OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Driver, Dorothy"

Browsing by Author "Driver, Dorothy"

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Bessie Head : re-writing the romance : journalism, fiction (and gender)
(1997) Guldimann, Colette; Driver, Dorothy
This thesis examines the relationship between Bessie Head's work as a journalist during the late 1950s and two of her novels: the first written just after she had left formal journalism and the second a decade later. I claim, in this thesis, that early journalistic writing by Head, which has been critically ignored, and even dismissed, not only merits critical attention but, furthermore, that knowledge this work will yield new insights into Head's fictional writing for which she is famous. Between 1959 and 1960, before she left South Africa, Bessie Head wrote two weekly columns for children and teenagers, some book reviews and had a role in the production of "True Romance" stories for Home Post, a tabloid supplement to the Sunday newspaper Golden City Post. Head was involved in the production of these romances for over a year and I provide an analysis of the "True Romance" stories published in Home Post. I maintain that these romances, like all texts in popular romance genre (which I discuss) constructs the feminine in very particular ways. I locate this analysis within wider, but related, discussion about the representation of women in both Golden City Post and Drum magazine as they were both considered to be the authoritative newspapers representing black South African life in the 1950s. Head's columns, I claim, especially the one for teenagers, present constructions of the feminine, as well as the masculine, which are significantly at odds with the dominant representations of the feminine, and masculine, in the media I have mentioned, during the late 1950s. A close reading of the representations of gender which Head set up in this column, together with the book reviews she wrote, will give us new insight into her fictional work, particularly The Cardinals which is an early work written and set during this period but only published posthumously in 1993. Reading this novel against the background of the journalistic work and world Head was engaged in just before she wrote it will enable us to read its complexities, specifically those regarding gender and romance. I claim that Head also gave us what is probably the earliest gender perspective, and critique, of 1950s black journalism - a period generally considered to be a vibrant one for black journalism and writing in South Africa. In The Cardinals, which fictionally recreates the black journalistic milieu of the late 1950s in South Africa, Head suggests that black women journalists (and writers) found themselves facing a very different situation from black male journalists. Finally I suggest that with romance structure and the role which gender plays in the novel. Although critics have persistently read this novel as an idealistic, and unrealistic, romance with a happy ending, I suggest, in this thesis, that one can read the novel, in the light of Head's earlier work, as being a radical subversion of the romance.
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Empire, nation, gender and romance : the novels of Cynthia Stockley (1872-1936) and Gertrude Page (1873-1922)
(1997) Walton, Marion Nicole; Driver, Dorothy
As the first detailed study of the Southern Rhodesian romantic. novels of Cynthia Stockley (Lilian Julia Webb) and Gertrude Page (Gertrude Dobbin), this dissertation presents biographical information about the two writers as well as an analysis of the historical reception and discursive context of the novels - focusing primarily on the novels as rewritings of the gendered discourses of the British "New Imperialism" and of a nascent Rhodesian nationalism. Their novels reveal ambivalences about and conflicts between feminism and maternalism, heroic and bourgeois versions of the romance genre, and bourgeois imperialism and the representation of feminine sexuality.
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The female quest in the novels of Alice Walker
(1987) Miles, Lesley Margaret Pears; Driver, Dorothy; McCormick, Kay
This study is an examination of the development of the quest motif in Alice Walker's novels, from a male quest in the first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, to the female quests which supersede it in the two later novels, Meridian and The Color Purple. In this analysis, brief reference is made to Walker's poetry, essays, and short stories, as well as to texts by black male writers and other Afro-American women writers.
