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

Abstract

Karel Schoeman’s This Life (published as Hierdie lewe in 1993; translated into English in 2005), like other post-apartheid novels recently published by Afrikaans-speaking authors, considers the past and the future of the Afrikaner people. It is also markedly 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.

Opsomming

Karel Schoeman se roman Hierdie lewe het in 1993 die lig gesien en is in 2005 in Engels vertaal en as This Life gepubliseer. Soos vele ander postapartheidromans deur Afrikaanssprekende skrywers, werp Hierdie lewe ook ’n blik op die Afrikanerdom se verlede en toekoms. Die roman se styl en inhoud word gekenmerk deur Gotiese elemente: die elegiese verhaal is deurspek met geweld, vrees, die dood en lyding. Gerald Gaylard het die volgende stelling gemaak: “[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”. In die lig hiervan voer ek aan dat Schoeman se bepaalde gebruik van Gotiese konvensies in This Life om genderverhoudinge op ’n Suid-Afrikaanse plaas in die laat negentiende en vroeë twintigste eeu uit te beeld, dui op sy eie vrese oor die toekoms van die Afrikanerkultuur ná apartheid. Sy besorgdheid oor Afrikaners se verlede en hul toekoms (in hierdie roman en in sy ander werke), sy besorgdheid oor die rol van die kunstenaar in die Suid-Afrikaanse konteks, en sy uitbeelding van die verteller in Hierdie lewe en die genderklimaat waarin sy leef, kan ook beskou word as tekenend van Schoeman se eie vrese. Schoeman se versugting na ’n verlore paradys in sy antipastorale Hierdie lewe bring ‘n Gotiese somberheid mee wat die ellendigheid van die “goeie” vrou en die destruktiewe mag van die “slegte” moeder omvat. Dit is ’n manifestasie van sy woede en verdriet, nie net omdat die idille verlore gegaan het nie, maar ook omdat dit van die begin af ’n valse idille was. Schoeman gebruik sy verteller om die patriargale oplegging van stilswye en die marginalisering van vroue aan die kaak te stel, maar ek voer ook aan dat die protes namens vroue verwater word deur die verband wat Schoeman in konvensionele, patriargale terme lê tussen die verteller se liggaam en die vrugbare land, asook deur sy beklemtoning dat ’n vrou, die “moeder”, die blaam dra vir die agteruitgang van die Afrikanerkultuur.