"Where the World May Ne'er Invade"?: Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Princesse de Clèves, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless , and Cecilia

Abstract

"Where the World May Ne'er Invade"? Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Princesse de Clèves, The History ofMiss Betsy Thoughtless, and Cecilia J. David Macey, Jr Give me O indulgent Fate! Give me, yet, before I Dye, A sweet, but absolute Retreat, 'Mongst Paths so lost, and Trees so high, That the World may ne'er invade, Through such Windings and such Shade, My unshaken Liberty.1 The speaker in Anne Finch's poem "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat " (1713) expresses her desire for "A sweet, but absolute Retreat," and she locates this retreat out of doors, in a retired and inaccessible corner of a grove where unwelcome visitors will be unable to infringe on her "unshaken Liberty." Finch is not alone in her desire for a green retreat: the gardening mania that gripped England during the eighteenth century bears witness to the widespread appeal of gardens, groves, and wildernesses as sites of recreation and spiritual renewal. Novelists pay tribute to the ideal of rural retirement celebrated in Finch's poem when they represent their heroes or, more frequently, their heroines retiring to bowers in 1 Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess ofWinchilsea, "The Petition for an Absolute Retreat," The Poems ofAnne Countess ofWinchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds, The Decennial Publications ofthe University of Chicago, 2nd series, vol. 5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 68-69, lines 1-7. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 1, October 1999 76 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION lovely and lonely gardens in order to reflect on the tumultuous events that shape their careers. The secluded garden seat provides these heroines with a place in which to express feelings, either alone or to a privileged confidant , that would invite censure were the heroines to acknowledge them in public. Richardson's Clarissa, for example, seeks respite from the oppressive atmosphere of Harlowe Place—and finds means to conduct a clandestine correspondence with her beloved Anna Howe—in her father's "rambling, Dutch-taste garden," and she dreams of escaping from her tyrannical family and retiring to the rural "dairy-house" that her grandfather erected for her use.2 As Clarissa learns, however, the garden at Harlowe Place is far from an absolute retreat, and more than a few other eighteenthcentury heroines make the same discovery about the gardens to which they retire in moments of crisis. Lovelace is not the only villain—or hero— in eighteenth-century fiction who possesses a key to the heroine's garden gate: again and again, heroines are taken by surprise by intruders after retiring to gardens in order to be alone. Some of these surprises effect éclaircissements that facilitate the heroines' marriages, while others, including Clarissa's, have disastrous consequences. Whether happy or fatal, these conventional scenes of discovery suggest the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of securing the perfect and "unshaken Liberty" that Finch associates with the possession of an "absolute Retreat." One version of this discovery scene derives from Mme de La Fayette's novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678). In La Princesse de Clèves, the heroine retires to a pavilion or "bower" in the garden ofher château at Coulommiers in order to contemplate a portrait of her beloved would-be lover, the Duc de Nemours. Nemours, who has penetrated the Princess's maze-like garden, observes her and recognizes himselfas the object ofher affectionate regard, butthe Princess, when she realizes thatNemours is watching her, withdraws from view. The remainder of La Fayette's novel describes the Princess's search for and eventual discovery of a more secure retreat in which she will be able to indulge both her passion and her melancholy without exciting malicious gossip or inviting the unwelcome advances of a lover whom she feels duty-bound not to marry. The scene in the bower at Coulommiers marks an important turning point in the Princess's relationship to Nemours, and it anticipates her decision, at the end of the novel, to turn her back on Nemours and the court in order to seek, in the seclusion of an "absolute Retreat," a degree ofpersonal freedom impossible in the conspiratorial and sexually charged environment of the French court. Eliza Fowler Haywood 2...