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“OUR ENGLISH GROUND”: DOMESTICITY, NATIONALISM, AND THE NATURAL WORLD, 1900-1950
A dissertation presented
by
Alicia Peaker
to The Department of English
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the field of
English
Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April, 2014
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“OUR ENGLISH GROUND”: DOMESTICITY, NATIONALISM, AND THE NATURAL WORLD, 1900-1950
by
Alicia Peaker
ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April, 2014
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ABSTRACT
My dissertation, “Our English Ground”: Domesticity, Nationalism, and the Natural
World, 1900-1950 argues that many women made crucial contributions to ecological discourses of the early-twentieth century—more specifically, that they produced nuanced accounts of the relationships between humans and the natural world in their visual and textual representations of
“nature,” “landscape,” and “the nation.” Although “nature has a persistent, even adaptive, presence in modernism” (Scott 13), that presence frequently serves as a background in modernist literature. Bonnie Kime Scott, dealing with mostly canonical writers, asks “what happened to the work of writers who were more obviously centered in nature, but not classifiable as modernist?”
(40). In this dissertation, I begin to account for these canonical caesuras by pulling from the academic margins work by three English women who explicitly engaged with and represented the natural world in their writing and artwork. Beginning with Edith Holden’s naturalist field books (1905-1906), moving to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s super-natural novel Lolly Willowes
(1926), and finally to Vita Sackville-West’s long poem The Garden (1946), I argue that the natural world and nationalism are inextricably intertwined in these texts. Though the women came from different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, they all began their careers during a shared moment of unprecedented environmental change that had major impacts on their writing.
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To the regulars at Hugh O’Neill’s, who saved me from a fate worse than ABD. 5
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the past nine years I have received support, feedback, and encouragement from a number of individuals. First and foremost, I’d like to thank my advisor, Professor Laura Green for believing in this project from the beginning and for helping to continually improve my writing. I’d also like to express my deep gratitude to Professor Mary Loeffelholz who helped me recognize the centrality of nationalism to the project, and to Professor Patrick Mullen for his guidance and support.
My journey to grad school was enabled by the McNair Scholars Program and particularly the unwavering support of Karen McKinney and Cynthia Dukich, who have been cheering me on from afar over the past decade. They saw potential in me that I had not yet recognized and am still discovering. Thank you also to Paul Lindholdt who taught me that the quirks in my writing I had tried so hard to exorcise were what made my writing mine. And also to Anthony Flynn who introduced me to literature I had never dreamt existed and gave me words to talk about it.
Thank you also goes to Professors Ryan Cordell, Julia Flanders, and Elizabeth Maddock
Dillon who ensured I had the financial support to finish my final year. Their mentorship over the past year has helped me grow in more ways than I can list. I am continually astounded by their generosity with their time, energy, and knowledge. I would also like to thank Professor Kimberly
Juanita Brown for always keeping her door open and the proverbial kettle on. I am eternally grateful for the support of Linda Collins, Jean Duddy, Kelly Gould, and Cheryl Delaney. On a near daily basis, they helped to remove small obstacles to ensure that I could focus on the big one. 6
I would also like to thank the members of my multiple writing groups over the past few years who read my work with patience and critical eyes. Thank you especially to Jodi Benson,
Michael Dedek, Lauren Dutra, Erin Hoffer, Sadaf Jaffer, Susie Kimm, Sue Lanser, Aparna
Mujumdar, Danielle Skeehan, Jen Sopchockchai, Allison Taylor, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze,
Erika Zimmer, and my classmates at the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies—all of whom were incredibly generous with their time and feedback.
This dissertation would not have been possible without the intellectual and personal support of my dear friend and colleague Jessica Nelson who encouraged, inspired, and consoled me. Over and over again. And of Jason McGibbon whose eternal patience and expert culinary skills brought me through these last two years. I’d like to thank my family, as well, who never doubted I could do it, and my second family Paul Campbell, Jessica, Herve Simon, and Mbole
Nku who generously gave me support, an ear, or space whenever I needed it. The seeds of this dissertation were sewn in the four by four plot you let dig in your yard four years ago.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract Title Page 2
Abstract 3
Dedication 4
Acknowledgements 5
Table of Contents 7
Introduction 8
Chapter 1: From Drawing “Nature” to the Nature of the Drawing-room: Domesticity and the Natural World in Edith Holden’s Naturalist Field Books, 1905-1906 22
Chapter 2: Botany and Broomsticks: Witchcraft, Domesticity, and Landscape in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes 55
Chapter 3: Cultivating Landscapes: Nature and Nationalism in Vita Sackville-West’s The Garden 83
Appendix A 123
Appendix B 124
Works Cited 127 8
Introduction
In 1926, Vita Sackville-West published a long poem, titled The Land, that both rehearsed and revised the pastoral mode in its representations of farming practices at the beginning of the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem chronicles farmers’ seasonal work from winter to fall. In the poem, Sackville-West draws heavily from agricultural encyclopedias, folklore, and personal experiences. The poem was both commercially and critically successful, winning Sackville-West the Hawthornden Prize for 1926. The Nation and Athenaeum printed a summary of the awards ceremony, likely written by Leonard Woolf, who was editor at the time.
The piece included an anecdote about a farmer who wrote to Sackville-West “to say that he didn’t know anything about poetry, but he could tell her that there was nothing wrong with her agriculture” (qtd. in Blyth 26). The poem was generally well-received, but Edith Sitwell took issue with it, publishing a review that called The Land “poetry in gumboots,” denouncing the poem as “one long catalogue of agricultural implements” and “the worst poem in the English language” (qtd. in Blyth 20). Virginia Woolf responded to Sitwell’s criticism, in a letter to
Sackville-West: “you sell, and she don’t—all good reasons why a Sitwell should vomit in public” (qtd. in Glendinning 177).
Sitwell’s animosity towards The Land reprises the deep tension between the divergent modernisms and responses to modernization that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Whether defined as a period, a genre, a style, or a combination of those things, modernism comprised a nexus of ideas about appropriate aesthetic responses to what was perceived as an entirely new cultural moment. Implicit in this description is the centrality of humans to the project of modernism. Walt Whitman, arguably one of the first modernist writers, 9
memorably revised Virgil’s declaration in the Aeneid: “Of arms and the man I sing,” in part by omitting Virgil’s metonymic reference to war in his 1900 Leaves of Grass, when he claims it is of: “The Modern Man I sing.” Whitman’s revision focuses attention on the human as a modern and democratic subject. More than two decades later, Sackville-West provides a different revision of Virgil’s pronouncement: “I sing the cycle of my country’s year,” she writes at the beginning of The Land. Sackville-West entirely elides the figure of “the man,” replacing it with a singular point of view. Further, she shifts the focus away from the human as a category and towards the relationship between the nation and the natural world. While both Whitman and
Sackville-West engage deeply with the natural world, each writer’s mode of engagement is intrinsically tied to their respective nationalities. For Whitman, the bunched leaves of grass are a powerful symbol of democracy; for Sackville-West “the land” is the English countryside, a symbol of national pride and resilience.
Though rarely the main topic of modernists texts, “nature has a persistent, even adaptive, presence in modernism” (Scott 13)—from the decimated landscapes of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste
Land” to the jungles of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.1 Bonnie Kime Scott, dealing with mostly canonical writers, asks “what happened to the work of writers who were more obviously centered in nature, but not classifiable as modernist?” (40). In this dissertation, I begin to account for these canonical caesuras by pulling from the academic margins work by three English women who explicitly engaged with and represented the natural world in their writing and artwork.
1 Bonnie Kime Scott notes that Eliot removed large portions of “The Waste Land” featuring seascapes on the advice of Ezra Pound. 10
Though the women came from different geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, they all began their careers during a shared moment of unprecedented environmental change.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Edith Holden (1871-1920), Sylvia Townsend
Warner (1893-1978), and Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) produced a number of texts that foreground the complicated positions from which women experienced domesticity, nationalism, and the natural world. Nature appears frequently in their work because each of these women encountered, designed, and conceptualized the natural world in their personal lives—for pleasure and for profit. Holden, an artist and art teacher by trade, illustrated issues of The Animal’s
Friend, an animal rights journal which advocated for humane treatment of animals. Sackville-
West grew what it is still one of the most famous gardens in England at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent in addition to writing a weekly gardening column for The Observer for several decades. Warner wrote a guide to Somerset that was published by Paul Elek in the Vision of England series in
1949. And all of the women lived—for significant portions of their lives—in rural areas in
England, which figured frequently and powerfully in their oeuvres. Though all three women represented the English countryside as a beautiful and fecund place, the England they inherited was far from idyllic.
By the turn of the twentieth century, England was faced with increasingly urgent environmental crises. By 1900, woodlands occupied less than 5% of Great Britain’s total landmass and in the West Midlands, where Holden spend most of her life, less than 3% (National
Inventory of Woodland and Trees 47). When World War I began, Britain’s access to timber imported from the colonies was jeopardized, creating a reliance on locally produced timber. The
Great War significantly depleted the United Kingdom’s supply of lumber, necessitating a revised 11
management system for woodlands. At the end of World War I, the Forestry Act of 1919 was enacted, officially founding the Forestry Commission, which was tasked with purchasing and rehabilitating forest land in Great Britain that had been severely depleted during the war. By
1939, the Forestry Commission had purchased nearly one million acres which they reforested or afforested. During World War II, the Forestry Commission was permanently divided into the
Forest Management Department and the Timber Supply Department whose express purpose was to provide timber for the military and civilian war efforts (“History of the Forestry Commission” n.pag.).
The Forestry Commission was able to purchase hundreds of thousands of acres of land in large part due to the massive nineteenth century migration of people in the UK from rural areas to towns and cities. While roughly 50% of the population lived in towns or cities at the middle of the nineteenth century, that number rose dramatically to 80% in 1911 (Sheail 12). Warner was one of the many young people of her generation who moved from their parents’ homes in the countryside to cities across England.2 As people moved into towns and cities, the density of the population resulted in a sharp increase in pollution, caused primarily by the burning of coal. By the beginning of World War I, Britons consumed more than 183 million tons of coal each year, and in London, nearly 2 tons of coal were burned per person each year (Thorsheim 4-5). The
2 In 1917, Warner moved to London, living there until 1930, when she began spending more time in rural Chaldon with Valentine Ackland whom she had recently met. Over the next several decades, Warner had a tumultuous relationship with Ackland, who was chronically unfaithful. But the two lived together from about 1930 until Ackland’s death in 1969. 12
resulting pollution became a public health issue as research about environmental hazards increased in the latter half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.3
Responding to the perceived threat of urban sprawl and environmental degradation,
Ebenezer Howard began what eventually became known as the garden city movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Howard envisioned planned cities that integrated the conveniences of urban living with the natural world through concentric circles of greenery or “greenbelts.” The garden city movement gained popularity in the United Kingdom after World War II as major redevelopments were planned in the wake of the blitz and as part of the New Towns Act of 1946
(Sheail 62). The substantial destruction to the British landscape caused by the war coupled with the British government’s methodical “dig for victory” war-time propaganda campaign, ironically allowed both the physical and mental space to reimagine human relations to the natural world and to the nation.
During WWII victory gardens became major symbols of patriotism at the same time that they encouraged individual engagement and cultivation of the British landscape, as my third chapter explores at greater length. Sackville-West in particular was entrenched in the wartime propaganda, hosting members of the Women’s Land Army and writing an introduction to a collection of their poetry in 1944. Both Warner and Sackville-West witnessed British and
German bomber planes flying above their respective gardens, bringing home to them the perilous and profound connection between nationalism and England’s countryside.
3 See Thorsheim for a detailed account of how the smoke produced from burning coal was redefined as pollution in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 13
In the work of these three women, concerns about nationalism are deeply intertwined with representations of the natural world. Through distinctly English symbols such as the English countryside, Home Counties landscapes, and victory gardens, Holden, Warner, and Sackville-
West expressed other-than-modernist responses to their cultural moment. Before turning to local instances and representations, it is useful to step back and consider some of the broader terms that I use to frame this dissertation, namely nature, landscape, and the garden.
The OED provides fourteen definitions of the noun “nature,” each with a number of sub- definitions and denotations. Number eleven defines nature as “a. The phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations. b. In wider sense: the whole natural world, including human beings; the cosmos. Obs.” In spite of the categorization of definition 11b as obsolete, this is the only definition in the OED that begins to get at the complicated interrelationships between humans, nonhuman others, and their environments that ecocritics have been working through for decades. However, the term “nature” is also contentious within the field because of the gendered ways in which it has been put to use over the centuries.
Nature is frequently feminized, described through the tropes of Mother Nature or the virgin earth, ripe for masculine exploration and mastery. Because we continue to be bound by
“the vocabulary of a feminine landscape and the psychological patterns of regression and violation that it implies” (Kolodny 146), there are direct correlations between the destruction of environment and the oppression of women. Scholars since at least the 1970s have identified and challenged the ways in which women’s bodies were associated with “the land,” to the detriment 14
of both women and the natural world.4 Some feminist and ecofeminist scholars have worked to reclaim the association of “women” and “nature,” with much controversy. While scholars like
Luce Irigaray and Susan Griffin have claimed that reconnecting “women” with “nature” strengthens the power of each, Sherry Ortner and others have argued that such an association is culturally constructed and deeply harmful for both women and the natural world.
Timothy Morton takes the negative impacts of conceiving of the natural world in this particular way one step further. In the polemical introduction to his controversial 2007 book
Ecology without Nature, Morton holds ecocriticism culpable for perpetuating harmful attitudes towards the environment because of its unexamined fixation on a particular kind of aesthetics which valorizes “Nature” and nature-writing. His solution is to eradicate “nature” from ecocritical practices. To do so, I argue, is to dismiss a substantial amount of writing, including much writing by women who deployed “nature” for a wide variety of purposes, not all of them conventional or harmful.
Throughout this dissertation, I focus primarily on landscapes and gardens. The term
“landscape” foregrounds the idea of human presence in the natural world since landscapes, particularly in the pictorial sense, suggest or imply a (usually male) human viewer whose eye organizes the natural world around him into an intelligible view. Critical debates about what landscapes mean and do span multiple decades and disciplines including, among others, art history, geography, literature, and sociology. During the 1980s and 1990s, theories of landscape shifted towards interrogations of the “discursive and symbolic roles of landscape” (Wiley 54).
4 See especially Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World and Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land.
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John Wiley identifies four major critical approaches to landscape—reflective of larger trends in the humanities and social sciences inspired by the material, cultural, and spatial turns—that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the first approach, exemplified by the work of Gillian
Rose and Annette Kolodny, representations of landscape are understood as “ways of seeing” that tell us more about the gazing subject and the culture which produced him than the landscape itself. In a related approach, Wylie notes that scholars such as Edward Said and W.J.T. Mitchell look at landscape from a postcolonial standpoint in order to “emphasize questions of representation, erasure and appropriation, the mapping-out of imaginative geographies of self and other, and issues of scientific and aesthetic authority in visual and textual landscape depiction” (137). A third approach, practiced by John Berger and Raymond Williams, figures landscape as “veil”; in this account, landscapes function “as glosses, façades and aesthetic veneers, designed to perpetuate existing social, economic, and political hierarchies” (Wylie 100).
Practitioners of the fourth approach, heavily influenced by poststructuralist theory (and Michel
Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s work in particular), see landscape as text, as a “purely discursive construction” (Heise 512). This brief survey demonstrates that “landscape” remains protean or, as William Howarth has it, “a continuous history, never quite completed” (“Some
Principles of Ecocriticism” 76).
While these four approaches continue to operate in current critical discourse, many ecocritics, including Howarth and Neil Evernden, have voiced suspicions about critical approaches to landscape which continue to frame it as a product of culture. Instead, ecocritical projects frequently emphasize the always already interactive and contingent relationships between humans and the natural world. In this project, I have it both ways. On the one hand, 16
Holden’s naturalist field books portray humans in an interactive, if inherently privileged, relationship with the individual and collective objects of the natural world. On the other, propaganda (whether posters or poetry) inevitably frames the natural world in terms of its use and importance to the narrative of the nation. Because of the multivalent ways in which the natural world is both present and represented in these texts, a flexible definition of the natural world is called for, which, like the natural world itself, is framed by and contingent upon local circumstances.
When focusing on human interactions and representations of the natural world, I primarily use the term “landscape,” since “landscapes don’t just happen… they are (and have been) created by and for people, and according to notions sometimes hegemonic, sometimes contested, but always involving people, and usually people living in communities of some kind or another” (Short 4). Because landscape functions as a “‘collecting’ structure for the representation of inner experience and an ideological tool shaping the way in which we envision and construct the natural world” (Gendering Landscape Art 1), these women writers can and do use landscape to construct and challenge perceptions and practices of gender. A number of feminist scholars are currently engaged in the work of “explor[ing] the exclusionary process by which groups create, produce, and represent landscape to legitimize gendered ideologies"
(Hayden qtd. in Dowler 4).5 But landscapes can also be used to delegitimize traditional gendered ideologies. For instance, in Lolly Willowes, Warner critiques the logic of lives ruled by inherited patriarchal systems such as Christianity through the eponymous protagonist, who moves to a
5 See also Gendering Landscape Art; Feminist (Re)Visions of the Subject: Landscapes, Ethnoscapes, and Theoryscapes; and Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, and Representation.
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rural English village to build a life for herself as a witch. The transition from spinster Aunt Lolly to autonomous Laura is not a singular event but a repeated performance that is enacted through her experiences with the landscape. In one instance, Laura walks among a field of cowslips
“innumerable as stars in the milky way” (151) and kneels
down among them and laid her face close to their fragrance. The weight of all her
unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her bosom down to the earth; she trembled,
understanding for the first time how miserable she had been; and in another moment she
was released. … With every breath she drew, the scent of the cowslips flowed in and
absolved her. (151-2)
The landscape in this passage absolves Laura of the “sins” of her past life when she behaved according to existing social expectations. Through her interaction with the landscape, Laura is able to throw off the weight of the chains of domesticity and recreate her life anew.
While Warner uses landscape as a way to separate Laura from the social dictates that stifle her identity, Sackville-West adopts the garden as a symbol through which she can connect her individual self to a national identity. A garden is, as John Hunt Dixon and others have theorized, “a resilient, central aspect of human culture precisely because it is, in the words of a scholar of Ming gardens, ‘a site of contested meaning,’ subject to the ‘pull of a number of discursive fields’” (76). And it is because gardens are sites of contested meaning that “women writers and artists used the subject matter of gardens and plants to educate their audience, to enter into political and cultural debates, particularly around issues of gender and class, and to signal moments of intellectual and spiritual insight” (Smith and Page 1). As I explore at greater 18
length and to different degrees throughout each of my chapters, one vital thread that connects much of the writing during this period is the representation of the natural world as an educator.
In keeping with Catherine Nash’s call to “think through a range of potential identifications with landscape or nature, including those of indifference or disinterest” (qtd. in
Wiley 87), I juxtapose varying accounts of the interactions between humans and the world around them in three texts, from three different genres, in order to situate the texts within larger ecological discourses of the early-twentieth century. While Sackville-West, for example, frequently describes nature as powerfully resistant to human endeavors at cultivation, Warner insists that Laura’s self-awareness increases in direct correlation to her attentiveness to the natural world. This is not to say that these women wrote to address ecological concerns as they were articulated at the turn of the century, but rather to suggest that narratives about landscapes which seem “sentimental, romantic, tradition-bound, stupid, superstitious … or obscurantist”
(Winter 255) when considered alongside an ideology of progress, might, as James Winter suggests, “be interpreted instead as a valuable cultural constraint on narrowly self-interested and ultimately self-destructive exploitation [of the landscape]” (255). Though landscapes in these texts serve different local narrative and pedagogical purposes, the texts are connected through a shared English landscape.
In many ways, the treatment of landscapes in these texts is as diverse as the landscapes themselves: Sackville-West’s realistic Kentish farms contrast strikingly with the supernatural landscapes of Warner’s Cotswolds and with Holden’s shrinking countryside in suburban
Birmingham. In these texts, landscapes and nature are not (or not only) the restorative, nostalgic, traditional, or conservative places that modern subjects escape to from the city and its pressures. 19
They are also the mode through which the writing and reading subject expresses her individual experiences of nationalism.
To trace these modes, I begin with Holden’s naturalist field books. In the first chapter:
“From Drawing “Nature” to the Nature of the Drawing-room: Domesticity and the Natural
World in Edith Holden’s Naturalist Field Books, 1905-1906,” I argue that Holden creates hybrid texts that combine the didactic uses of a personalized commonplace book with the observations of a naturalist field book. Through these pedagogical texts and their representations of nature,
Holden encourages her young female art students to cultivate a closer relationship with and understanding of the natural world in Edwardian England. The pedagogical practice of “learning from nature” has a long history, and gardens, especially, have been used for didactic purposes since at least the eighteenth century (Smith & Page). I locate Holden’s hybrid texts within the pedagogical tradition of “learning from nature” in Edwardian England. Though Holden produced them in 1905 and 1906, they were not published until 1989 and 1977, respectively.
