While I found Esty’s argument somewhat compelling, and I do think he drew some interesting claims that could, possibly, be substantiated, I could help but feel like much of his paper had the air of someone grasping at straws. From my reading of The Story of an African Farm, I didn’t feel like there was much of a focus on colonialism. As we discussed in class, I think that a feminist reading of the novel is much more supported by the actual novel itself. Sure, Esty could (and did) find some things that he could make fit into a reading on colonialism, but reading his paper kind of made me wonder how much license we, as readers, have when interpreting a novel. Where do we draw the line between looking beyond the literal and exploring underlying meanings, and reading too much into something? Just because you can find bits and pieces of a story that you can make fit into some hypothesis or idea doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily valid to do so, and while the literary acrobatics can no doubt be impressive, are they worthwhile? I think that I would be more accepting of Esty’s argument if I felt that there was more of an overtone concerning colonialism in the story, but I just didn’t feel that there was. I feel like we would have had to see more of colonialism at play, and we really didn’t. It goes beyond Schreiner being racist in the typically nineteenth century way – there wasn’t much evidence of the native Africans, period. And to me, colonialism isn’t colonialism if the native population isn’t figured into the picture somehow. Even if Schreiner was focusing on the effects of colonialism on the transplanted Europeans, there still has to be some sense of their interactions with the community and people around them. I don’t feel like there is in Story of an African Farm. I’m pretty sure Schreiner could have taken this farm and plopped it down in Louisiana, Ireland, Germany – any place you can think of – and the story would have turned out much the same.