Seeds of change: Rewriting the garden in American literature and culture, 1854--2009

This dissertation explores the topos and practice of gardening in American literary history as both a spatial symptom of the dominant mode of production and a site of utopian counter-imagining, a figure endlessly constructed and defined against capitalist normativity and the structures of experience it produces. Gardens have typically been equated with the apolitical and escapist; the famous final lines of Candide, for example, express a resolution to return home and "cultivate our own gardens"—a remark that single-handedly releases the principle characters from reformist expenditures. Yet as my project argues, since the nineteenth century this figure has become increasingly central within projects of resistance to capitalist modernity, redeploying what might be thought of as nostalgic to interfere with the future. Far from suspending the historical, gardens intensify and complicate some of its key contradictions—divisions between work and leisure, nature and culture, the private and common, and perceptions of space as landscape versus space as social process. The garden histories I track in this project proceed according to transformations in the mode of production, beginning with American farm industrialization in the nineteenth century, continuing through twentieth century urban growth and culminating in our own globalized, neoliberal present. As I examine literary scenes that manifest the way these forces have reshaped labor, the sensual experience of nature, urban and rural geographies, and the rhythms of everyday life, I reconstruct a counter-history of garden practices and representations alongside that dominant narrative, one that unfolds from nineteenth-century pastorals designed as zones of visual relief to the militant manifestations of "guerilla gardening" in today's cities.