Throughout the original creation and subsequent publications and adaptations of Holden’s field books, different versions of acceptable and desirable relationships with the natural world have circulated around and through Holden’s texts. By focusing on the texts’ original function as a pedagogical tool, I have recontextualized Holden’s books within the Edwardian period, pointing to both the rehearsals of and breaks with traditional Edwardian domesticity that the texts enact.
In the second chapter, “Botany and Broomsticks: Witchcraft, Domesticity, and
Landscape in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes,” I shift from formal education to the informal education Laura experiences on her path to becoming a witch. I argue that in Warner’s novel the supernatural is not something above or outside of the natural world, but rather a 20
particular mode of attentiveness that discloses the natural world to humans more fully. Critics of the novel have tended to treat its use of witchcraft as a route to “self-actualization” (Port 144)
(see also Gan), a supernatural manifestation of her feminism (Nesbitt, Port), an expression of her suppressed lesbian desires (Garrity, Castle, Wachman), or a combination of these things. I argue that witchcraft must also be considered in terms of its historical and deep connections to the natural world and the English countryside more specifically. Reading Warner’s novel in this way both builds the current canon of ecocritical literature and expands our conceptions of the kinds of narratives that contributed to ecological discourses in the beginning decades of the twentieth century.
In the final chapter, “Cultivating Landscapes: Nature and Nationalism in Vita Sackville-
West’s The Garden,” I argue that Sackville-West’s long poem The Garden (1946) positions gardens as responses to hostility, and especially to the hostilities and destruction caused by the
Second World War. I trace her representations of the relationships between nationalism and the natural world in three ways: through the strategies of minimizing, idealizing, and militarizing the natural world. I further argue that Sackville-West utilizes visual and rhetorical strategies demonstrated in propaganda posters circulated during the two world wars in her poetic representations of landscapes. In these posters, landscapes are turned into objects of fantasy for both men and women and mobilized to promote the war effort, both abroad and at home.
Although from different genres, all of these texts demonstrate the interconnectedness of domesticity, nationalism, and socially constructed ideas of nature. Each text demonstrates both a shared concern with the status of women and a different way of approaching and communicating that concern. In the first instance, Holden is concerned with the education of young women 21
artists, in the second, Warner uses witchcraft to reassess the status of women in England, and
Sackville-West, finally, shapes the garden as an evocative symbol for English nationalism.
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From Drawing “Nature” to the Nature of the Drawing-room:
Domesticity and the Natural World in Edith Holden’s Naturalist Field Books, 1905-1906
On November 9, 2012, the interactive eBook The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady became available solely through Apple’s iTunes store, as a product of RosettaBooks.6 The book was originally created by Edith Holden (1871-1920), an artist, illustrator, and art teacher who lived most of her life in rural and suburban Birmingham. Produced in 1906 as a model for art students, the book taught students about drawing by learning from the world around them. Over the course of her relatively short life, Holden showed several paintings at the Royal Academy of
Arts and Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (among others) and earned money both as an art teacher and as an illustrator, primarily of children’s books. In 1907, she illustrated issues of The
Animal’s Friend, an animal rights journal which advocated for humane treatment of animals and worked to outlaw vivisection.7 In 1911 she married the sculptor Ernest Smith and moved with him to Chelsea. It was at their home in 1920 that she drowned in the Thames, after falling into the water while collecting chestnut buds.
For decades, her life and death remained a family tragedy until her book was discovered
“on the shelves of an English country house” (Country Diary dust cover) more than seventy years later by one of her descendants. Like many commonplace books before it, Holden’s book is a compilation of multiple genres, pieces of information, and visual components. It was never meant for publication, but in 1977, Webb & Bower Ltd. published it in facsimile under the title
6 RosettaBooks is an independent eBook publisher that does not appear to be associated with Rosetta Stone, the popular language acquisition software. 7 She was also a Unitarian and a spiritualist who “believed in a spirit guide called Hope” (Taylor 60) and, with her family, held weekly séances. 23
by which it is now known: The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. Though Holden was of decidedly middle class origins, the characterization of the author as “an Edwardian Lady” both obfuscates her class origins and reinforces her perceived “gentility” through both class (“Lady”) and gender (“lady”). The addition of the adjective “Edwardian” highlights her Englishness and explicitly situates her in a historical period that both Americans and the British frequently idealize as the last golden summer before the horrors and tragedies of the two world wars.
Webb and Bower’s change in title purposely connects the book to similar other neo-
Edwardian objects made popular during the Edwardian craze of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as the television series The Forsyte Saga (1967), Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-1975), The
Duchess of Duke Street (1976-1977), and Thomas & Sarah (1979). The Edwardian craze emerged in the UK during an economic decline when unemployment was on the rise and tensions between the government and coal miners intensified, finally culminating in the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978 that saw major union strikes and one of the coldest winters on record
(Hay 253). The Edwardian craze was and continues to be a form of escapism from current conditions driven by a nostalgia for life before the great wars.
Benefiting from public interest in Edwardian culture, The Country Diary was a major publishing success, becoming a best seller almost overnight. It remained at the top of the Sunday
Times’ best seller list for 64 weeks, selling 2.8 million copies by 1987 (Edwards, “‘That
Honeysuckle Rose’” 105, 125). The book’s success led to multiple spin-offs and adaptations including a popular biography of Holden, written by Ina Taylor and published in 1980, that sold in the millions. Four years later, in 1984, the Central Independent Television channel (now ITV) adapted Taylor’s biography into a 12-part miniseries that the International Movie Database 24
(IMDB) describes as a “gentle drama series about the Warwickshire schoolteacher whose nature diary became a best seller” (imdb).8 IMDB describes the series as a “gentle drama,” using an adjective whose feminine connotations connect the series to the middle-class women who were the intended audience and market for The Country Diary.
Subsequent adaptations of the book intensified the ways in which women were targeted by creating household products designed for middle-class women. Holden’s watercolor illustrations were adapted into prints for curtains, wallpapers, tea sets, paper plates, cookie tins, and more. Sarah Edwards terms these kinds of adaptations “trans-generic transformations”
(“‘That Honeysuckle Rose’” 105) of both Holden’s life and her illustrations. These transformations emerged at an important historical moment, during and after Queen Elizabeth
II’s Silver Jubilee (1977), and participated in a history of commodifying a distinctly English nostalgia. Edwards specifically contextualizes the publication of Holden’s work as part of the emerging heritage industry which connected domestic life with an idealized English countryside.
The products created from Holden’s books as part of this industry sold very well and turned the craze for Holden regalia into a multi-million dollar industry which was re-invigorated by the discovery and subsequent publication in 1989 of Nature Notes, 1905—a draft version of the later
Country Diary. In 1990, Anthea Gerrie reported in The Times (London) that the Holden
“empire” of merchandise was worth ₤294 million, demonstrating the financial success of the sentimentalization and commodification of Holden’s two field books and the simultaneous
8 For a detailed records and analysis of The Country Diary’s adaptations, see Sarah Edward’s “Private Enterprise: The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and Female Fan Communities” (2007) and “‘That Honeysuckle Rose will soon Encircle the Globe’: A Reception History of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady” (2003). 25
British re-colonization, which planted her books and representations of an idealized English countryside in countries around the globe.
While reincarnations of Holden’s field books have emphasized their connection to an idealized English past in which women produced beautiful, decorative objects, I also read them as pedagogical objects and interrogate the reproductions of the natural world, domesticity, and
Englishness that they teach. Holden’s texts exemplify the fraught position from which women artists negotiated their worth at the turn of the twentieth century, and Holden’s skill and choice of subjects provided her with an income as an illustrator and teacher. On the one hand, Holden’s texts continue the long tradition of women painting “charming” pictures of flowers as decoration.
On the other hand, they resist such simplified versions of women’s skills by appending Linnaean nomenclature to each plant, insect, and animal. Indeed, Holden’s texts are a kind of hybrid, pulling from the generic traditions of both naturalist field books and of commonplace books, as we will see.
These texts emerge at a moment of ambiguous possibility and contain the seeds of two major ways in which the twentieth century will reframe the relationships between women and the natural world: first, by framing the natural world through a feminized, English, and genteel domesticity exemplified by “the Edwardian Lady,” and second, through radical political movements that included women’s liberation, the environmental movement, and animal rights.9
9 “In a large part, the uncertain future facing us early in the twenty-first century arose from the inventions, thoughts and transformations of those unusually rich fifteen years between 1900 and 1914, a period of extraordinary creativity in the arts and sciences, of enormous change in society and in the very image people had of themselves. Everything that was to become important during the twentieth century – from quantum physics to women’s emancipation, from abstract art to space travel, from communism and fascism to the consumer society, from in 26
Still, the predominant way in which Holden’s texts were marketed to women on their initial publication and in which they continue to be marketed in the twenty-first century is as guides to pleasant, beautiful, and accessible relationships with the English countryside.
Educational Contexts
While most middle- and upper-class women received some level of arts education in the first half of the nineteenth century, often through a governess or traveling tutor, few received formal arts education through educational institutions. By the middle of the century, this began to slowly shift when debates about girls’ access to formal education became a public discourse. In
1869 girls’ education was officially provided for under the Endowed School Act. Just two years later, in 1871—the year of Holden’s birth—The Slade School for Fine Art was founded, training both men and women who sought to become professional artists (Macdonald 270). Connected to the debate about education for girls was the push for improved and institutionalized education for women teachers and governesses. The economic depression of the 1840s led many middle-class women to seek employment, and working as a governess “in principle allowed them to earn a living while maintaining their appropriate role as reproducers of the domestic ideal” (Green 11).
In 1863, according to official statistics, 1,513 governesses were enrolled at art schools in
England (Dodd 192). Holden’s mother, Emma Wearing, was one of the women who may have benefited from these shifts in women’s access to formal education. Wearing was employed as a governess until her marriage to Arthur Holden in 1865. Although little is known about Holden’s
industrialized slaughter to the power of the media – had already made deep impressions in the years before 1914, so that the rest of the century was little more than an exercise, wonderful and hideous by turn, in living out and exploring these new possibilities” (Blom 4). 27
mother’s life and training as a governess, nor her skills as an artist, it is likely that she was artistically trained in some capacity like the majority of middle- and upper-class women of her generation. Even if Wearing wasn’t formally educated in the arts or other subjects, her background as a governess undoubtedly influenced both the way Holden was raised and
Holden’s own pedagogical practices. Because of Wearing’s background, she was largely responsible for the education of her daughters and sons, until the latter were sent to boarding school. Ina Taylor, Holden’s biographer, records that the girls’ lessons included sketching lessons, at first from their mother and afterwards, when Wearing’s health was failing, from their eldest sister Winnie (31). Within Holden’s family, arts education fell to the women and was passed down through matrilineal lines.
Holden was born into a moment when the cultural shift towards better education for women was already occurring. Throughout the nineteenth century, education for women was largely informal, carried out primarily within the home or in local day schools. While Holden’s early education followed this model, by the age of thirteen she began formally training as an artist at the Birmingham School of Art, one of the most prestigious art schools in the country.
Later, from 1891-1892, Holden studied under Joseph Denovan Adam, at Craigmill Art School in
Stirling, Scotland. Her experiences at Craigmill may have fit into a traditional narrative in which
“artistic instruction for women, not surprisingly, was oriented around the representation of nature in its small, sedate views” (Smith and Page 92). Holden’s paintings from this period are frequently of local landscapes and Scottish Longhorn cattle. Adam also introduced her to a number of practicing artists, both women and men, exposing Holden to new opportunities and helping to launch her career. She was chiefly successful as an illustrator, mainly of children’s 28
books, but she also showed pieces at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and by the Royal
Academy of Arts (1907, 1917). Holden maintained close ties with Adam throughout her life, often visiting him and his family for long holidays, and a portion of each Nature Notes was recorded during two of these trips.
Holden’s positive experiences with arts education coupled with her father’s diminishing finances likely propelled her to accept an offer from Margaret Burd, the sister of the vicar of
Shirley, to teach art at Solihull School for Girls. From 1906-1909 Holden taught art to girls aged
14-17 once a week at Burd’s school. The private (mostly day) school enrolled about forty girls including a few lodgers. Burd’s school followed the model of many similar girls’ day school in suburban England established in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing up until the First World War. These schools were mainly attended by middle-class girls who were likely educated in their homes by governesses or private tutors, often alongside their brothers, until around the age of ten, at which point they were sent to the local day school. The more affluent members of the middle class might then have sent their daughters to an elite boarding school, which was sometimes followed by a finishing school. Establishments like Burd’s were often, according to Carol Dyhouse, “an extension of family life” (“Girls Growing Up” 47) in that their primary goal was to turn young women into eligible brides rather than educated women. As
Dyhouse explains, “Victorians educated boys for the world, girls for the drawing room” (44), and this distinction is clear in the curricula of Edwardian schools as well.
According to Taylor, it was Burd’s idea, not Holden’s, to instruct the young women through diaries. Taylor writes that “Miss Burd had encouraged the girls to keep diaries recording the changing seasons and to link their work with suitable passages from literature, and Edith felt 29
that she could fit her Friday afternoon lessons in to this scheme by bringing appropriate specimens of flowers, twigs or berries for the girls to draw” (118). Taylor further explains that
“Miss Burd gave out note-books to the girls and appropriate verses to start them off, but she informed them that in the future they must select their own material” (Taylor 118). Burd’s model follows the pedagogical tradition of requiring students to produce commonplace books, which included useful pieces of information such as proverbs, recipes, quotes, poems, and more (Smith n. pag.). Since at least the early-eighteenth century, commonplace books were used as a part of the informal and formal curriculum for young ladies. Like a commonplace book, Holden’s books begin with poetry and include detailed illustrations and descriptions of flora and fauna accompanied by notes about the change in seasons. At the same time, Holden’s books also draw from generic practices of naturalist field books in their form, content, and attention to detail. It is unclear how much poetry and other material Holden borrowed from Burd’s models since there are no known existing copies of Burd’s diaries or of the school’s records, and while some drawings of Holden’s pupils have survived, no complete diaries have.10
Each of Holden’s field books is divided into months, beginning with January and moving to December. Each month begins with a full-page illustration of a seasonally appropriate scene.
December 1905, for example, displays a blackbird perched in a holly bush holding a bright red holly berry in its beak (179). The facing page includes a number of short pieces about the month including poems, mottoes, folklore, and a list of Christian holidays. Following these monthly introductory pages, Holden writes short entries, usually no more than one paragraph that are
10 Some paintings by Doris Hamilton-Smith, one of Edith’s most talented students at Solihull School for Girls, still exist and were included in Ina Taylor’s 1980 biography of Holden. 30
organized by day and describe the flora and fauna she observes and sometimes paints in suburban Birmingham. The entries also frequently include the mode of transportation Holden took to reach the objects of her studies: “Cycled through Widney, I gathered the Less Spearwort in the marsh there, also Ragged Robin” (1906, 73). Interspersed among these entries are watercolor illustrations and selections of poems that directly relate to flowers, birds, or other animals she describes within her (nearly) daily entries. While the 1905 field book—again a trial run for the more complete and polished 1906 text—ends with Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The
Death of the Old Year,” the 1906 book ends with an alphabetized list of “wild flowers found in the neighborhood of Olton, Warwickshire” (178). The list, also known as a field catalogue, is a common feature of field books, and its inclusion in Holden’s second text signals a shift away from the personal commonplace book and toward the seemingly more distant naturalist field book. However, Holden’s paintings balance both genres, as we will see.
In teaching sketching and painting to young women, Holden participated in a tradition of turning out accomplished young women. Beginning in the eighteenth century, young women were trained to draw and paint, among other activities, as part of the requirements of becoming a
“finished” young woman who was then eligible for marriage. The association of drawing with the practice of finishing young women so that they become eligible for marriage has been critiqued by women for nearly as long as the practice has been in place. Maria Edgeworth in
Practical Education (written with her father in 1798), rails against “female accomplishments,”
“such as drawing, since they all too often lead only to empty praise: ‘charming! admirable! and astonishing!’” (qtd. in Smith and Page 80). The Edgeworths’ main concern seems to be that 31
drawing should be considered a private hobby rather than a public exhibition. The implication is that any praise a woman’s painting elicits can only ever be false praise, better avoided.
The kinds of praise women’s paintings provoked was shaped by the limited subjects that were considered acceptable for ladies to paint. Francina Irwin notes that prior to the 1790s, the primary subjects in instructional manuals for painting were human body parts. After the 1790s, the main subjects were “parkland with strolling figures…; classical ruins; a rural scene with a waterfall” and also included “lighter plates…which could equally well be adapted for embroidery: a playful dog, flower posies, goldfinches perched on a rose spray and chinoiserie design” (Irwin 150). By the end of the eighteenth century “books of instruction on landscape or flower drawing,” frequently written or illustrated by women, “outnumbered works dealing with other areas” (Irwin 150).While attention shifted away from human bodies and towards the natural world, the denigration of women’s painting coincided with the denigration of both women and nature. By making certain objects in the natural world the subject of feminine paintings, it became easier to dismiss both as “charming” and relatively frail, in need of protection.
Women were explicitly tied to the production of paintings of flowers as in an 1816 manual titled A New Treatise on Flower Painting or Every Lady her own Drawing Master (Irwin
156). Painted flowers became a kind of social capital in that flower paintings were visual evidence of acquired and appropriate skills of eligible, young women. As Smith and Page observe, “like fancy-work, flower painting was primarily practiced by women [in the early nineteenth century] and was identified as a minor art form, charmingly superficial and free from the passions of the human narrative” (93). At the same time painting flowers allowed women to 32
escape the drawing-room, if only temporarily, by going out into the natural world where the rules of decorum were less strictly enforced.
Flower cultivation and arrangement, similarly, afforded women reasons to leave the house for the liminal space of the garden—itself an apt example of the tension between control and loss of control. The cultivation and arrangement of flowers were a major part of women’s socialization and informal education in the nineteenth century, passed down from mother to daughter. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that flowers are the main subject and appear most frequently in Holden’s field notes. Her appreciation for “natural” beauty, and flowers in particular, was encouraged by her mother. According to Taylor, Holden’s mother Emma “had a great appreciation for her garden” and especially loved flowers “both cultivated and wild” for which she had a “special delight” (20). Holden expressed a similar “delight” through her watercolor paintings of both domestic flowers and wildflowers.
Holden’s choice to paint in watercolor reflects contemporaneous social expectations of women painters. By the nineteenth century, watercolor was considered a much more appropriate medium than oils for women. In Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1887), one woman says to another: “Water-colour is so much more lady-like than oils” (qtd. in Irwin 151). One explanation of the unsuitability of oils for women is that the smell was quite possibly “considered offensive, just as real ladies did not eat strong cheeses” (Irwin 151). The strong smell of oil paints and their accoutrement (e.g. varnishes) was also considered unhealthy and a threat to “ladies with their delicate constitutions and tendencies to faint” (Smith n. pag).
Watercolors are also much more portable than oils and more convenient in that they allow for a much speedier execution of a painting. Painting in watercolor meant that some of the 33
tools of the drawing-room could be carried out into the natural world to first capture it visually and then to bring it back into the home. On the one hand, we might read Holden’s choice of painting mainly wildflowers in watercolor as a decision to work within the realm of acceptable hobbies for young ladies in Victorian and Edwardian England. On the other hand, Holden, drawing from her interest in natural history, also painted adders, shrews, and trout—hardly typical subjects for a young woman of the period. The very act of painting each of these animals
(in watercolor, no less) with the intent of bringing them into a young girls’ school neutralizes the danger and “wildness” of each object while also providing Holden with an income. Ann
Bermingham writes that, in the early twentieth century, flower painting “allowed women the freedom to embrace the dominant cultural stereotypes of femininity—the overdetermined relationship of women to flowers—while, if they wished, using this relationship to pursue art in a professional way as artists, teachers, authors, and exhibitors” (Learning to Draw 224). By merging the genres of the commonplace book and of the natural history field book, Holden is able to convey her skill and formidable knowledge of local plant and bird life. Holden transformed the commonplace book into a kind of natural history field book, working within an acceptable genre for women (and especially for women teachers) but stretching it to engage more directly with the natural world. Though commonplace books often included poems about the natural world, Holden pressed her students to go out into nature and to sketch and paint it as they saw it, not (or not only) as the poets saw it. In so doing, Holden fostered her female students’ autonomy.
