TY - JOUR

T1 - Language in the Garden: Transcendentalist Legacies and the Problem of Metaphor in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels

AU - Walton, Georgia

PY - 2021/6/7

Y1 - 2021/6/7

N2 - This article interrogates two established critical approaches to Marilynne Robinson’s fiction. First, by analysing the Gilead novels’ engagement with nineteenth-century Transcendentalism, the article challenges the centrality of metaphor to Robinson’s literary project. I show how, in these novels, Robinson resurrects the nineteenth-century divide between Emersonian metaphor and Thoreauvian metonymy. There has been a recent critical move to understand Robinson’s fiction in relation to modern and contemporary literary forbears, but this article shows the complexity, contradiction and self-criticism that inheres in Robinson’s engagement with Transcendentalism. Secondly and connectedly, my argument complicates the current critical consensus that the home is the most significant locus of these novels. I argue that the indoor domestic spaces of the novels are associated with the metaphorical language that Robinson is critiquing and, in turn, that their garden spaces are associated with a form of language that has a more tangible relationship to action and process.

AB - This article interrogates two established critical approaches to Marilynne Robinson’s fiction. First, by analysing the Gilead novels’ engagement with nineteenth-century Transcendentalism, the article challenges the centrality of metaphor to Robinson’s literary project. I show how, in these novels, Robinson resurrects the nineteenth-century divide between Emersonian metaphor and Thoreauvian metonymy. There has been a recent critical move to understand Robinson’s fiction in relation to modern and contemporary literary forbears, but this article shows the complexity, contradiction and self-criticism that inheres in Robinson’s engagement with Transcendentalism. Secondly and connectedly, my argument complicates the current critical consensus that the home is the most significant locus of these novels. I argue that the indoor domestic spaces of the novels are associated with the metaphorical language that Robinson is critiquing and, in turn, that their garden spaces are associated with a form of language that has a more tangible relationship to action and process.

KW - American literature

KW - Marilynne Robinson

KW - children

KW - contemporary fiction

KW - gardens

KW - home

KW - metaphor

KW - transcendentalism

U2 - 10.1080/0013838x.2021.1928363

DO - 10.1080/0013838x.2021.1928363

M3 - Journal article

VL - 102

SP - 431

EP - 452

JO - English Studies

JF - English Studies

SN - 0013-838X

IS - 4

ER -