Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Zurich (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: Women have been closely associated with gardens: for a perceived similarity to their 'nature', for the garden's connection to the domestic sphere, and, not least, for their connection by the 'hortus conclusus' motif, referring back to the Bible.
This connection became even stronger in 19th century England. In the wake of the general gardening rage it became possible for women to pursue gardening as a career. Women began to emerge as competent authors of gardening books, and in imaginative literature, too, women in particular showed no restraint in declaring their passion for the garden.
The most important among them was Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941), an Australian-born British novelist. In her bestselling novels "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" (1898), as well as in the two sequels "The Solitary Summer" (1899) and "The Pious Pilgrimage" (1901), the autobiographical heroine Elizabeth enjoys ecstatic, creative freedom in her Pomeranian garden.
This thesis explores the relationship between gardens and their representation in literature, the relationship between women and gardens in the 19th century, and the function of the garden for the main character and narrator in works by writer Elizabeth von Arnim.
In von Arnim's works, the garden is a protected space of liberty. It enables a return to childhood, it restores the female speaker to her original self, is a space for creativity, offers freedom from familial restraints and society's roles, and provides independence and room for ecstatic feelings. It acts as an ally in a patriarchal and materialistic society, and it is, in general, the central object and issue against and through which the female speaker defines herself.
Von Arnim draws on a multitude of literary models and traditions related to gardens, and to women in gardens, above all to the garden image in Victorian literature. The writer does so, though, in an ironic, unorthodox way, fusing and subverting the conventional topoi. Von Arnim's garden novels thus herald a playful new consciousness towards any models, especially towards those concerning women's life and behaviour in the nineteenth century.
