ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three New Men in Schreiner's fiction that embody principles of both emotional sympathy and suffering: the gentle Waldo and cross-dressing Gregory in The Story of an African Farm and the sacrificial military man, Peter, in Trooper Peter Halket. It explores the Schreiner's representation of Waldo Farber and his almost gender-free relationship with Lyndall. While Waldo can be termed a New Man for his sympathy towards the plight of Victorian women, he might more accurately be called a New Boy, in his unusual embodiment of adult anxieties and childish naivety. Through her stories of failed and suffering but courageous New Men, Schreiner demonstrates the difficulty for late Victorian colonial figures to create new masculine models that embody sympathy and compassion for others, and especially for women. African Farm and Trooper Peter thus depicts the incompatibility of the colonialist mission to New Manhood that gesture to new conceptions of honour, manhood, courage for late century men.
