Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower against Gardens” famously begins with his contrarian mower castigating “Luxurious man” (1) for his rapacious exploitation of the natural world.1 Throughout the poem, the mower criticizes the ways in which nature is converted into capitalist commodities; even as his over-the-top delivery may be somewhat ludic in tone, it is at first blush easy to commend such an ecologically minded perspective, one that opposes human corruption of nature for personal financial gain. Upon another look, however, the mower’s rejection of exploitative if lucrative horticultural practices has at least as much to do with troubling racial anxiety as it does laudable environmentalist concerns. In this paper, I explore the racial implications of Marvell’s “The Mower against Gardens,” showing how the titular mower expresses suspicion toward foreign others; conveys deep anxiety about interracial procreation; evinces particular concern about female vanity as both product and driver of racial intermixing; and seeks to return to a fantasized England characterized by idealized if occluded labor relations and a comfortable insularity, untainted by modern agricultural and horticultural innovations and the foreign otherness they imply. In so doing, I situate Marvell’s work within the vital context of premodern critical race studies, furthering our understanding of Marvell’s engagement with the broader sociopolitical context of English racial formations, a topic that has been relatively understudied. I thus show how this bathetic, amusing poem teems with racial anxiety, despite its relatively humorous posture. I further demonstrate how the roots of the all-too-common alliance of pro-environmental and racist rhetoric extend (at least) to the English early modern. Overall, I argue, Marvell’s mower’s laudable if grumpy environmental concerns are ultimately inextricable from the undeniable racism underlying their articulation.

Despite the extensive imbrication of “The Mower against Gardens” in questions of colonialism and race, and their relationship to emergent capitalism, Marvell scholars have largely been silent on the racial implications of not only “Mower,” but also Marvell’s oeuvre more generally. Benedict Robinson’s 2009 article, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” productively if briefly uses “Mower” as a lens to discuss the colonial and orientalized rhetoric that the early modern English used to characterize the tulip trade.2 Other discussions of race in Marvell are few and far between. In “‘She Straightness on the Woods Bestows’: Protestant Sexuality and English Empire in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House,” Melissa Sanchez shows how the erotic and gendered sensibility that pervades Marvell’s canon actively contradicts the imperialist, patriarchal ethos one can often find in a surface reading of his poetry.3 However, as I will argue “Mower” demonstrates, Marvell’s relationship to English chauvinism and its imperial implications can be rather more ambivalent, the poem’s critique of the mower arising less from discomfort with his white supremacist leanings than his failure to recognize his own implication in the very practices he castigates. More recently, Blaine Greteman has situated the mention of “Indian Slaves” in Marvell’s “Mourning” in the context of the contemporary practice of forcing enslaved indigenous Americans and Africans to act as pearl divers in the Caribbean, pointing out how Marvell’s poem works to “aestheticize slavery.”4 Ross Lerner has similarly explored Marvell’s deployment of the curse of Ham story in The First Anniversary, arguing that “strategies for racialization, including the allusion to the curse of Ham, emerge explicitly in the poem only to be aestheticized.”5 Outside of this handful of isolated examples, however, race has largely not formed a topic of inquiry in Marvell studies. Yet, as I will show below, “The Mower against Gardens” is intimately bound up in questions of race and interracial eroticism that cannot be separated from its proto-environmentalist ethos.

