Gardens in Victorian Novels and the Extended Mind

Abstract

In Victorian novels, men and women across the social hierarchy gravitate toward garden spaces. Here they work, ramble, meditate, and engage in encounters that are pivotal to their character development. Within these half-domestic, half-natural environments, characters often experience heightened emotional, mnemonic, and imaginative moments. Lucy Snowe embraces solitude as she cultivates a garden nook in the metropolitan pensionnat of Villette; Adam Bede envisions domestic bliss with Hetty Sorrel as they pick red currants together in the abundant garden of Hall Farm; Ruth Hilton recalls her childhood as she winds through the flower beds and bushes of the homely garden at Milham Grange… The list could go on. Repeatedly, characters emerge from these garden spaces with cognitive transformations, often toward self-knowledge and improved understanding of others. Importantly, these psychological experiences are not portrayed as internal representations isolated from the physical environment. Rather, they are dynamic processes that unfold through sensory-mediated and materially grounded human-garden interaction. What makes the garden a particularly powerful space for evoking and accommodating psychological activities? What role does the garden play in shaping and structuring cognitive-affective-mnemonic experiences? What do these garden scenes disclose about the Victorian conception of the mind, its nature, location, and modes of operation? Focusing on selected texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, this thesis argues that in Victorian novels gardens constitute part of an integrated cognitive system, in which human characters rely on them to think, feel, reason, imagine, and make moral decisions. This argument leverages insights from what is known by philosophers and cognitive theorists as 4E cognition, or distributed cognition, according to which, human minds exploit environmental supports for cognitive functioning. Contrary to the conventional view that the mind is bound within the brain, 4E cognition proposes that the mind emerges through close interactions with the external environment. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to show that engagement with garden spaces is central to theses writers’ expansive conception of subjectivity.