The Feminine as Spiritual: Gardens as Metaphysical Retreats

In his study Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture, Stephen Bending stresses the tremendous significance that gardens held in eighteenth-century life, especially in women’s lives:

Gardens are places of pleasure and punishment; they are places to read, to dance, to work, to laugh, to study, to labour, to rest [...] they are places to imagine, to make, to own and to visit; they are places which speak of elsewhere and places which signify home; they are places of retirement and ostentation, they are places of transgression, of meditation, of excitement, of boredom, seduction, luxury, and suicide” (2013: int 1)

As the above quotation indicates, the garden was a ‘rich’ environment, full of endless possibilities and subject to multiple – often conflicting – interpretations. The garden offered women a retreat, a place to ‘escape’ their existence or, at least, to somehow surpass its limitations. Options are multiplied in a natural landscape which is strongly connected to the home while pulling away from it. In the midst of what appears to be an unfettered space, nature becomes the perfect venue to ponder around existence and its restrictions.¹⁰⁹ The act of finding a physical space, whether indoors or outdoors, inevitably “is the shaping also of identity” (Bending 2013: int 1) and gardens,

108 In Daly’s work, her critique of women’s submission is apparent in her choice of language expressions to refer to women, as she makes use of terms such as “’puppet’ or even ‘fembot’” (Grimshaw 1990: 15).

109 Bending reinforces this idea by arguing that “gardens are recognised as the opportunity for a self-fashioning engagement with cultural norms and narratives, a space in which the disparate agenda of eighteenth-century culture would inevitably have to be confronted” (2013: int 5).

176 in particular, are “speaking and reacting to a world beyond themselves” (Bending 2013:

int 1).

The idea of ‘female retirement’¹¹⁰ is a recurrent motif in private letters and diaries, and such retirement illustrates women’s attempt to somehow ‘escape’ the world but, as Bending notes, such attempt is destined to fail, as retreat “can never leave behind the ways in which it is constructed by the world beyond itself and about which it inevitably speaks” (2013: 68). Therefore, the garden proves a powerful space for reflection and successfully provides a space in which women can peacefully meditate on their own selves but this serene retreat proves inefficient as a means to escape the bounds of society to which they must respond, and which continue to be very much present in that isolated space:

Yes, my dear Fanny, I am now, thank Heaven, safely arrived at Woodfort – would I had never left it! I think even the place, and every thing in it, is altered, during a short absence, of twelve days. The trees have lost their verdure, and the birds cease to sing.

But though the autumnal season, may have produced these effects, I begin to fear there is a greater change in me, than in any of the objects that surround me.

Yet am I in the spring of life, not ripened even to summer; while like a blastered flower, I shrink and fade. Say, Fanny, what is this? The animal, and vegetable world bloom in their proper season, youth – while amongst those whom we call rational, grief steals the roses, from the downy cheek, and flowing tears oft dim the brilliant eye. Lord Seymour is unhappy; Thornton sighs; and my loved lord, seems wretched; – need I go on, and close the climax, with my breaking heart! (141)

110 The physical or metaphorical spaces to which women retire are subject to constant revision, and hence retirement becomes a place “constantly to be constructed and negotiated” (Bending 2013: 67)

177 Lady Woodville establishes a direct connection between her troubled sentiments and the place she inhabits. Her distorted state of mind has altered her surroundings; her sorrow has caused all things in nature to decay: the trees, the birds, all seem to ‘feel’ her anguish and have lost all bloom because of it. As she acknowledges, her perception of her surroundings is deeply conditioned by her inner feelings and sensations. The bond that is established between herself and the natural world that surrounds her is so prominent that she envisions herself as an element of nature, as a ‘blastered flower’ that has weakened.

Hence, the garden cannot be understood exclusively as a liberating space, as it can often become an oppressive, rather hostile environment. Seduction narratives make extensive use of gardens to either illustrate the threat of seduction or to actually display the seduction scene. The garden, with its clear Biblical reference to the Garden of Eden, becomes a place of confinement, of pastoral seclusion which, in turn, becomes a means

“for others to judge the individual against a claimed social norm and its inequalities”

(Bending 2013: int 6). The retirement that gardens entail endows an acute awareness of the distance that exists between individuality, what the individual truly desires, and what society demands from that individual. Thus, the garden, with its replication of cultural assumptions, can ‘entrap’ women in a place “that could taunt them with unattainable aspirations, and that as a result could damn them to disappointment, to disillusionment, and to a depressing sense of failure” (Bending 2013: int 7).¹¹¹

The trope of women in gardens was portrayed throughout the eighteenth century, and one of the implications of that trope was the peril of women’s ‘uncontrolled’

sexuality. In this respect, the presence of the woman in the garden exemplifies the fact that “women must be cultivated, governed, controlled, if their naturally conflicting

111 This notion of the garden as a place of disillusionment is linked to the idea of gardens as “a demonstration of the dangerous delights of society” (Bending 2013: int 20) which women are repeatedly warned against.

178 desires are to be socially contained” (Bending 2013: int 27). The garden becomes a metaphor for women’s ‘wild’ sexual nature, a nature that must be limited, and purposefully looked after, as one looks after a garden, so as to avoid women’s desires becoming dangerous ‘seeds’¹¹².