More often, Marvell’s poetry in general and “The Mower against Gardens” specifically are considered as revisions to the pastoral genre, necessary adaptations in light of the various military, economic, and ontological traumas shaping the mid-seventeenth century. Marvell’s treatment of the genre is central to major texts on early modern pastoral, such as Harry Berger’s Second World and Green World and William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral.6 Victoria Silver, for instance, posits the Marvellian pastoral as indelibly marked by the regicide of Charles I, the poem pervaded by “estranged, allegorized recollections of that political parricide, from whose memory and his own complicitous past the speaker strives to escape, yet cannot”; Anthony Funari sees the mower sequence as answering “Bacon’s question as to whether humanity can recover Adamic mastery over Nature, figured as a feminine other available for sexual exploitation” with a resounding “no”; and N.K. Sugimura argues that this “poetry teeters at the edge of an epistemological breakdown.”7 These scholars regard Marvell’s pastoral poetry as a response to ontological trauma, whether occasioned by the Civil Wars, personal loss (either prior or anticipated), or the upended epistemologies and estrangement from nature wrought by the new science and post-Cartesian philosophy. Other critics have situated the Marvellian pastoral as a more direct response to the changing economic structure of the mid-seventeenth century. For Bradford Boyd, the “Mower poems add to a literature of rural protest in English that critiques the condition of agricultural laborers” against a backdrop of “agricultural and horticultural improvements that are leaving people like Damon [the mower] behind economically and socially,” in line with the major changes in agriculture and land ownership coalescing in the mid-seventeenth century.8 Margaret Summerfield similarly sees the mower as a tragic figure: where in earlier periods he would have likely been a tenant farmer with some social and familial connection to land and community, by the mid-seventeenth century, he is consigned to the isolated life of the itinerant laborer; as such, he “does not possess a fully recognized identity under England’s political system, and his detachment from his environment effaces his biological as well as social identity … his meager status within England’s economic system emasculates and infantilizes him.”9 And in a trenchant reading that calls out the persistent scholarly greenwashing of Marvell’s poems—that is, the tendency to assimilate them to environmentalist agendas without properly attending to their ambiguities and complexities—Brendan Prawdzik carries this point further, arguing that these poems ultimately stage a “division at the heart of experience that is bound up with the history of the laborer-in-the-land,” a history that, in the seventeenth century, culminates in displacement and alienation.10 These latter readings are, I believe, largely accurate in the connections they adduce between the frankly unpleasant mower and the broader socioeconomic forces shaping his feelings of alienation from land and community. However, they by and large do not address the ways in which this economic dispossession manifests itself in not only misogyny (as multiple critics have shown) but also xenophobia and racism.

As Summerfield and Boyd note, the mid-seventeenth century was a time of significant agricultural and economic change, reflected in Marvell’s poetry. According to Marshall Grossman,

The historical moment indicated in Marvell’s poem … evoke[s] in miniature an economic and social history of the mid-seventeenth century: the increase in aggressive agricultural technology, the enclosure movement, the displacement of agricultural workers, [and] the gradually developing Protestant tendency to identify the accumulation of material and moral good.11

The enclosure movement, though inseparable from the other factors Grossman identifies, was not a new phenomenon in the seventeenth century,12 but it was a frequent source of popular ire in the early modern period. While enclosure was frequently rationalized on the grounds of the increased economic profits it yielded, it remained a controversial and largely unpopular process, at least among the lower classes whom it affected most materially. In the words of Katherine Bootle Attie, “in the eyes of the rest of the agrarian population, enclosing landlords were seen as acting in no one’s interest but their own. The main victims of enclosure were the poor subsistence farmers whose survival was tied to the scattered strips of land they cultivated on the commons.”13 Not only did enclosure mean loss of access to fuel and formerly common grazing lands, it also brought a great deal of economic instability, as Summerfield points out: “while the life of a tenant farmer was full of hardships and subject to its own uncertainties, it could provide a degree of stability that eludes that of a landless, seasonal laborer.”14 It is in this context—economic dispossession and loss of the social identity that once offered meaning to the tenant farmer—that we must read the Marvellian mower; while his racism and suspicion of foreign others is by no means justifiable, in this context it is explicable—and indeed, part of a tendency by no means consigned to the seventeenth century.

I

On its face, “The Mower against Gardens” is a comically over-the-top poem in which a cantankerous mower fulminates against the human exploitation of plant sexuality, attacking a world in which human voyeurs and petty-god horticulturalists manipulate and corrupt plants by forcing them to breed in unnatural ways to serve capitalistic ends. From his opening salvo, the mower rages against the sexually suspect nature of human avarice, asserting “Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, / Did after him the world seduce” (1–2). In addition to the obvious sexual charge implied by “seduce,” “luxurious” and “use” both had specifically sexual connotations in the early modern period, meaning “lecherous” and “sex” respectively; the rhyme of “seduce” and “use,” then, highlights the inextricability of sexual corruption from horticultural innovation. Corrupting the innocent natural world, humans “from the fields the flowers and plants allure, / Where Nature was most plain and pure” (3–4), removing them from their natural habitats through dubious means. After a glancing critique of enclosure as a newfangled and damaging agricultural practice—“He first enclosed within the gardens square / A dead and standing pool of air” (5–6), enclosure thus associated with stagnation and death—the mower proceeds to criticize other agricultural innovations at greater length, focusing on both improvements in plant nutrition and crossbreeding. Creating a “more luscious earth” for the plants (7) that “stupefied them while it fed” (8), the mower vents his dislike of new fertilizers that he believes “did change the kind,” that is, have led to an ontological shift in the plants’ constitutions. From consumption of such stupefying food, the carnation “grew then as double as his mind” (9), becoming either hypocritical in its duplicity or ambiguous in its duplication, leading to epistemological uncertainty in either case. Turning his attention to crossbreeding practices that allow flowers to acquire new coloration, the mower is enraged that roses are “taint[ed]” (11) with “strange perfumes” and “flowers themselves were taught to paint” (12). Like a procurer, man sexualizes the flowers, not only smearing them with makeup but also teaching them to paint (and thus debase) themselves, making them active participants in their own degradation.

