Word: lawns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There are. A closer glance at the lawn reveals that the grass ritual is not borne of practical necessity, but that Harvard nonetheless has a vested interest in maintaining the perfect condition of the Yard...
...lawn in the Yard is a deeply, powerfully invested symbolic vehicle of meaning. It represents Harvard's economic and cultural imperialism, its sexist and elitist tendencies and its dichotomous aspiration to identify with both the British Oxbridge educational model and the American Way of life. The small "green span" we constantly traverse wields at least as much power--albeit of a different sort--as the Fed Head himself. Who knew...
...Lawns were not always the chosen landscape of the educational countryside; Oxford and Cambridge adapted and refined their expanses of herbiage to conform to fashion dictates. Oxbridge was the seat of elite male education in Britannia. In her 1994 work, "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession," Virginia Scott Jenkins relates how the lawn concept emerged in the 18th century, when the gardens at Versailles were designed to include a small lawn, called the "tapis vert" and the popularity of Lancelot Brown's landscape stylings in Britain ("a new, elite style characterized by a mixture of meadows, water...
...Owning and cultivating a lawn became a fabulous new way for the social elite to compete in the conspicuous consumption of leisure. A great deal of money was required to buy the materials, hire a designer and planters, and have either gardeners or animals shave it down to its optimum length. When the upper echelons of colonial society returned from their European travels with news of the latest in fashion, food, and home decor, they brought the lawn with them--it came from Old to New England with all its attendant symbolism...
...Oxbridge's lawns were sites of power assertion; their ideological transfer here brings resonances of sexist structural inequality into our own Yard (see Lawn Lib). The grass has other implications as well, which manifest themselves most clearly when contrasted with the unique position the lawn has assumed within the American Dream...