African nature as allegorical setting for female liberation in Three Dreams in a Desert by Olive Schreiner
Keywords:
South African literature, Feminism, AllegoryAbstract
This paper analyses the short story Three Dreams in a Desert, published by South African writer Olive Schreiner in 1887, connecting it to the ideals of women’s liberation and social progress that are fundamental to Schreiner’s work. The story deals with the history of sexist oppression and the desire for women's liberation through dreams that the narrator has while sleeping in the desert; it is remarkable for using the act of dreaming as a frame for the representation of women’s social struggle in three different pictorial forms, and for using the African natural space as an allegorical setting for the materialisation of the ideal.
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