Digging for England in Elizabeth’s German Garden: Imperial Romance and National Femininities in the Early Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

Abstract

The author treats von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer as types of imperial romance, showing the ways in which von Arnim quite literally domesticates the genre by adapting discourses of eugenics and racial contest to fit an Englishwoman’s experiences of home-making and gardening in late nineteenth-century Pomerania. Racial fitness is replaced by aesthetic fitness as von Arnim sets up a contest between English and German femininities within the home and garden.

Keywords:

• gender
• genre
• eugenics
• imperialism
• horticulture
• gardens
• nationalism
• femininity
• domesticity

Notes

1 An early study that takes von Arnim's work seriously and places it in a highbrow context is Schaffer (2000).

2 See Maddison's discussion of the ‘middlebrow’ (Maddison 2013: 3–11).

3 Eliza Lynn Linton compared English girls to other European types before concluding that the traditional English girl was ‘the ideal of womanhood’ (quoted in Hamilton 2004:).

4 See Kipling (1899), traditionally read as justification for European and American imperialism as civilizing.