정원 가꾸기와 글쓰기 :마사 발라드와 가브리엘 루아

Gardening and Writing in Martha Ballard and Gabrielle Roy

This essay explores the meaning of gardening and writing in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 and Gabrielle Roy’s Garden in the Wind . Gardening and writing are argued to create a space of freedom and life through their creativity and imagination. Garden as a cultivated plot becomes a space of birth and husbandry where food crops and flowers are cultured by women, who seldom have the room of their own in traditional patriarchal households. Garden also functions as private shelter and public space for an artistic representation. Though the parallelism between gardening and writing has been a commonplace since Homer in the European literary tradition, it is remarkable especially for women writers in that both gardening and writing are the acts of cultivation and creativity, that is, of maternal re-productivity, free from patriarchal oppression. The two target texts of this analysis especially reveal the importance of gardening for female characters. Martha Ballard’s garden is a space where she builds her identity as a birth mother, creator and midwife. Martha’s garden also allows her to root in the wild foreign land, and it brings her the grace of salvation, vitality and hope. Here Gabrielle Roy finds the analogical juxtaposition between gardening and creative writing as a means of care, affection and mutual communication given a hostile and incumbent environment and reality. Garden becomes a great space for female characters in the chosen texts to reflect on themselves and others around. Garden is a space of invention which provides materials and plots to write of, a space of vision and epiphany. As women, artists and great thinkers, Martha and Marta are able to create 'the room of their own' through an act of gardening and writing.