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"Walled in" di Boileau e Welshman - Coggle Diagram
"Walled in" di Boileau e Welshman
I. Virginia Woolf and the gardens
Shakespeare influenced greatly Woolf: in his plays, gardens are spaces away from watchful eyes of others, in which restrictions are forgotten
His characters often work through their emotions thanks to the natural setting: the same goes for Woolf and in
Mrs Dalloway
the plants are used to convey a deeper meaning,
revealing the nature of the characters
+ gardens are not just reatreat for Woolf
The idea of lost Eden preoccupied some victorian writers:
Tess of the Ubervilles by Hardy: Tess devises her own escape,but the society doesn't welcome her as a fugitive. Hardy's philosphy is informed by PL
Paradise Lost by Milton: according to Woolf, it's impersonal and lacks of psychological complexity
The idea of self realization is deveoloped is developed in Mrs Dalloway in the garden: no rambling Eden, but domestic and designed. Woolf believes in the idea of fragmented paradises pieced together in sudden moments of realization--> she's
subverting the literary tropes of the garden
The book starts with Clarissa recollection of the garden at Bourton: this memory serves as an awakening, a slap in the present. Clarissa's memory of Peter Walsh are fluid and triggered by her contemporariness and her past
Woolf in the final version describes a walled in garden in which Sally tears the roses (Eve's plucking) and the man is passive, while the woman is active (
path wide enough just for the two
--> the garden is territory of a woman
The theme of the lonely heroine seeking respite from turbulent circumastances is central in
The country life
. The garden there symbolises the
idealised country life
Stella yearns for, seeking comfort after her marriage.
Stella's mobility -as a woman who escapes from her past- is in contrast with Martin's disability: their experience in the garden brigs them closer. Just like in Mrs Dalloway, in TCL the garden also has rose. The setting reflects a character prone to realize her
lost sense of being
While in
Mrs Dalloway
the description of the garden is a fleeting sequence, in Cusk's the countryside offers a setting for the psychological study of how the character adjusts to the new life and her relations with the family. The country life remains a nebulous horizon of expectations that Stella struggles to comprehend
II. Cusk and the gardens
Stella's first experience in the house involves her being lost: it's associated with the impressions of
emptiness and disproportions
. It's the perfect set for a gothic novel, in which the anxieties of the heroine grow.
Stella's approach to life is characterized by
unwarranted anxiety
: 'my personal landscape of fears' is what she says imagining the house as haunted.
Stella is the Madden's servant, but she cannot fulfilled the role because she's enslaved to the past. Cusk offers a revision of the gothic + plays with the elastic time of the rural enviroment (slowness of time = reinforces Stella's lack of sleep and distort the vision of reality).
Stella's experience doesn't resemble the middle class life as uneventful and comfortable, let alone the idealised way of life imagined in 'Country Life'
The representation of time takes us back to
Mrs Dalloway
, and the original title was
The hours
: it's a novel that stresses about the
passage of time
, and the subjective experience of it.
Clarissa and other characters experience time as the result of the day passing, layered with different experience. Time is slowed down by Clarissa who spends her day planning the party (she has not been invited to lunch) while Peter wanders in the London streets feeling an outsider)
Cusk uses the passage of time to convey the
difficulty of the character to seek unity
in her experience of fragmentation. The lack of activity in Stella's life gives her time to daydream but also stretches the daytime hours (no structural stability). Stella doesn't fit in the country life, yet she forces that style as an
aptitued which could be acquaried
In contrast with Stella's urban life there is the emptiness of the surronding: everything is dark and empty. Stella needs to find a
new language
in order to participate in the countrylife
Stella is shown an enclosed space, and then the garden, a symbol for the Maddens to attempt to maintain a veneer of domestic harmony and respectibility. There Stella picks an already decayed rose, but her act is still violent.
The rose garden is a topos of fiction, and the episode read as metatextual, that allows the character to grasp an aspect of her discomfort. After thinking of her childhood garden, she's able to feel happiness. The vision of the continental city produces an experience of revelation
Unlike Tessa, Stella finds
hospitality
in the country society from her previous life; this episode facilitates a connection to the past. However, at the end of it, she still feels
inadequancy
, a recurring cycle that suggests how moments of epiphany are small steps for self realization (not necesseraly beyond the walled in garden)
The scenes replay the whole logic of the relation between English, gender, class: in
Mrs Dalloway
the garden is part of the memory that resurfaces after Clarissa and Peter are trying to reconnect + presence of the war which leads to a map of London (fragments of conversations).
In
TCL
the vision is less historically conscious and her narrative less anxious: we dig into the tradition of the rose to
rediscover the narrative
potential of
its symbolism
.
Stella's
inability to adapt to the country life
is replicated when she misunderstands the meaning of the rose: Elizabethan only stands for the name of the rose, not an old style garden. The novel twists the intertextual reference to a piece of comedy: Stella is literary at loss with words.
In the garden Stella is truly connected to who she is, a moment brutally interrumpted by Martin.
Both Woolf and Cusk depict the flower as a symbol of self: it represents
moment of being
, in which the depths of one could resurface.
Being walled in by past experiences and then working on them.
In both novels, the utopian peace of the garden is denied to the characters who are held from a deeper engagment to nature by their own insecurities and the underlying conflicts of gender and class
eg: Cusk's character fragmentation finds a brief echo in the garden, but it's not fully articulated;
the walled in garden holds potential of self realization