Vera Alexander

Pamela L. Travers

(auch: Lyndon Travers; d. i. Helen Lyndon Goff) – 1920 Schauspielkarriere in Sydney; Journalistin; 1924 Emigration nach England; Gedichte und Theaterkritiken in New Age; in den 1920er Jahren Bekanntschaft mit W. B. Yeats und A. R. Orage; verfasste Kinderbucher und Romane, aber auch nichtfiktionale Werke.

The Relational Imaginary of MG Vassanji's A Place Within

ABSTRACT Currently life writing criticism shows a growing interest in relationality. In the context of lives written after empire, relational dimensions are often fragmented, misremembered and semi-imaginary. This essay explores life writing in a diasporic context, focusing on M. G. Vassanjis travel-self narrative A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008). Relational dimensions do not solely encompass human subjects. Selves and subjectivities are formed and transformed by objects and environments. I argue for extending the category of relational life writing beyond the human sphere to include two significant non-human others: books and places and analyse their role in the fraught project of constituting a life in writing.

Kew Gardens as a literary space

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which celebrated their 250-year anniversary in 2009, have been extensively studied in disciplines as diverse as garden history, economy, anthropology, ecocriticism, post-colonialism and various branches of cultural studies. In this essay I aim to complement the list with a discussion of Kew Gardens as a literary subject by looking at a corpus of poetic and fictional writings it has inspired throughout its history. This essay explores different dimensions of how the Royal Botanic Gardens are represented, and what it reveals about the ways different writers conceptualize human constructions of nature. The texts discussed in this essay, though only partly aware of each other’s existence and politics, map how Kew Gardens became a public monument, and at the same time, a location of private, individual recreation, recovery and creativity. A thematic focus on the setting and motif of Kew makes for a heterogeneous corpus. It comprises two distinct groups of texts: the first is made up of two long poems produced at the time at which the Royal Gardens were first built: Henry Jones’s Kew Garden (1763) and Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1790). The second, following a gap of over a century when no poet or novelist made Kew their eponymous location, contains Virginia Woolf’s innovative short story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919) and the intertextual and semi-biographic story the Jewish American Bernard Malamud wrote in response, ‘In Kew Gardens’ (1984). Kew is presented as a place of individual creative epiphany but moreover as a public meeting-ground between high and low classes, men and women, different generations, past and present, and, most interestingly, fiction and reality. My investigation draws ideas and tools from disciplines as diverse as history, both literary and horticultural, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonialism, ecocriticism and literary theory. This methodological variety is dictated by the garden as a hybrid and ambivalent location. Gardens bridge the humanities and the sciences, poetry and botany, and no single discipline can claim to make sense of them. What are gardens good for? In contrast to agriculture, horticulture does not cater for any basic human needs. Perhaps even programmatically so: in his discussion of ‘defiant’ gardens in wartime, Kenneth I. Helphand recruits the work of environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan to challenge ‘Abraham Maslow who hypothesized that ‘‘basic’’ physiological human needs must be satisfied before ‘‘higher’’ needs can be addressed’, concluding that ‘the definition of ‘‘basic’’ needs revising’. Helphand observes that the book of Genesis, ‘this first commentary on creation’, puts aesthetics before material needs: the trees in paradise are presented as ‘pleasing to the sight’ (‘good to look at’ in many translations) and Helphand underlines that this ‘is cited before food, which is necessary for physical sustenance’. He concludes tentatively: ‘Perhaps the aesthetic is as essential a need as food’ (p. 5). Helphand’s reference to Genesis is significant: more than any other space, with the exception, in recent times, of tropical islands, gardens have functioned as images of paradise both as a mythical point of human origin and as a heavenly destination. Plants, scented flowers especially, have been used as symbols of beauty and goodness and can even be said to have made up an entire vocabulary of love. Almost all geographical regions have garden cultures, making different kinds of gardens familiar concepts to people of different backgrounds and occupations: ‘[G]ardens reflect prevailing social relations of power, culture, race, class, and gender, and there are significant social and environmental consequences connected to the way we garden’.