Awful Knowledge: Anthropology and Feminist Pessimism in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man, or Perhaps Only

This essay reads Olive Schreiner’s final, posthumously published novel, From Man to Man, or If Only (1926) as an anthropological epic. Its heroine, Rebekah, is an armchair anthropologist who must come to knowledge not only of herself and her society, as would be conventional in a bildungsroman, but account for her place in the sweep of social evolution. From Man to Man is animated by a dynamic I describe as recursive feminist pessimism: over and over, Rebekah confronts the idea that women’s subordination is both archaic and inexorable. Across the novel, Rebekah’s struggles with this idea are salutary, spurring her toward a proto-intersectional feminism. Pessimism is also an incisive instrument of feminist self-critique for Schreiner, driving her to interrogate her investments in the primitive versus civilised binary and in evolutionary anthropology as the basis of progressive ideals.