy makes her own plea for a future queer community in which women's intellect is valued.

“Three Dreams” is framed from the first-person perspective of an unnamed dreamer who journeys “across an African plain” on horseback. This ungendered figure in motion, who sleeps three times and thus trades spatial movement for temporal exploration within each dream, may be seen as a figure for the collection as a whole. Anchored in an African landscape but dreaming beyond it, the rider becomes an embodiment of the multiple personas who inhabit Dreams more generally. The first of the “three dreams,” often thought to represent the history of women's oppression, is a heavy-handed allegory. Making a direct connection between maternity and gender inequality, it suggests that even well-meaning men may be unable to help women become fully independent. The explicit symbolism is reinforced by the presence of a man who explains the allegory to the dreamer, limiting even further the interpretation of the allegorical figures. Having unambiguously established the existence of systemic sexism, Schreiner seems freer in dreams two and three to explore other ways of understanding gender, sexuality, and the meaning of freedom.

In the second dream, a woman leaves the desert and must cross a river to reach the Land of Freedom. But as she speaks to an old man, “Reason,” holding the stick of “Wisdom,” it becomes clear that she may not reach this goal as an individual in a human time frame. As the old man counsels her on how to achieve freedom, the question of maternity emerges. At first, the man says that the way to the Land of Freedom passes “Down the banks of Labour, through the water of Suffering” (82). Depending on the interpretation of “Labour,” this could suggest that women reach freedom through the act of giving birth or, alternatively, that the journey to freedom is itself a process of rebirth. On the other hand, it is possible that “Labour” has a more general significance, meant to establish common cause between the New Woman and socialist movements.

Next, the woman having shed all garments except the one called “Truth,” the man will not let her continue until she stops nursing the enigmatic creature against her breast. Associated with both Love and Passion, this male, childlike creature also has the wings of an angel, and it bites her when she takes it off the breast. Once again, it is possible to read this as a renunciation of maternity, since the care of the child prevents the woman from having complete freedom. At the same time, however, the oddly unchildlike nature of the creature suggests a deeper critique of heterosexuality, since it seems to represent both the needs of the infant and the demands of the adult man, and Reason tells her that the creature will reach freedom first.

A queer reading is further supported by the emphasis on the need for a community of women to work and sacrifice together to achieve freedom:

The woman hears the sounds of those who will follow her and presumably benefit from her sacrifice, but she will not achieve freedom as an individual. Instead, she will be washed away and forgotten, or, at best, her corpse will serve as a bridge for others. This is characteristic of Schreiner's pessimistic feminism; as a woman, total self-sacrifice is her only means of contributing to a future of freedom, as she is explicitly instructed to reject maternity to enable others. In tension with this pessimism, however, is an alternate vision of community among women, not in a tangible present but as a more abstract queer vision over an inhumanly long time frame. The woman senses that she is ultimately not alone and embarks with faith that her actions support the liberation of the many. Rather than preserving an individual life, and perpetuating that life through motherhood, she becomes part of a queer futurity of new possibilities for women.

As if to emphasize the possibility of a queer reading, the short third dream explicitly includes relationships between women. In the final dream, the narrator has a vision of heaven: “I dreamed I saw a land. And on the hills walked brave women and brave men, hand in hand. And they looked into each other's eyes, and they were not afraid. And I saw the women also hold each other's hands” (85). This ideal of fearless relationships is the only feature narrated in the heaven of “Three Dreams,” and it is identified as a vision-to-come “IN THE FUTURE.” Perhaps, then, as a result of the woman's actions in the second dream, a utopian lesbian future has been enabled. The final framing of the allegory is also future-directed. The dreamer has slept most of the day, and when the dreamer wakes up, the sun is setting, but the last line of the text reiterates the dreamer's faith: “Then the sun passed down behind the hills; but I knew that the next day he would arise again” (86).

