“And all the crops of Asia flourish here” : unsettled boundaries between East and West, landscape and text in Eliza Lucas Pinckney and André Michaux (Article)

• Main Author: Bullington, Thomas
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148298
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The stories European writers tell about “the East” leave a physical mark on the landscapes we inhabit. Literature and landscape are linked both in the physical forms of gardens and plants and in the consumeristic, imperialistic narratives that surround these organisms. However, the disciplinary boundaries that twenty-first-century scholars draw between garden history and literature obscure these linkages. Tom Williamson’s pivotal study Polite Landscapes articulates this border best. Williamson delineates between the idealized landscapes of eighteenth-century’s British landed elite—such as the undulating parks of Capability Brown—and the actual landscapes designed by the landed gentry. Williamson frames this distinction as a critique of Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology: “Individual landowners were . . . much more concerned about the impression their gardens made on neighbours of similar rank than with the impact they had on the local poor. . . . Gardens, like houses, were certainly expressions of wealth and status. . . . But the social realities they expressed, or concealed, were highly complex.” 1 From this critique, Williamson’s argument branches out, revealing the methodological constraints of garden historians: an overemphasis on what literature has to say about gardens and not enough emphasis on what gardens actually looked like for most eighteenth-century British landowners. Most cleaved to the older geometric tradition that various landscape writers (Addison, Pope, Walpole, etc.) railed against. Such writers heralded not an aesthetic that typified the eighteenth-century English garden but rather something of an avant-garde. While the cultural work of literary and artistic forms helps twenty-first-century scholars uncover fantasies of what people wanted landscapes to look like, Williamson urges us to heed the boundaries between artistic representation and the one-upmanship of people who designed these landscapes.