34
Learning from the Natural World in Holden’s Field Books
The pedagogical practice of “learning from nature” has a long history that continues into the twenty-first century.11 While the active terminology from the middle of the twentieth century onwards has been the “environment,” in the nineteenth century “nature” was the conventional word for describing the perceived animated landscape. In the nineteenth century, nature held a particularly powerful didactic position in England’s collective imagination. Bill Marsden identifies three different ways in which “nature” was commonly invoked in instructional texts of the nineteenth century: “nature as content, nature as teacher, and nature as victim” (n. pag.). The first category refers to the natural world as an object of study, an object that contains knowledge that willing human subjects can extract. In the second category, the natural world still holds information but as a teacher, actively transmits it to willing human subjects. The third category includes calls to save or protect “nature,” often invoked through Christian ideologies of human responsibility to the natural world (also referred to as stewardship). Judith Page and Elise Smith trace one particular kind of manifestation of the “learning from nature” trope by focusing their attention on gardens. They note that, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature, the garden “was a training ground for children, providing a flexible, experimental area for role- playing, safely removed from the dangers of the world beyond but also freer and more expansive than the controlled spaces of the house” (Smith and Page 17).
Holden’s texts expand the didactic space of the garden to the undomesticated “world beyond,” removing it from “danger” and locating it within the realm of domestic practices. At
11 See What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-Modern Period, The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History, and Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment for studies which look at “learning from nature” in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. 35
the same time, Holden’s decision to bring scientific studies—particularly natural history and botany—into an all-girls’ art classroom also expands traditional domestic and classroom practices. Many of the pedagogical and artistic strategies Holden deploys in the two texts, such as painting flowers and using watercolors instead of oils, were typical of commonplace books of the nineteenth century. Holden’s addition of horticulture and natural history to the curriculum of her young pupils’ commonplace books created a hybrid that undermined a number of the domestic expectations placed upon young English women, as we will see. Within Holden’s field books, nature plays an important role in mediating moments of collusion and disruption.
Holden cites several poems that invoke “Nature,” even though she never uses the word in her own notes. Both books begin with Romantic-era poems that foreground “Nature’s” didactic impacts on human—particularly male—subjects. For instance, Nature Notes, 1905, the first book, begins with a selection from William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour” (1798):
Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts (123-8)
Written for his sister Dorothy, the didactic poem advises her to pursue a particular kind of careful and contemplative relationship with “Nature.” He warns her against the dangers of the 36
“wild” abandon to the natural world that he had experienced in his youth, when with “glad animal movements” (75) he lost himself in nature. Seeing something of a similar “wildness” in
Dorothy’s eyes, he suggests that
in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! (138-47)
For Wordsworth, a mature view of nature is made possible through Dorothy’s education and domestication. This maturation will be revealed or perhaps even completed in Dorothy, a woman of twenty-eight at the publication of this poem, when her mind can organizes the passion and pleasure she takes from the natural world into an orderly “mansion for all lovely forms.” In other words, education and growth are made possible through the domestication of nature.
Like many of his contemporaries, Wordsworth associates “Nature” with the nineteenth century ideals of femininity and establishes “Nature” as a feminized teacher who
“inform[s]…with quietness and beauty.” Wordsworth “feeds” from her as an infant suckles at his mother’s breast. As Marsden observes, Wordsworth “conceived of nature as a body of content, 37
and educational guide and, more, as enshrining moral and spiritual purposes” (n. pag.). Like
Wordsworth’s “Nature,” women were expected to practice and reproduce Christian morality. At the same time, “by taking on the feminine virtues of compassion, mercy, gentleness, and sympathy, the male Romantic poets could claim to speak with ultimate moral as well as intellectual authority” (Mellor 23-4), effectively silencing feminized Nature.
Holden’s use of Wordsworth’s poem in her classroom field book turns the meaning of the poem to her ends, creating an argument for the value of women teachers. If access to education for girls was controversial, so much more so was women’s access to the teaching profession, outside of the home. In Wordsworth’s poem a feminized “Nature” appears to be an effective teacher of men, if we are to believe the mediating voice of the male speaker. As a professional art instructor, Holden had a personal stake in the legitimation and advancement of women teachers. At the same time, Holden’s extension of Wordsworth’s feminization of “Nature” also reinforces existing and persistent associations of “women” and “nature.”12 In bringing
Wordsworth into the classroom, Holden brings with him the philosophical baggage of nineteenth century ideas about the natural world.
While Holden’s initial pedagogical strategy concerning the natural world seems to have been bringing specimens into the classroom for her students to draw, this strategy evolved into
Holden bringing her students out onto “the very extensive school grounds to sketch the schoolhouse or views of Solihull Church” (Taylor 121). Moving the girls closer to the objects they were observing increased the contact and interactivity between the girls and their
12 As my introduction traces at length, scholars since at least the 1970s have identified and challenged the ways in which women’s bodies were associated with “the land,” to the detriment of both women and the environment. See especially Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World and Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land. 38
environments. Similarly interactive pedagogies were encouraged by various educators and educational reform advocates in the nineteenth century, including by Sarah Trimmer, editor of the periodical The Guardian of Education (1802-1806). Trimmer’s educational philosophy, advanced in An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, published in 1820, “was based on two progressive pieces of pedagogy, namely learning at first hand from nature through instructive and health-promoting rural or parkland walks, and at the same time associating this with ‘intelligent conversations,’ whether on the walk or in the preparation or follow-up time”
(Marsden n. pag.). Holden’s classroom strategies coupled with the informative passages of her model field books align with Trimmer’s educational principles. For instance, in an undated passage recorded in the month of January in 1905, Holden writes: “Birds of all kinds are to be seen going about in large flocks in the winter months, traversing the fields in search of food.
Among the birds who thus congregate together are – Rooks, Wild Pigeons, Plovers, Missel thrushes, Field-fares, Redwings, Starlings, Sparrows, Buntings, Larks, Finches of all kinds, Tits, and Golden-crested Wrens” (12). Holden’s first entries in the 1905 text indicate that she might have originally imagined her texts to be filled with this kind of information but ultimately determined that providing her students with factual information was insufficient. It missed both the going out into the natural world and the personal interactions that Holden encouraged her students, by her own example, to pursue.
Holden extends interactivity beyond contact between humans and nonhumans to include interspecies interactions in her representations of the natural world. Not much is known of the depth of Holden’s knowledge of ecology—a concept that gained traction in England at the end of the nineteenth century. However, it is clear both from her paintings and from her journal entries 39
that she was aware of the basic principles of an ecosystem. For example, on a trip to Bristol,
Holden comments: “The Nightingale is also a stranger to Devonshire. One reason I have heard given is, that the insects they chiefly feed on, are not found there, I think this is likely to be the true explanation, as otherwise this flowery, fertile corner of England would seem to be a very paradise for them” (1906, 57). In this passage, Holden does not use the authoritative voice of a teacher in relating this piece of information. Instead, she uses a feminized rhetoric which provides a personal opinion, “I think this is likely to be the true explanation,” in place of a statement of fact or an excerpt from an outside text as she does in other places in the field books.
The interactivity she witnesses, or in this case misses, between species in the natural world becomes a major strategy for both the practice and products of drawing in her own work and in her classroom. For instance, in one full-page piece Holden paints several birds whose eyes are trained on a single snail at the bottom center of the painting, clearly eager for their next meal.
The painting illustrates the fierce competition the small birds engage in order to survive. The centrality of the snail in the foreground of the illustration points to the single-mindedness of the surrounding birds in fighting for their food.
Holden’s pedagogical strategy of interactivity suggests a complicated understanding of the natural world, whereby nature is both an object of study and a teaching subject. Treating nature as an object of study is in keeping with the tenets of natural history in which the natural world is to be observed and knowledge collected through that observation. Natural history was a field whose practitioners avowed methods based on observation rather than experimentation. As such, the field was more accessible to interested women practitioners than scientific fields that 40
required specialized education, training, and equipment.13 Often the process of observation meant that the natural historian would kill his specimen, and bring it back into his home for continued study. Though killing animals through so-called blood sports (e.g. foxing, haring, and bear-baiting) has a long and contentious history in England, as I discuss at greater length in the following chapter, killing animals for science has been framed, since at least the eighteenth century, as a relatively acceptable practice when it leads to greater good for humanity (Franco
245). One of the most long-standing arguments and judgments against the former has been that blood sports are pursued for entertainment and pleasure, while blood shed in science is by necessity. Naturalists are uniquely poised, frequently negotiating between experienced pleasure and scientific pursuit. To put it differently, naturalists both take pleasure in the natural world and take out of that world the things that give them pleasure—in order to study the objects within their homes and laboratories.
In her field books, Holden never purposely kills an animal, but she does bring home both plants and animals for study: “This afternoon I went to gather Cuckoo-pints for my drawing- class. Going through the wood I picked up a Thrush’s egg” (1906, 61). The results of her collections are sometimes unfortunate: “The Tadpoles have come out of their balls of jelly and career madly about the aquarium wagging their little black tails. A Gudgeon which had put into
13 Susan Scott Parrish’s American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World traces popular interest in natural history from England to the colonies and back again. She argues that natural history allowed more marginalized people to contribute to scientific discourses because the novelty of the information or specimen was considered more important than the procurer of the information. Some women of means, however, were able to enter scientific discourses. Beatrix Potter, for instance, who was a natural scientist (rather than natural historian) had the resources to purchase expensive equipment and the space needed to perform experiments— experiments that led to her eventual submission of a paper on mycology (the study of fungi), titled On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae, to the Linnean Society in 1897. She later withdrew the paper after finding an error in her results caused by contaminated samples.
41
the aquarium has made a meal of a good many of them” (1906, 39). The agent of destruction for the inharmonious meeting of the species is obscured by Holden’s syntax; she writes that the
“Gudgeon had put into the aquarium,” making it difficult to determine whose hand is responsible for the introduction of the predator to the aquarium. This syntactical choice may be purposeful and in line with natural history, which seeks to record what is rather than speculate about why or how such a thing has happened. The TV series based on The Country Diary, however, seems uncomfortable with this uncertainty and instead assigns the deed to two mischievous and cruel schoolgirls who play a trick on a classmate before pouring the Gudgeon into the aquarium.
While much of Holden’s text is in line with the idea of a natural historian as an observer, there are also moments where she clearly understands herself as interacting with and affecting the world she inhabits. The most poignant example of Holden’s articulation of this understanding is an anecdote she tells about how she sets up her drawing station too near to a nest and so is harried by the parent birds. Holden moves her station but apparently not far enough, because one of the birds continues to “scold” her. After thirty minutes, the birds give up on her and begin to feed their young while Holden observes (1905, 65). Because Holden’s field books serve as a model for her art students, it seems that she expects them to follow a similar strategy of interactive observation.
Holden’s anthropomorphizing of animals, and birds in particular, pushes beyond the strictures of natural history which are based on objective observation. In her field books, nature holds a different position than the nonhuman and nonliving objects that make up the natural world. While “Nature” is figured as a gentle teacher, for instance, in the earlier example from
Wordsworth’s poem, Holden describes the individual species which exist within the natural 42
world as more personally interested and short-sighted. That is, some birds, like the Robins, are concerned with their own petty jealousies and ownership: “I don’t think the Robins really care for cocoa-nut; but they dont [sic] like to see the Tits enjoying anything, without claiming a share” (1906, 171). At another moment, Holden singles out a particular caddis grub who “looked very smart,” because “he had stuck his house all over with bits of bright green rush and water plant” (1906, 33), implying that the grub’s vanity or sense of style were behind his decision to
“decorate” his “house.” For Holden, the natural world is not an imaginary and complete entity but rather an environment that includes a series of competitions, some of them far from edifying.
Holden’s interpretation of the actions of animals indicates her attempts to empathize with nonhuman others. In the last decade, social scientists, and anthropologists in particular, have shown an increasing interest in the effects of anthropomorphization on human empathy.14
Recently, Meredith Root-Bernstein et al. have argued that anthropomorphization can play an important (though precarious) role in conservation efforts as well. In her field books, Holden’s anthropomorphic moments exhibit enlivened language and a more personal attachment to her work. In other words, anthropomorphization closes the gap created by the distanced observation required by natural history and by landscape art. Such moments in her field books anticipate her later work with The Animal’s Friend magazine, an animal rights journal, produced by the
National Council for Animals’ Welfare (NCAW), which raised awareness about vivisection and advocated for the humane treatment of animals. Holden’s concern for the welfare of animals resulted in her producing an illustrated calendar, painted in a similar style to her earlier Nature
Notes, for the magazine. The calendar was printed, monthly, in the magazine and then compiled,
14 See Lorimer; Tam, Lee, and Chao; and Mitchell. 43
published, and sold in aid of the NCAW. In addition to the calendar, Holden contributed more than forty illustrations to the magazine from 1907-1912 (Taylor 130). In these illustrations and in her field books, Holden’s concern for the welfare of animals is evident. In one memorable instant, in a failed attempt to capture a small lizard, Holden pulls off the lizard’s tail: “Saw a little yellow Lizard on a bank; I thought I would capture it and bring it home to sketch, but it slipped through my fingers and when I caught it by the tail, to my horror it snapped itself free, leaving the end of its’ tail wriggling in my fingers!” (1905, 74). Holden is clearly appalled by the event, ending her entry with an exclamation point—a type of punctuation rarely seen in her field books. And while she cannot empathize with a lizard whose tale will eventually grow back, she makes an attempt to relate to the shock or “horror” that the lizard likely experienced in losing its tail and that she experienced in suddenly finding a severed but still wriggling tail in her fingers.
The scale of shock is almost certainly different for the two beings but the presences of shock is a shared experience. Still, this experience does not keep her from attempting to capture and bring home numerous other specimens.
Holden’s field books, as I have argued, both replicate and deviate from artistic productions by women in Edwardian England. In the initial reviews following the publications of her field books, “early representations of Holden sought connections between her artistic, pedagogical, and domestic roles and drew on distinctly suburban models of feminine relationships to familial and domestic spaces” (Edwards, “‘That Honeysuckle Rose’” 110).
These connections are easy to draw both in her field books and in her life story. At the same time, these particular histories omit or gloss over Holden’s more radical participation in animal rights advocacy and her deep interest in natural history. Holden’s hybrid field books both work 44
against the grain of commonplace books to include some of the less glamorous aspects of natural history, while at the same time domesticating these more troubling aspects by including them within commonplace books. One of the ways Holden accomplishes this domestication is through poetic allusion to specific flora or “Nature,” as we saw in the earlier inclusion of Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey.” Holden begins her second field book in much the same way as the first, but this time with a selection from the second canto of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
(1812-1818):
To sit on rocks; to muse o’er flood and fell;
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been!
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock, that never need a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude: ‘tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stones unrolled. (217-25)
In the poem, “Nature” is precluded from “owning” “man’s dominion,” where “man’s dominion” is negatively compared to Nature’s realm. While “Nature” cannot own or enter “man’s dominion,” “man” clearly can and does penetrate her. This sexual relationship is reinforced in the erotically suggestive phrase “Nature’s stones unrolled,” which positions “Nature” as untouched, unaffected, and virginal. Byron further eroticizes “Nature” through imagery of
“steeps” and “foaming falls.” 45
Holden’s repositioning of Byron’s poem within a pedagogical text may desexualize its erotic subtext. Instead, Holden’s inclusion of the poem seems to emphasize the connection between Bryon’s and her own approach to “Nature.” Like Wordsworth’s earlier “Tintern
Abbey,” man’s experiences of “Nature” initiate transcendent moments, though these moments are ultimately unsustainable. The breakdown of transcendence is absent from Holden’s notes, however. Instead, “Nature” and “man” maintain an amiable relationship in which humans can learn from “Nature” by both observing and experiencing “her.” Byron’s ideal interaction with
“Nature” in this passage is to “sit” and “muse.” To observe and “slowly trace” (a phrase easily repurposed to suggest sketching) the scene around him—principles in keeping with the tenets of natural history.
The competing pulls of the need to represent specimens as a natural historian and her own conviction about the relatedness and interactivity of humans and nonhumans is made apparent in the construction of Holden’s paintings. As a natural historian, Holden often paints plants or animals (including insects) in relative isolation on the pages of her field book, refusing the urge to represent the natural world as a landscape. That is, although a single page may include multiple specimens, they are separated by white space that keeps them from deep interactions. For instance, in one page from April 1906, Holden paints six different species of butterflies and plants, posing them relatively naturally but separating each species from the others through white space (42). In other places, and especially in the first pages of each month,
Holden paints more complete scenes where plants and insects interact within the space of the page. The paintings that begin each month generally include both a foreground and a background, filling out the environment around the featured plant or animal as one painting, 46
from May of 1905, where four sheep huddle together in the foreground of the painting. A bright yellow gorse bush occupies the mid-ground, while the background displays rolling fields and a sparsely clouded sky (55). In other paintings Holden positions plants and animals to interact, but keeps them all on a relatively two-dimensional plane—that is, there is no background or major visual depth to the painting. These various configurations illustrate the multiple ways in which
Holden perceives the natural world to function. Further, Holden’s refusal to represent the natural world, in these field books, through the genre of landscape painting is a rejection of the pictorial and purely aesthetic representation of living beings.
Undomesticating the Domesticated
While the previous sections have made an argument for how Holden’s texts domesticate the natural world through their function as pedagogical tools and how Holden’s texts are further
“domesticated” by their commodification, this section demonstrates how Holden’s field books also renegotiate domestic spaces and practices. As Stacy Alaimo insists in Undomesticated
Ground, “to argue that female naturalists extended the domestic realm into nature and built a women’s space in the wilderness from ‘their domestic roles as wives and mothers’ [Norwood
240] forecloses the possibility that women entered the wilderness, literally, or imaginatively, precisely in order to throw off—or complement, subvert, or bracket—their domestic roles”
(Alaimo 15). Holden’s subtle subversion of domestic practices, I argue, is visible in her persistent engagement with botany and horticulture. Holden’s paintings of flowers recall the domestic practice of arranging flowers for decorative purposes. At the same time her paintings demonstrate over and over that she is interested in the botanical properties of the flowers as well 47
as their aesthetic arrangement. For instance, flowers in the field books are generally surrounded by white space on the page, removing them from their ecologies in order to facilitate close and focused inspection in keeping with the principles of natural history.
In fashioning much of her two texts after naturalist field books, Holden recontextualizes the domestic practice of flower arrangement in a more scientific tradition of botany and horticulture. This context is particularly underscored by her inclusion of the Latin names from
Linnaean taxonomy for the plants, birds, and insects she paints. In the back of the 1906 text,
Holden goes so far as to include an alphabetized index, also known as a field catalogue, of the wild flowers and birds that can be “found in the neighborhood of Olton, Warwickshire” (178).
The index lists both the common name and taxonomic name of each plant and bird.
Holden’s decision to include the Linnaean names of the plants and animals she paints introduced the young women in her classroom to a field of study with which they were likely unfamiliar. Stanley Hall, an educational pioneer and president of the American Psychological
Association, laid out an ideal curriculum in which young girls would be taught in schools in the countryside where they would be exposed to botany (among other subjects), but, he argued, the
“Latin nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all” (316) in girls’ education.
Hall may have considered Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature too difficult for young women, but
Holden did not.
Some of the hesitancy nineteenth century educators experienced in exposing young women to botany had to do with plants’ overt sexuality. Paula Bennett argues that women writers in the nineteenth century were able to speak of sexual arousal and autoeroticism through the images of flowers, buds, seeds, and berries (“Pomegranate-Flowers” 192). The so-called 48
“language of flowers” was a “highly nuanced discourse of female erotic desire” (Bennett
“Critical Clitoridectimy” 241) that pervaded Western culture: “Throughout the nineteenth century, this language, presumably with varying degrees of awareness, was used in the United
States by sex educators, letter writers, artists, craftswomen, pornographers, dreamers, and poets alike” (“Critical Clitoridectimy” 242). Because Holden’s field books were designed with the education of young women in mind, Holden tended to treat plant reproduction with an assumed scientific distance as in the description of the self-pollinating yew as simply “diaecius” (1906,
11). At the same time, Holden’s description of the yew’s botanical structure is highly erotic: the yew’s “poisonous properties reside in the foliage, the fleshy part of the berries being quite harmless, though the seed is injurious” (1906, 11). Though likely unaware of the degree to which her description of the yew participates in the erotic language of flowers, Holden, in her field books, propagated that language.
Holden’s purposeful association of her paintings with contemporaneous natural histories is evidenced in the fact that she often composes her drawings to aid in identification rather than solely aesthetic pleasure. For instance, on page 46 of the 1906 book, Holden paints a Pasque flower and a branch of Wood Spurge, numbering each so that their identification is clear in the labels below. The very act of numbering aligns these images with both scientific and educational materials whose main purpose is to inform. Numbering also disassociates the paintings from the traditional practice of teaching young women to paint for purely decorative reasons, since this level of didactic detail would not be necessary in a purely decorative object.