The frame of “Three Dreams,” which unfolds over the course of the day, is one of the elements that links this text convincingly with Levy's “Xantippe.” Just as the realist setting in the desert contrasts with the temporal extremes of each of the dreams, so the immediate scenario in the poem—Xantippe speaking to her maids—frames the temporal complexity of the story of her life with Sokrates. And though it was not published until 1911, Schreiner also invokes the historical Xanthippe in her full-length feminist analysis, Woman and Labour. There, she suggests that women's exclusion from intellectual society helps account for the fall of Greek civilization: “Man turned towards man; and parenthood, the divine gift of imparting human life, was severed from the loftiest and profoundest phases of human emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant and miserable little life between the walls of her house, and Socrates lay in the Agora, discussing philosophy and morals with Alcibiades; and the race decayed at its core.”Footnote ¹⁷ Levy's poem has attracted critical attention for its engagement with classical history, its use of dramatic monologue, and its explicit feminist content, all made more remarkable by the fact that she composed the poem the year she turned eighteen.Footnote ¹⁸ Building on and complicating the work of Cynthia Scheinberg, T. D. Olverson, and Emily Harrington, I emphasize Xantippe's imagined queer community of intellectual women, rather than the monologue's immediate audience of the maids, to highlight the ways in which the poem speaks to and of its late Victorian moment.Footnote ¹⁹

Xantippe's monologue begins emphatically in the present, as she asks, “What, have I waked again?” Invoking thoughts of both death and rebirth with this abrupt question, the whole poem is set in a kind of “borrowed time” and has the quality of a final reckoning with one's life. Despite Xantippe's focus on her past life and decisions, in the opening of the poem she seems haunted by a kind of inescapable futurity:

The temporary suspension of time, the ambiguity of the state of “watch[ing] and wait[ing],” and the tension between whether Xantippe's monologue represents an end or a beginning, suggest a deferral of decision and judgment, making it extremely difficult to settle on a reading of pessimism or hope.

Addressing the poem's internal audience of maids, Xantippe continues to focus on time as she introduces her narrative. She reports that she has been dreaming of both troubled moments in her past and of the happier times that preceded them, but then immediately calls this distinction into question:

In this image, bad memories flow further back to “prophetically” taint the recollection of even her earliest and happiest experiences. This is a nonlinear image of time, in which the trauma of Xantippe's relationship to Sokrates is capable of infecting events that came before, causing the “current” to flow backward, and thus canceling out even the future-directed hope of that earlier self. While in some ways a bleakly pessimistic vision, allowing dark emotion to blot out all that comes before or after, it also suggests a remarkably fluid sense of how memory and experience work to construct the self, and the possibility that this process can be endlessly rewritten.

In contrast to Medea, as we will see, Levy does not represent Xantippe as ethnically or racially marked. Nevertheless, she experiences herself as different—multiple and exceptional, with aspirations that cannot be fulfilled or even expressed in conventional language:

These lines simultaneously imply division within the self—“I” is “apart” from “my” thoughts and dreams—and distance between self and others: the plural self (“we”), including the thoughts and dreams, is “apart” from the larger community. Additionally, the soul's desire for both “knowledge” and a “tongue” complicates the question of what she has and what she needs; is the knowledge itself missing, or merely the language to articulate the “mysteries” that Xantippe already possesses? Finally, the distinction between secular and religious thought is collapsed as the soul, rather than the mind, yearns for knowledge of both “fair world” and “holy gods.” As a self-alienated character unable to communicate effectively with others, Xantippe may embody forms of difference beyond simply gender.

Xantippe expresses her separation from other women in terms of intellectual curiosity and ambition. It is also possible, however, to interpret her desires as queer; the language of her discontent sounds remarkably close to the way nonheteronormative sexualities are often expressed:

While it is clear that Xantippe refers to her thirst for knowledge, this desire is aligned with questions of sexuality throughout the poem. The source of the unacceptable thoughts is explicitly gendered as a “woman-mind,” and the straying is characterized as a “sin,” thus conflating epistemological and moral transgressions. She goes on to emphasize the paradox of a “woman-mind” thinking those which “are not woman's thoughts,” and it is easy to imagine that the same paradox might define her nonheterosexual desire for other women. Xantippe's connection to Sokrates develops despite his physical unattractiveness—it is expressed as a respect for his intellect—and the community of scholars in ancient Greece, of course, is also a refuge of queer male sexuality.

