Janice Niemann

Topic

Over the Garden Wall: Garden Settings and Genre Transgressions in British Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century

Department of English

Date & location

• Tuesday, May 7, 2024
• 10:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room A127

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Lisa Surridge, Department of English, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Department of English, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Erin Kelly, Department of English, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Deborah Begoray, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Amy King, Department of English, St. John’s University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Lyndze Harvey, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UVic

Abstract

Despite gardens featuring prominently as settings throughout British novels of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914), there are few studies that examine the complex impact of garden settings on fictional content, form, and reader expectations. Although critics have pointed to general garden spaces as sites of social or sexual transgression, and as spaces that were often incongruent with their historical counterparts, I maintain that certain garden settings have a far greater impact on British novels of the long nineteenth century than has been previously acknowledged. I argue that the liminal nature of four specific garden settings—walled gardens, summer-houses, shrubberies, and lime-walks (avenues of linden trees)—enable such settings to facilitate characters transgressing social norms and authors pushing genre boundaries, often by means of the technique known as “unnarration.” Through case studies of each of these garden settings across examples of domestic fiction, Gothic fiction, sensation fiction, and a variable genre in each chapter, I argue that garden settings function as catalysts for often-unnarratable boundary violations in British novels of the period. In addition to addressing a gap in the criticism, my argument demonstrates that the impacts of garden settings on character behaviour and genre performance are not discrete literary events but, rather, part of a trope that developed and evolved during the long nineteenth century and that was recognizable to nineteenth-century readers. Understanding this trope, especially its consistent occurrence across genres, enables us to read novels from the long nineteenth century more thoroughly than we have previously been able to both because the trope newly illuminates ways that these novels participate in historical literary traditions and because it offers new insight into the experience of readership in nineteenth-century Britain.