And yet he corrupts his floral victims even more fundamentally by realigning their aesthetic preferences through the ontological shifts induced by transplantation into corrupted soil and inappropriate, mixed breeding practices—flowers now want to wear cosmetics: “The tulip, white, did for complexion seek; / And learned to interline its cheek” (13–14). “Complexion” is here an interestingly ambiguous term; it means both “cosmetics” and “natural complexion,” suggesting that the tulips ultimately come to regard their painted complexions as natural, their native judgment and physical appearance thus perverted to conform to human preference, and, as we shall come to shortly, humans’ debased economic motives. The shift of agency between lines twelve and thirteen—though initially “taught” to paint, tulips then “seek” complexion themselves—redoubles the emphasis on man’s corrupting influence over the natural world, as flowers themselves are seduced to participate in their own perversion. And all of this is a smutty travesty perpetrated not for the benefit of the flowers, but rather for transnational commercial interests; once the tulip has become variegated,

Its onion root they then so high did hold,

That one was for a meadow sold.

Another world was searched, through oceans new,

To find the Marvel of Peru. (15–18)

Humans have undertaken huge and unnecessary labors to wantonly transplant flowers into soils for which they are not natively suited; once back in England, they crossbred them to the point of unrecognizability, converting their natural beauty into commodity in order to gain wealth.

Over the top as his concerns may seem thus far, the mower’s hysteria reaches a pitch when he begins to speak of plant sexuality more directly, or, rather, of man’s avaricious exploitation of plant sexuality: man has

…dealt between the bark and tree,

Forbidden mixtures there to see.

No plant now knew the stock from which it came;

He grafts upon the wild the tame:

That the uncertain and adult’rate fruit

Might put the palate in dispute.

His green seraglio has its eunuchs too;

Lest any tyrant him outdo.

And in the cherry he does Nature vex

To procreate without a sex. (21–30)

For the mower, crossbreeding plants is a sexual vice. Man “dealt between the bark and tree,” the verb “dealt” not only bringing to mind business ventures but also carrying illicit, scandalous, and sinister implications.15 According to Nigel Smith, these “forbidden mixtures” call to mind both Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9, the mower’s invective thus taking on the weight of biblical interdiction.16 In his avarice, man “grafts upon the wild the tame,” illegitimately merging domesticated and wild—civilized and barbarous—botanical life. That is to say, the practice of grafting, in the period often “signal[ing] a disruption of the social order” and an “unsanctioned combination of different family lines,” per Erin Ellerbeck, here allows the horticulturalist to play panderer and scandalously cross-breed plants.17 As the wild shoots are grafted into the body of the domestic plant, the mower reveals an anxiety about the corruption of domesticated breeds this entails. The fruits of this union are “adult’rate,” that is, impure and morally compromised progeny that connote more than a whiff of sexual disrepute. Such outrageous admixture further disrupts the natural sensory epistemologies of taste: “put[ting] the palate in dispute,” it confuses the senses and undermines human ability to perceive and interpret the natural world. And the language of “seraglio,” “eunuchs,” and cherries “procreat[ing] without a sex” insists on the unnatural, forced, and indeed violent nature of botanical generation in this venture, in which procreation becomes artificial, “enforced” (31), and estranged from the natural world it ostensibly serves to propagate.