This close association between sexuality and intellect establishes another connection to Schreiner, who often expresses the wish, in both her letters and her fiction, for the possibility of relations between men and women based on the sharing of ideas rather than of bodies. Schreiner's attitudes toward queer men, in both ancient Greece and within her own late Victorian circles, is complicated and often contradictory. I have already cited her defense of Xanthippe, which simultaneously condemns Socrates and his all-male intellectual community. As Mark Sanders says in his recent study of complicity, “Schreiner's feminist historicism in Woman and Labour reads as antihomosexual and reflects the sexualization and pathologizing of the homosexual that took place late in the nineteenth century.”Footnote ²¹ At the same time, however, as seen in her lifelong friendship with Edward Carpenter (to whom she wrote of her dismay at hearing of Levy's suicide)Footnote ²² as well as in the unconventional intellectual intimacy between Lyndall and Waldo in Story of an African Farm, she seems to search for alternatives to heteronormative relationships.Footnote ²³ For New Women like Schreiner and Levy, the question of whether gay men are allies or yet another community from which women are excluded remains unsettled. Here I suggest that the two authors are engaged in a literary dialogue that explores multiple alternatives, explicitly queer and otherwise, to Victorian expectations for women.

Narrating her disappointment after marriage, and speaking of herself in the third person, Xantippe's account of her disillusionment places the poem firmly in a nineteenth-century context of debates about women's education. In language that recalls Mary Wollstonecraft's “Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” she explains that she was not able to overcome the shallow expectations for women's intellectual capacity:

This lament is again slightly paradoxical, of course, because the speaker must possess some knowledge of the very material she claims is being withheld, and because the choice of Xanthippe as subject betrays Levy's own unconventional education. It is also striking that the very knowledge inaccessible to women, of “Nature's divineness and her harmony,” is itself gendered female. The temporary switch to a third-person voice allows the perspective of a more knowing speaker to frame Xantippe's dilemma from outside and highlights the relevance of the poem to contemporary debates about women's education. Thus, in addition to the complexity of the internal time frame (as Xantippe remembers her past hopes for the future), this moment extends a temporal doubleness to the poem itself as it becomes both a first-person monologue from ancient Greece and simultaneously a commentary on the relevance of that monologue to the late nineteenth-century woman question. Finally, the third-person shift suggests a kind of alliance between Levy and Xantippe that transcends conventions of time and space and raises the possibility of a community of women based on shared experiences and emotions, unbound by restrictions of geography or physical life span. Just as Schreiner's “Three Dreams” imagines a feminist collective that functions beyond the time frame of the single woman's life, so Levy reaches back to classical history to give new voice to the late Victorian New Woman.Footnote ²⁴

Xantippe's dissociation from self continues as she explains her decision to give more details of her unsatisfying life with Sokrates:

Though the speaker reverts to the first-person, she maintains the image of a divided self, with a possibly nineteenth-century voice within that sees a value in detailing her experiences and trying to correct the historical record of Xanthippe as shrew. Even the sentence structure suggests temporal confusion, and both the source of the “urge” and the timing of the “echo to the later life” are left unclear, inviting us once again to associate Xantippe's woes with those of the New Woman. These vague echoes and the urgent need to retell the story both contribute to the sense of a community of women's voices stretching back to antiquity and resonating strongly with the nineteenth-century female author's dilemma.

Having recounted her failed attempts to share in Sokrates’ intellectual endeavors in the early days of their marriage, Xantippe goes on to narrate a memory of bringing wine to her husband and his students, Plato and Alkibiades. The men are discussing Perikles’ foreign lover, Aspasia, who, according to Sokrates:

He goes on to contrast the exceptional Aspasia with other women, who are incapable of acquiring or using knowledge correctly. And while Xantippe's anger is clearly in response to this generalization, it is also framed, unnecessarily, by the image of an intellectually superior woman, with whom Xantippe is incapable of competing. The men's admiration of Aspasia simultaneously constructs Xantippe's response as jealousy (rather than legitimate intellectual frustration) and raises the unfulfilled possibility of a community of women scholars, undermining the claims of women's intrinsic unsuitability for higher learning.

