Violets and Violent Alliances: The Queer Gardens of Modernism

This thesis examines the relationship between queer sexualities and gardens in the poetry and life writing of Amy Lowell, H.D., Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf. By drawing on the diverse sexual relationships that constitute gardens, these writers seek to understand and generate gender and sexual identities beyond those categorised by sexology and psychoanalysis. All four writers, I argue, model their poetic and biographical narrative voices on the figure of the woman gardener, who, in their works, possesses a virile silhouette and wields sharp tools, including the sword, pen, and pruning knife. Crucially, they also present flowers as sharp-edged, and these potent organic beings influence the form and arrangement of their poetry collections and biographies. Identifying a “violent alliance” between queer women writers and plants in the modernist era, this study regards the site of the garden as abundant with erotic and liberatory potential. Chapter One proposes that in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Lowell establishes a sexual and ecological union between the “virile” imagist and her garden flowers. Chapter Two considers the motif of the “sword flower” in H.D.’s Sea Garden (1916) and Paint It Today (1921), interpreting this dual image as an intimate symbol of same-sex desire and a queer code in the networks of women’s imagism. Chapter Three explores the shifting significance of “exotic” flowers in Sackville-West’s conceptualisations of same-sex desire in her writings of the 1920s. Chapter Four argues that, for Woolf, allusions to gardening activities, including pruning and planting bulbs, are pivotal to the creation of her queer biographical portraits, “Friendships Gallery” (1907) and Orlando (1928). By highlighting the intertwined themes of queer sexualities, flowers, and violence in all four writers’ works, the project intervenes in current critical conversations about queer ecologies and the “nature” of women’s writing.