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Heritage, letters, and public history : Dorothea Fairbridge and loyal unionist cultural initiatives in South Africa, circa 1890-1930'
(2002) Merrington, Peter James; Driver, Dorothy; Hall, Martin; Brink, Andre
The study of the life and work of the 'nation building' author Dorothea Fairbridge is framed by the concept of the inventing of heritage for the Union of South Africa, circa 1910. The thesis begins with a historicizing of the concept of heritage, which is shown to have enjoyed a complex and wide range of social and cultural implications during the period roughly 1880 to 1930. This heritage paradigm or heritage discourse is reﬂected in the narrative dynamics of the contemporary novel, and samples including Fairbridge's ﬁction are discussed. The heritage paradigm is then applied in a survey of the Fairbridge family and its contribution to public culture. This paradigm is turned to the idea of the inventing of heritage for the Union, with a study of the rise of a 'Cape vernacular' architectural style and related topics, at the time of Union. The 'Van der Stel controversy' of 1909 plays a central role in Fairbridge's literary and historical work. The place of Van der Stel's farm, Vergelegen, as a cultural centre at the time of Union, is discussed, along with Fairbridge's classic studies of old Cape architecture and history. The exportation of the Cape vernacular building style as a national architectural idiom for South Africa at large is explored in a case study of the Tongaat-Hulett sugar estate in Kwazulu-Natal. The role of genteel anglophone Englishwomen in deﬁning Cape identity at the time of Union is explored, and Fairbridge's Guild of Loyal Women is shown to have been the origins of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Questions of archivism, memory, history and memorialism are linked. The signiﬁcance for literary production, of British immigration schemes, is discussed. The idea of national identity is then pursued in terms of the period genre of the 'new pageantry' where national and ethnic identity are performed. This is compared with mural painting in public buildings, and a case study is made of the 1908 Quebec Tercentenary pageant and the 1910 South African Union pageant. The study of Fairbridge and her milieu closes with a reconstruction of the cultural matrix with which the 'Cape-to-Cairo' idea was sustained for three decades, including an examination of the concept of the Cape as 'Mediterranean'. Thus, Fairbridge's contribution to South African public culture and identity is traced through her thirteen books and in the context of heritage, Africana, archives, colonial book production, architecture, gendered interests and activities, public performances, cultural geography and travel writing.
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Living on an horizon : the writings of Bessie Head
(2000) Lewis, Desiree; Driver, Dorothy
Bessie Head's writing illustrates a rich fusion of styles, subjects and philosophical and literary influences. I explore this range by drawing both on postcolonial and feminist theories and on the variety of cultural references that Head acknowledges and that her writing evokes. Postcolonial perspectives are used to confront Head's attention to the discursive foundations of social fictions, relations and identities. Postcolonial theories also shed light on the figurative resonance of Head's writing. Her fictional insights into power are extremely concrete, but also fathom many fundamental and enduring patterns of power and subject constitution.
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Negotiating femininity, ethnicity and history : representations of Ruth First in South African struggle narratives
(2006) Klein, Deborah Rochelle; Driver, Dorothy
An exploration of South African historiography through the prism of representations of activist writer Ruth First (1925-1982) forms the focus of this thesis. Ignored in South African canonical histories during the apartheid era, Ruth First is frequently portrayed as an icon of the struggle in current accounts about the past. The dissertation is ordered by five central discussions: gender, political activism, Jewishness, maternal behaviour and the role of the individual in the community. With reference to her non-fiction writing, autobiographical accounts by her daughters and her contemporaries, photographic exhibitions and transcriptions of amnesty hearings to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (amongst other works), I trace Ruth First's presentation of identity through communications of dress, posture and language. I examine too the production of her image across time in South African culture. Imprisoned under the infamous Ninety-Day law in 1963, Ruth First subsequently wrote a memoir titled 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under South African Ninety-Day Detention Law (1965), which became known as a classic of the genre. Caught between her commitments to racial equality and a life of social privilege, between the demands of motherhood and her sociological research work in Africa, between performances of a white femininity and the suppressed ramifications of a difficult ethnic past, Ruth First shuttles between unsatisfactory subject positions. I propose here that Ruth First strains against the representative mantle which she is made to wear in post-apartheid tributes to the past, and which she herself sometimes donned as a lifetime member of the South African Communist Party, and later the African National Congress. As the daughter of poor Yiddish-speaking Jews from Lithuania, I propose that Ruth First is marked by a history of dislocation, immigration and revolutionary activity which she refused to acknowledge. I undertake my own historiographical exercise through which I re-situate Ruth First within an alternate heritage of Jewish activist women. An understanding of the historiographical process as a series of continuous adjustments of the past to politicized positions in the present underlies my examination. Includes bibliographical references (p. 308-326).
