The Woman in the Garden: Representations of Femininity and Domestic Gardens in Nineteenth Century Writing and Twentieth Century Film

This thesis will examine the ways in which the garden acts as a space where dominant representational accounts of femininity are both reflected and subverted by critically analysing a range of texts which situate women in the garden. These will include the horticultural publications of Jane Wells Webb Loudon, the novels Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899) by Elizabeth Von Arnim and the films The Assam Garden (1985, dir. Mary McMurray) and The Draughtsman’s Contract (1985, dir. Peter Greenaway). Each text (re)presents a woman, or women, in the garden, a space conventionally regarded as one of constraint and enclosure, contributing to notions of female passivity and restraint. I aim to demonstrate that, rather than a being a conservative space, the garden is able to encompass a range of representational ambiguities/ contradictions.

Using a methodology informed by, but not limited to, feminism, this thesis takes a multi-disciplinary approach, engaging with fields as diverse as art and garden history, social history, horticulture and cultural and historical studies and sets out to contribute to analyses of representation, explored through notions of gender by using the garden as a starting point for investigation. My thesis will be informed by a feminist methodology, in particular the approach of feminist geographers who have addressed the subject of gardens and garden histories from a female perspective. The texts selected embody, implicitly or explicitly, an engagement with dominant ideas about the role of women. Each work will be read in historically and culturally specific contexts framed by the issues and concerns of the period and explored for the ways in which notions of femininity are both reproduced and destabilized in the garden. Textual analysis will form the basis of the primary research, while secondary sources will be used to provide contextual detail. A thematic engagement with notions of space, agency, and identity underpin this work.

A large body of literature has considered the history and meaning of the garden, its design and, more recently, the space of the garden itself. Although ideas of representation have been a central feature of academic study in cultural, media and feminist studies, little scholarship has been dedicated to the ways in which femininity has been represented in the garden. This thesis will contribute to debates about femininity, drawing attention to the garden as a space for the construction of meaning and suggests that the garden, both physically and conceptually, embraces competing and contradictory discourses.

The chapter on Jane Loudon focusses on her horticultural writing and specifically on the ways in which it represents women as actively engaging with the work of gardening, offering its nineteenth century female readers an alternative view of feminine propriety. My reading of von Arnim’s work develops themes outlined in the previous chapter and suggests that Elizabeth too was an active gardener. In this chapter I foreground notions of enclosure and retreat for the female gardener and draw attention to the meaning of space for the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century definitions of femininity.

My discussion of The Draughtsman’s Contract, proposes a totally different reading, focussing on the language of horticulture and its use in enshrining particular qualities associated with the feminine and the ways in which representations of the feminine are aligned with ideas of nature and the land. Key here are notions of prospect and view, nature and the land. My exploration of The Assam Garden extends the discussions of space developed by feminist cultural geographers and examines how two women restore a garden and forge a friendship which crosses class and ethnic boundaries, against a background of possession and prevailing definitions of what it means to be feminine.