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
J. David Macey, Jr, University of Central Oklahoma
Volume 12, no. 1, October 1999
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
[T]he 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 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 “daily-house” that her grandfather erected for her use. As Clarissa learns, however, the garden at Harlowe Place is far from an absolute retreat, and more than a few other eighteenth-century 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 eclaircissements 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.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Frances Burney” include:
Black, Patched and Pennyless: Race and Crime in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA CZECHOWSKI (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Dangerous Fortune-telling in Frances Burney’s Camilla
by JENNIFER LOCKE (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
Volume 24, Number 3 (Spring 2012)
Rewriting Radicalism: Wollstonecraft in Burney’s The Wanderer
by TARA GHOSHAL WALLACE (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
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