Love Scenes and Garden Plots: Form and Femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Abstract

This essay reads Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) in relation to Alfred Austin’s garden book, The Garden That I Love (1894). The Garden That I Love presents the garden as a retreat modelled on the Horatian ideal, in which a man retires from public life to enjoy a peaceful rural existence. Von Arnim shows how the garden, or rather the good of retreat that the garden represents, is well-nigh inaccessible to a female subject. At the same time, she wants to claim the garden’s seclusion for the female subject. Ultimately, von Arnim takes the idea of feminine retreat to an unexpected extreme, generating, in certain passages of her text, a perverse garden fantasia that celebrates feminine autoeroticism and sexual self-sufficiency. Notably, it is specific aspects of the form of the garden book that allow von Arnim to develop her ambivalently feminist, unabashedly utopian vision of feminine withdrawal and retreat.