65 pages • 2-hour read
Orwell's Roses
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Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Retreats and Attacks”
Part 5, Chapter 1 Summary: “Enclosures”
Solnit discusses the sociopolitical importance of gardens. While gardens aren’t often considered political, she posits, they reflect their custodians—and identity itself is always entangled with political questions and cultural markers. She examines the contrast between the highly ordered gardens of Europe and the increasing trend toward naturalness that emerged in England in the latter half of the 18th century. This trend underscored the claims that the aristocracy made on the land. Coupled with the enclosure acts, which turned previously public spaces into privately held areas, these land claims made nature less accessible to most of the English population. Thus, many people within the lower classes moved to urban areas and provided the labor necessary for the Industrial Revolution.
Symbolically, the aristocratic claims to nature had the effect of naturalizing the unequal social order. Solnit acknowledges that during Orwell’s lifetime, nature was not widely considered a political subject; she counters that even if it wasn’t seen as such, nature was certainly a point of political tension—even ignoring its political significance is, in a sense, taking a particular political stance. This is reflected in current trends wherein privileged (usually white) people yearn to return to their rural roots: “[T]he yearning to be more rugged, more rustic, more rough, more scruffy, is often a white and a white-collar yearning” (155). Those who were once yoked to agricultural work (via slavery, sharecropping, migrant farm work, or family inheritance) rarely romanticize that kind of work.
Part 5, Chapter 2 Summary: “Gentility”
In this chapter, Solnit examines a painting by 18th-century English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds. In this painting are three men, two seated and one standing, with a swath of countryside as the backdrop. She explains that the man who is standing somewhat apart from the two seated men was Charles Blair, “Orwell’s great-great-grandfather” (158). This is notable for two specific, intertwined reasons: First, Blair is in the painting because he married into the family of one of the seated gentlemen, making him the son-in-law of an earl; second, the family into which he married gained its wealth from the sugar trade. Thus, Blair’s gentility, his aristocratic privilege, is directly tied to slavery. Sugar cane was grown and harvested, under brutal conditions, by enslaved Africans in Jamaica, one of Britain’s most financially valuable colonies.
Next, Solnit explores the links between quintessentially English activities—drinking a cup of tea, for example—and the global exploitation of labor along with the interconnected web of trade that grew out of the British Empire: “Like cotton and tea and the ceramic dishware called china, sugar was one of the new substances that the colonial era brought to Britain [...] and so that quintessentially English thing, a cup of tea, could be made with Indian tea and Caribbean sugar, served in Chinese porcelain” (161). The marker of gentility comes from the spoils of imperialism and colonialism, themselves inextricably bound to slavery. She notes that the scholar Edward Said pointed out such resonances in the work of Jane Austen; the genteel atmosphere of her novels, especially Mansfield Park, is possible only because of the enslaved labor of others in faraway places. In addition, the organization English Heritage, which oversees Britain’s many country houses, finally acknowledged in 2013 that much of the wealth that made these large estates possible was derived from the “‘Atlantic slave economy’” (163).
Part 5, Chapter 3 Summary: “Sugar, Poppies, Teak”
Solnit notes that Orwell changed his name—he was born Eric Blair—to distance himself from his Scottish family and their dubious history. She notes that his chosen name, George Orwell, was instead very English: George is the patron saint of England, and has its etymological roots in words that “meant farmer, earthworker” (166). In addition, “Orwell was an old English word” (166). Thus, the Scottish Eric Blair, whose family married into wealth made in the slave trade, became the doubly English George Orwell. In contrast, Orwell’s family, by the time he was born, were peripatetic “citizens of empire more than of England” (167).
Orwell’s father worked in India, managing the vast poppy fields that produced opium—a highly addictive drug that was mostly exported to China (and led to two Opium Wars in the 19th century). Orwell was born in India, though he spent much of his childhood at boarding schools in England. He then served as a police officer in Burma (now Myanmar), where the teak forests were one of the primary natural resources to be exploited. Orwell’s lineage can be traced back for centuries, Solnit notes, unlike the lineage of the enslaved or exploited workers that made the British imperial project possible.
Part 5, Chapter 4 Summary: “Old Blush”
Solnit returns her attention to roses, describing the spike in popularity of rose-patterned clothing and decor during her youth in the 1980s. Ralph Lauren and other designers “began using nostalgic floral prints in their clothing and houseware lines” (171). Solnit admits that she herself fell under their sway, because of their nostalgic allure, a looking back to an ideal time that she herself had never lived.
She explains that these rose prints, and Ralph Lauren’s imagery in general, were the products of empire, if not always recognized as such. His signature “polo” shirt and imagery derive from a game exported from India; the chintz and calico rose prints were originally stylized Indian fabrics, while the faux roses themselves were likely modeled on flowers imported from China. In fact, Solnit reveals, most modern varieties of rose were originally derived from Chinese flowers, though they mostly bear distinctly English names. The era of empire reverberates into the present day.
Part 5, Chapter 5 Summary: “Flowers of Evil”
In contrast to the nostalgia that Solnit describes in the previous chapter, the writing of Jamaica Kincaid, a Black woman from Antigua, expresses an unmitigated anger at the enduring legacy of the British Empire. From Kinkaid’s perspective, that legacy is one that enslaved her ancestors, rendered her homeland impoverished, and erased her history and language.
