Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Sister Arts at British Studies

I gave a talk on my new book at The University of Texas on Friday.  My friend and former student, Deborah “Warrior Marks” Nguyen, snapped a picture of me so I thought I’d post it along with a short excerpt from the talk.

 

"In 2006, I traveled to the National Library of Wales to read 18^th-century garden designer Mary Delany’s voluminous correspondence.  The National Library of Wales, despite its official-sounding name, is an endearingly populist institution.  Located not in glamorous Cardiff but in Newton, a small provincial town about a thirty-minute train ride outside the capital, it is really just a collection of materials inside the regional public library, housed in a small strip mall above a fish and chips takeaway.  One memorable day I seated myself between a teenager surfing the Web on a library computer and an elderly gentleman reading the paper on a long wooden spindle.  The librarian eventually rolled out the cart stacked high with boxes and I nervously spread the precious papers in front of me, trying to avoid the teenager’s soiled and soggy backpack.

These letters have only been published once, in 1861-2, edited by a great-niece with an eye to the family name.  Reading her edition, one letter in particular had always intrigued me.  In 1732, Delany writes to her sister from Dublin, saying that she is not going to bore her correspondent with accounts of the men she meets, but rather give her a detailed account of her new women friends.  In the published version, one sentence reads:  “Letty Bushe is [a] very good humored agreeable Girl with abundance of fancy.”  In manuscript, the sentence is longer: “Letty Bushe is [a] very good humored agreeable Girl with abundance of fancy makes violent Love to me so we never meet without giving the company a great deal of entertainment.”

I found this exciting.  I looked to my left...the old man was not interested.  I looked to my right…the teenage boy was likely to be only too interested.  I stepped outside and made a very expensive phone call home to share the news.

Of course, the phrase “make love” as a euphemism for “have sex” dates only from 1950. The sense “pay amorous attention to,” however, dates from 1580 and is to me at least, clearly the sense meant here.  Letty Bushe is engaging in amorous behavior toward Mary Pendarves when they are with their friends.  Their friends find this not shocking or disgusting, but entertaining.  Such is the world of the cosmopolitan eighteenth-century bluestocking."

Want to hear more?  Order my book from University of Minnesota Press:

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/moore_sister.html

 

Queer gardens

The best-known contemporary queer garden is Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent.  Jarman, who died in 1994, was a pathbreaking filmmaker and artist who moved to the cottage when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1986.  Located near England’s most notorious nuclear power plant, the garden was ongoing project to wrest beauty from the shadow of disaster.  It’s still deeply moving.

Jarman wrote a book about his garden that was published posthumously in 1996.

The garden is in the shingle (beach) cottage-garden style.  Jarman makes exquisite use of the arid media of sand and stone to create sculptural forms that nonetheless warmly embrace the cottage.  Austere but intimate, Prospect Cottage attracts thousands of visitors every year and has remained an important site in the history of gay rights and AIDS activism as well as garden history.  Here’s a video with original music made by one visitor, the composer Paul A. Jackson:

 

I plan to visit Prospect Cottage this summer and look forward to posting more from on-site.

Meanwhile, an amateur collector in the suburbs of Stockholm has opened her backyard garden to public view in order to display her collection of erotica.  What she really wants is for someone with more resources than she has to open a sex museum to which she could donate her collection, but until then her garden will have to do.  Rather than re-shaping the landscape as Sir Francis Dashwood or Derek Jarman did, Jorma Toivonen is just taking advantage of the space available to her as a homeowner to display her beloved objects.

Next time:  Garden art in Austin, Texas.

 

 

Gardens are sexy

Everyone knows gardens are sexy.  Ever since Eden, the garden has been associated with nudity and breaking the rules.  I just finished writing a book about the great age of English garden design, the eighteenth century, and I gave the bawdy garden of the period some attention. 

 The most famous example is Sir Francis Dashwood’s West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.  In addition to being a politician and art collector, Dashwood was a notorious rake who led a secret society called the Hell Fire Club, which met in a network of prehistoric chalk caves that surfaced on his West Wycombe estate. (They became know as—what else?—the Hell Fire Caves, and you can still go visit them.)  Sir Francis and his associates were either “happy disciples of Venus and Bacchus” or “subversive of all decency,” depending on your point of view. 

Here’s one of many period portraits of Sir Francis.  It's called Sir Francis Dashwood Worshipping Venus, and it shows our loose-living subject kneeling blasphemously in front of an erotic novel instead of the Bible, with his equally notorious friend Lord Sandwich peering from the halo instead of an angel:

 

To facilitate his Venus-worshipping tendencies, Sir Francis carried out a series of ambitious renovations to his West Wycombe estate in the 1760s and 1770s.  Like a lot of eighteenth-century gardens, the updated West Wycombe included a temple to Venus.  But Dashwood’s Venus Temple is special.  The temple is built into a hillside with the arch-shaped door opening into a dark interior space.  Another Hell Fire Club participant, John Wilkes, said this archway was meant to represent “the Door of Life, through which we all enter”—in other words, the vagina.  The small rotunda on top of the hill, which looked like a belly button, emphasized the bawdy meaning of this part of the garden:

 

Get it?

 Yeah, the belly button is a little oversized.  The symbolic effect was probably strengthened at the time by the fact that there were apparently two swelling mounds with their own, smaller rounded porticos on top visible behind and to each side of the vagina-and-belly construction above—i.e., the breasts complete with nipples.  

 In the eighteenth century people were either scandalized or titillated—or both--by Dashwood’s Venus Temple.  As a feminist I was intrigued to find a similar design by an eighteenth-century woman garden designer named Mary Delany  Delany knew about West Wycombe and Sir Francis’ highjinks both through family connections and because he was a neighbor of her longtime girlfriend (more on eighteenth-century lesbian relationships later) the Duchess of Portland, whose estate at Bulstrode was just a few miles away.  Delany collaborated with the Duchess on the Bulstrode renovations (everybody was doing it; that’s why it’s the great age of English garden design!), but here’s the Beggar’s Hut she designed for her own garden outside Dublin:

See the similarity?  In the middle of the drawing you can see the arched doorway of the "hut," which is actually an underground cave, drawn just below the belly-like mound of the hillside.  This image was a starting point for me in realizing that women participated in the tradition of the bawdy garden.  I’m sure some of them made gardens that looked like penises (actually Dashwood made a church steeple with a golden ball on top of it that was even more scandalous than the Venus Temple) but since I’m a lesbian, I was less interested in that possibility.  I liked the idea that women in the eighteenth century made gardens that looked like the sexy bodies of other women.  And my book, Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, was born.

Next time:  the erotic gardens of the 21^st century.