| Summary: | The South-African essayist and novelist Olive Schreiner wrote allegories which were treasured by early twentieth-century feminists, who turned to them for inspiration and comfort. In Dreams (1890), Schreiner denounced the arbitrariness of man’s domination over woman, invited women to try to achieve both Freedom and Love, and looked forward to a state of gender equality. Schreiner’s allegories are a good place to start an inquiry into the ways in which narratological practices can challenge stereotyped perceptions of gender. The first-person narrator, who is our substitute in many of her stories, is the source of the hermeneutic process at the core of the allegory. The reader’s conjectures are rendered more complex by the ambivalence of this narrator’s gender. Schreiner’s prophet/ess delivers a pragmatic truth, depending on the sexual identity which the reader attributes to him/her in context. Gender neutral first-person narration allowed Schreiner to tell certain stories from a gender-free perspective, or created gender leeway which allowed meaning to proliferate.
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