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Negotiating truth, freedom and self : the prison narratives of some South African women
(1996) Young, Sandra Michele; Driver, Dorothy
The autobiographical prison writings of four South African women - Ruth First, Caesarina Kana Makhoere, Emma Mashinini and Maggie Resha - form the focus of this study. South African autobiography is burdened with the task of producing history in the light of the silences enforced by apartheid security legislation and the dominance of representations of white histories. Autobiography with its promise of 'truth' provides the structure within which to establish a credible subject position. In chapter one I discuss the use of authenticating devices, such as documentary-like prose, and the inclusion in numerous texts of the stories of others. Asserting oneself as a (publicly acknowledged) subject in writing is particularly difficult for women who historically have been denied access to authority: while Maggie Resha's explicit task is to highlight the role women have played in the struggle, her narrative must also be broadly representative, her authority communal. As I discuss in chapter two, prison writing breaks the legal and psychological silences imposed by a hostile penal system. In a context of political repression the notion of the truth becomes complicated, because while it is important to be believed, it is also important, as with Ruth First, not to betray her comrades and values. The writer must therefore negotiate with the (imagined) audience if her signature is to be accepted and her subjectivity affirmed. The struggle to represent oneself in the inimical environment of prison and the redemptive value in doing so are considered in chapter three. The institution of imprisonment as a means of silencing political dissidence targets the body, according to Michel Foucault's theories of discipline and control explored in chapter four. Using the work of Lois McNay and Elizabeth Grosz I argue in chapter five that it is necessary also to pay attention to the specificities of female bodies which are positioned and controlled in particular ways. I argue, too, using N. Chabani Manganyi, that while anatomical differences provide the rationale for racism and sexism, the body is also an instrument for resisting negative cultural significations. For instance, Caesarina Kana Makhoere represents her body as a weapon in her political battle, inside and outside prison. The prison cell itself is formative of subjectivity as it returns an image of criminality and powerlessness to the prisoner. Following the work of human geographers in chapter six I argue that space and subjectivity are mutually constitutive, as shown by the way spatial metaphors operate in prison texts. The subject can redesign hostile space in order to represent herself. As these texts show, relations of viewing are crucial to self-identification: surveillance disempowers the prisoner and produces her as a victim, but prisoners have recourse to alternative ways of (visually) interacting in order to position the dominators as objects of their gaze, through speaking and then also through writing. Elaine Scarry's insights into torture are extended in chapter seven to encompass psychological torture and sexual harassment: inflicting bodily humiliation, as well as pain, on the body, brings it sharply into focus, making speech impossible. By writing testimony and by generating other scenes of dialogue through which subjectivity can be constructed (through being looked at and looking, through having the message of self affirmed in the other's hearing) it is possible to contain, in some way, the horror of detention and to assert a measure of control in authoring oneself. For Mashinini this healing dialogue must take place within an emotionally and ideologically sympathetic context. v For those historical subjects who have found themselves without a legally valued identity and a platform from which to articulate the challenge of their experience, writing a personal narrative may offer an invaluable chance to assert a truth, to reclaim a self and a credibility and in that way to create a kind of freedom. Bibliography: pages 173-182.
