Introduction

Summary

And I heard a sound of something cracking, and I looked, and I saw the band that bound the burden on to her back broken asunder; and the burden rolled on to the ground.

And I said, ‘What is this?’

And he said, ‘The Age-of- muscular- force is dead. The Age-of- nervous- force has killed him with the knife he holds in his hand; and silently and invisibly he has crept up to the woman, and with that knife of Mechanical Invention he has cut the band that bound the burden to her back. The Inevitable Necessity is broken. She must rise now.’

Olive Schreiner, ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (1891: 71–2)

The close of the nineteenth century marks an epoch of social revolutions! Humanity is borne more and more rapidly along on the course of the ever-widening, the ever-swifter flowing stream of progress, through scene after scene of novelty, where stupendous events and marvellous discoveries and inventions crowd thickly one upon another…. [M]ore discussed, debated, newspaper paragraphed, caricatured, howled down and denied, or acknowledged and approved, as the case may be, than any of them, we have the new woman … immeasurably the first in importance, the most abounding in potentialities and in common interest.

Mrs Morgan-Dockrell, ‘Is the New Woman a Myth?’ (1896: 339–40)

In Olive Schreiner's 1890 short story ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, the narrator, having fallen asleep under a mimosa tree, experiences in three dreams an allegorical journey from slavery to emancipation. In the first dream the narrator finds herself in a desert, in which she encounters the figure of a woman lying motionless in the sand, bound by chains and weakened by ages of subordination. But after having her chains cut off by ‘Mechanical Invention’, the woman staggers to her knees, and continues towards emancipation; the other two dreams see the narrator journey through a purgatorial river, and then arrive at a heavenly future. This book focuses on just what cuts off the woman's chains in Schreiner's allegory: that ‘Mechanical Invention’ of the late nineteenth century. Mrs Morgan-Dockrell in the Humanitarian names the ‘course of the ever-widening, the ever-swifter flowing stream of progress, through scene after scene of novelty, where stupendous events and marvellous discoveries and inventions crowd thickly one upon another’ (1896: 339).