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

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.