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Olive Schreiner : women, nature, culture
(1988) Barsby, Tina; Driver, Dorothy
This dissertation locates Olive Schreiner as a nineteenth-century colonial woman writer who challenges the traditional association of men with culture, and women with nature. In Schreiner's writing the oppression of women is situated within an understanding of the social construction of "woman" as closer to nature than man. Through the lives of her central female characters, Schreiner shows how this definition of "woman" works to position women as "other" to culture, both preventing their access to public power and marginalising their fully social activities within culture. Schreiner attempts to displace definitions of culture constituted through a system of binary oppositions which inevitably privilege masculinity as opposed to femininity by redefining culture in three distinct ways. The patriarchal conception culture as the sole preserve of men is rejected in Schreiner's demands for women's educational and legal equality, and for their right to economic independence. Conventional notions of culture are equally refused in Schreiner's stress on women's traditional domestic labour as essential to the very emergence and continuation of culture. Finally, the deconstruction of sexual difference as a fixed immutable category within Schreiner's writing exposes the definition of "woman" as socially constructed and legitimated. The contradictions and tensions within and between these demands illustrate the limits of Schreiner's feminist and socialist politics, and point to how her writing both challenges and articulates aspects of dominant nineteenth-century ideology. At the same time, such contradictions were vitally important in motivating Schreiner's on-going attempt to change radically the position of women within culture. Moreover, the co-existence of apparently conflicting demands within Schreiner's redefinition of culture suggests the terms of a resolution of the perennial problem within feminist discourse around competing claims for women's equality or for a recognition of their difference.
Open Access
Representations of writers as public intellectuals : Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Gao Xingjian and Pablo Neruda
(2003) Lee, Jenny V; Driver, Dorothy
This thesis takes as its subject the various public roles and representations of writers, using Said's 1993 Reith lectures on the subject of the intellectual as a starting point. The main questions raised are how writers, in various political and historical contexts, have functioned as public intellectuals, and how they have negotiated the tensions between their various private and public commitments and responsibilities, whether artistic, social, or political. To gain insight into these issues, this thesis turns to the essays, memoirs and lectures of Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Pablo Neruda and Gao Xingjian.
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Representations of writers as public ntellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Gao Xingjian and Pablo Neruda
(2003) Lee, Jenny; Driver, Dorothy
This thesis takes as its subject the various public roles and representations of writers, using Said's 1993 Reith lectures on the subject of the intellectual as a starting point. The main questions raised are how writers, in various political and historical contexts, have functioned as public intellectuals, and how they have negotiated the tensions between their various private and public commitments and responsibilities, whether artistic, social, or political. To gain insight into these issues, this thesis turns to the essays, memoirs and lectures ofJean-Paul Sartre, Nadine Gordimer, Pablo Neruda and Gao Xingjian. Chapter I is concerned with Sartre's attempt to systematize a conception of the writer as an intellectual through the writer's commitment in the work itself. Chapter 2 looks at the development of Gordimer's explorations of her own positioning in such a public role, as well as how these explorations point towards a transformative view of literature. Chapter 3 sets up a comparison between Neruda and Gao, who share an important conviction that literature provides an "alternative" historical record of human experience despite their opposed ideas regarding the writer's relationship to society. As winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, these writers have been "officially" recognized as public intellectuals, and thus their emblematic position affords an important opportunity to examine how such writers deal with public pressures, clarify their commitments and attempt to construct a feasible identity within the matrices of art and politics. By looking at their nonfictional and often deeply autobiographical writings, this thesis hopes to locate these writers at their most candid, reflective and even contradictory moments, in which they attempt to delineate a certain credo that informs their public and private activities as writers.
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Ruth Miller and the poetics of literary maternity
(2012) Warner, Sarah Jane; Driver, Dorothy; Young, Sandra; Distiller, Natasha
Ruth Miller's poetry was written between 1940 and the year of her death in 1969, and is published in three volumes, Floating Island (1965), Selected Poems (1968), and Ruth Miller: Poems Prose Plays (1990). In this thesis, I modify the concept of literary maternity suggested by Joan Metelerkamp in her article, “Ruth Miller: Father's Law or Mother's Lore?” (1992). My approach is informed by a model of literary maternity that is not defined in terms of a female figure but in terms of a relation between the earliest parent and the child, or what is referred to in psychoanalytic terms as the preoedipal relation. My thesis is concerned to show how Miller's poetry and a theory on the maternal function of literature reinterpret each other; it includes a consideration of Miller's literary legacy, the critical literature describing her oeuvre, and the issues of continuity and authority that arise in the context of literary publication.
