Virgin

The romantic and naturalistic schools of literature have long been pitted against each other by talented theorists best on divorcing freedom (romantic) from determinism (naturalistic) and using literature to promote the extreme they decide is either morally good (freedom) or effectively caused (determinism). In Negligence in the Garden, the characters are faced with deciding if they are free to determine the courses of their lives, or if their lives are set in motion by endless chains of cause and effect. Their world is the place where romanticism meets naturalism. They discover that through acting free, they can become free, but that the importance of understanding where they might stand in relation to any string of cause and effect is also of the utmost importance in determining how to use their freedoms.