Occasionally, Holden’s choice of subject deviates from societal expectations for women, aligning particular paintings more closely with natural histories than drawing-room still lifes. For 49
example, one of the first illustrations provided in the 1906 text is of dead leaves. Holden makes no claims for the aesthetic power of the leaves, including them without much commentary. The leaves are painted in great detail: in the oak leaf, for example, the leaf is mainly brown but also shows some of the leaf’s original green color which fades to light and then darker browns. And in many of the other leaves, you can see both primary and secondary veins. The lesson suggested by the inclusion of this painting is clear: even dead objects and non-decorative but functional parts of plants are worth her students’ attention. This early lesson reflects popular artistic teaching methods, including Ruskin’s exercise in Modern Painting that asks students to master painting a pebble before moving on to brushes and color: “Now if you can draw that stone you can draw anything” (qtd. in Irwin 163), he asserts.
There are few moments where the undomesticated landscape Holden explores and observes disturbs the enforced neatness and niceties of domesticated spaces. One of those moments occurs when Holden records how a farmhand captured two adders on a moor in
Devonshire: “The gentleman who had captured them handled them quite fearlessly, he held one up by the back of the neck and forcing it’s [sic] mouth open with a stick, he showed me the two little pink fangs in the upper jaw. When on the ground they reared themselves up and hissed and struck repeatedly at a walking stick placed in front of them” (1906, 49). Holden’s competing interest and revulsion in the capture and display of the reptiles comes through in the language of the passage where the snake is forcibly “handled” by a “fearless” man. On the one hand, the experience of the striking adder and the forceful man make a dramatic break from the colorful two-page spread of butterflies, blooms, and birds that appear directly before the anecdote. On the other, Holden’s descriptions of the laborer as a “gentleman” and the adder as having “little pink 50
fangs” temper the anecdote, making it less of a frightening experience and more of a “wild” story told in a middle-class drawing room or art classroom.
Because the domestic sphere is both decorative and functional, Holden’s field books are able to operate on multiple levels within her classroom. The books serve as instructional guides, but what they teach is not always clear. At moments the books appear to reproduce the domestic sphere in the natural world, taming its influence for Holden’s young pupils. At other moments the books challenge what counts as acceptable content and behavior for the domestic sphere by providing alternative methods of interacting with the natural world.
The Country Diary of and Edwardian Lady in the 21st Century
Moving forward more than a century, I close with an examination of some of the newest
“trans-generic adaptations” (Edwards, “‘That Honeysuckle Rose’” 105) of Holden’s text: the first set of texts are instructional guides, all published in 2006, that teach the reader how to draw or paint “in the style of the Edwardian lady,” and the second is the RosettaBooks iBook mentioned in the introduction to the chapter and published digitally in 2012 using the iBooks
Author eBook app. These adaptations exemplify the complicated nexus of education, art, and the natural world that Holden’s original field books represented. They are also, like Holden’s field books, entangled in a history of commodifying the domestic, the sentimental, and Englishness. In the trans-generic adaptations of Holden’s work, the English countryside replaces the naturalist field book as the dominant symbol and mode of experiencing the natural world. Because of this shift, Holden’s continued mainstream popularity may be due, in part, to the perceived performance of an accessible relationship with “Nature,” particularly at a time when many 51
women were feeling disenfranchised from the radical politics of ecofeminists in the 1970s and again in the 2000s.
Learn to Draw Nature in the Style of the Edwardian Lady, Learn to Paint Wildlife in the
Style of the Edwardian Lady, and The Country Diary: Painting with Watercolours are all instructional manuals for the reproduction of a particular kind of uncritical representation of nature that misses much of Holden’s intellectual curiosity about the natural world. The books do, however, pick up on the original pedagogical purpose of Holden’s field books in providing instructions, however rudimentary, for producing artwork. Learn to Draw Nature and Learn to
Paint Wildlife come complete with a sketch pad and set of colored drawing pencils and watercolor paints, respectively. The books purport to guide readers through the process of imitating Holden’s style of representing the natural world. In The Country Diary: Painting with
Watercolours, Carol Daniel and Anne Bignall similarly guide readers in imitating Holden’s style and emphasize ways in which the reader can connect herself to Holden through this book:
“Staying true to the methods and styles of Edith Holden, the projects of this book will help you create watercolours Edith Holden herself would be proud of” (5), imaginatively positioning the
(presumably adult) readers as eager pupils of Holden’s. Indifferent to the full century between the creation of Holden’s field books and the present, Daniel and Bignall assure readers that
“although modern equipment is even more portable [than in the nineteenth century], it is fundamentally the same as the materials Edith Holden herself would have used” (6). By stressing the ways in which the reader can identify with and imitate Holden, Daniel and Bignall perform the accessibility of Holden’s field books. The book ends with the reassuring statement that
“you’ll always be inspired if you pick up your paints and spend a day out in the countryside” 52
(64). The connection between reader/artist and the natural world that these texts set up is an easy relationship between admirer and admired, or, in the final example, between inspirer and inspired. The reader/artist’s role is to pleasantly enjoy and aesthetically reproduce the natural world—a role similar to but still different from Holden’s more nuanced understanding of the agents that occupy and constitute the natural world.
RosettaBooks’s iteration of the The Country Diary is a fortified ebook, supplemented by relevant historical and biographical information that “pop-up” when users select underlined words and phrases while swiping through the digitized pages of Holden’s text. RosettaBook’s digital adaptation makes multisensory and interactive modifications to Holden’s text that amplify its aesthetic appeal and invite twenty-first century audiences to explore the book in an entirely new way. The eBook begins with a collage of two of Holden’s illustrations that is animated so that flowers grow from buds on branches of a crabapple tree and a common elm. In the background, the song of a nightingale plays. Once the flowers have reached the full bloom of
Holden’s illustration, a nightingale appears to fly in from the top right of the screen, alighting on the branch of crab-apple blossoms. The iBook version also includes a side-scrolling Table of
Contents which provides full-color previews of each page. The addition of a Table of Contents sets the book up as an object of study; at the same time, the reproduction of the full-color pages within that Table of Contents reinforces the aesthetic value of the book.
Through animation, sound, and modified colors, the additional beautification of the text connects this edition to its trans-generic predecessors, which capitalized on the visual aesthetics of the original field books. The colors of the eBook are muted versions of the originals, and the contrast between colors has been increased or decreased in some instances, apparently 53
amplifying the eBook’s aesthetic appeal but at the cost of clearly communicating the original content. For example, the publishers significantly lightened the color of Holden’s illustration of a
Red-tailed Humble Bee so that it appears orange in the digital version, making the name of the insect confusing (i80, original on 95). Even the idea of this being a field book is commodified— that is, although the text is not reproduced in facsimile (despite the publisher’s claim), it appears that a font has been designed for the page numbers based on Holden’s handwriting, likely because handwritten texts feel more personal and, in some instances, more accessible for readers.
The addition of annotations appears to shift the primary purpose of the book back into a kind of pedagogical text. RosettaBooks claims, in a press release, that the edition includes
“hundreds of pop-up pieces of information about poets, plants, and places Edith Holden visited and loved” (n. pg.). In spite of the neat alliteration of the purported content of the annotations, the actual annotations privilege people and places over plants and animals, even though people appear infrequently in the text and almost not at all outside of naming the authors of the poems she includes. Instead, the annotations shift the educational focus away from plants, animals, or even drawing and toward people and places, increasing the anthropocentrism of the adaptation.
In their commodification of Holden’s style and work, these adaptations also participate in the newest revival of the English heritage industry and our own neo-Edwardian craze. Since
2000, and particularly since 2010, both American and British audiences have become re- enamored with Edwardian-era England, demonstrated by the popularity of ITV’s Downton
Abbey (2010-current) and remakes of The Forsyte Saga (2002), and Upstairs, Downstairs (2010- current), both of whose predecessor were popular in the 1970s. Given that both the 1970s and the
2010s have been characterized by economic instability and anxiety in the UK, this turn to 54
nostalgia may be a way of reconnecting with an idealized past rooted in the English countryside.
In Downton Abbey in particular, the most popular of the series by far, the English countryside is as romanticized as the lives of the inhabitants of Downton Abbey.
Holden’s field books have similarly been used to package and sell a particular version of
“nature” in England aimed at middle class women. Throughout the original creation and subsequent publications and adaptations of Holden’s field books, different versions of acceptable and desirable relationships with the natural world have circulated around and through Holden’s texts. By focusing on the texts’ original function as a pedagogical tool, I have recontextualized
Holden’s books within the Edwardian period, pointing to both the rehearsals of and breaks with traditional Edwardian domesticity that the texts enact.
55
Botany and Broomsticks: Witchcraft, Domesticity, and Landscape in
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes
About three years before Virginia Woolf declared that “a woman must have a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (6), Sylvia Townsend Warner, living in her own London flat, began writing a novel about Laura, a respectable, middle-aged woman who leaves her extended family to become a witch in the rural Chilterns.15 Near the end of the novel, Laura, at the prodding of Satan, explains her belief about the importance of witchcraft for women: “One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own , not an existence doled out to you by others” (243). Rejecting potential religious and moral ramifications of witchcraft outright, Laura, anticipating Woolf’s later assertion, identifies autonomy as the desired outcome of becoming a witch.
Between the two world wars, witchcraft experienced a period of popularity in both public and academic circles. Aleister Crowley, the infamous English occultist, founded the Abbey of
Thelema in 1920 and was frequently accused of hosting orgies and sacrificial rituals at the abbey.
Arthur Machen, a writer of horror and supernatural fiction, whose novella The Great God Pan
(1890) includes episodes of supernatural copulation and transformation, experienced a significant revival of interest in his work. Two decades earlier, in 1903, he had married Dorothie
Purefoy Hudleston, Warner’s aunt, and the two of them frequently hosted Warner, of whom they
15 Warner was born in 1893, the only child of George and Nora Townsend Warner. Her father was educated at Cambridge and worked as a master at Harrow School. Warner prepared for a career in music, but eventually transitioned to writing. Although she had long-term relationships with men, her most meaningful relationship was with Valentine Ackland, with whom she lived for nearly four decades, until Ackland’s death in 1969. See Claire Harman’s biography of Warner for a richer account of Warner’s life. 56
were very fond, at their house in London (Harman 58). In 1921, anthropologist and Egyptologist
Margaret Murray published a book that purported that witches were the remnants of a pre-
Christian pagan society that the Christian church attempted to eradicate through legal persecution and execution. In The Witch-Cult of Western Europe, Murray draws from selected, surviving documents of witch trials (primarily from England, Scotland, and France) in order to trace the contours of the religion including its initiation ceremonies, rituals, and beliefs. Its theory that witchcraft was a religion that pre-dated and influenced Christianity was soon discredited by her peers as historically inaccurate (Simpson 89). Still, Murray’s book became a popular success in
England and remains one of the fundamental texts of the Wiccan religion.16
Regardless of its controversial reception, Warner read and was influenced by Murray’s book when she wrote Lolly Willowes or The Loving Huntsman (1926). Warner’s novel follows the life of Laura (Lolly) Willowes, who lives in idyllic Somerset until her father’s death, at which time, she is packed off (at the age of 28) to live with her brother Henry and his family.
After decades of acting the dutiful spinster aunt in London, Laura relocates to a small, insular village in the Chilterns called Great Mop (a play on the folk story of witches riding broomsticks) against her scandalized family’s wishes. In Great Mop, Laura is able to indulge her inclinations towards witchcraft. The novel contains many reversals of expectations: ordinary things are ironized and extraordinary things are related as if they were natural. The novel is a kind of parody of the bildungsroman, where the most important developments happen at the end rather than at the beginning of the protagonist’s life. Though the first third of the novel paints a
16 For an overview of the history of witches in the United Kingdom, see Leo Ruickbie’s Witchcraft out of the Shadows: A Complete History. For a detailed history of British witchcraft since 1800, see Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. 57
somewhat satirical portrait of Laura’s life in middle-class England, it then turns almost shockingly to the supernatural as Laura realizes she is being “hunted” by Satan, “the loving huntsman” of the alternative title of the novel. Pleased by his attention, Laura embraces her newly recognized identity as a witch and begins to understand her life, actions, and desires through the framework of witchcraft. It is only by recognizing herself as a witch that Laura can connect meaningfully with the rural landscape surrounding Great Mop and begin to articulate her resistance to ideologies of place that oppress and control.
Warner uses inherited vocabularies of witchcraft from Murray and Machen, but turned them to her own purposes, making serious interventions with a characteristically light touch. In one of her notes about the novel, Warner writes of her conviction that “witches were witches for love; that witchcraft was more than Miss Murray’s Dianic cult; it was the romance of their hard lives, their release from dull futures” (qtd. in Harman 59). Warner’s belief that witchcraft involved love in addition to or instead of goddess worship substantiates both the novel’s belittling of witchcraft’s ritualistic aspects and its emphasis on the importance of individual autonomy and self-respect—especially for women. Indeed, Warner’s version of witchcraft does not involve worship of any kind—unlike newer iterations of witchcraft and the Wiccan religion.
Rather, it provides a mode through which women can exert their power and autonomy and connect more meaningfully to the natural world around them.
In Lolly Willowes, Warner simultaneously subverts readers’ expectations about witchcraft and the bildungsroman. Critics of the novel have tended to treat its use of witchcraft as a route to
Laura’s “self-actualization” (Port 144) (see also Gan), a supernatural manifestation of her feminism (Nesbitt, Port), an expression of her suppressed lesbian desires (Garrity, Castle, 58
Wachman), or a combination of these things. Further, many critics read Laura’s witchcraft, like
Jacqueline Shin, as “an allegory for the liberation of European women from everyday oppression” (Shin 709). Warner’s novel is complex enough to allow for all of these readings. To these readings, I contribute an ecocritical perspective that illuminates Laura’s continuous negotiation of self as it relates to the natural world. As Nesbitt rightly acknowledges: “Warner's novel is a commentary on the semiotics and politics of landscape as a structuring agent in subjectivity” (“Footsteps” 450). I argue that the supernatural and the (anti)bildungsroman are the vehicles through which this commentary is made possible in the novel. Drawing on David
Abram’s concept of “magic,” I argue that witchcraft provides a vocabulary, while the bildungsroman provides a structure, through which Warner articulates the importance of Laura’s lived experiences of the natural world. Through the practices of witchcraft, Laura develops a heightened attentiveness to the landscapes she inhabits, which, in turn, enable the development of her autonomy.
Like in many bildungsromans, Laura’s move out into the world is precipitated by a tragedy, in her case, the death of her father when she is twenty-eight. However, unlike many bildungsromans, once in society, Laura’s behavior rarely clashes with social expectations.
Instead, she seemingly sews herself into the social fabric of her extended family, experiencing discomfort in the act but unable or unwilling to express her distress. Warner drew from her own life in characterizing Laura’s predicament. After a poignant experience with the natural world on the marshlands near Southminster, Warner felt a change in herself: “She felt, as she was to say later, that she had become properly her own person, having been till then ‘the creature of whomever I was with’. She [like Laura] was twenty-eight” (Harman 53). Although Warner’s act 59
of “becoming” occurs at twenty-eight, Laura’s evolution toward witchcraft and autonomy takes several more decades. I trace Laura’s winding path through three key phases of her life. During
Laura’s early life, Laura’s relationship to the natural world is strictly mediated by social expectations of her behavior. In spite of these restrictions, Laura is able to develop the beginnings of a satisfying relationship to the natural world through her forays into herbalism.
After her father dies, Laura moves in with her brother and his family in London where her perceptions shift dramatically, stunting her developing relationship to the natural world. Laura eventually throws off her role as the dutiful aunt and moves to Great Mop to become a witch, precipitating a major shift in how she relates to the world around her.
Part I: Natural Domesticity
The natural world is noticeably present in the domestic spaces of Laura’s early life, but it is present in forms that display its commodification and cultural transformations in a specifically
English context. The British bourgeoisie understood it was culture’s role to transform raw materials from the natural world into usable material for human lifestyles (Kehler, Mabie, or
MacKenzie). Because of this constructed relationship between “nature” and “culture,” many of the objects and materials with and through which Laura structures and experiences her world express anxieties about gender relations and modernization in twentieth-century England.
When Laura Willowes is born to a loving, upper middle-class family at the end of the nineteenth century, her father insists on the middle name “Erminia” after a “stuffed ermine” he recalls from his childhood, which “was still his ideal of the enchanted princess, so pure and sleek was it, and so artfully poised the small neat head on the long throat” (13). Warner immediately 60
deflates his sentiments about the taxidermied ermine through Mrs. Willowes, who cracks a joke:
“Weasel!” she calls Everard, “how dare you love a minx!” (13). Mrs. Willowes’s jibe calls attention to the way Everard has sexualized the ermine (or mink) and, by extension, his own daughter. Everard’s idealization of the ermine, though sexualized, also aligns with Victorian representations of femininity as pure, virginal, and composed. While Everard projects his ideals onto the ermine, the ermine itself is dead, frozen in space, and used as decorative ornament. The taxidermist artfully hides the horror and gore of the ermine’s death in his staging of the carcass as a trophy of the hunt.17 Three days after Laura is born, Everard rides to hounds and comes back with the brush of a fox who was “such a pretty young vixen” (13) that it reminds him of Laura.
He then rewards the infant with the severed tail of his kill, connecting Laura with his prey and foreshadowing Satan’s later pursuit of Laura as the “loving huntsman” of the alternate title of the novel.18
Everard’s obsession with ermine is such that he names her after one, compares her to one, and imagines her dressed as one. Enamored with infant Laura’s femininity, he thinks of her as
“his very ermine come to life” (13). He anticipates Laura’s first ball declaring that it “must take place in winter, for he wished to see Laura trimmed with ermine” (13). Everard wants his daughter to both be like a dead ermine and adorn herself in dead ermines. These contradictory states expose the impossibility of living up to patriarchal ideals of femininity. As a woman in
17 For more on the popularity and pervasiveness of taxidermy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Poliquin. 18 The English obsession with blood sports goes back centuries before Everard’s fictional ride and continues on to this day. Though fox hunting was officially outlawed in the United Kingdom in 2004, it remains a powerful symbol of dissenting views about class, animal rights, environmental conservation, and more.18 Emma Griffin argues, in Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066, that the practices and laws regulating hunting in Great Britain have also had major impacts on national identity and social relations. 61
Everard’s imagination, Laura is to be both a static decoration for his drawing room, like the stuffed ermine, and a decorative object on which he can display his wealth and skill as a hunter in the shape of pearls and furs.
Women, of course, also participate in the production of patriarchal values, in part through policing the appearances of other women. During her adolescence, Laura’s benevolently neglectful mother is pestered by the ladies in the neighborhood who are concerned that Laura
“might grow up eccentric” (17) if not sent off to school where she would undoubtedly be finished into a proper and marriageable young lady. Mrs. Willowes’s response to this pressure is to alter Laura’s clothing: “Nannie would let out another tuck in Laura’s ginghams and merinos, and some months would pass before the ladies returned to the attack” (17). Mrs. Willowes understands that the women, dressed in “mantles of silk or of sealskin, according to the season of the year” (16), read Laura’s inability to fit into the social fabric of the county through her clothing. The ladies who press Mrs. Willowes into action are dressed in fabrics which make visible the deaths of silkworms and seals. On the one hand, their choice in clothing appears to connect them more closely to the natural world since the heaviness of each fabric appropriately mediates between the external temperatures and the women’s bodily temperatures and comfort.
On the other hand, the fabrics publically display England’s history of imperialism, ecological destruction, and unsustainable hunting practices, histories in which the ladies (and indeed all of the English people in the novel) are complicit. In other words, the clothing may seem to advertise a sensitive connection to the natural world while actually advertising colonial power and conspicuous consumption. The glamour of the fur trade, or what Carol Dyhouse calls the
“Romance of Furriery” (27) appealed to the Edwardians and late Victorians who participated in 62
“an alarmingly gruesome vogue for the wearing of jackets, hats, and muffs trimmed with whole birds, stuffed kittens’ heads and baby squirrels” (Dyhouse 27). Though not taking fashion this far, the ladies of the counties’ conspicuous display of wealth through the bodies of dead animals disassociates them from Laura’s more peaceable connections with the natural world.
After Laura’s mother passes away, the family dressmaker lets down the hem of Laura’s dresses, convinced that “legs could not look sorrowful. Indeed Laura’s legs were very slim and frisky, they liked climbing trees and jumping over haycocks, they had no wish to retire from the world and belong to a young lady. But when she had put on the new clothes that smelt so queerly, and looking the mirror saw herself sad and grown-up, Laura accepted the inevitable”
(18). As in many female novels of formation (e.g. Villette, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret
Garden), Laura’s moment of moving into adulthood is precipitated by looking at her reflection in the mirror. The reflected image of Laura swathed in the fabrics and styles of middle-class respectability provokes a major shift in how she understands her place in the world, from vivacious explorer to a responsible young woman who is expected to keep house for her widowed father. This moment of seeing herself reflected in the mirror is a revision of an earlier moment in the text when, as a child, Laura crushes the petals of a red geranium and smears them across her cheeks. She looks into the glossy, reflective surface of a tank in the greenhouse to consider her performance of female attractiveness. But the tank refuses to show her what she expects to see. Instead of a young girl playing “grown-up,” she sees “only a dark shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth” (3). This early reflection serves as an external manifestation of her internal dark self, foreshadowing her eventual recognition of herself as a witch. The house’s 63
mirror replaces the greenhouse’s reflection with a vision of Laura as a solemn and respectable young woman.
