Artificiality and Supplementarity: Universality of the Garden in Literary Representations

This paper looks at the concept of the garden and explores different representations of the garden in various literary texts, including the Bible, Blake’s and Marvell’s poems, Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’, Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, and Da Guan Yuan (Garden of the Great Spectacle) in the Chinese epic novel The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. These literary representations manifest diversified understandings of the garden across different cultures. This paper attempts to reveal the artificiality and supplementarity as the universal features of the garden besides the notions of innocence, virginity and naturalness, concluding that the garden is a space fundamentally artificial and ideological.