Speaking gardens: Constructing gender in early modern English poetry

The topos of the pleasure garden has from antiquity been associated, sometimes even equated, in Western culture primarily with ideologies of the feminine in literature and in culture more generally. In the seventeenth century, the garden and naturalized spaces offered a particularly powerful symbolic matrix to the project of gender construction and manipulation in English literature. This dialogue involved both male and female poets, although they approached the topos from different perspectives and consequently employed it to different ends. Published female poets of the time exploited the gendered associations of the garden topos to gain authority in their art.;The study begins with an ecocritical and historical evaluation of real-world pleasure garden spaces as they were created physically and culturally in seventeenth-century England. It then moves to establish the theoretical framework by which the poetic readings are constructed. This framework utilizes ecocritically inflected feminist spatial theory and speech act theory to read the use of the garden topos in the poems that follow. Native and European Renaissance garden traditions combine in early modern England, to create a strong garden imaginary with which poets could interact creatively. The study thus surveys canonical works that feature gardens prominently, tracing the development of the topos to the beginning of the seventeenth century.;In that century, male poets---including Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton---tended to use the garden trope straightforwardly and in line with the received traditions. Female poets, on the other hand, because they are culturally associated with it, tend to have a relationship with the garden that is both more problematic and more productive. I examine first the garden poetry of these male poets and then turn to that of Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn. These writers used the symbolism of the garden performatively to interact with the world as artists, and it helped them craft voices that contributed to the shape of literature and culture in England in the following years.