Sokrates’ generalization about other women includes an odd conflation of physical and mental incapacity, which stands in direct contrast to his own embodied intellect (“Pregnant with novel theories and great thoughts” [117]):

In contrast to Victorian commentators who accuse women of indifference to world events, Sokrates suggests instead that they are indiscriminate, that their excessive hunger for knowledge results in a breach of propriety. In response to this accusation, Xantippe is moved to speak back, as she suggests that women exist in a hybrid state, created with intellectual potential but then barred from fulfilling it:

Despite the polytheistic phrasing, this speech again recalls Wollstonecraft's arguments about women's souls and the folly of preventing them from becoming fully developed individuals. Levy's emphasis on the contradiction between women's potential and their sanctioned roles implies that they occupy an indeterminate space, neither conventionally female nor with any alternative identity to claim.Footnote ²⁶ The most radical reading of the poem would see this contradiction as embodied in Xantippe's status as a widow, an identity for women located outside of social expectations for marriage and reproduction. As Carolyn Dever has suggested, such a position implies the potential to challenge conventional structures of gender and domination: “the powerful single woman, a spinster or widow whose awareness of her cultural capital, and whose resistance or failure to become conscripted in the marriage plot, poses a challenge to the sex/gender system of ‘patriarchal’ power.”Footnote ²⁷ While Dever's essay concerns the Victorian novel, I would argue that Levy's monologue in the voice of Xantippe enables an even more radical exploration of the widow's suspended status and resulting exemption from conventional female perspectives.

After Xantippe hurls a wineskin at the men, she describes the “flowing tides of [her] hopes / . . . sent back / Swift to their sources” (220–22). This sense of creation and futurity turned inward is echoed by Xantippe's lack of offspring in the poem. Historically, Xanthippe and Socrates had three children, but Levy's monologue makes no mention of them; instead, Xantippe accuses her husband of having “kept his love / For this Athenian city and her sons” (225–26). By replacing their biological sons with the image of Sokrates fathering the men of Athens, the poem's Xantippe implies that her own reproductive capabilities are yet untapped or will take a nonheteronormative form. In contrast, as we will see, to Medea's killing of her existing sons, Xantippe has metaphorically aborted hers, allowing the possibility of greater freedom from traditional family structures in the wake of Sokrates’ death.

A similarly inward-turned productive force informs the final sections of the poem, in which Xantippe describes herself as performing her feminine duties with an attitude of deliberate withdrawal. I agree with Iveta Jusova that this moment can be read as an example of Luce Irigaray's feminist “mimicry,”Footnote ²⁸ and that it complicates the question of whether the poem ends in a spirit of resignation or rebirth. Although Xantippe describes a process of fading fury and her soul being spun “from out my body,” the very last lines of the monologue are a plea for the window to be opened and light to be admitted. The most optimistic reading would suggest that Xantippe's resistant weaving and the process of reflection recorded in the poem have rekindled her capacity for learning and hope. In part, interpreting the conclusion of the poem depends on how one understands the relationship between Xantippe and her maids. Scheinberg and Harrington have helpfully analyzed the complexity of the internal and external audiences for the monologue, suggesting an interplay between sympathetic contemporary women readers (of Levy's time or our own) and the less clearly invested maids of Xantippe's own moment.Footnote ²⁹ My reading, stressing a connection to Schreiner's imagined queer communities, focuses on the future potential of a female intellectual space, marked in Levy's poem by the references to Aspasia and women's education, especially in nineteenth-century terms. I argue that Levy's temporal logic invokes the past to comment on and stimulate change in her present moment, rather than trying to bring a modern sense of class back into the historical dynamic of Xantippe's relative privilege and her maids’ disenfranchisement.