The mower’s solution to this conundrum is simple: a return to the halcyon days of English folklore, when “fauns and fairies do the meadows till, / More by their presence than their skill” (35–36). Returning to an English Eden, “Where willing Nature does to all dispense / A wild and fragrant innocence” (33–34), the mower counters the idea that human intervention is at all necessary for the successful maintenance of the gardens. Of course, this is rather ironic, given his own position as a mower—hardly a figure who takes a noninterventionist stance vis-à-vis the natural world—and the fields he evokes are, as he notes, not natural but rather require tillage, here performed by fauns and fairies. That he uses the present tense to suggest such an idealized relationship is still possible further suggests the naïvety of his nostalgic fantasy; had it ever been possible, it certainly wasn’t in the mid-seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the vision on which the poem closes is the return to a time before humans eagerly and cruelly exploited plant sexuality for their own avaricious gain.

So far, so laudable; that is, the mower takes a stance against human exploitation of natural resources, what Funari sees as resistance to “the narrative of the Scientific Revolution that will predominate in the seventeenth-century,” a narrative that will in many ways sever the relationship between scientist and natural world, instead constructing the latter as the proper object of epistemological—and sexual—domination.18 However, as Prawdzik cautions, such a reading of Marvell tends to smooth off the rough edges of his work in order to conform to contemporary notions of ecological morality—that is, it’s a form of greenwashing.19 And while Prawdzik is quite right to remind us that the criticized “pleasure garden [is] complicit, on the one hand, in the enclosure movement and its geographical and macroeconomic implications and, on the other, in the emergence of the commodity-form, which is the sign of these transitions,” the mower’s reasons are not mere rejection of emergent, exploitative forms of capitalism and agrarian labor arrangements.20 To simply affirm the mower’s stance as a bathetic but ultimately benign or even beneficent instance of ecological thought overlooks a critical challenge this poem poses: the ways in which the mower articulates his environmentalist stance aligns his perspective with white supremacy.

II

The mower’s concerns in this poem are not merely directed toward the rapacious exploitation of plant sexuality by budding capitalists; rather, his distress reflects contemporary English anxieties about racial mixing and colonial enterprise. In effect, the mower is horrified at what he sees as illicit admixture and scrambled taxonomies. His fear that “The nutriment did change the kind” (10), that the “luscious earth” (7) “stupifie[s]” (8) the flowers, reflects in miniature very real contemporary anxieties that English colonists might experience unprecedented physiological and ontological change as a result of their transplantation into foreign climates and environments—a danger to which the English, with their malleable complexions in geohumoral racial paradigms, were believed to be particularly susceptible.21 The impressionability of the English complexion also explains part of his contempt for crossbreeding plants for color—he has no qualms about potential adverse effects on their yield, beauty or resilience. Rather, he fears the corruption of a feminized natural purity, whether the roses’ scent or the tulips’ whiteness. His freakout about tulips learning to paint themselves recasts contemporary debates over women’s use of cosmetics, which, in addition to potentially signifying female vanity and moral turpitude, also had the alarming effect of destabilizing complexion as a meaningful index of racial and class difference.22 And indeed, several early modern theorists (most notably John Bulwer) even posited that phenotypical racial distinctions were the result of cosmetics, what was once artificial paint becoming naturalized in a proto-Lamarckian understanding of heredity.23 Further, the foreign origin of many cosmetic products provoked concern:

the most sought-after cosmetics in the period were foreign products from Asia, Africa, or the Americas, and since cosmetics were applied directly to the skin (a porous bodily boundary), women who used these products encoded anxieties about race-mingling and cross-cultural contact on their skins.24

Through the feminized flowers becoming addicted to cosmetics and thus interlining their own cheeks, then, we see concerns about weak-willed women becoming not only consumers but also vectors of interracial mixing, even as their initial corruption is ostensibly the work of a male capitalist-scientist.