Laura’s grief is suppressed by the social rituals surrounding her mother’s death and mediated through memories of her mother’s encounters with her garden: “So Laura behaved very well—said the Willowes connection, agreeing and approving amongst themselves—and went about her business, and only cried when alone in the potting-shed, where a pair of old gardening gloves repeated to her the shape of her mother’s hands” (19). In this hauntingly beautiful image,
Laura expresses her grief through her contact with her mother’s gloves. Although Laura’s response to her mother’s death cannot be expressed through typical social ceremonies and platitudes, the gardening gloves provoke her to tears. The shape of the gloves indicate negative space, framing but not filling the space once occupied by Mrs. Willowes’s hands. The shape of her mother’s body remains in Laura’s world as an article of clothing, even in the absence of her mother.
The gloves also metonymically stand in for Mrs. Willowes’s relationship to the natural world. Specifically, Laura responds to the evidence of her mother’s labor in the garden.
Gardening, though certainly part of her domestic responsibilities, is the least mediated way in which Mrs. Willowes’s interacts with the natural world in the novel. As I argue in the previous chapter, the garden serves as a liminal space, particularly for women, between the restrictive boundaries of the house and the “wild” and uncultivated spaces outside of the garden walls.
Laura’s response to her mother’s work in the garden demonstrates her deep desire to connect with both the landscape around her and with other women. 64
Laura’s brother Henry expresses his grief to their mother’s death in a very different way:
“He did a thing so unprecedented in the annals of the family that it could only be explained by the extreme exaltation of mind which possessed him: for without consulting any one, he altered the furniture, transferring a mirror and an almond-green brocade settee from his mother’s room to his own” (21). The heavy-handed irony of the narrator’s tone pokes fun, here, at the Victorian sensibilities and habits the Willowes family has inherited. Unlike Laura, Henry takes possession of his mother’s effects, moving them from her space to his own. His grief is expressed through objects associated with his mother’s social role—as a woman both the mirror and brocaded settee were important features of her domestic life. In these descriptions, Warner contrasts Laura’s more “natural” grief with the “unnaturalness” of Henry’s actions—both in the objects they choose and in the description of the act itself as “natural” or “strange.” And yet, the objects through which they each express their grief are all objects adapted from or for the natural world.
The fabrics, glass, and wood furniture all originated as raw materials that have been processed, shaped, and combined to serve particular domestic tasks expected of a middle-class woman at the turn of the century. Laura’s choice to grieve over her mother’s gardening gloves in a potting shed is a deliberate choice to privilege the part of her domestic life (namely gardening) that connected her more deeply to the natural world. Henry’s choice to take possession of pieces of his mother’s furniture demonstrates his attempts to take control of and enshrine Mrs. Willowes’s social and familial status as a respectable woman.
Like in the description of Mrs. Willowes’s gardening glove, representations of women’s domestic relationships with the natural world are memorialized, in the novel, in interesting ways.
In another such instance, Laura’s great-aunt Emma’s hair is “cut off [after her death] to be 65
embroidered into a picture of a willow tree exhaling its branches above a padded white satin tomb” (9). The embroidered willow functions symbolically on multiple levels. First, it references
Emma’s (and Laura’s) family name, reinforcing the importance of names, which take on an almost allegorical role in the novel. For instance, place names like Lady Place and Great Mop identify locations where Laura has more freedom to explore her associations with other women and witchcraft. Second, willows symbolize mourning, a fitting image for a funereal piece of embroidery. Third, willows played a very important role in English witchcraft. For one, they were frequently used as materials for spell casting and potion making including, of course, boiling willow bark to treat inflammation and headaches, eventually leading to the development of aspirin. Finally, the willow was a major symbol of the Greek goddess Hecate who was also associated with women and witchcraft (Johnston 204). The layered symbolism of Emma’s embroidered memorial connects her to a long history of women developing deep ties to the natural world. Laura’s memories of this piece of embroidery similarly connect her to a family history both of associating women with the natural world and of women claiming that relationship for themselves.
After her mother’s death, Laura’s begins an informal study of herbalism under the tutelage of “Nannie” and the village crone Goody Andrews. Through this mentorship, Laura develops a particular interest in and aptitude for herbalism, which draws her outside where “she roved the countryside for herbs and simples” (32). During her time spent wandering “the forsaken green byways of the rural pharmacopoeia” (31), Laura collects and experiments with many plants: “Many were the washes and decoctions that she made from sweet-gale, water purslane, cowslips, and the roots of succory, while her salads gathered in fields and hedges were 66
eaten by Everard, at first in hope and trust, and afterwards with flattering appetite” (32). Many of the herbs Laura finds are used both in what can crudely be called potion-making and in salads.
Warner points to Laura’s interest in both uses when she writes that Laura “had always had a taste for botany” (31), punning on Laura’s dual intellectual and gustatory interest in plant life.
Laura’s early endeavors into what will become witchcraft are relatively fulfilling. Her father and the other adults around her encourage her homeopathic and gastronomical curiosity and experimentation. Prompted by her father, Laura publishes her growing knowledge in “a little book called ‘Health by the Wayside’ commending the use of old-fashioned simples and healing herbs. It was published anonymously at the local press, and fell quite flat. Everard felt much more slighted by this than she did, and bought up the remainders without telling her so” (32).
Everard’s rather sweet and paternal act might also be read as a pursuit of external endorsement of
Laura’s interest in herbalism. Laura’s indifference to her publishing success divorces her further from any hold social expectations might have over her behavior. However, the freedom Laura finds in this indifference is abruptly shattered when she loses her father and is politely packed up and moved from Lady Place to London.
Part II: Unnatural London
When Everard dies, Laura experiences another major shift both in her environment and in her attitude towards her environment. In moving to London with her brother and his family,
Laura’s precarious independence at Lady Place is jeopardized. Further, her growing ability to fulfillingly relate to the natural world around her is cut off and stunted. Laura understands her 67
new environment as unnatural and far removed from the nurturing landscapes around Lady Place where she wandered, collecting herbs.
Laura’s move to London isolates her from the rural landscapes and objects through which she has developed a sense of self. In an attempt to adjust to life in London, Laura fixates on material objects and sensual experiences of the familiar objects she will miss: “In London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank” (4), she thinks, remembering her earlier childhood experience of smearing the red geraniums on her cheeks and being surprised to find that the tank
“showed only a dark shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth” (3). Without the greenhouse tank, the reflection of her darker self will not be available to her in London, as if London could not repeat back to her who she really was. In London there would also be “no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray” (4-5). In the potting shed at Lady Place, the natural and domestic intersect: the lavender dries on tea-trays brought down from the house and plants and bulbs are prepared in order to grow flowers that will be used to decorate the house. Laura fears the exclusion of the natural from her new position in her brother’s domestic life and her exile from the production involved in (for instance) planting, growing, cultivating, cutting, and arranging flowers for the house. As Laura expands her vision, the “no” that indicates absence is dropped from her imaginative description, as if she cannot continue to think in absences.
Fearing the absence of the natural world, Laura initially frames much of her bodily discomfort in London as the result of being plucked from a nurturing countryside and transplanted, against her will, into an uninterested, even malicious, city. Laura attempts to 68
acclimatize herself to her new life in London through an imagined familiarity with the objects of the city: “She thought of street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in their turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed streets and squares” (4). Laura recognizes that her body (and women’s bodies more generally) would be directed and scrutinized in the city in ways that she generally was able to avoid growing up at Lady Place. Instead of roaming the woods for herbs, she would be watched and handed from one indifferent street lamp to the next, from one eligible dinner party guest to the next. The street lamps stand in for the inescapable male gaze to which her family repeatedly subjects her in their desire to marry her off. As a result,
Laura feels the loss of the freedom and independence she had gained growing up in the countryside with a benevolently neglectful mother and a doting father.
Laura’s experience with natural objects cannot alleviate or completely mediate the trauma she experiences from mechanical objects. When the natural is injected into descriptions of the mechanical world it is to reveal Laura’s perception of nature’s complicity in her discomfort. She thinks of herself as an “extra wheel, [who] soon found herself part of the mechanism, and, interworking with the other wheels, went round as busily as they” (46-7). On the same page, the unseen labor of servants’ hands is described like the “inward persistent workings of heart and entrails” (47). Warner describes Laura’s discomfort through these mixed mechanical and organic analogies, which trouble rather than assuage Laura.
Even the seemingly natural parts of London assault her. In her first winter she develops chilblains and suffers from extremely dry hands: “She was … annoyed by the hardness of the
London water. Her hands were so thin that they were always a little red; now they were rough 69
also” (46). The weather and hardness of the water penetrate the permeable boundaries of Laura’s skin. Laura’s hands did not become rough when she worked in Lady Place’s garden or at her still; they only become rough through contact with London.
Even as the outside forces its way into Laura’s interior through her skin, the sounds and smells of domestic life similarly affront her: “When she awoke, the day was already begun. She could hear iron noises from the kitchen, the sound of yesterday’s ashes being probed out. Then came a smell of wood smoke—the kitchen fire had been laid anew and kindled in the cleansed grate. This was followed by the automatic noise of the carpet-sweeper and, breaking in upon it, the irregular knocking of the staircase brush against the banisters” (47). In Warner’s description of Laura’s discomfort we can see first, that the effects of domestic work are unpleasant and second, that the description of these effects as violent signifies the violence and oppression many women experience. Here the language is of “probing” and “breaking in,” signaling Laura’s discomfort with “iron” and “automatic” noises that surround “natural” smells like the burnt wood. The mix of the mechanized and natural in this description increases Laura’s discomfort.
Unable to take comfort from the natural world, Laura is “driven to embroidery” (46) and other domestic tasks through her sister-in-law, Caroline’s industrious efforts. Because Caroline handles all of the “useful needlework,” Laura is left to decoratively embroider. But “each time that a strand of silk rasped against her fingers she shuddered inwardly” (46). Laura’s shuddering is both a response to the inhumane production of silk (worn by the ladies of her childhood) and the perceived uselessness of the activity of decorative embroidery. In the production of these embroidered pieces, Laura “had actually a sensation that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good deal of background” (46). Without fully realizing what she is doing, 70
Laura spells herself into the household as a decorative addition through her embroidery even against her resistance to her family’s assimilation of her personality into their bourgeois existence. In weaving herself into the fabric of the household, Laura participates in the very unnatural (read: socialized) acts she was able to avoid or defer at Lady Place.
This discontent grows throughout Laura’s decades dutifully living with her brother and his family in London. Though she generally follows the expectations her family establishes for her, she does exhibit moments of rebellion and pushes back when they go too far. For example, when they decide it is time for Laura to marry and start a family of her own, they invite eligible men to dinner. They invest particular efforts in trying to marry her off to Mr. Arbuthnot, a colleague of her brother’s, but Laura “who had been behaving nicely for years, chose to indulge her fantasy, and to wreck in five minutes the good intentions of as many months” (57) by informing him at dinner one night that he might very well be a werewolf, whether or not he aware of it himself (58).
The routines of Laura’s domestic life dull her senses over the decades she spends in
London. As she ages, her sense of discontent and longing for a different life increases. One night she is unexpectedly drawn into a greengrocer’s shop where she has her first of a series of awakenings. As with later moments in the novel when Laura believes she has finally been
“awakened” to a satisfactory sense of herself in the world, moments whose finality the narrator continually undermines through irony and an indulgent attitude toward Laura, her initial self- awakening happens through contact with natural objects. Walking into the small shop, “half florist and half greengrocer” (82), Laura is immediately arrested by the sights, smells, and textures of the shop’s organic wares. She imagines they come from a small farm where “a 71
solitary old woman pick[s] fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches” (84-5). Not content to merely observe this woman in her mind’s eye, Laura imaginatively replaces her, hearing plums drop nearby, feeling the grass below her feet, and suffering a pain in the back of her neck from reaching upwards for too long. By positioning herself within what Warner calls the “country of her autumn imagination” (86), Laura re- envisions the natural world as “a world to live in, not a scene to view” (Wylie 149). This is the first of many similar experiences where Laura consciously works to connect herself to the natural world. Returning to her awareness of the shop around her, Laura catalogues the organic wares she sees: “There were the apples and pears, the eggs, the disordered nuts” which she considers
“kindly things to waken to” (86). Laura purchases a bundle of chrysanthemums, into which the owner of the shop throws in a free spray of beech leaves. Touched by his unlooked for generosity, Laura asks where they come from, and he informs her that they and many of the other wares in the shop come from his sister’s in the Chilterns. Her vision and deep connection to the organic wares in the greengrocer’s shop are so powerful that she impulsively purchases a guidebook and map of the Chilterns, which she intends to use to select a new place to live.
The map of the Chilterns is a colored map where “the woods were coloured green and the main roads red. There was a great deal of green. She [Laura] looked at the beech leaves” (89).
Laura visually associates the green of the map with the orange of the beech leaves the green grocer had given her, drawing connections between the “natural” leaves and the “unnatural” representation of the Chilterns. In so doing, she begins to locate herself imaginatively in relation 72
to the countryside in a way that is different than her current existence in London. The countryside captivates Laura’s imagination in a way that London cannot. Without ever having visited the village, Laura selects Great Mop from her guidebook as her preferred residence and duly informs her incredulous family that she will be moving their at once.
Upon arrival in Great Mop, Laura continues her attempts to experience the landscape of the rural Chilterns in expected and prescribed ways—namely through her guidebook and map— but she is deeply dissatisfied with the results: “For the first time she was looking at the intricate landscape of rounded hills and scooped valleys which she had chosen for learning by heart”
(111). But Laura “wrecked” “her first days at Great Mop…with her excitement” (112). After planning her walks for the day, she eats a massive breakfast, packs no lunch for her hike, begins to feel faint, and ends up walking home with a limp. Even so, when she arrives back home every night, she “marked where she had been with little bleeding footsteps of red ink,” and becomes
“enchanted afresh by the names and the bridle-paths, and, forgetting her blistered heel and the dissatisfaction of the day’s walk, planned a new walk for the morrow” (112-3).
Planning to experience the landscape ultimately fails Laura because it establishes a prescribed and one-sided relationship to the natural world, framing the landscape around her as pictorial rather than animate. After a particularly disappointing experience, Laura reconfigures her walks: “She had made an appointment with the sunset that she should see it from the top of a certain hill.” When she does not make the hill in time she “lost her temper entirely” (113).
Finally she says: “This sort of thing…has got to be put a stop to” and so “she sat down in an extremely comfortable ditch to think” (113). She figures out, as Walker Percy would argue decades later, that the best way to be sure to miss having an experience is to seek one out (57). 73
She spends the next day reading in front of the fire, thoroughly enjoying herself. And the next day she “fell asleep again, in a beech-wood, curled up in a heap of dead-leaves. After that she had no more trouble” (115). Laura’s “trouble,” Warner suggests, comes from trying to project her desires for connection outward onto the landscape. When she lets go of this unnatural approach and instead allows herself to be open to whatever experiences the natural world offers her, she becomes much more content.
Part III: Super-natural Landscapes
So far, I’ve demonstrated the many ways Laura has attempted to relate to the natural world around her. In this final section, I shift the conversation—much in the way that the novel shifts—to the supernatural. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram makes a compelling argument for the reconceptualization of magic and the supernatural as a deep attentiveness to what has been understood as the natural world. In Abram’s figuration, the supernatural is not something above or outside of the natural world but a way of being in the world that reveals connections between things that have been obscured over time. Abram defines “magic” as “the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on the blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own” (24). Such a definition is useful for understanding the otherwise disorienting turn that Warner’s novel makes from a relatively straightforward plot about a spinster’s life to an exploration of the supernatural through
Laura’s status as a witch. Indeed, the supernatural in the novel is frequently related as if it were 74
natural: “You see, although I’m a witch, and although you sitting here beside me tell me so, I can’t really appreciate it, take it in. It all seems perfectly natural” (237), Laura says to Satan.
Laura is unable to “take in” the fact of her status as a witch because witchcraft is always already inside of her, a part of her being. Although, at this point in the novel, she has become newly aware of Satan’s presence and her relation to him, still she understands witchcraft as natural because it is and has been the way through which she understands and most successfully relates to the landscapes around her. Warner’s shift to the supernatural makes sense if we think, along with Abram, that “the traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human experience is intertwined” (24). Laura similarly shifts her consciousness at several key moments in the text beginning with her initial awakening at the greengrocers.
A few months after Laura settles in the village, she consciously revises her understanding of her body in relation to landscape. In so doing, she rejects established ways of seeing (i.e. maps, guidebooks, blazed trails, etc.) and replaces them with a supernatural awareness of the world around her. This awareness leads to Laura destroying her guide book in a dramatic way:
It was a still, mild evening towards the end of February, the birds were singing,
there was a smell of growth in the air, the light lingered in the fields as though it were
glad to linger. Looking into the well she watched the reflected sky grown dimmer; and
when she raised her eyes the gathering darkness of the landscape surprised her. The time
had come. She took the guide-book and the map and threw them in. 75
She heard the disturbed water sidling against the walls of the well. She scarcely
knew what she had done, but she knew that she had done rightly, whether it was that she
had sacrificed to the place, or had cast herself upon its mercies—content henceforth to
know no more of it than did its own children. (130)
Here Warner’s representation of the natural world is more than a pictorial representation of a landscape. The environment Warner describes comprises light, darkness, smell, temperature, sound, movement and lack of movement. Laura is situating herself in relation to all of these things. Laura’s active surrender of the guidebooks—whether it is a “sacrifice” or a “casting”
(and hear in that last word the implications of witchcraft)—is rewarded with a sense of contentment and rightness.
Laura’s newfound peace is disrupted by visits from her family. When visiting Laura in the countryside, her sister-in-law Caroline comes “dressed in sensible tweeds” and is put off by
Laura’s cotton gown, at which she “glanced severely” (140). The clothes represent each woman’s attitude toward the landscape: cotton is flexible, thin, and light, whereas tweed is rigid, thick, and durable. Laura is responding to the landscape as she finds it, Caroline as she expects it to be. Caroline’s disapproval of Laura’s behavior (and garb) is extended to the landscape itself.
Caroline justifies her tweeds to Laura by explaining that it was raining in London. But the skies over Great Mop are quite clear of clouds. The landscape, Laura’s behavior, and Laura’s “cotton gown” are all tied up in what makes Laura indecorous to Caroline. Laura does not act according to social expectations. The landscape around Great Mop does not act according to Caroline’s expectations of the weather. And Laura’s gown is evidence of both of these misdeeds. 76
During the same visit, Laura brings Caroline on a walk to a hill top that overlooks the village of Great Mop. Although Laura had planned at least ninety minutes for the trip, it takes them less than twenty since Caroline “take[s] no time at all” (141) when looking at the view. To her “it was a clear day, and everything that could be seen was perceptible at the first glance”
(141). Caroline looks, but she doesn’t see (let alone hear, touch, or smell) the English countryside around her. When Caroline looks at the view, she understands it as something outside of herself that has nothing to do with her, a landscape without depth or interiority. When
Laura looks at the landscape, she immediately positions herself in relation to it. She is aware of the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and affects of the landscape. Laura’s nephew Titus—who shares his name with the short-lived Roman emperor and conqueror—similarly fails to see what is directly in front of him. Later in the novel Satan attempts to meet Titus in a field, but Titus does not notice him: “It is remarkable,” Satan observes, “how invisible one is on these bare green hillsides” (233). Yet both Caroline and Titus believe that they are consuming the landscape in the way they should, positioned as they are, as God’s stewards over the world created for their lives.
It is difficult for Laura to escape her relatives’ well-meaning ministrations, but as the novel progresses, Laura comes to realize that the landscape expresses affects and intentions that can be understood by those who pay enough attention. During one particular walk, Laura opens herself up to the landscape around her: “As she came to the edge of the wood she heard the mutter of heavy foliage ‘No!’ the woods seemed to say, ‘No! We will not let you go’” (168). The foliage’s declaration that they “will not let [Laura] go” is ambiguous, making it unclear if they refuse to let Laura exit the wood or if they plan to keep her safe and protected. Continuing on her walk, Laura notices that the “hedge and coppice and solitary tree, and the broad dust-coloured 77
faces of meadow-sweet and the hemlock [that] had watched her go by, knowing. The dusk had closed her in, brooding over her. Every shadow, every deepened grove had observed her from under their brows of obscurity. All knew, all could bear witness” (172). Here the woods observe,
“know,” and “brood,” invoking the trope of watching and animate woods perhaps most common in fairy tales like “Snow White” or “The Kind Woodcutter.”19 For Laura, the woods’ possessive and near-hostile brooding is preferable to the unseeing eyes of her relatives.
