This article investigates Elizabeth von Arnim’s construction of an Italian ‘garden of Eden’ in The Enchanted April (1922) as a space essentially characterized by magic and timelessness. It sets itself the goal of shedding light on the Anglophone cultural and literary construction of Italy as a time-capsule in partial discontinuity with the modern world. It will be argued that The Enchanted April re-articulates the tropes of such a notion in a distinctively brilliant and light-hearted key.
The multi-coloured, abundantly luxuriant, and anarchic character of the flora in the gardens of Villa San Salvatore, where most of the drama takes place, mirrors the casual, unexpected, but fortunate encounter of four different women at the centre of the novel’s narration. This space, plentiful, sunny, and animated by a benevolent atmosphere towards its visitors, will serve as the main stage for the heroines’ much needed rest, voluntary exile, introspection, falling in love, restoration, and healing. Despite their distinct social statuses, personalities, and age, the ladies will connect with one another leaving behind initial reluctancies, personal idiosyncrasies, and mutual distrust.
By placing the protagonists within a bounded space of natural beauty, blissfully chaotic but still manageable and cultivated, von Arnim aptly illustrates England’s relationship to Italy as an imagined connection to a ‘faintly oriental’ and ‘other’ domain frequently functioning, in Anglophone narratives of the time, as the privileged context for a (mild) challenging and subsequent restoration of the (British normative) self and the rediscovery of natural and unaffected existential values.