Indeed, the mower’s scornful castigation of the sailors who travel the world to track down the “Marvel of Peru” points to a critique not of European colonialism as such, but rather of the incursion of foreign flowers into European climes, and, even more particularly, of the potential for foreign plants to thus sexually contaminate English flowers. (That the white tulip is not in fact native to England is a fact that appears to elude the mower, as Robinson has pointed out.)25 Indeed, after enumerating the moral perils of these newfangled plants, the cosmeticized tulip and the Marvel of Peru, he in fact grudgingly admits

And yet these rarities might be allowed

To man that sovereign thing and proud

Had he not dealt between the bark and tree

Forbidden mixtures there to see. (19–22)

That is to say, while the mower is dubious about the importation of plants, he reluctantly admits their potential if inadvisable permissibility—until he realizes the sexual implications of such imports. Such anxieties are wrought even further by the invocation of grafting, the charge that the heedless horticultural innovator “dealt between the bark and tree / Forbidden mixtures there to see” (21–22) and “grafts upon the wild the tame” (24). Grafting was a process that, as Miranda Wilson puts it, problematically “introduc[ed] uncertainty into Renaissance distinctions between high and low, animal and plant, human and nonhuman”; to the taxonomically-minded mower, this is bad enough.26 However, we can also consider grafting as having a racial dimension as well; this becomes clear when we consider that the mower is most anxious that the wild is grafted onto the tame, the foreign or barbarous onto the domestic. Indeed, the mechanics of grafting—in which a shoot from one plant is inserted into a notch carved in the other—provide a particularly fertile ground for such anxieties about sexual scurrility and racial admixture. The fruit produced by hybridization is “forbidden,” “uncertain,” and “adult’rate,” adumbrating anxieties about species purity and legibility that will undergird the project of scientific taxonomization—“a scientific method that was developed in and through its colonial, anti-Black, and pathologizing uses,” in Kadji Amin’s words, and one that is central to the development of so-called “scientific racism” of the nineteenth century.27 And this concern at bastardized fruit, the “forbidden” outcome of these dubious mixtures, reflects the increasing discomfiture with interracial sexual relationships that develops across the seventeenth century, a trajectory that scholars like Carmen Nocentelli have demonstrated.28 Thus, the mower’s anxieties about category contamination place him squarely in the rhetorics of an emergent English chauvinism and white supremacy, anxious about the corruption of a pure English whiteness and endogamous botany, despite his laudable concerns for human exploitation of the botanical world.

This admittedly comic hysteria about the cataclysmic implications of hybrid fruit reaches its fever pitch when the mower fantasizes an Ottoman pleasure house as the scene of such deviant mixtures. Recasting nature as the “green seraglio” of a “tyrant,” attended by cherry-eunuchs, the speaker plays on contemporary, racist English depictions of the Ottoman court as the site of luxury, indulgence, tyranny, and what the early modern English would consider heathenry and likely sodomy. The figure of the eunuch signifies with particular racializing significance here, as Abdulhamit Arvas has shown:

In England, with the increased importance of Anglo-Ottoman encounters in the 1580s as a result of England’s participation in Mediterranean trade, the figure of the eunuch emerged as an integral, orientalist component of travelogues and stage plays, and as means of signaling Ottoman otherness.29

Sodomy too was highly associated with Ottoman sexuality, as Arvas and others have well documented.30 This is to say, the speaker uses an orientalist rhetoric of the harem and its eunuch guardians to further denaturalize human incursions into botanical sex lives, positioning a natural English sexual purity against a corrupt, Eastern sexual deviance as he does so. The speaker’s critique of crossbreeding for capitalistic, greedy aims slides into a criticism of all crossbreeding as unnatural and indeed un-English, not only because of its contamination of the purity of English flora but also because it is associated (in his rhetoric) with the ostensibly debased sexual practices of the Ottoman Empire.

The answer, it seems, is recourse to a retrospective, nostalgic, and fictive English purity:

’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot;

While the sweet fields do lie forgot:

Where willing Nature does to all dispense

A wild and fragrant innocence:

And fauns and fairies do the meadows till

More by their presence than their skill.

Their statues polished by some ancient hand,

May to adorn the gardens stand:

But howsoe’er the figures do excel,

The gods themselves with us do dwell. (31–40)

After the “enforced” rape of nature, the mower takes comfort in a pure, innocent England, one in which Nature provides for all, free of charge; in this fantasy, agricultural labor does not actually entail work but is rather facilitated by the mere presence of those stalwarts of English folklore, “fauns and fairies.” The speaker yearns for this purified, insular, idealized past—although the concealed toil, both that displaced onto the fauns and fairies and that hinted at with the sleight-of-“ancient hand” that polished the fauns’ and fairies’ statues (that is, the statues required work to create and polish) can’t totally circumvent the problems of labor this poem raises. This is a particularly weird way to end this poem, given that the speaker moves to both celebrate the work undertaken by “fauns and fairies” to “till” the meadows (35) and admire the “statues polished” (37) that “adorn the gardens” (38). By lauding not only agricultural labor but also “statues polished”—that is to say, artistic creations—the speaker praises the very artificiality he has lambasted throughout the poem. This shift to embrace artifice reminds the reader that whatever professions of naturalism the mower wishes to make can only be ironic given his occupation as mower, a figure that can hardly be said to leave the natural world to its own devices. This imagined pure, English landscape, then, is very clearly only a fantasy, one in which the mower himself has no place.