In contrast to “Three Dreams,” the poem seems to end in the same predawn moment in which it began, but Xantippe cries out, perhaps with a parallel faith in the inevitability of the sun rising again:

Reading the two pieces in relation to each other helps bolster a possibly hopeful, future-directed interpretation of these last lines of “Xantippe,” just as it gives lie to the idea of Levy's apolitical or disengaged attitude toward the issues of the day.

Medea and Dreams

While I have pointed out that Levy “aborts” Xanthippe's children in her poem, she takes the rejection of maternity even further when she makes the surprising choice to give voice to the central character of Medea. It was published in 1884 in A Minor Poet and Other Verse, and several critics have argued that Levy's rewriting is a feminist revision of the Greek source material that also takes on questions of Jewishness, race, and cosmopolitanism. Linda Beckman notes that Levy wrote the verse play (or “fragment”) in 1882 while traveling (it was composed in Dresden and Lucerne) and highlights the parallels between Medea's experience in Corinth and Levy's ambivalent status as a member of London's Jewish community.Footnote ³⁰ Ana Parejo Vadillo looks closely at Levy's time in Dresden to comment on her mixed feelings about cosmopolitanism, and both Vadillo and Olverson provide useful analysis of the German translations of Euripides’ play from which she drew. Building on these readings of the racial/religious politics of the text, I take up Linda Hughes's suggestion that Medea can also be read as a repudiation of heteronormative marriage and reproduction, to offer a multilayered analysis of Levy's pessimism, queer temporality, and critique of imperialism.Footnote ³¹

As Josephine McDonagh notes, Levy's rewriting makes it very clear that Medea's actions are a result, not a cause, of her rejection by the citizens of Corinth.Footnote ³² Levy's Medea is described in ways that emphasize her status as a foreigner, in both language and appearance. When Nikias and Aegeus discuss Medea, they disagree about her looks. Aegeus finds her “fair enough,” but Nikias focuses on her racial difference:

In language that recalls Charlotte Brontë's descriptions of Bertha in Jane Eyre, Nikias links Medea's “swart skin” to a threatening, and possibly supernatural, sexuality.Footnote ³⁴ The conversation between essentially neutral observers helps affirm Medea's sense of alienation in Corinth since it demonstrates the suspicion and hostility that surround her. Even the relatively more sympathetic Aegeus agrees, “’Tis certain that the woman's something strange.”Footnote ³⁵ The possible reference to Brontë invokes the complexities of nineteenth-century racial identification; Bertha's creole status is comparable to Levy's Judaism, a cultural rather than literal racial difference that is nonetheless perceived and represented in racial terms. Additionally, it suggests a connection between the Greek source drama and British imperialism, thus raising the political stakes of Levy's rewriting. Like Bertha, Medea has been removed from her birthplace and then cast aside by her husband, and she seeks revenge on him from within the domestic space.

Schreiner may also rewrite some aspects of Jane Eyre in her first novel, The Story of an African Farm. Even in her realist fictions, Schreiner's main female characters embody a complicated blend of “Jane” and “Bertha,” since they are white women struggling to define their identities as unwitting participants in England's colonization of South Africa. In detailed descriptions of the African landscape in which her characters are embedded, she enacts a complex politics of both admiration and appropriation, as she tries to negotiate the ethics of hospitality in a colonial setting.

If Medea is a version of Bertha, then Levy's poem can be read as an even more radical undoing of home, as she takes her revenge on the very ideas of maternity and domesticity that would define it. Reclaiming herself in an act of rebirth, she turns unwelcoming Corinth into a productive space of ignorance, an opportunity to claim an unanticipated freedom and violence. Her vow of revenge is directed not just toward Jason but to the full community within which she found no possibility of comfort or home:

Not only will this act extend beyond the house she shares with Jason, it will also be temporally unbounded, affecting not just the existing citizens but their as yet unborn offspring, poisoning present and future with the consequences of their failure of hospitality.Footnote ³⁷ Having treated Medea as unknowable and strange, the people of Corinth will experience an unknowable and limitless response, a level of violence and rejection of maternity that will stain the reproductive future indefinitely.

