Language in the Garden: Transcendentalist Legacies and the Problem of Metaphor in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels

Walton, Georgia (2021) Language in the Garden: Transcendentalist Legacies and the Problem of Metaphor in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels. English Studies, 102 (4). pp. 431-452. ISSN 0013-838X

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Abstract

This article interrogates two established critical approaches to Marilynne Robinson’s fiction. First, by analysing the Gilead novels’ engagement with nineteenth-century Transcendentalism, the article challenges the centrality of metaphor to Robinson’s literary project. I show how, in these novels, Robinson resurrects the nineteenth-century divide between Emersonian metaphor and Thoreauvian metonymy. There has been a recent critical move to understand Robinson’s fiction in relation to modern and contemporary literary forbears, but this article shows the complexity, contradiction and self-criticism that inheres in Robinson’s engagement with Transcendentalism. Secondly and connectedly, my argument complicates the current critical consensus that the home is the most significant locus of these novels. I argue that the indoor domestic spaces of the novels are associated with the metaphorical language that Robinson is critiquing and, in turn, that their garden spaces are associated with a form of language that has a more tangible relationship to action and process.