Despite the irony of this conclusion, human manipulation of plant sexuality is in this poem presented as explicitly negative, harmful to the flowers and evidence of humans’ conjunction of corrupt commerciality and sexual perversity; in this way, it might be said to evince something of a proto-environmentalist ethic. In closing, I would like to consider how the racist imperatives of the poem’s ecological agenda do not divorce it from a major strand of the mainstream Western environmental tradition, which has historically included “visions of a sublime and romantic wilderness [that] have served narratives of white supremacy that promote a right and wrong way of engaging with nature,” per Sarah J. Wald.31 While the mower does not advocate a sublime, post-Romantic vision of the natural world, he nevertheless emphatically posits a right and wrong way of engaging with nature, one that relies on romanticized fantasies of an insular, quasi-magical past. As Wald and others have shown, Western environmental movements have all too often sought to create idealized consumer, settler-colonial, cisheteronormative subjects through ideals of a pristine nature untouched by human hands, one available for the rugged (white, male) subject to appreciate and consume.32 While the whiteness of such visions is often implicit, environmentalist rhetoric often explicitly engages in racist fantasies of the ostensible harms posed by people of color, such as the “so-called population bomb that considered people of color and those from the developing world as agents of uncontrolled population growth,” which “surmised that uncontrolled population growth would promise global environmental catastrophe.”33 While the mower does not evince anxieties about overpopulation, we can see how related concerns of English botany being crowded out and replaced by foreign imports is very much on his mind. The alliance, that is, of an ostensibly environmentalist ethic and white supremacist overtones is hardly unique to Marvell, yet understanding the deep roots of this environmentalist racism is central, I argue, for continuing to combat its effects in the present.

In “The Mower against Gardens,” then, we see both a laudable skepticism vis-à-vis human exploitation of plant sexuality for commercial and capitalist ends and a troubling nascent white supremacist ethic that is leery of the contamination of the purity of English flora not merely because of the dubious pecuniary aims of the cross-breeders but also because of the greater principle of species and racial pollution this entails. These two imperatives, of rejecting the exploitation of plants for financial gain and of protecting English purity from foreign incursions, I argue, are not incidental to one another but inextricably intertwined. What are we, finally, to make of this poem? Marvell’s own position is characteristically difficult to pin down, and certainly the poem does not offer a clear-cut repudiation of the mower’s white supremacist leanings. Yet the bathos of Marvell’s mower invites us to take a critically distanced perspective from this ludic figure, whose position is undercut by his own status as a mower, that is, someone who participates in the very agricultural labor he castigates. The critique of the mower, which is both implicit and clear, is nevertheless not wholly satisfying for readers looking for an antiracist message: the poem ironizes the mower’s contradictory attitudes, rather than his racism—what comes under fire is his hypocrisy, not his position per se. What we can say is, I think, that with his characteristic elusiveness, Marvell shows intellectual incoherence in a figure who conjoins an ostensibly environmentalist ethic with white supremacy, yet he does so in ways that do not offer a significant challenge to this conjunction as such.