The connection to nineteenth-century ideas of ethnic otherness and anxiety about colonial encounters, already seen in the possible reference to Bertha in Jane Eyre, is reinforced by the repetition of “horror.” Anticipating Joseph Conrad's famous invocation of this word in Heart of Darkness (1899), it resonates with late nineteenth-century fears of both urban poverty and the threat of colonial rebellion in response to England's imperialist oppression. Jason's misreading of the extent and nature of Medea's revenge is shown by his command to her to “get you within”; he is unaware that she plans to destroy the very family that defines the domestic space as such. Just as the heart of England was seen as vulnerable to the “horrors” of class and racial difference, so Medea brings this same horror to the center of Jason's home.

As in the original drama, Medea's murder of her sons takes place “offstage” and is not directly narrated in the poem. Instead, we learn of it from the perspective of the same earlier citizens, Nikias and Aegeus, who confirm the horror and incomprehensibility of her actions. Cast out of Corinth, the dramatic fragment ends with Medea wandering in the wilderness alone. While it is not a hopeful conclusion, it does place Medea in a radically new position, having undone her maternal/genetic connection to her Corinthian oppressors. While Medea might seem to be an odd choice for a feminist reclamation, she represents the most profound possible refusal of maternity and domesticity. Her individual act of revenge may destroy her sense of self and future, but on a larger level, this excessive, nonrealist act registers the possibility of full resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.

Schreiner's allegories similarly represent women untethered to familiar domestic roles, using a nonrealist form to explore possibilities in a range of temporalities and landscapes. Rather than resulting in a heavy-handed didactic and limited meaning, the complex mingling of realist frames and symbolic exploration allows Schreiner to pose new “New Woman” questions, to imagine resistance that is neither bleakly pessimistic nor naïvely utopian, but instead exploits unhomely space and time to posit other alternatives. In the short third allegory of Dreams, “The Gardens of Pleasure,” a female figure tries to pick and keep flowers from a garden but is admonished by the male figure of “Duty.” This minimalist text can be read in multiple ways; if the woman is Eve, then Duty is a figure for the unforgiving God of Schreiner's upbringing. The woman's resistance to multiple requests, however, can also be seen as the ongoing effort of women to free themselves from social and cultural sources of “Duty.” Each time she defies Duty and manages to keep a flower would then represent progress, despite the ultimately bleak conclusion: “She had nothing more to give now, and she wandered away, and the grey sand whirled about her” (75). The emphasis on Duty's “white face” also invites a reading in terms of the racial politics of South Africa (where the unnamed desert is almost certainly located), and the woman's persistence may anticipate success beyond the limits of the text. Temporally, it is also possible to see the woman aging, enjoying the sexual “pleasures” of the garden “beds” when she is younger and gradually trading these early values for other (unnamed) duties and ultimately death. The possibility of simultaneously representing a single life span and the larger nineteenth-century shift in women's roles gives even this brief text a depth of meaning that resonates provocatively with Levy's resuscitation of the wandering Medea.Footnote ³⁸

The pattern of individual sacrifice for a possibly hopeful but also unknowable future is repeated in several of the allegories. Levy and Schreiner share a deep skepticism about the benefits of marriage, family, and other conventional sources of community, and both offer visions of suspended present states or undetermined futures as alternatives. These alternatives to marriage and family unfold in queer times and spaces, as both writers illustrate the limits of a reproductive heteronormative temporal frame, especially for women. I am not the first to note that Schreiner's “A Dream of Wild Bees” deals explicitly with questions of maternity and futurity; it was originally composed as a letter to Karl Pearson, and both Chrisman and Ruth Livesey have analyzed it as a direct repudiation of his instrumental analysis of reproduction and eugenics.Footnote ³⁹ Reading in dialogue with Levy, I am most interested in the complexity of the relationship between mind and body, female agency and ambiguously gendered aspirations. The pregnant mother in this scenario has already produced eight children and is both darning and reading when she falls asleep. There is no father mentioned, immediately suggesting an alternative mode of possibly queer reproduction—the only fertilization directly represented is that of the bees visiting the flowering acacia trees, “their legs yellow with pollen” (87). But it is other bees, the “fellows who make no honey,” who are transformed in the woman's “weird brain picture” into allegorically named men who offer a variety of gifts to the unborn child (87). The mother is thus granted exceptional power to choose a future for her child, outside all normative frames of inheritance or genetics.

