Making Space: Gardens and Social Identity in Early Modern English Literature

"While prescriptive manuals self-consciously tie themselves to actual gardens, poetic texts use representations of gardens to negotiate social position in other domains. Chapter Three analyzes how Spenser uses representations of gardens in The Faerie Queene (1590) and A View of the State of Ireland (1633; written in 1596) to establish the preeminence of male authority vis-a-vis a female sovereign over Irish subjects, and over the Irish landscape the male colonizers sought to make ""English."" By the beginning of the seventeenth century, aesthetic gardening permitted women creative agency in separate garden-spaces isolated as their own in the prescriptive manuals. Hence, Aemilia Lanyer's representations of gardens in Salve Deus and ""To Cooke-ham"" depict how women might imagine another context for holding land and real property. In my fifth chapter I show how in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) Lady Mary (Sidney) Wroth uses settings and images that represent women gardening, embroidering, and writing, to emphasize that they are all equally examples of ""chaste art"" that prove women to be creative agents, desiring subjects, and fully feminine at the same time."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Munroe, Jennifer Ann

Contributors dc:contributor

• Carol Neely

• Literature, English

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3130987

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81402