While Kincaid is known primarily as a novelist, she’s an avid gardener and writes movingly—sometimes bitterly—about her forays into the natural world. Roots and rootedness express different meanings to her, as in the uprootedness at the heart of the colonial and postcolonial experiences. Kincaid’s planting of daffodils and writing about the experience in English signifies something different than Orwell’s planting his roses in Wallington. Orwell legitimately came by his English heritage but considered that heritage a mixed blessing at best and wrote pointed critiques of the imperial project and the exploitation it engendered.
Part 5 Analysis
The title of Part 5, “Retreats and Attacks,” is another example of Solnit’s signature juxtapositions. In this case, the retreats and attacks aren’t on a literal field of battle but in the garden. She quotes another gardener: “‘Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks’” (149). While the notion of a garden as an “attack” rather than as a place of respite and retreat, may at first seem counterintuitive, Solnit thoroughly justifies this position by analyzing the features that undergird what at first appears a simple garden or landscape: the inescapable connection among English gardening, the aristocracy, its claim to gentrification, and the underlying project of imperialism—which includes the slave trade and the attendant enslaved labor. The slave trade afforded England (at least the English of a certain class) the wealth and leisure to create elaborate gardens. This is why the characters that populate Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park can enjoy their own romantic pursuits. They don’t need to confront the exploitation of the people working on the sugar plantations in Jamaica, which provided the wealth that affords them their leisure. It’s all inextricably bound together, and Solnit suggests that this rather unsavory, if distant, connection to the British Empire is at least partly what compelled Eric Blair to change his name to George Orwell.
In addition, the notion that the aristocracy rightfully belongs in their country homes—and hence has the privilege to enjoy the greater English countryside—is fraught with political and philosophical justifications that are clearly self-serving. That is, the country homes occupied by the gentry grew out of a series of political decisions, the enclosure acts, which disenfranchised the lower classes from their claims to the land—and connect to arguments about nature that originated during the Enlightenment: “They were arguments of sorts that the English aristocracy and the social hierarchy were themselves natural, that the aristocrats’ power and privilege was rooted in the actual landscape, even as the humbler dwellers were uprooted in the enclosure acts” (150-51). One of the many effects of the enclosure acts was to drive peasant farmers away from the land and into the city to become the marginalized and exploited labor force that fueled the Industrial Revolution. As Solnit argues, paraphrasing historian Peter Linebaugh, the processes of “enclosure, slavery, and mechanization [were] a trinity of brutally transformative forces at work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (151). Thus, English wealth—and, with it, the English garden and country home—was built on the backs of enslaved peoples abroad and exploited workers at home, which underscores one of the book’s main themes: Politics and the Natural Landscape.
She goes further, exploring the links between gentility (English power and privilege) and slavery (imperial exploitation). In the first case, the money that was needed to enter the aristocratic ranks, to be a member of the gentry, often derived from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the resulting enslaved labor. Solnit discusses Orwell’s great-great-grandfather’s connection to this ruthless network:
The money that qualified Blair to link himself to the daughter of an earl came from Jamaica, which is to say it came from sugar. Sugar in that era was both an extraordinarily valuable crop [...] and the result of extraordinarily brutal slave labor (159).
She adds that in Jamaica, most of the population was enslaved, which justified the extremely cruel and tyrannical treatment meted out by the British masters.
In addition, Solnit addresses the long-lived repercussions of the British Empire, not just in its political impacts but also in its cultural power. A native Californian, she expresses the nostalgia for the chintz and calico roses of Ralph Lauren and other designers in the 1980s, which shows how much Britain and its long-gone empire loom in the contemporary imagination. She notes that Lauren’s “goods and vision were about the empire, but the empire was always about people seeming to dominate things that had overtaken and transformed them” (173-74). That is, the process of global trade and trans-cultural exchanges obscures the origins of objects and the labor that produced them. Thus, high tea can be seen as an essentially English pastime, while its origins are rooted in the spoils of empire, from the tea itself to the sugar that sweetens it to the porcelain cup (china) out of which it’s sipped.
In the postcolonial era, Solnit discovers both this obscuring of origins and a kind of resistance. Ralph Lauren appropriated the cultural accoutrements of the British Empire to build his own global empire of clothing and housewares. The domestic rose industry appropriated the Chinese rose, which now dominates the market, but the names that are given to these crossbred varieties are distinctly English. Princess Diana could be called an “English rose,” while real roses, with Chinese origins, have names like “Ancient Mariner, Wife of Bath, Thomas a Becket, and Emily Bronte” (176), all English references. Colonial authority persists in the process of naming, which is also a process of claiming (ownership). Still, Solnit cites the writer Jamaica Kincaid as one voice who speaks back, using the English language forced upon her through the processes of colonization and the slave trade. Solnit ultimately links Kincaid’s opposition to Orwell’s own: While he was a product of his time, admittedly, he was committed to challenging the status quo. Solnit quotes him: “‘In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation’” (183). In this, and in many other ways, Orwell speaks truth to power.
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