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Jessica Lawrenceis a master’s student. Before beginning graduate work, she received a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Smith College. She has taught high school English in France, New York, and Indiana. Jessica’s research focuses on spatiality, mapping, and the intersection of ecology and gender in literature.
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Mother/Earth:
Human and Horticultural Generation in The Winter's Tale
Abstract
This paper reads The Winter’s Tale in conversation with early modern gardening manuals, focusing specifically on human and horticultural generation. Taking an ecofeminist approach, I explore how the characters in The Winter’s Tale draw on the language of generative plants and generative women in a struggle for control over reproduction. Polixines and Leontes use this language to implicate men in aspects of reproduction that were typically controlled by women. By contrast, Paulina, Perdita, and Hermione use ecological and reproductive rhetoric to construct female-dominated rhetorical spaces in which men’s control over human and plant reproduction is sharply limited. Ultimately, however, the women’s rhetorical resistance achieves only limited success. Just as several early modern gardening manuals encouraged subtle rather than violent intervention in the natural world, so too does Leontes transition over the course of the play to a subtler form of patriarchal control that eventually allows him, at least to some extent, to realize the desire for male reproductive control that motivated his violence in the play’s early scenes.