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The working title for my MA thesis is “The Greenhouse Effect in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma”. Through an ecofeminist lens, I will examine these three Jane Austen novels, with the aim of complicating traditional readings of her representation of the woman-nature association. While Austen’s landscapes are often perceived as passively picturesque, I will argue that far from Charlotte Brontë’s assessment of “a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers” (“Letter to G.H. Lewes”), we find instead integral environments in which women find symmetry and expression. Moreover, I wish to consider how such language of ‘cultivated’ nature, particularly as applied to women, deliberately problematises the Romantic vogue for botanical female descriptions, to critique the dependence and ‘pruning’ of women and nature by men.

A central text throughout will be Deidre Lynch’s “‘Young Ladies are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism”, which considers Austen’s references to the forced nature of the hothouse as commenting on women’s moral versus formal education, in dialogue with the ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ world. Each chapter will focus on a different novel, ordered chronologically, and will employ Lynch’s concept to follow Austen’s evolution of nature imagery and greenhouse symbolism. I will begin with Jonathan Bate’s “Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy”, which provides a crucial historical context for Austen’s “deceptively natural novels” (542). Bate contends that the nature/culture binary had a more reciprocal relationship in Austen’s day, encompassing the 'cultivation' of both agriculture and civility (543). With this Romantic understanding, I will interrogate Austen’s complex use of the word across these three novels. Considered pivotal in the move towards both “greening … Romanticism [and] the Romanticization of greenness” (Drew and Sitter 227), Bate’s work precedes Soper, Garrard and Buell’s seminal guides; What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Ecocriticism and The Future of Environmental Criticism, all of which will inform my interpretations throughout.

Another key idea Bate raises is the imperial and moral character of the greenhouse, which will assist my first chapter on Sense and Sensibility, and an exploration of its two hothouses. I will also draw on Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist delineation between land and landscape in The Concept of a Cultural Landscape, to consider the enclosed nature of the greenhouse alongside Austen’s framed descriptions of countryside and Elinor’s ambiguous watercolours. A core concern of my thesis will be to explore whether Austen’s protagonists escape their societal constraints through walking or connecting with the natural world, and if those who view, or are associated with nature through a frame, consequently struggle to achieve the same liberation. Plumwood’s understanding of landscape as “passive, visually captured, something to … survey and subdue” (123), will therefore be crucial to my examination of both sisters’ differing responses to nature and the implications of greenhouses in the novel. Against Irene Fizer’s study of Elinor’s “framed abstractions” (62) in “A ‘Passion for Dead Leaves’: Animated Landscapes and Static Canvases in Sense and Sensibility”, I will question whether Marianne displays a potentially “more rounded and embodied [way] of knowing the land” (Plumwood 123).

While Plumwood’s modern focus on nature’s agency will have limitations for what Judith Page terms Austen’s “Romantic vision of nature” (2), the core tenet of the privileging of the visual as mutually denuding for women and environment, will inform my analysis of the impact of Gilpin’s picturesque and Repton’s improvements on Austen’s female characters. Building on Kathleeen Anderson’s “‘Every Day was Adding to the Verdure of the Early Trees’: Women, Trees, and the Relationship between Self and Other in Jane Austen’s Novels”, I will further her assertion that Austen evokes a joint woman/nature vulnerability to improvements with ecofeminist ramifications. Similar to Anderson, Fizer’s “Dead Leaves” contends that aesthetic arguments surrounding nature are mostly focused on trees, which function variously as commodities, custodians of memory, inconveniences to improvement, desirable elements of picturesque landscapes, and metaphors for generational fruit-bearing (53). To examine this symbolic fruit-bearing, I will analyse Cleveland’s imperial ‘green-house’ with “plants, unwarily exposed” (S&S 291), as possibly associated with the forced nature of the societal season, and Marianne’s indiscreet trip to Allenham. Using Lynch’s ‘greenhouse romanticism’ will help to deconstruct the complex function of the novel’s cautionary and “morally-dubious” (Bate 548) hothouses. Following on from this heated emblem, I believe some attention is needed towards Marianne’s fevered relation to nature and romance, and Brandon’s association with the East Indies. To interrogate the references to social, colonial, and bodily contamination which link Marianne’s “putrid tendency” (S&S 291) to Cleveland’s health-threatening “wildness” (290), I will turn to Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, which provides essential context to the ecological imperialism inherent in Romantic nature and greenhouses.

Uniting my first chapter with my second on Pride and Prejudice, will be the literal and figurative use of the greenhouse, which appears physically, with moral connotations in Sense and Sensibility and implicitly, but with suggestive force, in my second text. Penny Gay states that greenhouses are for Austen “a useless extravagance” (54), but it is Bate’s foregrounding of its imperial history which will contextualise my consideration of Pemberley’s greenhouse fruits. While Bate suggests the unwelcome intrusion of empire’s spoils into the protected atmosphere of Britain, I will posit that Pemberley, as an implicit though obvious greenhouse estate, functions as an Edenic ecosystem itself, and a figurative glasshouse in which sororal bonds are heightened, and ‘seasoned’ women are associated with hothouse fruits.

