Domesticity, Nationalism, and the Natural World, 1900-1950

1 “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 2 “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 3 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. 4 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. 7 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.

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