Even the apparent temporal direction of the story collapses in on itself; the fetus participates in the decision by “trembling” at the prospect of being granted love, and then goes on to have its own dream and to “already” have its reward, that “the Ideal was real to it” (89). The allegory does not only refuse conventional values of “wealth,” “fame,” and “talent,” then, but also reimagines pregnancy and reproduction as a complex and creative dialogue between mother and child, as knitting, sleeping, reading, childcare, and dreaming are integrated into a timeless moment of present and future. Gender and sexuality are ambiguous in this text in multiple ways; the mother usually refers to the child in gender-neutral language (it is only the bee-men who consistently call it “he”), and each time the possibility of love is mentioned, the gender of the partner is unspecified: “when he puts out his hand he shall find another hand by it. . . . another shall say ‘You and I’” (88). I thus suggest that, beyond functioning as a simple repudiation of Pearson's deterministic vision of women's roles, “A Dream of Wild Bees” presents a radical reimaging of gender, sexuality, and temporality, using the nonrealist modes of allegory and dream to go beyond Lyndall's refusal of motherhood in Story of an African Farm and Rebekah's complex compromises in From Man to Man (1926), and instead working toward a more fundamental queering of maternity.

Even when the central figure is a man, Schreiner shifts expectations of ambition, community, and time. Like the woman in the garden, the central figure in “The Hunter” learns he must sacrifice the false comforts of his “comrades,” his religion (including the promise of immortality), and sensuality in his search for truth. Ultimately, the hunter spends the rest of his life trying to climb the “mountains of reality and hard facts,” and is rewarded at the moment of his death with a single feather dropped by the bird of truth. I am most interested, however, in the relationship between the hunter and those who precede and succeed him in this quest:

The hunter suggests that he has traded his former social life, with his “comrades,” for a community that unfolds over time rather than through proximity in space. In his quest, he is deeply connected to the men who have come before and enabled him to reach this point, and, like the woman of “Three Dreams,” equally connected to the men of the future, who will literally stand on the steps of his own achievements to further the quest. Having ceased to listen to the voices of his old life, he instead claims his soul's ability to hear the steps of these future hunters and dies in their company, rather than alone.Footnote ⁴⁰ In addition, just as it is possible to read the “Garden” allegory in both conservative religious terms and as a more radical plea for women's rights, the seemingly conventional gendering of “The Hunter” may be misleading. On one hand, it reads as a familiar and sexist argument that women and family distract men from their purest ambitions, and that the quest for truth is best left only to men. On the other hand, it is possible to frame the end of the allegory in terms of queer temporality, as an image of an all-male, nonreproductive future that privileges the search for truth over more conventional models of family or community. Despite Schreiner's ambivalence toward alternative masculinities and sexualities, “The Hunter” makes space for a rethinking of gender, knowledge, and time.Footnote ⁴¹

Arthur Symons's glowing review of Dreams in 1891 raises the possibility that Schreiner's relationship to the decadent writers of her time has been undertheorized. Here I join recent critical attempts to shed new light on Schreiner's queer and decadent affinities while simultaneously revealing the radical potential of Levy's politics.Footnote ⁴² Putting the two writers in dialogue helps build on and elaborate some of Symons's initial insights about Schreiner's allegories; he emphasizes the tension between their novelty and their “old form,” their incorporation of “the essential qualities of poetry,” and especially their “ascetic, unrestful hope, born painfully of the brave, acquiescent despair of the earlier book [African Farm]; but still, hope.”Footnote ⁴³ Levy's monologues similarly seem to birth a kind of hope from despair, a belief in the possibility of radically different futures, even as both writers struggled with the inequalities of their late Victorian present.