The Spinster in the Garden: Joy and Transcendence in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

Abstract

This article proposes an original reading of Father (1931) and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), two texts by Elizabeth von Arnim that centre on a young single woman. It will examine how female autonomy is spatially imagined in the form of a garden and poses significant challenges to the patriarchal societies presented in the texts. Many scholars have detailed the recurring motif of the garden in Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899). The two texts this article addresses were published later than those that have been discussed in relation to the garden, and signal a move away from the married female towards an examination of the independent or single female. Significantly, they disrupt the traditional ‘marriage plot’ novel by tracing two single women’s movement into the garden as a retreat from the societies in which they live. In both texts, von Arnim presents a distinctively beautiful, transcendent garden experience for her female protagonists that contrasts with the oppressive expectations placed on them by urban society. These texts turn on dichotomies—city/country, built/organic environments, repression/freedom—to expose the central characters’ repression and their attempts to gain some degree of independence. Each central character experiences joy as a result of her interaction with the organic environment and the power the protagonist exercises over this space.

Keywords:

• garden
• spinster
• middlebrow
• joy
• transcendent
• organic environment
• ecocriticism

Notes

1 Hugh Walpole claimed in von Arnim's obituary that some of her novels would remain ‘minor classics’ (Usborne 1986: 312).

2 I use the terms ‘organic space’ and ‘more-than-human’ as part of a dialogue that seeks to change how we discuss and regard these parts of our world.

3 Von Arnim's use of irony has already been noted by Maddison (2013) and Römhild (2014).

4 Maddison attributes this to ‘the result of the changing critical climate’ (Maddison 2013: 3), which shifted attention towards writing that was considered avant-garde.

5 Waters discusses this ambivalence towards remote rural locations in Dickens's middle-class readership, and the move towards the garden as a retreat (Waters 1988: 169).

6 The unmarried woman as repressed was an idea in circulation by the time of the publication of Father: ‘By the 1930s the spread of psychoanalytic ideas focused concern on the dangers of repression’ (Fink and Holden 1999: 236).

7 The quote is from Fräulein Schmidt (von Arnim 1983: 372).