A new Brontë-related paper has just been published onlione:
by Peiran Peng, Durham University
In Charlotte Brontë’s novels, men and women from across the social hierarchy demonstrate an obsession with gardens and gardening. In Villette, as Lucy Snowe enters her precarious position as teacher and nursery-maid in the continental pensionnat, she devotes herself to cultivating an obscure garden nook. In Shirley, the newly immigrated entrepreneur Robert Moore struggles to gain footing among antagonistic local workers, while devoting time and energy to growing a patch of garden. Shirley Keeldar, the landed heiress, also constantly manipulates her garden resources (nosegay-making and floral gift sending) as she navigates contentious social relationships. What motivates Brontë’s characters to seek the garden repeatedly? Focusing on Shirley, this article offers an explanation for this garden obsession by suggesting that manipulating garden spaces constitutes an important means of affective regulation. To do this, the argument leverages insights from what is known by philosophers as the ‘extended mind’ framework, and more specifically the extended account of affectivity, according to which human minds exploit environmental supports for cognitive-affective-mnemonic functioning. My reading of Brontë argues that garden spaces are particularly important external environments that structure and support affective experiences. Contrary to the conventional view that affective regulation occurs internally, within the inner world of individual psychological experience, this reading argues that it is often achieved through close interactions with the external environment. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to show that the garden obsession in Brontë’s fiction should be understood as meaning-making and affective management practices that are central to her expansive conception of subjectivity.
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