Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses: The Ideology ofAugustan Landscape Design CAROLE FABRICANT The symbolic association of women and land has been explored in the past through a variety of Freudian and Jungian interpretations, so that by now we are quite familiar with the image of the great mother goddess earth and of the garden as the repository of female mysteries, both maternal and erotic.1 The trouble with viewing the feminine landscape in these terms, however, is that we tend as a result to overlook the fact that it can assume very different shapes and mean ings reflecting historical changes in taste, in political and epistemolog ical assumptions, in patterns of economic distribution and ownership. Considerations like these help to determine more precisely what “the lay of the land” signifies in any given period.2 My particular concern in this essay is with the way in which the links between women and landscape, as they were commonly perceived and treated by poets, painters, and estate planners alike, expressed certain fundamental in terconnections between aesthetics and ideology in eighteenth-century England. The political terminology frequently employed in contempo rary treatises on landscape gardening possesses more than metaphorical significance and comes to assume very special nuances when understood 109 110 / CAROLE FABRICANT in light of the assumed sexuality of the land. It is not coincidental that Horace Walpole chose to call Capability Brown both the “second monarch of landscape” and “Lady Nature’s second husband.”3 The analogy could on occasion be expressed in strikingly literal terms, as evident in Richard Bradley’s primarily clinical but also faintly voyeuristic descriptions of the “female parts” of plants as they lay exposed before his minute scrutiny, alternately revealing the “Sev eral Ovaries of the Pompion or Melon,” between which, he assures us, “we may very easily perceive the Vagina,” and the “Postillum or Uterus of the Tulip, cut horizontal and magnified with one of Campani ’s Microscopes.”4 Far more often, however, this gynecological spirit of inquiry gave way to the aesthetic but no less sexual con templation of the gentleman builder or planter dedicated to beautify ing the landscape, to rearranging a terrain that could boast of such features as “Venus’s-Looking-glass” and “Venus’s Navel-wort.”5 The all-important sexual dimension of Augustan gardening has previously been almost totally ignored, despite the many studies—some admira bly thorough in other respects—devoted to aspects of eighteenthcentury landscape design.6 Throughout the period, Nature was variously described as a coy or seductive maiden, as a promiscuous or chaste consort, as a naked or overadomed damsel. An obvious example occurs in Pope’s depiction of Windsor Forest: Here waving Groves a chequer’d Scene display, And part admit and part exclude the Day; As some coy Nymph her Lover’s warm Address Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress. (17-20)7 The mixture of freedom and constraint, abandonment and discipline, suggested in this passage, characterized Pope’s own gardens at Twick enham judging from a description of it written three years after the poet’s death by a visitor, who spoke of “Banks and Hillocks; which are entirely cover’d with Thickets of Lawrel, Bay, Holly, and many other Evergreens and Shrubs... where Nature freely lays forth the Branches, and disports uncontroul’d; except what may be entirely prun’d away for more Decency and Convenience to the surrounding Grass-plots.”8 The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design / Ml This paradoxical combination was, in fact, relevant to all eighteenthcentury landscapes, particularly the gardens of the major estates, which catered to the pleasures of the “unfettered eye,” to what Stephen Switzer in his Iconographia Rustica referred to as the mind’s natural desire to “rove uncontroul’d thro’ the promiscuous Scenes of a Country” (GP, p. 156), even as they insisted upon man’s “skillful hand in management” in order to prevent anarchic dispersion and avoid what Humphrey Repton, in discoursing upon gardens, termed “the liberty of savages.”9 The “opening and retiring shades of Venus’s Vale” at Stourhead (the words are Walpole’s [GP, p. 315]) and the suggestively sinuous banks laid out in “French curves” which...