Making space: Gardens and social identity in early modern English literature (Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth)

This dissertation argues that dispossessed men and women writers drew from lived experiences in gardens to imagine themselves as active and viable members of culturally-central social spaces. Chapter One traces the changes in land use and the shift from subsistence to aesthetic (and increasingly gendered) gardening. These conceptual and practical changes in gardening created new alternatives for negotiating social position, and the garden space came to represent and facilitate mobility and mark social status. Chapter Two analyzes how men who wrote gardening manuals represented gardens that centralized male authority and hierarchized social relationships while they simultaneously proposed to help men and women develop practical skills in gardening and delimit the physical and representational boundaries of the gardens they described. Published manuals throughout the period anxiously balance these different representations of gardens---as primarily creative sites for women and primarily productive and authoritative sites for men---even as these gendered uses coexist in tension with one another in the representational space of the garden.; While prescriptive manuals self-consciously tie themselves to actual gardens, poetic texts use representations of gardens to negotiate social position in other domains. Chapter Three analyzes how Spenser uses representations of gardens in The Faerie Queene (1590) and A View of the State of Ireland (1633; written in 1596) to establish the preeminence of male authority vis-a-vis a female sovereign over Irish subjects, and over the Irish landscape the male colonizers sought to make "English." By the beginning of the seventeenth century, aesthetic gardening permitted women creative agency in separate garden-spaces isolated as their own in the prescriptive manuals. Hence, Aemilia Lanyer's representations of gardens in Salve Deus and "To Cooke-ham" depict how women might imagine another context for holding land and real property. In my fifth chapter I show how in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) Lady Mary (Sidney) Wroth uses settings and images that represent women gardening, embroidering, and writing, to emphasize that they are all equally examples of "chaste art" that prove women to be creative agents, desiring subjects, and fully feminine at the same time.