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Rachel OConnell Love Scenes and Garden Plots Redraft 2.pdf (458.38 kB)

Love scenes and garden plots: form and femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and her German garden (1898)

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posted on 2023-06-09, 05:45 authored by Rachel O'ConnellRachel O'Connell
This essay reads Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) in relation to Alfred Austin’s garden book, The Garden that I Love (1894). The Garden that I Love presents the garden as a retreat modelled on the Horatian ideal, in which a man retires from public life to enjoy a peaceful rural existence. Von Arnim shows how the garden, or rather the good of retreat that the garden represents, is well-nigh inaccessible to a female subject. At the same time, she wants to claim the garden’s seclusion for the female subject. Ultimately von Arnim takes the idea of feminine retreat to an unexpected extreme, generating, in certain passages of her text, a perverse garden fantasia that celebrates feminine autoeroticism and sexual self-sufficiency. Notably, it is specific aspects of the form of the garden book that allow von Arnim to develop her ambivalently feminist, unabashedly utopian vision of feminine withdrawal and retreat.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Women: A Cultural Review

ISSN

0957-4042

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

1-2

Volume

28

Page range

22-39

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-04-11

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-08-23

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-04-11

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