A garden party for spinsters, queers, and whores: Gender performance and nature imagery in the novels of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In Victorian Britain, separate sphere theory entrapped women in domesticity, and normative discourse used nature imagery to legitimize this confinement as "natural." In this project, I argue that the fiction of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf reclaims nature imagery to challenge hegemonic rhetoric that confines gender and sexuality into oppositional positions; both authors also recast the cultivated garden as a space for women to perform gender beyond conventional notions of "femininity." I first examine Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss to analyze how Eliot uses conventional literary devices to provide literal spaces for unlikely heroines to (temporarily) escape from gender constraints. I then look at Mrs. Dalloway and The Years in order to consider how Woolf draws on traditional floral and plant imagery to help her characters to act out "unnatural" desires and gender performances.