Women Poets in the Victorian Era

Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry

Fabienne Moine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134776603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Examining the place of nature in Victorian women's poetry, Fabienne Moine explores the work of canonical and long-neglected women poets to show the myriad connections between women and nature during the period. At the same time, she challenges essentialist discourses that assume innate affinities between women and the natural world. Rather, Moine shows, Victorian women poets mobilised these alliances to defend common interests and express their engagement with social issues. While well-known poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti are well-represented in Moine's study, she pays particular attention to lesser known writers such as Mary Howitt or Eliza Cook who were popular during their lifetimes or Edith Nesbit, whose verse has received scant critical attention so far. She also brings to the fore the poetry of many non-professional poets. Looking to their immediate cultural environments for inspiration, these women reconstructed the natural world in poems that raise questions about the validity and the scope of representations of nature, ultimately questioning or undermining social practices that mould and often fossilise cultural identities.

Chapter 1
A Woman’s Place is in the Garden

A Woman’s Nature

In 2004, the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology launched a campaign to foster the recruitment of women in stereotypically male occupations. The slogan chosen for the campaign was ‘A woman’s place is at the kitchen sink’. The aim was not, of course, to drive women back to domestic chores but to increase the number of women plumbers and more generally to fight occupational segregation. Similarly, the title of this chapter evokes the mixed messages which have come to surround the garden. No longer would it be merely conceived as a ‘woman’s space’, encircling and supposedly protecting her, according to the traditional gendered discourse, a discourse which often sought in reality to imprison women, putting them on show like a botanical exhibit under a bell jar. Rather, the garden came to represent a space where gender issues could be negotiated. The topic of nature is capable of being turned into a political tool; a way of manipulating conventional discourses which seek to confine women to the “natural” realm, offering them a precious, and often exhilarating, opportunity to subvert the scopophilia of the male onlooker. In fact, Victorian women played an active role in gardens, not only professionally as gardeners, but also politically when gardens inspired them to think and comment about the world in which they lived.

My chapter title also echoes the title chosen by journalist and gardener Eleanor Perényi for one of her chapters in Green Thought: A Writer in the Garden (1981). In ‘Woman’s Place’, she argues that the garden represents a space that enables questions to be raised about the supposed connections between women and flowers. She observes that horticulture started out as a predominantly female occupation: ‘Women were the first gardeners; but when men retired from the hunting field and decided in favor of agriculture instead, women steadily lost control’ (260). The power of women subsequently diminished, reducing their role to that of cultivating flowers and herbs, thus supporting the subsequent affinity between the two. Women were thus ‘incarcerat[ed] in the flower garden’ (261), breathing new life into the natural bond long considered to link womankind and nature. In this sense, flowers may be seen as emblems of feminine submission.

As Perényi points out, however, such passive stereotypes did not stop women from becoming active female gardeners and herbalists, and by the end of the nineteenth century there began to emerge a corps of professional female gardeners, of whom Gertrude Jekyll is perhaps the best known. From being the ‘inventors’ of agriculture, women thus were transformed into its ‘goddess’ (261). In reality, women’s place had always been in the garden, not because they were to be found there whiling away their hours, but because their production participated in the local economy. The garden must thus be considered as a place of production, even for those who cultivated words instead of plants.

It is important to be aware of the recurrent but significant tendency to subsume nature within the garden; the title of this chapter also hints at this semantic trap. Indeed, the trope of the garden as well as gardening metaphors have proven a convenient means to symbolically circumscribe and control the essence of women. It is precisely because gardens are closed in that they have been associated with women, enhancing the seemingly necessary control over female virtues. The Book of Solomon metonymically pairs the two because the female lover does not live in the garden, but is the garden. Later on, medieval illustrations represented virginal women within enclosed gardens. As for Victorian women poets, they chose to combine the representation of the medieval garden with the image of the cottage garden. In contrast, they largely eschewed the humanist garden of the Renaissance, the classically inspired jardin à la française or the landscape gardens cleverly imitating wild nature, imagined by William Kent, Capability Brown or Charles Bridgeman. All these gardens are less gender-conscious, because they aim rather to recreate the grandeur of princely or regal power. It might be countered that André Le Nôtre’s designs for the Sun King’s gardens at Versailles or Sir John Vanbrugh’s plans and Brown’s later improvements at Blenheim parallel the unbridled masculine desire of the sovereign to control unruly, “female” vegetation. Still, the scale of these royal gardens did not lend itself to poetry writing by women. The latter looked elsewhere for inspiration.