Laura’s spiritual growth continues as her interactions with the natural world deepen.
Walking among a field of cowslips “innumerable as stars in the milky way” (151), Laura has a particularly potent experience:
She knelt down among them and laid her face close to their fragrance. The weight of all
her unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her bosom down to the earth; she
trembled, understanding for the first time how miserable she had been; and in another
moment she was released. It was all gone, it could never be again, and never had been.
Tears of thankfulness ran down her face. With every breath she drew, the scent of the
cowslips flowed in and absolved her. (151-2)
This early absolution of her sins against her family and her self sets Laura firmly down the road of witchcraft. The cowslips replace an Anglican priest in whose power it is to offer absolution on behalf of the Christian God. But instead of the oral call-and-response required of Anglican absolution, Laura’s absolution takes the form of physical contact with, even immersion in, a field of flowers. For Laura, this absolution serves two major functions: it relieves the weight of her
19 Throughout her life, Warner was interested in revisions of fairytales, finally publishing Kingdoms of Elfin in 1977, a year before her death. 78
past unhappiness and it reveals and dismisses the “slavish remnant” (152) of the pleasure she took in “triumph[ing] mentally over her tyrants” (152). It is not a matter of forgiveness, Warner insists, but a matter of “forget[ting] them without flouting them by her forgetfulness” (152).
While forgiving is a way of affectively reconciling differences between people that connects the offender and the offended, in forgetting there is no use for reconciliation. By replacing
“forgiving” with “forgetting,” and by refusing to “flout[] them by her forgetfulness,” Laura’s act distances her from her family rather than connects her to them. The peace that Laura experiences from this moment of absolution lasts for several months, until disrupted by a visit from her nephew Titus who, like his namesake, comes to conquer the countryside.
When Titus first visits Great Mop, he takes in “the view,” the church, and everything else he can possibly devour before breakfast on his first day. His hunger for the English countryside only grows with each sight/site he consumes. Although Titus seems like he might be an early ally for Laura, his attitude towards the landscape emerges as one of a possessive and dominating lover; one day when observing the view from a ridge, Titus admits to Laura: “I should like to stroke it” (162). Titus longs to stroke the land because he “loved the countryside as if it were a body” (162). His love is a “horror” (162) to Laura and antithetical to her way of loving the land.
While he sees the landscape as a body to be possessed and stroked—without the possibility of it stroking back—Laura understands the landscape as a kind of collective consciousness with agency and emotions.
The landscape responds to Titus’s attitude by punishing Laura: “day by day the spirit of the place withdrew itself from her. The woods judged her by her company, and hushed their talk as she passed by with Titus. Silence heard them coming, and fled out of the fields, the hills 79
locked up their thoughts, and became so many grassy mounds to be walked up and walked down.
She was being boycotted, and she knew it” (164). Emptied of their spirit, the hills become grassy mounds whose only purpose is to be tread upon by Titus’s thoughtless feet. Titus’s presence in
Great Mop threatens to isolate Laura from the landscape through which she has come to know herself. Soon, “Great Mop would be a place like any other place, a pastoral landscape where an aunt walked about with her nephew” (164). Laura’s subjectivity is predicated on her understanding of Great Mop as a landscape with a unique identity or spirit. If she loses her sense of the place as unique, she will also lose her sense of herself as something different than or apart from the social relations forced upon her for most of her life. She will sink back into being “just” an aunt. Laura understands here that her relation to the natural world is more important than her relation to the human social order. It is more important for her to be able to know herself in relation to the landscape around Great Mop than for her to be Titus’s aunt.
Distressed by Titus’s presence and trying to reassert her agency, Laura returns home one night to find that a scraggly black kitten has found its way into her locked room. The kitten immediately bites her, drawing blood. The drawing of the blood is both a reference to satanic rituals and a kind of reversal of English blood sports, which traditionally placed humans as the drawers of the blood. In Warner’s novel, it is Laura who is marked and whose blood is sacrificed to Satan. Puzzled by the feline’s mysterious entrance, Laura finally accepts that he has been sent to her as her familiar and that, through this blood pact, “she, Laura Willowes, in England in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil” (172). This pact opens up to Laura a whole set of knew skills and abilities with which she begins to drive her nephew out of Great
Mop. She is “the inheritrix of aged magic, spells rubbed smooth with long handling, and the 80
mistress of strange powers that got into Titus’s milk-jug” (185), curdling it prematurely. So Titus turns to canned condensed milk. But he cuts himself on the tin, and Laura’s first aid efforts cause the wound to fester rather than heal. With each of Laura’s new attempts to make Titus uncomfortable enough to leave Great Mop, he turns his discomfort into an opportunity to rely more heavily on Laura. Using his festered hand as an excuse, he begins to dictate his book on the painter Fuseli to Laura, whose plight the narrator comically likens to that of Milton’s daughters, finding Laura’s situation the worse, “for she did not suppose that they had to be for ever jumping up and down to light the poet’s cigarette; and blank verse flowed, flowed majestically, she understood, from his lips, whereas Titus dictated in prose, which was far harder to punctuate”
(214). Laura carries out all of her curses without Titus’s knowledge that she is orchestrating these events. If Titus’s relationship to the natural world was as attentive as Laura’s he would have been able to recognize and fear Laura’s powers. Instead, his thickness and sense of possession or “dominion” (157) over the landscape keeps him in ignorance of it and of his aunt’s true nature. After several weeks of curdling his milk, sending bats after him, and infecting his wounds, Laura creeps after Titus on one of his country walks and sends an entire nest of wasps after him, which drives him, oddly, into an engagement with a girl from the village, which leads to his departure and eventual taking up of family responsibilities.
Finally free of Titus’s presence, Laura sinks herself into her new life as a witch. In drawing power from her new relationship to the natural world, Laura comes to understand that rural landscapes are not Satan’s only domain: “Then I needn’t really have come here to meet you!” (235), she says to Satan upon this realization. Suspicious of narratives that provide simplistic descriptions of the differences between rural and urban life, Warner argues that 81
specific locales or places do not necessarily cause the kinds of experiences that Laura has.
Instead, Warner shows through Laura that it is a general openness and attentiveness to the natural world that gives her power and frees her from a society that had predetermined her value. While
Laura seems to relate more readily to the countryside than London, Warner argues that it isn’t the place itself which matters, but Laura’s understanding of herself within that place.
In the final pages of the novel, Laura and Satan hold a long conversation about witches and about Laura’s new life as a witch. In uncharacteristically long pieces of dialogue, Laura argues that witches are more important to Satan than warlocks. She explains that while women’s lives seem to be dull and “unregarded” (239), in reality they are much more dangerous:
Is it true that you can poke the fire with a stick of dynamite in perfect safety? ... Even if it
isn’t true of dynamite, it’s true of women. But they know they are dynamite, and long for
the concussion that may justify them. Some may get religion, then they’re all right, I
expect. But for others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them
real. Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with
them, they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they
are. Even if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it’s there—ready!
(241).
Through Laura, Warner argues that women are dangerous because they have incredible power that they rarely choose to exercise. They revel in this danger, answering Satan when he calls to them: “Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it” (242). Laura insists that it is this danger that draws women to 82
Satan: “That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure” (242). Through witchcraft, women are able to better understand their powers. Like women’s latent powers, Laura’s latent feminism emerges after a series of “concussions” which drive her away from a bourgeois existence in London and towards a rural life as a witch.
For each phase of Laura’s life, Warner equips Laura with new strategies for relating to the natural world around her. Ultimately, it is through witchcraft that Warner is able to articulate how a deep attentiveness to the natural world produces individual autonomy for women. Of course, Warner is not advocating that all women run out and become witches. Witchcraft, for
Warner, is both a historical phenomenon and a metaphor for the intersections between women, identity, domesticity, and the natural world.
83
Cultivating Landscapes: Nature and Nationalism in Vita Sackville-West’s The Garden
From her home in Kent, Vita Sackville-West witnessed planes flying over her large garden to and from Europe. On the seventh of June 1944, she wrote to her husband Harold
Nicholson that the “shadows of aeroplanes keep winking across my paper as I write. Once it used to be the shadow of white pigeons” (qtd. in Glendinning 330). On the same day she witnessed the explosion of a “doodlebug” (a German flying bomb) above a neighbor’s barn that damaged her greenhouses and a window in her writing room. For her, the connection between writing, gardening, and the war was alarmingly real, and the fate of each was tied to the fate of the others:
“I feel that I, and the lake, and the wood, are all damaged and spoilt for ever [by the war]—and I mind very much…If only I thought I could write good poetry I should not mind anything” (qtd. in Glendinning 332). Writing out of this fear, Sackville-West published The Garden in 1946, a book-length poem that sought to counter the despair caused by the two world wars through the
“small pleasures” (14) of gardening and the hard work of writing poetry.
Sackville-West was born in 1892, the only child of one of the oldest families in England.
She spent her childhood on the family estate at Knole with the knowledge that she was unable to inherit the title or estate because of her sex. In 1913 she married Harold Nicolson, a diplomat and writer, with whom she had an open marriage that afforded both members the freedom and flexibility to pursue same-sex relationships, for Sackville-West, most famously with Virginia
Woolf.
Vita and Harold began their gardening partnership at Long Barn, a dilapidated property they purchased in 1914 and occupied until 1931. In 1930, they purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a near-ruin that Sackville-West called “Sleeping Beauty’s Castle; but a castle running away into 84
sordidness and squalor; a garden crying out for rescue. It was easy to foresee, even then, what a struggle we should have to redeem it” (qtd. in Buchan 59). Over the course of their lifetimes,
Harold and Vita settled into different gardening roles. In general, Harold conceptualized and designed the gardens (with the exception of Vita’s famous “white garden”) while Vita planted profusely and maintained the gardens. The result of their collaboration illustrated Sackville-
West’s general gardening philosophy: “gardens should be romantic, but severe” (112).20
Over the course of her life, Sackville-West built a career as a public figure and popular amateur gardener. On Fridays in 1933, she gave gardening talks on BBC radio. From 1946-1961 she wrote a weekly column called “In Your Garden” for The Observer (now The Guardian), which provided readers with practical advice and lyrical ruminations on gardening. The columns were collected and anthologized several times. She was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1954. Though a self-taught gardener for most of her life, she took a correspondence course on horticulture in 1955, perhaps in response to some of the criticism leveled at her from experts in the field (Fox 9).21
During her lifetime, Sackville-West published, among other texts, thirteen novels, six biographies, twelve books of poetry, and several gardening books. She is the only person to have won the Hawthornden Prize twice: once in 1927 for The Land and once in 1933 for her Collected
20 This arrangement was typical of gendered labor in the garden during the period although, perhaps, unusual for their class (Taylor 137-41). Their socioeconomic status afforded them the ability to hire professional help for the day-to-day maintenance of the garden: “Significant for the time, Vita employed two women as her gardeners. Graduates of Waterperry [a horticultural school for women], Sibylle Kreutzberger and Pamela Schwerdt came to Sissinghurst three years before Vita’s death in 1962” (Rogers 140). Sissinghurst opened up to visitors in 1938, and in 1941 was open “every day in the growing season” (Buchan 61). On Harold’s death in 1968, Sissinghurst became the property of The National Trust and has since become one of the most visited gardens in the country (Fox front matter). 21 For a more detailed of Sackville-West’s gardening experiences, see Jane Brown’s Vita’s Other World: A Gardening Biography of V. Sackville-West. 85
Poems. And in 1947 she won the Heinemann Prize for The Garden. Although perhaps best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passions Spent (1931), it is in her two long poems The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) that she advances her most profound representations of the relationships between humans and the natural world. In these poems
(roughly 2500 lines each), she explores the tensions between idealized landscapes and the material realities of farming and gardening in the rural English county of Kent. Both poems are divided into four sections that chronicle farmers’ and gardeners’ seasonal work from winter to fall. The Land loosely follows the structure of Virgil’s Georgics, covering many of the same topics: “arable farming, arboriculture, viticulture, animal husbandry, and beekeeping” (Blyth 22).
Although both poems are chronological in that they follow England’s season, they progress thematically rather than in a strictly chronological narrative arc. Each section uses the activities expected during that season (e.g. planning in winter, planting in spring) to comment on humans’ lived experiences, positioning them within larger discussions of the relationship between humans and their environments. Both poems build from conventions of the epic and pastoral, but to different ends. The goal of The Land is to “sing the cycle of [the] country’s year” (3) by focusing on the everyday activities of laborers in Kent as an entry point into discussions about humanity.
The Garden is, in many ways, a miniature version of The Land, both in its scaling back to the space of a garden and in its focus on national politics.
Though Sackville-West remains an iconic figure in the history of popular British gardening, her place in literary history as a poet in her own right has been eclipsed by her affair with Virginia Woolf and Woolf’s subsequent fictionalization of Sackville-West’s life in
Orlando. Of her work, the novels receive the most critical attention. Critics have examined her 86
work and especially her poetry through its use of the pastoral (Ames, DeSalvo, or Bazargan).
And there has been an increasing amount of interest in her work from the field of sexuality studies (Helt, Moran, Oram, or Meese). By attending to Sackville-West’s representations of gardening, and the natural world more generally, I take an ecocritical approach to her writing that illuminates the ways nationalism and nature interweave and intersect repeatedly in The
Garden.
Throughout her oeuvre, Sackville-West uses numerous words to describe the “natural” forces she sees frequently opposing human activities and intentions. Most frequently, she uses the word “Nature” to signal the complicated combination of conditions and subjects that compose landscape. I examine moments in the poems which both explicitly name and implicitly reference human interactions with and experiences of landscape, beyond Sackville-West’s conception of “Nature” and particularly as they intersect with nationalism.
In doing so, I pinpoint moments in her writing that reveal her affinities and breaks with nationalist rhetoric as it relates to the natural world. Her writing is symptomatic of much women’s writing during this era in its attempts to reconcile pride in a nationalist landscape with nationalist pride which damages that landscape. At the center of this tension, gardens became contested sites infused with nationalist rhetoric as in the “victory gardens” of World War II.
Gardens are one configuration of landscapes that have been particularly powerful and meaningful for humans for several centuries.22 Gardens were indeed massively important both as symbols and as sources of food for the British public during and after World War II. Charles
Pack, former President of the National War Commission, claimed that during WWI “gardening
22 See Bending; Smith & Page; and Taylor. 87
came to be the thing” (Pack 18). And in 1950, just four years after The Garden was published,
Roy Hay, editor of the British journal Gardens and Gardening, claimed that “enthusiasm for gardening has never been so high” (9).23 And so when Sackville-West writes: “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, / Therefore of gardens in the midst of war / I boldly tell” (13) the tone may sound like an unnecessary justification. What is “bold” about this topic, however, is that she is writing about gardens built for pleasure rather than for food.
A garden is, as John Hunt Dixon and others have theorized, “a resilient, central aspect of human culture precisely because it is, in the words of a scholar of Ming gardens, ‘a site of contested meaning,’ subject to the ‘pull of a number of discursive fields’” (Hunt 76). And it is because gardens are sites of contested meaning that “women writers and artists used the subject matter of gardens and plants to educate their audience, to enter into political and cultural debates, particularly around issues of gender and class, and to signal moments of intellectual and spiritual insight” (Smith and Page 1). A garden is a particular construction of landscape that appears to be a discrete place (these lilies are within the garden but that grass on the other side of the fence is not), but any gardener will tell you such a construction is false since the borders around gardens are continuously being broken, penetrated, expanded, contracted—by wildlife, by “weeds,” by erosion. And gardens themselves do not acknowledge borders; they strain to break them by throwing their seeds into the wind and by stretching their roots beneath the artificial borders we construct and attempt to maintain. They attract both humans and non-humans to themselves, tempting us to cross the gardens’ borders through the beauty of their blossoms and the pollen or
23 “By the 1930s, gardening had become a national working-class pursuit and the publishers of the day sought to capitalise on its growing popularity” (Taylor 26). This popularity continued to grow over the next few decades: by the 1950s, “two thirds of Britons had gardens…and four fifth by the late 1960s” (Taylor 27). 88
other food they offer. They “refuse,” as Barbara Bender has it of landscapes “to be disciplined”
(qtd. in Massey 34).24 Still, gardens continue to be used as symbols around which people and communities are organized.
During WWI, gardens were infused with new meaning as a site of national pride, community, and survival. Both the British and American governments launched aggressive propaganda campaigns during the First and Second World Wars which worked to establish gardening as a noble act of patriotism. As Pack readily admits: “Before the people would spring to the hoe, as they instinctively sprang to the rifle, they had to be shown, and shown conclusively, that the bearing of the one implement was as patriotic a duty as the carrying of the other. Only persistent publicity, only continual preachment, could convince the public of that”
(Pack 9). The propaganda campaigns running simultaneously in Great Britain and the U.S. were a multi-media assault on the public’s understanding of acceptable labor for both men and women. For men, the message was mainly a reassurance that gardening was an acceptable and patriotic replacement for military action for those who could not serve. For women, the message had to do more with class—to reassure “genteel” ladies that fieldwork was an important and gender-appropriate task during war. Much of the propaganda featured both men and women working the soil to contribute to food production on the home front.
Sackville-West’s participation in the war effort “at home” indicated that she was well aware of the propaganda produced to convince the public that gardening was good for the nation.
24 Just as gardens resist our discipline, so do the terms we use to describe our experiences of gardens and of landscapes slip from our grasp. As I demonstrate in the introduction to this dissertation, in trying to pin down what I mean by “landscape” and “nature” and “gardens” I have only established borders which these terms immediately resist and push beyond. 89
During the Second World War, she hosted a group of women from the women’s land army, and in 1944 was commissioned to write a propaganda book about them simply titled The Women’s
Land Army. The book portrays Land Girls as heroines who stave off starvation on a national scale. In the same year, Sackville-West contributed a foreword to a volume of poetry written by members of the women’s land army that had been previously published in 1940. Sackville-
West’s participation in propaganda production strengthens her ties to nationalist rhetoric. Like much of the propaganda published during the two world wars, The Garden deploys specific strategies to convince readers about the importance of gardens during war, namely minimization, idealization, and militarization.
PART I: “A Little Perfect World”: Matters of Size and Scale
After the successful publication of The Land, Virginia Woolf recommended that
Sackville-West write another long poem, this time about a village of people. But Sackville-West determined, instead, to write about gardens and gardening—a kind of miniaturized version of the agricultural practices of The Land. The poem’s aim was to counter the desolation and despair of both war and high modernism by attending to the “small pleasures” (13) of gardening: “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, / Therefore of gardens in the midst of war / I boldly tell”
(13). Sackville-West makes her prescribed response to the great tragedies exacted on the landscape and on humans and nations clear: it is the small pleasures, the small acts, not the big ones, which “must” correct the “great tragedies” of the war. This strategy of minimization runs throughout the long poem and is deployed for many different, and sometimes competing reasons.
When Sackville-West writes that The Garden leaves aside “the classic tools, the plough, 90
the scythe” of agriculture and takes up the “smaller spade and hoe and lowly trowel” (13) of gardening, she minimizes the tools of gardening and, by extension, the poem’s (and poet’s) impact. Many women participated in this discourse of minimizing the importance of their own work. For instance, Sackville-West contributed several chapters to a 1935 book written by women gardeners called How Does Your Garden Grow? The preface of the book repeatedly diminishes the contributions of its authors. It reads:
These are just undress talks on gardens and gardening, with passing references to
cabbages, kings, and other subjects. Generally (but quite definitely not always) practical
and informative, they talk diverse aspects of garden work, but are united by the thread of
feeling that runs through them all: the love of the beauty of the out-of-doors, by the
common ability of their authors to see what is not obvious to all of us—and by their
charm.
The book contains “just undress talks” whose claims to authority are the authors’ “feelings,”
“love,” and “charm.” The practical advice and information included in the various articles is in a dependent clause, grammatically secondary to the “charm” of the book. The gendered and self- dismissive language of the preface is in keeping with a long tradition in which women writers foreground potential criticism of their work through litotes that appear to deprecate their skill.
The performance of modesty and minimization through litotes is one of Sackville-West’s most powerful rhetorical tools because it establishes as much authority as it appears to disavow.
In the dedication of The Garden to Katherine Drummond (a fellow gardener she admired),
Sackville-West repeatedly minimizes her own work both as a gardener and as a poet: “[I] write no poem that’s fit for you // Rubbish verses fit for fire, / Gardener, poet on single pyre” (9). She 91
writes that in composing this poem she is “failing as gardener, failing as poet” (9). And in the final stanza of the dedication, she again minimizes both her labor and its impacts:
So take the little I have to give
Here in a poem to fill your leisure
Where every word is lived and true.