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Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa
(2005) Hanzimanolis, Margaret; Driver, Dorothy
This study examines how possessive interests have been encoded in southern African contact literature via the signing of gender, sexual violability and territoriality. Portuguese shipwreck survival accounts from the long sixteenth century, the ﬁrst sustained narratives of contact between southern African peoples and Europeans, are examined in the first half of this study. British women’s travel writings from the nineteenth century are the topic of the second part of the study, as these later texts yield the ﬁrst important female perspectives on contact. Both subgenres are crucial to formulating a feminist reading of the southern African contact zone. While the Portuguese shipwreck material suggests that exposed or abandoned white women provoked great cultural anxieties, British travel texts written by women move in a different direction. Many of these texts were pitched to assuage readers' fears about the fate of the self-itinerizing women in southern Africa. l ﬁrst establish that neither the shipwreck material nor the British women's impressions of contact has been well integrated into the founding narratives of South Africa. I then focus on key episodes related to gender and hyper-vulnerability in the early accounts of overland shipwreck survivor treks, especially Leonor de Sa’s death in southern Africa in 1552, after the wreck of the St. John. The second part of the study surveys the earliest women's writings about southern Africa. Chapter Four concentrates on Anne Barnard’s letters and journals (written 1797-1801) and several other women travel writers. I ﬁnd that these women downplay, or occlude entirely, the physical dangers in southern African spaces and emphasize, instead successfully transplanted tropes of domesticity and theatricality and the premature memorialization of the existing culture. The ﬁnal chapter examines the artworks and writings of Marianne North, a traveling artist whose work combines some of the tensions evident in the earlier theatricalizing tropes, but with a displaced focus on botanical descriptions and ﬂower painting. The chapter about South Africa in her autobiography and the exhibition of her paintings of South African flowers on display at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew provide insight into how some early cultural anxieties surrounding gender, empire, and sexuality can be found in botanical discourse and representations. My conclusions are twofold. In the ﬁrst place, the expansion of the notion of contact narratives I propose in this study brings into the foreground the anxieties associated with the presence of European women in under-regulated contact and colonial spaces. Women's relationship to the land or landscape, evident in the discourses of the Portuguese mercantile empire as well as the British territorial empire, suggest that marooned or self-itinerizing women are in a position to signal, with their bodies, a graphos on the imperial map of the colonial or pre-colonial land.
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The unhealed wound : Olive Schreiner's expressive art
(1994) Green, Louise; Higgins, John; Driver, Dorothy
In this paper I discuss the relation between Olive Schreiner's social context and the form of her fictional writing. It is not intended as an interpretation of her work but rather represents a preliminary sketch of the social and political discourses which structured her environment. I suggest that for Olive Schreiner writing is not a means of representing a given reality. Instead writing itself is a constitutive act through which she attempts to articulate a subject which expresses the conflicts and contradictions of its social and political location. In the first section of the paper, I discuss Olive Schreiner's position as a woman in relation to the literary canon. I argue that the social discourses of femininity in the late nineteenth century attempted to exclude women from the realm of cultural and intellectual production. Looking at the work of Herbert Spencer, the influential social philosopher who used scientific principles as the basis for his ideas about social order, I analyse the way in which Olive Schreiner rewrites his theory in order to make a space for women as cultural producers. In the second section I look at the dominant forms of the novel available to Olive Schreiner. The dominant mode of representation for metropolitan writers was the realist novel and women writers such as George Eliot found it an extremely effective way of articulating their experiences. The other significant form of writing for Olive Schreiner was the colonial adventure story, the most popular way, in the nineteenth century, of representing the colonial space. I suggest that Olive Schreiner's rejection of both these forms and her choice of the allegorical mode, can be understood in terms of the specificity of her position as a colonial woman writer. In the third section, I focus more closely on one of Olive Schreiner's texts, The Story of an African Farm in an attempt to illustrate how allegory allows Olive Schreiner to reorder the unstable colonial space. Both realism and the adventure novel, I argue, assume a coherent and unified self. The colonial context, I suggest problematises this sense of self as individualist agent and in the figure of Lyndall I see the limits of the reflective self as a means of interacting with the colonial situation. Bibliography: pages 68-69.

Browsing by Author "Driver, Dorothy"

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