Following Lorraine Anderson’s advice in the preface to her Sisters of the Earth (1991), an anthology of women’s nature writing in prose and verse, we need to remain alert to the fact that any discussion of women and nature runs the risk of attributing female characteristics to nature, with predictably harmful consequences. Anderson argues that ‘to personify the earth as a woman is to invite treating it as the second-class citizen women have been’ (xviii). Indeed, she objects to any approach which considers that there is ‘a woman’s view of nature’ (xvii), while accepting that there exists ‘a feminine way of being in relationship to nature’ (xvii). Even this latter statement is questionable unless it is made clear (as Anderson does not) that we are talking about a culturally constructed relationship. Some radical ecofeminist critics take a different view, and seek to identify a distinctly feminine way of caring about nature that counterbalances a masculine attitude based on the desire to control and subjugate. According to this argument, the “nature” of women gives them a different rapport with nature, based on empathy and common understanding. Yet non-essentialist feminists ‘have long argued against the acceptance of some “feminine essence” grounded in biological sex, showing instead how gender is culturally constructed’ (Garrard 24).

In the analysis that follows, care will be taken to keep in mind the power and reach of essentialist views in women’s poetry while analysing the potency of this perceived natural affinity as a cultural tool. As noted in the introduction, women poets often cast animals, wild or domestic, in the role of friends or allies. There is clearly room here for making parallels between the human and nonhuman world in order to denounce gender inequality. However, it is rare for such criticism to extend to a desire to fundamentally question the patriarchal and anthropocentric domination over nature itself. There are very few examples from this period of protest against the degradation of the environment. In this respect, Victorian women’s poetry at this point cannot really be considered as a form of ecological activism.

In fact, most women poets from this period were content to use the natural world as a resource to be mined to help construct representations of Victorian social life. And while the absurdities and contradictions of the rigid separate spheres model might and often were subjects of criticism, few went as far as to question the need for those spheres in the first place. In this sense, essentialism in some form was for most women poets a given in this period. However, it is possible to observe signs of resistance behind the conventional construction of gender, and it is on these signs – flora or fauna – that this study will focus in particular. This chapter will cover the range of poetic messages present in flower, animal and garden poems, from the defence of traditional essentialism to the more progressive manipulation of ‘horti(counter)cultural’ essentialism. It will be asked how women’s nature-inspired poetry conveys a message that combines feminine, feminist and female elements according to the categories used by Elaine Showalter to describe women’s fiction in A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing.¹

The Gardens of Essences

Garden historians have shown that flower gardens have always been women’s territory. As Catherine Horwood points out, women have regularly been involved with flowers and plants, collecting, growing or weeding them. Starting her study on gardening women in the 1600s, Horwood relates activities in the garden to gender roles:

Within most marriages there was a clear demarcation of territory when it came to being in charge of the various areas of the garden. The orchard was the man’s province, while the kitchen and flower garden were women’s territory, which may have been because the cultivation of fruit trees involved heavier work in the form of pruning and harvesting. (146)

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a sexual division of labour in the garden continued to hold sway, with ‘the man working on the allotment and the woman cooking or growing flowers with which to make the house beautiful for her family’ (152). Thus, men were in charge of growing food whereas women were left to adorn their own domestic environment. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the suburban garden idealised in late-Victorian garden memoirs confirmed the persistence of gendered spaces, as shown by Lynn Hapgood’s Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1925.² Utility versus beauty is a great divide when it comes to the analysis of gender roles and their representations. Vegetable gardens would remain off-limits to both women and a wide range of animal “pests”, as Peter Rabbit would learn to his cost after his disastrous foray into Mr McGregor’s garden.

The association of women and gardens, whether occupational or metaphorical, is such a familiar feature of Victorian poetry that its analysis needs to be approached with care. With home representing the nerve centre of the woman’s sphere in Victorian gender ideology, the ubiquitous feminine presence radiates from and contaminates the representations of anything touching the domestic setting, stamping them too as loci of femininity. Natural surroundings, either real, fantasised or regretted, are thus invested with gendered meaning by the woman poet herself as she occupies in verse a space that has already been handed over to her. Recurrent images of women immersed in contained nature are constructions of an idealised state of femininity and Victorian poetry would often perpetuate such imagery. In Victorian Britain, as the countryside receded, losing out to landscaped parks, and as city life stimulated the love and demand for green spaces, female poets may have wanted to (re)construct the discourse of their gender’s timeless affinity with the natural world.

