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I
am currently working on a project examining the image of the
woman in the garden in early modern English poetry. The project
explains why this image was so ubiquitous by tracing how it
manifests the period’s changing attitudes toward aesthetic
pleasure and gender relations.
At
the end of the sixteenth century, the image embodied the age’s
moral anxiety regarding art’s–and particularly poetry’s–sensuous
pleasures, personified in deadly seductresses like Edmund Spenser’s
Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss. But as it entered the seventeenth
century the image lost its threatening aspect. I explain this
change in connotation as a shift in artistic method: both poets
and gardeners began to use the image to answer the troubling
moral questions about sensuous art it had previously represented.
The image came to embody varied answers, but all of them enabled
the male artist to claim for himself, to a lesser or greater
extent, forms of aesthetic pleasure that traditionally had been
gendered feminine. Analyses of a masque by Inigo Jones, a gardening
manual by John Parkinson, the landscaping of Philip Herbert’s
Wilton estate, and poems by Andrew Marvell and the Cavaliers
provide cases in point.
The
project offers new readings of Aemilia Lanyer’s “The
Description of Cooke-ham” and Mary Wroth’s Urania
to demonstrate how female poets, in sharp contrast to their
male contemporaries, were able to reappropriate the image to
authorize women’s writing. The pleasure garden’s ambiguous
status as an extension of the public order of the household,
as well as a more intimate sphere apart, made the garden a site
uniquely suited to dramatize the female poet’s predicament,
caught between social constraints on self-expression and a desire
for it.
My past projects have included studies of Queen Elizabeth I's
self-representation and Tudor ideas about motherhood.
Copyright
2003. All rights reserved.
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