The weeds in my garden remain as green,
And I cannot tell if I bring you pleasure,
But the little patch I have cleared for you,
That one small patch of my soul is clean. (10)
While Sackville-West appears to minimize the work she has dedicated to Drummond, there remains an emphasis on the lived truth of the poem, a claim to authority that is not entirely suppressed by the repeated minimizations. The language of cleaning and clearing turns the work of writing into a household (or, rather gardening) chore. In creating a metaphor which compares writing poetry with “clean[ing]” and “clear[ing],” Sackville-West turns writing into domestic work, in a way that appears to minimize but ultimately elevates both forms of labor.
Sackville-West’s strategy of minimization frequently functions as an idealization mechanism in the poem. Holding onto a fantasy of the “natural” world in the “lost world” of wartime England inspires hope for Sackville-West:
I tried to hold the courage of my ways
In that which might endure,
Daring to find a world in a lost world,
A little world, a little perfect world. (14) 92
There is no certainty that the landscape will endure, but it “might” and that “might” is powerful and hopeful. This hope springs from the fantasy of an idyllic countryside which is always already unrecoverable, unrealizable—which is made possible only through imagination. This sense of vast loss caused by the Second World War is mitigated, for Sackville-West, by “finding” a much smaller world. That is, the largeness of loss as experienced during and after a major world war is made comprehensible and surmountable, in the poem, by scaling it down to a “little world.” The oxymoron is quaint, yet Sackville-West describes the action of conceptualizing the world thus as something worthy of courage, of “daring.” Sackville-West’s “little world” is her garden, and it is the practice of gardening that gives her hope. The remainder of this section explores how minimization functions when Sackville contextualizes gardens within wartime Britain and when she pits gardens and landscapes against war and its destruction. On the one hand, the domestic work of flower gardening is made into a “small pleasure” when compared to the “great tragedies” (13) and necessities of war (including victory gardens). On the other hand, however, in conceptualizing gardening as a “more persistent war” (97) than any war fought between men,
Sackville-West makes humans’ wars small.
Gardens and gardening pervade much of the propaganda published during the world wars. And yet Sackville-West repeatedly minimizes gardens and their impacts on war through belittling language, rhetorically performing modesty. Near the beginning of the poem, Sackville-
West provides a lengthy justification of her subject matter. But this justification repeatedly minimizes the importance of gardening and, even more so, of writing about gardens:
So to such small occasions am I fallen,
And in the midst of war, 93
(Heroic days, when all the pocket folk
Were grabbed and shaken by a larger hand
//
Such big events
That from the slowly opening fount of time
Dripped from the leaky faucet of our days (14).
Here the poem, the subject matter, and the people who experienced the war are minimized in relation to the “big events” of the war. The short period of time war occupies is compared to a common feature of many gardens, a “leaky faucet,” and set against the much larger “fount of time.” Sackville-West pits gardens against war, confident in gardening’s ability to counteract the
“great tragedies” of war. At the same time, she insists that gardening is a “small pleasure.”
Sackville-West’s strategy of minimizing gardening’s impact on war is flipped on its head at several moments in the poem when gardening becomes a longer-term and more important activity than war, which she understands to be a temporary state: “Strangest of all, we knew that it [war] must pass; // And men throughout their little world regain / The trim that they call peace”
(97). Healing and peace is achieved through imagining a “little world” in defiance of the large scale damage caused by a world war. In a moment of vivid description, Sackville-West paints a picture of a war-damaged landscape:
Coppices I have seen, so rudely scarred,
With all their leaves in small confetti strown;
The hazels blasted and the chestnut charred;
Yet by Autumn, leaves of Spring had grown. 94
How temporary, War, with all its grief!
Permanence only lay in sap and seed. (92)
This landscape survives the damage caused by the war. The emphasis on the seasons further reinforces that the renewing process of death, decay, and life far outlasts the temporary grief of war.
Landscapes both resist and survive the damage caused by technological progress—and especially technologies of war. During World War II, the natural world functioned both as a
“thing worth fighting for” and “a way of healing what modern society has damaged” (Morton
22). Although the devastation in London and Coventry was more extreme, the war also damaged
Kent’s landscape. Sackville-West writes of the air raids and bombs that fell on Kentish soil:
Strange little tragedies would strike the land;
We sadly smiled, when wrath and strength were spent
Wasted upon the innocent.
Upon the young green wheat that grew for bread;
Upon the gardens where with pretty head
The flowers made their usual summer play;
Upon the land, and gaped it to a rent
So that the hay-cart could not pass that way.
So disproportionate, so violent,
So great a force a little thing to slay.
—Those craters in the simple fields of Kent! (The Garden 91-2)
The first line in this passage makes light of the bombs, calling them “strange little tragedies,” 95
There is, in this passage, an acknowledgement that the suffering that occurred in Kent did not and could not compare to the utter obliteration of Coventry and the major destruction in London.
The violence enacted upon the “simple fields of Kent” is a part of the unimpeded progress of destructive technologies which is here both symbolized and materialized in the unchecked progress of the implied but absent German bomber planes. Unlike in Coventry where the primary targets were munitions factories, the “victim” of the bombs in Kent is the land itself. The people
“sadly smile” both in knowing that the bombs were “wasted” upon unstrategic targets and with the grief of what has happened to the land. The agrarian way of life is disturbed by the progress of the German fighter planes across the county of Kent: the hay-cart cannot continue along its usual route; wheat fields and gardens—sources of sustenance and pleasure—are destroyed. The land is “rent.” The agents of destruction, the planes and the bombs they carry, are distant or absent in Sackville-West’s descriptions of damage. It is “strange little tragedies,” not bombs, that
“strike the land” in this passage. Later, a plane appears in the searchlights, “caught as a floating point across the ways / Of the old skies” (97). Its distance makes identification difficult: “Is it a dove, soft-feathered? or a plane / Tiny with murder?” (96), Sackville-West asks, knowing the answer.
Both minimization strategies (of pitting gardens against war and of contextualizing gardening within war) rely on metaphors of war and take nationalist propaganda for granted in their production of metaphors and meaning. As well, these strategies are deployed, in the poem, in service of idealization as a way of counteracting the destructive forces of war and of modernism.
96
Part II: Idealized Landscapes
Humans idealize landscapes during war as a way of identifying more deeply with them.
Nationalism and nature are inextricably linked in this identification, and both concepts are invoked to mobilize humans in service to the nation-state. Interspersed between lines about creating “gardens of the ideal” (32), Sackville-West turns to war-time symbols:
—As some young simple soldier, far from home,
Goes walks down cottage paths, and speaks no word
Of flowers he perceived or birds he heard,
But holds that corner of his exiled heart
Private for that rare pious pilgrimage
When he with his true self may live apart.
Thus do I love my England, though I roam.
Thus do I love my England: I am hers.
What could be said more simply? (32)
Through the simile this passage sets up, Sackville-West connects experiences of nationalism and the natural world. The “simple soldier” finds respite from the horrors of war and his homesickness by imagining his homeland, populated with birds and flowers. The soldier’s nationalism is reinforced through an imagined experience of nature, and the speaker’s sense of nature reinforces her nationalism: like a soldier loves the birds from home, thus do I love my country. Though home and battlefield are far apart for the soldier, nation and nature are very near to each other and indeed are experienced through each other. 97
The passage is a revision of Rupert Brooke’s WWI sonnet “The Soldier,” which begins with the soldier-speaker contemplating his death:
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware.
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air... (1-7)
While Sackville-West rhetorically approximates the soldier, Brooke’s speaker is the soldier. This soldier-speaker is only able to become a part of the earth after his death, and his death is an act of colonization, turning “foreign fields” into England. At the same time, the soldier is a “body of
England,” belonging to her without possessing or inhabiting her. Two different imagined landscapes are operating here: England as Mother Earth and the foreign fields which the soldier’s
“richer dust” will penetrate and colonize. In contrast, Sackville-West’s speaker imagines a different kind of relationship between her self and her nation:
….As a lover
Says of his mistress, I am hers, she mine,
So do I say of England: I do love her.
She is my shape; her shape my very shape. (32).
In these lines, England as nation and as an idealized landscape is again feminized. While
Brooke’s soldier is shaped by England, Sackville-West’s speaker takes England’s “very shape.” 98
Brooke’s soldier’s relationship to England is reimagined in Sackville-West’s lines where she both possesses and is possessed by England. The lovers’ relationship she compares to her nationalism resembles her explanation of queerness as a doubling, a “dual personality…in which the feminine and the masculine elements alternately preponderate” (qtd. in Nicholson 106). She is both lover and beloved. If England is female, and the speaker takes the same shape as England, then the relationship between the English landscape and female bodies is doubly reinforced.
Within these two poems, as within literary history and British history, nature and nationalism are closely interwoven; Sackville-West’s expression of this relationship as love between two women queers it, challenging not so much nationalism but the expression or form that nationalism takes.
To put it differently, Sackville-West retains the idea of a national landscape as a sexualized woman’s body but alters the way she, as a national subject, relates to that landscape. By altering the representation of this relationship Sackville-West redoubles her claims to nationalism because she can both idealize and incarnate England.
Sackville-West’s overall strategies for engaging with landscape in The Garden parallel many of the visual and rhetorical strategies demonstrated in propaganda posters circulated during the two world wars. These posters turned landscapes into objects of fantasy that promoted the war effort. During war, and especially during a war on domestic soil, landscapes frequently rise to the forefront of national propaganda campaigns. Landscapes are re-tilled to address the need for increased food resources. They become symbols of solidarity and of patriotism. They’re put on display, painted at their best, idealized to evoke feelings of nostalgia and a sense of a place
“worth fighting for.”25 War is justified through a perceived threat to one’s own national
25 On the uses of landscapes in maps and photographs to reinforce colonialism and nationalism see Denis 99
landscape. Reading these posters and poems together contextualizes Sackville-West’s poetry in the nationalist rhetoric circulating during the two world wars.
Much of this propaganda represents the English countryside
as a refuge—a safe, beautiful space worth preserving. It layers
representations of peaceful English villages and landscapes with
variously jaunty or solemn soldiers in uniform, depending on the
intended message. As Figure 1 asks of its young, male viewers
“Isn’t this worth fighting for?” The enlarged soldier in the
foreground holds his gun in one hand and the safety of the English
countryside in the other. The landscape represented in this poster Figure 1 British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Art.IWM PST 0320, 1915. IWM Non- draws from well-established visual cues associated with England Commercial License. since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century: “In Britain, a ‘home counties’ scenery of lowland chalk downs, wide river valleys with slow-flowing perennial streams, compact villages with towered or spired churches set among a hedgerow mosaic of garden-like fields … [became] figured as the whole nation’s vulnerable and feminized ‘heartland’” (Cosgrove 42). Similarly, the poster emphasizes the importance of protecting the imperiled national landscape by “calling” its viewers to enlist. That invitation is encouraged by the gentle curves of the hills, clouds, and roofs, suggesting female anatomy.26 The feminized landscape is disrupted and penetrated by the rigid arm of the pointing soldier whose other hand wraps around the shaft of his also rigid gun.
Cosgrove’s Geographical Imagination and the Authority of Image. See also Kenneth Olwig for the linguistic and cultural relationship between English landscapes and the concept of a “country.” 26 For a lengthier discussion of the history of associating landscapes and nature with female bodies, see my introduction. 100
In the almost thirty years between the publication of Figure 1 (1915) and Figure 2 (1942), landscape takes on a greater visual role in inciting young men to enlist, and the presence of
human habitation is understated. Here
“Britain,” the nation-state, is the
pastoral landscape portrayed for and
possessed by the viewer. The
possessive pronoun of the poster copy
reinforces the viewers’ ownership of
and dominance over the landscape he
Figure 2 Frank Newbould, Army Bureau of Current Affairs, Art.IWM PST 14887, 1942. IWM Non-Commercial License. surveys—a landscape that is populated by iconic features of a nostalgic England—the shepherd with his sheep, a small village nestled among ancient trees and rolling green hills, and a church perched above it all, close enough for comfort but far enough to demonstrate that religion is no longer the cause worth fighting for.
The sense of urgency indicated by the call for viewers to “fight for it now” establishes the notion that this world is slipping away, evoking feelings of desperate nostalgia. The 1942 poster removes the soldier and replaces him with a working shepherd, engaging the viewers’ sense of nostalgia even more directly by invoking a historic and bucolic, as opposed to wartime, England.
In both images, human habitats are surrounded and enclosed by the rolling landscape. And in both posters, attention is eventually directed to those houses—in the first poster through the soldier’s pointing finger and in the second through the line of sheep moving towards the human- built barn, emphasizing the significance of humans. The second poster is more somber in its color choice and presentation of virtually the same message, implying that the horrors of WWI 101
forever changed the way the English thought about war. Even so, the push to enlist by eliciting nostalgic and protective impulses in the young men of Britain remains.
The dominant strategy of idealization of the landscape
during World War II and indeed during many wars and times
of national unrest is to invoke a sense of nostalgia for a
landscape that never actually existed. The desire to get back
to a “simpler” time has a long history. As Marion Shaw
argues, this fantasy is tied to anxieties revolving around
nationalism: “The desire to reclaim what had been lost, even
if only in the imagination…is strong in much of the writing of
the period, alongside a need to assert a national identity
which has to do with notions of tradition embedded in a Figure 3 Adrian Allinson, National Archives, INF3/23, 1939-1946. Public Domain. perception of landscape which is immemorial” (75). For
British residents in 1942—at the end of the blitz—that “simpler” time may have been re-oriented from the temporal to the spatial—from a “simpler” time to a “simpler” place. A place where laborers work tirelessly in golden, weed-free fields underneath storybook skies, as in this propaganda poster by Adrian Allinson (Figure 3). Here, as in many of the posters published during the war, farms, cottages, and villages occupy the center of the poster, while the countryside is arranged in their peripheries.
In comparing Sackville-West’s poetry to propaganda posters of the time, it becomes clear that her responses were both in keeping with popular nationalist rhetoric during the war and different in their revisions of that rhetoric. For Sackville-West, desperation and nostalgia are 102
closely linked. In describing the importance of gardens during the war, she writes: “Strange were those summers; summers filled with war. / I think the flowers were the lovelier / For danger”
(90). While in the poster there is a kind of desperate longing or nostalgia for the past (desperate because of the uncertainty of the future), these lines betray a nostalgia for the desperation of wartime England. This nostalgia for the desperation of the war was valuable for the speaker because that moment of danger clarified feelings and intensified sensations, making the flowers lovelier. Distance in time makes this shift from desperate nostalgia (during the war) to nostalgia for desperation (after the war) possible, and nostalgia and homesickness are frequently evoked in texts written during times of war.
Waste Lands and Modernisms
For Sackville-West idealization and optimism are powerful tools; she positions The
Garden as a necessary revival of hope, and this hope is represented through a revival of both the pastoral and a celebrated English landscape. Sackville-West sets her poem up against what she perceives as a very real threat to England and English nationalism: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste
Land.”27 In the opening stanza of the Spring section of The Garden, Sackville-West quotes the first four lines of Eliot’s poem. Her next stanza immediately challenges Eliot’s modernist attitude:
Would that my pen like a blue bayonet
Might skewer all such cats’-meat of defeat;
27 For a thorough, if dated, account of the uses of landscapes in Eliot’s poetry see Nancy Duvall Hargrove’s Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot. 103
No buttoned foil, but killing blade in hand.
The land and not the waste land celebrate. (The Garden 63)
Using archaic syntax and weapons, Sackville-West reiterates, here, an anti-modernist and poetically conservative point of view for which she was famous during her lifetime. In these lines she deploys linguistic tools of the past to ensure a hopeful future for both England and poetry. Ian Blyth notes that Sackville-West’s poetry is “conservative (in several sense of the word)” because in “recognising the kind of changes that were happening, she sought to make a record of things as they currently were, or very recently had been” (28). Rather than looking backward or forward, as modernists so often did, she works to maintain the present as it is. James
Winter finds value in such work, arguing convincingly that narratives about landscapes which seem “sentimental, romantic, tradition-bound, stupid, superstitious … or obscurantist” (255) when considered alongside an ideology of progress, might “be interpreted instead as a valuable cultural constraint on narrowly self-interested and ultimately self-destructive exploitation [of the landscape]” (255). Similarly, I argue that reconceptualizing conservative aesthetics can open new avenues of inquiry into ecological discourses, including Sackville-West’s poetry in which nationalism, concern for the landscape, and an aversion to modernism are deeply intertwined.
For Sackville-West, Eliot’s poem exemplifies the despair and desolation of the worst versions of modernism and modernization. And indeed, Eliot’s poems have been read as desolate by numerous scholars, including Nancy Duvall Hargrove who argues that Eliot “uses urban landscape as a major means of conveying this contemporary condition of ennui or spiritual torpor” (36). These worldviews are useless to Sackville-West who seeks to build a world on hope and rebirth, rather than cruelty and death. While Eliot insists, in “The Waste Land” that 104
emotional and spiritual connections between human beings are all but impossible, Sackville-
West contends that they are both possible and necessary.28
The kind of waste land Sackville-West associates with Eliot’s poetry also appears in
propaganda posters from the Second World War. In this
particularly riveting poster, Hitler occupies a waste land of his
own making. He is branded a “MANEATER” who gnaws the
bones of the countries he conquers. The poster portrays Hitler
as a lycanthropic figure with hairy arms, long talon-like
fingernails, and hunched shoulders. He sits atop a pile of skulls
labeled with the names of conquered nation-states. The
anthropomorphization of the nation-states into human skulls
evokes feelings of sympathy for the nations and elicits fear and Figure 4 Ministry of Information, Art.IWM PST 0176, 1941. Fair Dealing. despair.
This poster, originally designed in Russia and adapted for British audiences, vividly
portrays ideas and attitudes about Hitler circulating at the time. The poster also uses British fears
about waste lands—particularly as they relate to the future of Great Britain—to make its point.
Sackville-West expresses a similar fear and concern about the fate of the English countryside
when she writes that “the garden with the state of war / Aptly contrast, a miniature endeavor / To
hold the graces and the courtesies / Against a horrid wilderness” (14). It is against the kind of
“wilderness” that both Hitler and Eliot represent that Sackville-West positions her “civil”
28 And yet “despite the sharp contrast between Eliot’s high modernist work and Sackville-West’s archaic verse, both poems are efforts to use space (the modern city in Eliot’s work; the country in Sackville-West’s) in order to valorize a certain notion of subjectivity and its position in the culture at large” (Bazargan 29). 105
gardens. In comparing gardens to war, Sackville-West further participates in contemporary discourses that use landscapes as objects to further nationalist political agendas.
Both Sackville-West and the various organizations associated with the production of propaganda recognized the danger in public despair, yet their strategies in combatting it are quite different. The British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, in several instances, attempted to turn despair into action by feeding public anxieties and fears about a German invasion as in
Figure 4. Sackville-West, on the other hand, positions hope—and gardens as symbols of hope— against despair when she claims that we should celebrate the “rich, solvent land”: “Not some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones, / A land of death, sterility, and stones” (63). One wonders if Sackville-West had in the back of her mind a poster like the Ministry of Information’s representation of Hitler as a “MANEATER” when thinking of landscapes “strewn with nibbled bones,” where Hitler leaves in the wake of his horrific and insatiable appetite, a landscape filled with corpses, a landscape that has turned red with spilt blood. This is not a landscape to celebrate; it is one to be feared.
England’s “Rich Solvent Land”: Fertilizing the Waste Lands of Modernism
Pitting herself against Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and the wasteland of war represented in many propaganda posters, Sackville-West represents England as a fertile land: celebrate the
“rich, solvent land” and “not some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones” (63), she insists. But in fact England’s fertility is made possible because of its long-term program of collecting bones from home and abroad to be ground down into fertilizers. It is not the waste land that is strewn with nibbled bones, but England’s “rich, solvent land.” Due to their widespread availability, 106
bones became one of the most popular sources of phosphoric acid for agricultural fertilizers since at least the eighteenth century and remained so until after the Second World War.29 In 1905,
Britain imported more than 47,346 tons of bone and produced even more domestically (Hall
209). Britain’s practice of importing bones was far from new, in 1822 they imported 33,000 tons of bones from Germany alone, causing Justus von Liebig, a noteworthy German chemist and the
“father of the fertilizer industry,” to exclaim that:
England is robbing all other countries of their fertility. Already in her eagerness for
bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipsic, and Waterloo, and of Crimea; already
from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away skeletons of many successive
generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the
manorial equivalent of three million and a half of men... Like a vampire she hangs from
the neck of Europe, nay, of the whole world, and sucks the heart blood from nations
without a thought of justice towards them. (qtd. in Hall 209)
If Hitler is a werewolf for the Russians, England is a vampire for von Liebig. Von Liebig provides a counterpoint to Hitler gnawing on bones: England’s green, verdant, living land is a result of it appropriating dead, organic material from other countries. While it is common knowledge that life depends on death and decomposition, it is quite another thing to realize that
England bought and imported bones, including humans’ bones, to be ground into bonemeal and spread over farmlands, producing much of the nation’s food.