Notes

  1. All Marvell quotations are from Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013); line numbers will be cited parenthetically. [^]
  2. Benedict S. Robinson, “Green Seraglios: Tulips, Turbans, and the Global Market,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2009): 93–122. [^]
  3. Melissa Sanchez, “‘She Straightness on the Woods Bestows’: Protestant Sexuality and English Empire in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House,” in Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment, ed. Toni Bowers and Tita Chico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 81–96. [^]
  4. Blaine Greteman, “White Tears and Indian Slaves in Marvell’s ‘Mourning,’” Marvell Studies 7, no. 1 (2022): 3 [^]
  5. Ross Lerner, “Marvell’s Issues: Race and the Curse of Ham,” Marvell Studies 8, no. 1 (2023): 3. [^]
  6. Harry Berger, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 251–323; William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 119–45. For another classic account of the Marvellian pastoral, see also David Kalstone, “Marvell and the Fictions of Pastoral,” English Literary Renaissance 4, no. 1 (1974): 174–188. [^]
  7. Victoria Silver, “The Obscure Script of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls in Marvell’s Pastorals,” ELH 68, no. 1 (2001): 51; Anthony J. Funari, “‘Companions of My Thoughts More Green’: Damon’s Baconian Sexing of Nature,” Early English Studies 3 (2010): 2; N.K. Sugimura, “Marvell’s Mind and the Glow-Worms of Extinction,” Review of English Studies 62, no. 254 (2010): 249. [^]
  8. Bradford Boyd, “Marvell’s Mower Poems as Alternative Literary History,” Marvell Studies 1, no. 1 (2016): 6. [^]
  9. Margaret Summerfield, “Almanac Time and Growing Older in Andrew Marvell’s Mower Poems,” SEL 63, no. 1 (2025): 92. [^]
  10. Brendan Prawdzik, “Greenwashing Marvell,” Marvell Studies 4, no. 1 (2019): 19. [^]
  11. Marshall Grossman, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 96. [^]
  12. See e.g. Christopher Dyer, “Conflict in the Landscape: The Enclosure Movement in England, 1220–1349,” Landscape History 28, no. 1 (2006): 21–33. [^]
  13. Katherine Bootle Attie, “Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s,” SEL 51, no. 1 (2011): 135. [^]
  14. Summerfield, “Almanac Time,” 92. [^]
  15. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “deal” (v.), II.12, accessed September 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9660191666. [^]
  16. Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, 134n22. [^]
  17. Erin Ellerbeck, “‘A Bett’ring of Nature’: Grafting and Embryonic Development in The Duchess of Malfi,” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 89. [^]
  18. Funari, “‘Companions of My Thoughts More Green,’” 2. [^]
  19. Prawdzik, “Greenwashing Marvell,” passim. [^]
  20. Ibid., 14. [^]
  21. See e.g. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 49. [^]
  22. For the relationship between whiteness and cosmetics, see e.g. Kimberly Poitevin, “Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 59–89. [^]
  23. E.g. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 85. [^]
  24. Poitevin, “Inventing Whiteness,” 63. [^]
  25. Robinson, “Green Seraglios,” 101. [^]
  26. Miranda Wilson, “Bastard Grafts, Crafted Fruits: Shakespeare’s Planted Families,” in The Indistinct Human, 105. [^]
  27. Kadji Amin, “Taxonomically Queer? Sexology and the New Queer, Trans, and Asexual Identities,” GLQ 29, no. 1 (2023): 95. [^]
  28. Carmen Nocentelli, Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). [^]
  29. Abdulhamit Arvas, “Early Modern Eunuchs and the Transing of Gender and Race,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019): 125; Arvas also demonstrates how Black and non-Black eunuchs were regarded differently in both Ottoman and English texts. [^]
  30. See e.g. Arvas, “Performing and Desiring Gender Variance in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,” in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, ed. Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, & Anna Kłosowska (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 108–18; Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 63–118; Nocentelli, Empires of Love, 131. [^]
  31. Sarah J. Wald, “The National Park Foundation’s ‘American Latino Expedition’: Consumer Citizenship as Pathway to Multicultural National Belonging,” in Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial, ed. Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), 53. [^]
  32. E.g. ibid., 53–54. For more on this alignment, see e.g. Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) and Kyle Boggs, “The Rhetorical Landscapes of the ‘Alt Right’ and the Patriot Movements,” in The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse, and Communication, ed. Bernhard Forchtner (London: Routledge, 2019), 293–309. [^]
  33. David J. Vázquez, “Memory, Space, and Gentrification: The Legacies of the Young Lords and Urban Decolonial Environmentalism in Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams,” in Latinx Environmentalisms, 216. [^]

Acknowledgements

An early version of this article was presented at the 2025 Renaissance Society of American conference. I benefitted greatly from the ensuing discussion and would like to thank all panel attendees for their generative feedback. I would also like to thank Ryan Netzley at Marvell Studies for his insights and assistance in seeing the project to fruition.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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