While, as already seen, Perényi considers the garden as a ‘woman’s place’, according to garden historian Jane Brown it turned into ‘the symbol of a woman’s space’ (233) at the end of the nineteenth century. In her chapter on the artistic representations of gardens, Brown stresses the enduring mesmerising power of the late-Victorian garden romance Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim. No doubt this garden deserves particular attention being ‘somewhere to think, and write, to escape housekeeping and contemplate life and love’ in the protagonist’s own words (233). Women poets and writers in the Victorian period took advantage of that apparent affinity with the garden, one which empowered and belittled them at the same time. The titles of poetry books authored by women or anthologies of women’s poetry regularly highlighted the bond between poems and gardens, sustaining empowering connections between poetry and female identity or more conventionally reinforcing traditional associations between femininity, delicacy and beauty. The reader would be welcomed into the poetical gardens and invited to gather flower-like poems into posies of verse. The first and often most prominent poem of the book would often give its name to the whole volume, reinforcing the floral analogy as well as the central significance of the garden metaphor. For instance, in The Garden and Other Poems (1855) by Mrs M. Abbott (dates unknown), Songs, Ballads and a Garden Play (1888) by A. Mary F. Robinson or The Garden of Life and Other Poems (1913) by the American poet Anne Richardson Talbot (1857–?), the garden is used as a metaphor for poetic treatment of such themes as imagination, romance or childhood memories. Talbot evokes the familiar imagery of expressive flowers whispering the secrets of life to the careful reader:

But every blossom, leaf and fruit

The truth affirmed, thanks giving.

There in that calm and sunlit place

They told the joy of living. (‘The Garden of Life’ 2:25–8)

Gardens and flowers are many-layered metaphors that can apply to a wide range of literary fields. Nature offers poetic space and possibilities of democratic interpretations to all, men and women alike. Undoubtedly one of the most famous poetic gardens is Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850–1894) A Child’s Garden of Verse (1885). The collection explores in depth the potentialities of garden metaphors. Stevenson’s childhood garden is one protected from the intrusion of sexuality, though not from omnipresent Victorian codes of conduct. The analysis of the construction of masculinity in the garden-related poems would no doubt reveal the convergence and cross-fertilisation of natural features and gendered discourse. Stevenson’s garden does not differ much from his female counterparts’ in the way that it reinforces the identity of the poet, whose desires and anxieties – including a recurrent preoccupation with the passing of time – are inscribed in the blade of grass or in the song of the thrush.

Yet the gender perspective is not as prominent as it might be, since Stevenson chooses to frame his collection from the point of view of the male child who is emotionally connected to nature but who never contemplates any natural affinity. The garden evokes the experience of childhood for a traditional Victorian boy who recreates the natural landscape as a playful land of fantasy:

Here is the sea, here is the sand,

Here is simple Shepherd’s Land,

Here are the fairy hollyhocks,

And there are Ali Baba’s rocks. (‘Historical Associations’ 121: 9–12)

Like a modern Adam, the child coins new words for the plants of his childhood and renames the features of the natural world around him so as to transform his environment into his own kingdom. The leitmotif created by the anaphoras, or repetitions, of ‘here’ evidences the transformation of his identity as a frail and solitary child into that of a domineering figure of power. The intervention of his stout matron, known as Cummy, embodying the principle of reality, suddenly rouses the boy from his reverie, bringing him back to his eventless life. It is with affection, humour and wit that Stevenson reinvents the garden and compensates for the forces at work in the life of a young scion of a traditional Victorian middle-class family.

Comparing poems to versified flowers and portraying books as gardens of poems were such common representations during the Victorian era and are still so familiar today that it may be thought there is nothing new to be said. In fact, very little research has been done in the field of Victorian nature poetry from the perspective of gender and cultural studies; with nature and the garden in particular tending to be considered simply as natural extensions of women’s domestic sphere. The belief in that natural affinity, together with a fear that women could draw on the power of nature to bewitch their menfolk, has led men to reserve the garden to women and devote it to the cult of femininity. A recent collection of essays by Carolyn Freas Rapp, entitled Garden Voices: Stories of Women and Their Gardens (2007), acknowledges such a natural link as she underlines the healing power and soothing virtues of gardens for women suffering from physical and psychological pain, such as cancer, mourning or depression. She looks upon the garden as a ‘woman’s place’ because it brings all together in a spirit of sisterly equality; those who garden, those who paint gardens or those who are mentally or physically restored among their vegetal allies.

Decent Flowers

What might be termed “the garden of decency”, the Victorian avatar of the Garden of Eden, is firmly grounded in Victorian poetical representations, particularly in Christian poems. As garden historian Twigs Way observes in The Cottage Garden,

For the poorer gentry of the eighteenth century [cottage gardens] represented a rural idyll, a living nosegay of flowers to cover the shame of indigence; but by the nineteenth-century morality had crept in by the garden gate and a well-tended plot was the sign of a God-fearing labourer. (5)

Private gardens now became symbols of decency and respectability, with an impressive moral and religious dimension, and as such served to reinforce Victorian hegemonic discourses. Women poets constructed “their” garden as a personal space, an extension of the self, by means of a whole set of imaginary connections, from simple emotional affinity to physical interaction with its flora and fauna. They self-consciously constructed a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Woman’s Place is in the Garden
• 2 Saying it with Flowers
• 3 Digging for Identity
• 4 Manipulating the Animal
• 5 Science with a Conscience
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index