Like most gardeners in the first half of the twentieth century, Sackville-West was aware of and used fertilizers made from bones and even blood. In the introductory section, she
29 To make fertilizer, bones are ground down into fine powders such as bone meal or bone flour. 107
describes the various amendments gardeners add to:
... a grudging soil
Enriched or lightened following its needs:
Potash and compost, stable-dung, blood, bones,
Spent hops in jade-green sacks, the auburn leaves
Rotted and rich, the wood-ash from the hearth
For sticky clay; all to a second use
Turned in a natural economy (15)
Sackville-West claims the blood, bone, and dung are being put to a “second use” when applied to the soil as fertilizer, yet this is a shortened version of the ecological cycle of organic matter. The wood-ash, for example, is not the first, nor the last step in a continuous cycle of growth and decomposition. Dead trees are chopped up and burnt to keep humans warm; the ash from the hearth fire is used to fertilize clay soil, improving the quality of the soil and the yield of the crops. These crops are then consumed by humans and animals whose excretions return nutrients to the soil, allowing future generations of trees to grow.
While Sackville-West fears and rejects the symbol of the nation as a waste land strewn with nibbled bones, the British government embraced representations of bones in its propaganda.
In the propaganda posters of the Second World War, bones were portrayed as serving two major functions: increasing the fertility of arable land and building weapons of war. Their purposes were both to sustain life and to cause death. 108
The poster at left (Figure 5) is representative of a group of posters
and other propaganda produced to encourage viewers to save and
donate their used bones for fertilizer. The word “BONES” is kept
out of the frame of the photograph, while the word “fertilisers”
(what bones become) is superimposed on the photograph, almost
falling onto the soil, implying that fertilizers are responsible for the
success of the harvest. This poster was part of a campaign to
convince civilians that they could make meaningful contributions
Figure 5 Imperial War Museum, to the war effort. While the connection between the bones and the Art. IWM PST 14712. IWM Non- Commercial License. war in this poster is inexplicit, several posters and films addressed the connection more directly. One film, sponsored by the Ministry of Supply, is described by the
Imperial War Museum thus: “The film details the wartime uses of bones. Shot of a bag of fertilizer spread over a field of cabbages.
The cabbages grow and stand to attention, with the conversational commentary “What’s that got to do with the battle?” “Without food you can’t fight” (Imperial War Museum NPB 13986).
Drawing connections between civilian efforts and the success of the war was, as we will later see, an integral part of both Great
Britain and the U.S.’s wartime propaganda campaigns. Figure 6 National Archives, INF3- 216. Public Domain. The second major way bones were featured in propaganda was as necessary materials for explosives. For instance, in Figure 6 the navy soldier cups his hand around his mouth to call out to the viewer that he needs “BONES FOR EXPLOSIVES.” In the smaller copy, explosives are 109
first in the list of the uses of bones while fertilizers appear nearer to the end. This implicit ranking of the uses of bones suggests that it was easier for civilians to connect weapons with war than it was to connect fertilizers and food production with war. It might also be argued that such a poster specifically targets men who sought a more “active” role in the war but who were unable to serve overseas for whatever reason. In a 1943 film called “Skeleton in the Cupboard” a cartoon skeleton called “George” “wants to do his bit for the war effort” but is turned away from a military office. He then visits a cinema where he watches a newsreel that:
emphasises how vital bones are to the war effort, for the production of explosives, to
make glue for the production of tanks, aircraft, ships and ammunition, and the production
of bonemeal to feed pigs and poultry and fertiliser for the land. The newsreel trailer
explains that the bones should be clean and dried in the oven whilst the oven is still hot
and that 50,000 tonnes are needed each year. At the end of the newsreel trailer sequence
the commentary continues “There you are said George, I knew they needed me.” George
flies out of the cinema and dives in to a dustbin marked “BONES” he emerges from the
dustbin as a shell and flies over the city to a battlefield and chases Hitler towards Berlin.
“Now George is in his happy hunting ground scaring the pants off of the Nazis.” The film
ends with a woman carrying a skeleton of a rabbit along her front garden path and
depositing it in a bucket on the street marked “BONES ARE NEEDED FOR THE WAR
EFFORT” with the commentary “Now Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a moral to this
story - have you a skeleton in your cupboard? Give it to salvage and have a clear
conscience.” (Imperial War Museum NPB 13469)
Death and war are dealt with lightly in the film. George measures his happiness and self-worth 110
according to his usefulness in relation to the war effort rather than his moral behavior. The film culminates in a clever moral where skeletons in cupboards become ways for civilians to both contribute to the war effort (for social good) and clear their consciences (for individual good). In this way, bones offer a kind of rhetorical absolution, particularly for men who wished to serve but who had been “unfit” for active duty.
While this kind of propaganda was pervasive, the British government also commissioned posters designed to specifically target women. In Figure 7, a smiling, rouged, and neatly-coiffed woman tosses out the remains of a meal from a dinner plate. The bones from her dinner transform visually into planes as they fall.
The copy reinforces the visual message by informing its readers that “BONES help to make PLANES.” In posters like this, the domestic is visually transformed into a weapon of war. In other Figure 7 National Archives, INF3/201. Public Domain. posters, like Figure 8, the textual message is more direct but
the visual transformation (or connection) is obscured or
omitted. The women here stride purposefully and confidently
below the banner which seeks to mobilize housewives.
In tying domestic efforts of bone salvage to weapons
of war, the British government militarized civilian labor. As
part of this same campaign and borrowing language from the
military, England became “the home front” of the war. This
Figure 8 National Archives INF3-219. militarization of civilian efforts disseminated by propaganda Public Domain. 111
and the news media permeated popular discourses of wartime England and extended into
Sackville-West’s poetry.
Part III: “Armies of the Soil”: Militarizing Gardens and Gardening Militaries
Introduction
Sackville-West purposefully contextualizes much of her own poem within a rhetoric of war, posing gardens as powerful opponents to the destruction and desolation caused by war. In the introductory section, she establishes a direct contrast between gardens and war:
Yet shall the garden with the state of war
Aptly contrast, a miniature endeavour
To hold the graces and the courtesies
Against a horrid wilderness. The civil
Ever opposed the rude, as centuries’
Slow progress laboured forward, then the check,
Then the slow uphill climb again, the slide
Back to the pit, the climb out of the pit,
Advance, relapse, advance, relapse, advance. (The Garden 14)
In this metaphor, the advances and relapses of history are played out on and through experiences of the landscape. The advance of history is implicitly compared, here, to the strategies of war in which armies advance and relapse over and over. But in this passage, it is the garden, rather than an opposing army, which provides a check against unmitigated and destructive progress. When visualizing the lines of this passage as a description of war, one imagines one army advancing 112
and relapsing in response to an opposing army. But there is no opposing army in Sackville-
West’s description. Instead, “progress,” the subject of the final sentence, is opposed by the landscape itself which makes advance difficult and relapse probable. Of the dichotomies established in the passage, the reader is meant to identify with the civil over the rude, the garden over the wilderness, nature over progress. While both gardens and “the wilderness” have been powerful constructions of landscape created to direct human behaviors and attitudes, it is with the “civil” garden that Sackville-West is most concerned.
The final major strategy Sackville-West deploys to demonstrate the connections she sees between landscapes and nationalism is what I am calling a strategy of militarism. For instance, in the section I previously cited to show how she challenges Eliot’s despair in “The Waste Land,”
Sackville-West also uses distinctly militaristic language:
Would that my pen like a blue bayonet
Might skewer all such cats’-meat of defeat;
No buttoned foil, but killing blade in hand.
The land and not the waste land celebrate. (The Garden 63) 113
In her response to “The Waste Land,” there is a latent patriotism which connects the weapons of war with a celebrated national landscape. Sackville-West’s association of weapons of war with landscape echoes visual strategies of propaganda posters, similar to Figure 9 where both men and the landscape are in service to the nation—personified by Britannia, who stands atop the island she represents. The aggressive language deployed in the poem indicates that
Sackville-West imagines herself fighting against multiple perceived threats: to the land, to England, to poetry. Her pen Figure 9 Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM PST 13276, 1917. IWM becomes a weapon, and the poem her battleground. Non-Commercial License.
“Of Gardens in the Midst of War”
The cultivation of any and all available lands became a major
theme in propaganda which concerned the “home front.”
During World War II, the British and American governments
launched aggressive propaganda campaigns featuring posters,
pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and films, which pushed the
importance of gardening to alleviate the strain on available food
resources. Propaganda posters were placed “on bulletin-boards,
in railway stations, libraries, stores, at factory entrances, and
Figure 10 O’Connell, National Archives, even in clubs, banks and commercial houses” (Pack 20). The INF3/103. Public Domain. phrase “Dig for Victory!” became a battle cry, eventually lending its name to the “victory 114
gardens” which became a major part of civilian contributions to the war effort. By the end of
World War II, gardens were framed as vital contributions to the health of the nation. The “dig for
victory” ad campaign alternatively deployed visual and rhetorical strategies which called upon a
sense of communal duty and represented happy individuals gladly working for the good of the
nation. As Pack writes: “Nothing is more essential to success in war than the creation and
maintenance of an ardent patriotic spirit. War gardening fostered this spirit by enabling so many
individuals not actually in the army to do something tangible in the struggle. Millions of patriots
joined the army of the soil because of their deep love for their country, and their desire to help in
the hour of need” (33). National survival and recovery become personal, local.
In Error! Reference source not found. (above), space is left for “overprinting local
details” about agricultural camps, customizing a broader national campaign for local consumers.
This emphasis on the imperative of individual contributions runs
throughout the “dig for victory” and “lend a hand on the land”
propaganda campaigns. These campaigns maintained that small
efforts, when taken together, make big differences to the nation’s
economy, production, and eventual success in the war. In both of
these posters, farm work is portrayed as an enjoyable pastime.
The landscape is populated with young, attractive adults happily
going about the business of producing food for the nation’s
troops and civilians. The activity is framed as a “holiday,” a Figure 11 Eileen Evans, Art.IWM PST 0143, 1943. IWM Non-Commercial License. break from the usual slough of office or factory work, an
opportunity to work in idyllic fields surrounded by fluttering butterflies. But unlike 115
contemporary versions of working holidays—where billionaires pay exorbitant amounts of money to “rough it” on dude ranches with the goal of greater self-awareness that is somehow uniquely available in “the country”—the fruit (and vegetables) of these workers’ labor feeds their nation.
Food production was a major concern of the British government that was addressed through posters and other forms of propaganda. The relationship between agriculture and human consumption is plainly visualized in Figure 12. A pitchfork becomes a fork and a spade a knife; the tools of agriculture become the tools of the dinner table. The mystification of food production, exacerbated by the technological progress of the
Industrial Revolution in England, is lessened or at least shifted in this image. In other words, much of England was living in urban areas by 1942, and very few people grew their own food. As a result, the labor of food production was left to fewer and fewer farmers in rural areas. The process of growing Figure 12 Abram Games, 1942, Art.IWM and harvesting food was more or less mystified for the PST 2893. IWM Non-Commercial License. majority of England’s population at this point in history. As the “grow your own food” movement caught on, thanks to propaganda posters like Figure 12, more and more British citizens participated in some part of the process of food production. Lest the viewer forget that the reason behind this push for independent food production is the war, artist Abram Games places a military field service cap in the top-center of the poster, just above the quintessentially
English cup of tea. The verbs in the poster are strong and directly related to the purpose: grow, 116
supply, cultivate. Both Sackville-West and the poster use the modal verb “must” to reinforce the importance of cultivation: “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, / Therefore of gardens in the midst of war / I boldly tell” (13), Sackville-West writes, employing the conventions of a mock-epic since it is not of “arms, and the man” (Virgil 1) that she sings but of gardens. There is little choice for Sackville-West and the propaganda posters in addressing the impacts of war through cultivation.
Sackville-West takes a different approach to cultivation than these propaganda posters because she is mainly discussing “pleasure” gardens. For Sackville-West, these, too, serve important functions in raising morale and (other things) for the war. Both gardens and the pleasure humans get in cultivating for pleasure’s sake must work to slow the destruction of
World War II. To maintain a flower garden during the war was undoubtedly a luxury afforded to few British citizens. Indeed, many gardens were left by men gone off to fight, as Sackville-West acknowledges. Upon viewing the overgrown states of these gardens, she writes: “Neglect may hold a beauty of her own” (The Garden 57). Sackville-West’s choice to focus on flower gardens is an aesthetic choice made from a position of privilege.
“The Gardener’s More Persistent War”
In The Garden, Sackville-West deploys a rhetoric of war at multiple levels. As we have seen, she both implicitly and explicitly engages with representations of war in her poems and shows how gardens contributed to the war effort both within and outside of her poem. In a more localized view, the relationship between gardeners and the natural world is frequently represented in the poem as a war between worthy adversaries. In this turn to specifics about 117
gardening, the war is fought on England’s soil and is also a war of the soil (and landscape) itself.
The execution of this strategy is complicated, with aggression and power shifting according to local instances and metaphors, yet the presence of this militarized language runs throughout much of the poem.
Sackville-West describes gardening in relatively traditional ways: the gardener is a
“poet” of “color” (54) and a garden is a “canvas of the ground” (65). At the same time,
Sackville-West advances a view of gardening as a war between humans and a hostile landscape.
This war is more “persistent” and “permanent” than the wars fought between men. She writes:
So in the gardener’s more persistent war
Where man not always is the conqueror,
We plodded as we could, and fought
Permanent enemies, of weed and wing;
The strangling bindweed and the running strands
Of crowsfoot, and the suckers of the rose,
Inordinate thorns that mangle our poor hands. (97)
In comparing gardening to war, Sackville-West minimizes the impacts of the war and increases the importance of gardens. The use of the third-person collective pronoun positions readers with the gardener/speaker against a landscape that intends them harm. And in this particular passage, humans are losing the war. Injured and exhausted, they fight on, despite the impossibility of a permanent victory. It is clear that humans are valorized for their tenacity in the passage and throughout the poem: “Gardener, / Where is your armistice?” Sackville-West asks, “You hope for none. It will not be, until yourself breed maggots” (74). Continuing to “fight the good fight” 118
is necessary, and pacifism is not a valid option, for Sackville-West, in neither gardening nor war.
At several instances in the poem, the gardener is portrayed as defending his land, while an aggressive nature refuses to acknowledge the borders he has established. The denizens of
“Nature” attack like the moles who “invade your plot” (74). “Nature,” as a single entity, is also responsible, according to Sackville-West, for direct attacks. For instance, a gardener’s triumphs are recorded thus: “Here did you turn the stream of Nature’s will, / Damming the wilderness of her invasion” (75). “Nature” is female here, and militant. She invades, disrupts, fights back.
These lines echo much of Sackville-West’s early work, in which she characterizes “Nature” as at best indifferent and at worst hostile to human endeavors. One of the most vivid examples of this in is “Sissinghurst” (1932), a poem dedicated to Virginia Woolf. At the beginning of the poem,
Sackville-West describes the near-ruins of Sissinghurst castle where:
Invading Nature crawls
With ivied fingers over rosy walls,
Searching the crevices,
Clasping the mullion30, riveting the crack,
Binding the fabric crumbling to attack,
And questing feelers of the wandering fronds
Grope for interstices (20-26)
In this passage, “Nature” “invades,” “clasps,” “binds,” “gropes,” and “attacks,” interjecting herself into the ruined building. The hyper-sexualized language of the poem positions “Nature”
30 OED: 1. Archit. Any of the (usually vertical) bars dividing the lights in a window, esp. in Gothic architecture. Also: a similar bar forming divisions in screen-work or paneling. 2. Geol. Each of a series of ribs or columns of rock on a rock face, typically composed of the local rock and usually formed by folding. 119
as the feminized penetrator. Sackville-West’s representation of “Nature” reimagines Western traditions of representing landscapes as female bodies which are assaulted and destroyed by the men who seek to conquer and tame them. In her account, “Nature” is very much an agent but also something to be resisted, even feared. “Nature” is clearly an adversary, while at the same time a potential lover. The doubling of “Nature” as both soldier and lover reinforces the potency of her aggression.
The aggression of “Nature’s” denizens becomes a source of fear for Sackville-West who describes interactions between gardeners and “pests” as inundations of innumerable others.
Insects are “enemies” who come in “multitude / Unnumbered” (74). Ants are “armoured like daimios” (74), and wasps come in swarms as “small samurai” (98).31 Caterpillars “pullulat[e] more than Tartar hordes, / Despoiling as they travel” (74). The problematic exotification of these nonhuman others occurs through descriptions of their armor and battle tactics. In these lines, there is also a recitation of the fears of invasion by the Germans and Japanese, which were often expressed through the idea of being “overrun” or inundated with undesirable foreign others (see
Figures 13-15). The incessantly reproducing caterpillars are compared to “Tartars,” an ethnic group Sackville-West speaks of with derision and scarcely disguised disgust. In a similar move,
Sackville-West writes an apologue for wasps, “in blend of hatred, wonder, and of jest” (99), that represents them as Japanese soldiers:
Small samurai in lacquered velvet dressed,
Innumerable in their vermin breed
As fierce and fiery as a spark of gleed,
31 Daimyos were feudal rulers in Japan. 120
Scavengers on a gormandising quest
To batten on the treasure of our crops
Of promised fruit...
//
They came, destructive though we sought their nest,
Those fiends that rustic oracles call wopse. (98)
The moments of admiration in the passage are undermined by the persistent racialized construction of the wasps’ markings and behavior. Sackville-West’s fear of being overrun by the
“innumerable…vermin breed” participates in a long history of expressing a fear of the other as a fear of being overrun, and particularly by the Asiatic other. In 1942, in response to the newly- released Beveridge Report (widely cited as the foundation of the post-war welfare state)
Sackville-West wrote in a letter to her husband (who supported the recommendations of the report): “I think it sounds dreadful. The proletariat being encouraged to breed like rabbits because each new little rabbit means 8/- a week – as though there weren’t too many of them already and not enough work to go round” (Glendinning 320). For Sackville-West the fear of being overrun is a class issue as well as a national issue. Whether citizens of the working class,
Asia, or the garden, others in aggregate are aggressive, loathsome, and terrifying.
Beyond animals, the “forces of Nature” are similarly militarized and magnified by their incalculability. Both sleet (22) and frost (36) are enemies, the wind attacks in winter (22), and the hills that served as “guardians” betray humans by shifting their shapes in the dark (22).
Further, the landscape fights within itself while humans observe:
The aspiration of the myriad crowd 121
Of pushing leaves and buds within their sheath
Leaps with new motive in a long prepared
Attack to pierce the slowly softening earth.
A gentle mutiny; a pretty change;
Haste without violence; and then a flower
More lovely than mankind has ever brought to birth. (51)
The leaves are “myriad,” and in their aggression attack the earth. The “attack” produces a beautiful flower much like how beautiful gardens are produced through the opposing forces of humans and their perceived “natural enemies.” This artificial separation of humans from the landscapes they are working within allows Sackville-West to exploit the metaphor of gardening as a war, since war requires two sides in opposition to each other, even if the terms and alliances of those sides shift at different moments in the poem.
The counterpoints to these natural invaders are also figured, by Sackville-West, as a part of the natural world. The bee is an “unconscious agent” while the glow-worm “bores it light /
Into the shelly cavern of the snail” (75). They are the gardener’s “allies” (75), and so are still encased within the rhetoric of war. This rhetoric extends in other ways, as well: Tools are the
“the gardener’s armour, pewter as a lake” (118), turned first into necessary equipment for the battle and then into features of a “natural” landscape. This continuous shifting from militaristic to natural metaphors reinforces the strength of how Sackville-West relates nationalism to the natural world.
After the war, Sackville-West was able to return to her writing tower, which she had vacated for safety and economic reasons. The tower overlooked her gardens and provided a 122
different view of the damage caused by the air raids and bombings over Kent. Surveying the damage and considering the physical as well as ideological impacts of the war, Sackville-West finished writing The Garden in her Elizabethan tower. In a particularly contemplative moment in the poem, she reflects on the choices she made both during the war and in her writing:
We know that the ultimate vex is the same for all:
The discrepancy
Between the vision and the reality.
When this has been said, the last sad word is said.
There is nothing to add but the fact that we had the vision,
And this was a grace in itself, the decision
We took between hope and despond;
The different way that we heard and accepted the call;
The different way
We tried to respond. (63)
In finding that there is a “discrepancy / Between the vision and the reality,” we are faced with a choice “between hope and despond.” Opting to cleave to “hope” in spite of the wreckage caused by the war, Sackville-West sees her decision as a “different” one, perhaps even a more difficult response than “despond.” 123
APPENDIX A
Figure 13 Shackel, Art. IWM PST 13580, n.d. 124
Figure 14 Art.IWM PST 0161, n.d.
125
Figure 15 Art.IWM PST 16702, 1943. IWM Non-Commercial License.
126
APPENDIX B
Please see attached supplementary file for the Imperial War Museum (IWM) Non-Commercial License. 127
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