ABSTRACT
Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm is “the first distinctly ‘feminist’ fiction in English” and the first South African novel to attract international attention. The story told in African Farm depicts the unconscious in ways that illuminate the issue of fragmentation. C. G. Jung’s understanding of the primitive within the modern resonates with the novel in a way that implies fragmentation. Henry Rider Haggard considered African Farm one of the most significant Victorian novels. Wholeness and unity resonate with Jungian psychology in two significant ways: first, as an analogue to the wholeness of the Self, which is the goal of individuation; and second, as the equivalent of Jung’s term unus mundus, a comprehensive field that includes matter, psyche, and spirit. The epigraph from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America reinforces the sense that African Farm is written in the psychological/autobiographical mode.