Key texts I will employ will be Liz Bellamy’s The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century, and Amy King’s Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel. Bellamy attends to the symbolic code of fruit available before the Linnaean language of floral sexuality, while King considers Austen’s ‘blooming’ or marriageable girls, by decoding those Linnaean euphemisms shrouding women’s sexuality. While Lynch provides a thorough analysis of Austen, both Bellamy and King include her texts as a smaller portion of wider studies in the literary relation of gender and flowers. Situating my arguments within these three works will therefore offer a greater range of historical reference that will benefit my reading of cultivated nature and women.

I will then position my case for Pemberley’s greenhouse status in opposition to the ‘pollution’ that threatens its “shades” (P&P 347) in the form of Elizabeth’s muddy petticoats and unscrupulous relatives. Complicating this opposition, I will consider Austen’s class pollution against Anna Seward’s environmental concerns in her poem, “To Colebrooke Dale”. Drawing on Donna Coffey’s “Protecting the Botanic Garden” will help to juxtapose Austen’s use of ‘pollution’ and suggestive hothouse fruits with what Coffey considers Seward’s unique application of ‘pollute’ to Coalbrookdale, but an awareness-raising that reinforces analogies between women and “delicate … hothouse flowers” (149).

Considering Anna Barbauld’s “Inscription for an Ice-House” as a useful connecting poem between Austen and Seward, I will explore the implications of greenhouse romanticism when applied to its foil, the icehouse. Embodying Austen’s social concerns as an inherently classed structure, I will question whether Barbauld’s transposition of the hothouse’s “supernatural enchantments” (Lynch 719) onto the subterranean other, in fact crystallises Seward’s concerns about nature’s subjugation for human advancement while foregrounding what is only ever implicit in Austen’s greenhouse estates. Lisa Vargo’s “Anna Barbauld and Natural Rights: The Case of ‘Inscription for an Ice-House’” will contextualise the intersections of feminist and class potentials within this poem which might benefit from some consideration of Lynch’s greenhouse analysis.

For my final chapter on Emma, I will begin by integrating these ideas of Pemberley as symbolic greenhouse, with the similarly insular Highbury - one of the “protecting enclosures of orderly English society” (Wenner 99). Wenner’s “‘Enclaves of Civility Amidst Clamorous Impertinence’: Will as Reflected in the Landscape of Emma” provides a foundation for criticism on Austen’s portrayal of secluded communities, while Julie Donovan expands this outlook in “The Encroachment on Highbury: Ireland in Jane Austen’s Emma” to include the reverse colonial reality whereby “Highbury’s realm” is threatened by an invasive Irish presence.

These texts will inform my approach to the enclosed frame of Highbury itself, which I will situate alongside an examination of Emma and Harriet as artist and subject. My central question will be whether Austen draws parallels between her painterly description of Donwell and her treatment of women who paint, or are painted. Does this rendering enact a subjugation in line with men’s improvements of nature, as Harriet herself is explicitly Emma’s project in improvement? Or does corporeality exist at all for women outside of the frame? To navigate these questions I will refer to Barbara Seeber’s intersectional investigation of patriarchal, imperialist, and natural exploitation in “Nature, Animals, and Gender”; a crucial text in dismantling the power dynamics at play in a novel she claims allies “feminism and ecological thought” (282). Seeber’s ecocritical examination of Austen is amongst the first and most comprehensive in the field and provides a detailed analysis of the politics of agriculture, improvements, and the appropriation of the ‘gypsies’. While she argues these reiterate social division, I will further her exploration of Austen’s treatment of female characters who fall inside or outside of the social frame. Interrogating Jane Fairfax’s tenuous status, insistent lack of embodiment, and association with ‘air’ as an instance of this, I will also consider the links between nature and illegitimacy as embodied by Harriet. Emma herself will form the cornerstone to my debate, as the heroine whose paintings of the “natural” (E 20) Harriet are uniquely descriptive, and suggestive of male improvers, possibly indicating a social freedom that escapes gendered frames.

I hope that such a focus on Austen’s natural imagery as a key to implicit critiques of women’s restraint by patriarchal improvement, will form a strong connection between my primary and secondary texts. Connecting these novels through ‘greenhouse romanticism’ and integrating two of Austen’s contemporary female poets, is a combination I have not seen which offers many new questions and potential insights. Drawing from this pool of criticism in the immense fields of Austen studies and ecocriticism, I believe there is work to be done in complicating existing readings and scholarship with a focused ecofeminist, and greenhouse, perspective.

Works Cited

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Women, Trees, and the Relationship between Self and Other in Jane Austen’s

Novels.” ISLE, vol. 25, no. 1, 2018, pp. 80-94.

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Bate, Jonathan. “Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy.” New Literary History,

vol. 30, no. 3, 1999, pp. 541-560.

Bellamy, Liz. The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century.

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Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2004.

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Ethics and the Environment, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115-150.

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Soper, Kate. “The Discourses of Nature.” What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human.

Blackwell, 1995, pp. 15-34.

Vargo, Lisa. ‘Anna Barbauld and Natural Rights: The Case of “Inscription for an Ice-House”.’

European Romantic Review, vol. 27, no. 3, 2016, pp. 331-339.

Wenner, Barbara Britton. “‘Enclaves of Civility Amidst Clamorous Impertinence’: Will as Reflected

in the Landscape of Emma.” European Romantic Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 1997, pp. 95-115. Taylor

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---. Prospect and Refuge in the Landscapes of Jane Austen. Ashgate, 2006.