Aasdas
- Submitted by: gkushagra
- Views: 899
- Category: History: Religion
- Date Submitted: 08/01/2011 08:25 AM
- Pages: 6
- Report this Essay
Arcadia Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory
Sometimes, there’s more to Lit than meets the eye.
The Garden
Even though we never directly see the garden of Sidley Park, its symbolic presence is felt throughout the play. Hannah, especially, has Opinions about what the history of the garden means:
BERNARD: Lovely. The real England.
HANNAH: You can stop being silly now, Bernard. English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look – Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires. (1.2)
Hannah's main objection to the landscape is its triteness: it pretends to be natural, but really it's just riffing off of imaginary landscapes from the past or from literature (or from past literature). The so-called "real England" is actually a mash-up of French and Italian fantasies of what Ancient Greece was like.
The idea of coming up with an ideal natural landscape in order to make up stories about nonexistent past is a long tradition that usually goes by the name "pastoral." Pastoral art and literature imagines a green countryside populated by shepherds, shepherdesses, and very well-behaved sheep who pretty much take care of themselves so the shepherds and shepherdesses can spend all their time flirting with each other. The pastoral portrays a rural life where people survive just fine without doing any work – which, as anyone who's ever lived on a farm can tell you, is totally unrealistic.
The pastoral-life-magically-without-labor transforms into a landscape-magically-without-labor: Bernard calls it "the real England," as if it's what England would look like if no one did anything to it, when really it's the product of a bunch of gardeners and landscape architects...
Sometimes, there’s more to Lit than meets the eye.
The Garden
Even though we never directly see the garden of Sidley Park, its symbolic presence is felt throughout the play. Hannah, especially, has Opinions about what the history of the garden means:
BERNARD: Lovely. The real England.
HANNAH: You can stop being silly now, Bernard. English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look – Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires. (1.2)
Hannah's main objection to the landscape is its triteness: it pretends to be natural, but really it's just riffing off of imaginary landscapes from the past or from literature (or from past literature). The so-called "real England" is actually a mash-up of French and Italian fantasies of what Ancient Greece was like.
The idea of coming up with an ideal natural landscape in order to make up stories about nonexistent past is a long tradition that usually goes by the name "pastoral." Pastoral art and literature imagines a green countryside populated by shepherds, shepherdesses, and very well-behaved sheep who pretty much take care of themselves so the shepherds and shepherdesses can spend all their time flirting with each other. The pastoral portrays a rural life where people survive just fine without doing any work – which, as anyone who's ever lived on a farm can tell you, is totally unrealistic.
The pastoral-life-magically-without-labor transforms into a landscape-magically-without-labor: Bernard calls it "the real England," as if it's what England would look like if no one did anything to it, when really it's the product of a bunch of gardeners and landscape architects...