Gardens in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums,” and Xiaoping Zhu’s “Chronicle of Mulberry Tree Village”
Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums,” and Zhu’s “Chronicle of Mulberry Tree Village” feature a garden, which symbolizes a character’s inner turmoil by drawing parallels between their repression and the gardens they have created in order to facilitate a façade of internal harmony. The symbolic history of gardens begins with nearly every culture’s creation story. Eden, as it is called in Christian theology, was a paradise created to house one man and one woman, perfect and without sin. Their souls untarnished, they were able to live in utopia until their inevitable fall, after which the garden became their veritable enemy. No longer were they able to cull food from it easily or to use it as they had before. Their sin had separated their souls, and therefore their entire selves from the garden.......
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Approximate Word Count: 2236
Approximate Pages: 9 (260 words per double-spaced page) |