Citation

Coch C. Engl. Lit. Renaiss. 2009; 39(1): 97-127.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1475-6757.2009.01041.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The image of the woman in the garden captured the interest of early modern readers and writers as an embodiment of a historically specific form of moral ambivalence toward aesthetic pleasure, and, by extension, toward art and poetry. The image acquired this resonance as a result of two cultural coincidences: ambivalence toward sensual pleasure was conventionally schematized in gendered form, and functional and structural parallels were perceived between poetry and the period's new pleasure gardens. For poets, these parallels made poetic gardens a singularly rich medium for exploring the merits and problems of their art in a mode that exceeded the standard moral analyses of the defenses. What the image reveals, particularly when it incorporates a female Other to mediate between the male poet figure and art's sensuous and affective pleasures, is a reluctance to accept the widening gap between body and mind in the period's new conceptions of subjectivity. The new privileging of an independent intellect threatened an older posture essential to poetry as it was conceived by Philip Sidney and others, a porousness to the world at once mental and physical, a passivity that balanced and enabled the autonomy of “self-fashioning.” Rooted in traditional Galenic psychophysiology, this older, rival ontology accepted the sub-rational aspects of human nature that poetry appealed to as forces that connected a person to the lower tiers of creation, to other people, and finally to God.