In a lady's bower: Poetry, gardens, and the problem of pleasure in early modern England

This dissertation focuses on the image of the woman in the garden in early modern English poetry. It explains why this image was so ubiquitous by tracing how the image manifests the period's changing attitudes toward aesthetic pleasure and gender relations. At the end of the sixteenth century, the image embodied the age's moral anxiety regarding art's---and particularly poetry's---sensuous pleasures, personified in deadly seductresses like Edmund Spenser's Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss. But as it entered the seventeenth century the image lost its threatening aspect. I explain this change in connotation as a shift in artistic method: both poets and gardeners began to use the image to answer the troubling moral questions about sensuous art it had previously represented. The image came to embody varied answers, but all of them enabled the male artist to claim for himself, to a lesser or greater extent, forms of aesthetic pleasure that traditionally had been gendered feminine. Analyses of a masque by Inigo Jones, a gardening manual by John Parkinson, the landscaping of Philip Herbert's Wilton estate, and poems by Andrew Marvell and the Cavaliers provide cases in point. The project closes with new readings of Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cooke-ham" and Mary Wroth's Urania to demonstrate how female poets, in sharp contrast to their male contemporaries, were able to reappropriate the image to authorize women's writing. The pleasure garden's ambiguous status as an extension of the public order of the household, as well as a more intimate sphere apart, made the garden a site uniquely suited to dramatize the female poet's predicament, caught between social constraints on self-expression and a desire for it.