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Flowers and Femininity: Cultivating Gender in the Victorian English Novel

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Flowers and Femininity: Cultivating Gender in the Victorian English Novel Catsikis, Phyllis Joyce (2009) "A brilliant burst of botanical imagination": Proserpina and the nineteenth-century evolution of myth. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/774/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] “A brilliant burst of botanical imagination”: Proserpina and the Nineteenth-Century Evolution of Myth Phyllis Joyce Catsikis Ph.D. University of Glasgow Faculty of Arts Department of English Literature April 2009 ©Phyllis Joyce Catsikis 2009 With popular interest in Linnaean botany thriving at the turn of the century, the Proserpina myth and its central focus on flowers and the feminine support nineteenth-century approaches to nature as an object of both scientific study and a source of spiritual or moral contemplation and guidance. The mythological figure of Proserpina with her dual nature of innocence and sexuality, is easily transposed into or appropriated as a flower- woman who can be identified with the moral typology or teaching of a mother‟s botany—whether it be the maternal ideology of the “Linnaean years” or the Wordsworthian nature philosophy of Victorian Romantics—or the scientific knowledge of the “sexual system” and its link to industrial, technological science. Drawing upon historicist myth criticism, I trace the nineteenth-century evolution of the Proserpina myth into botanical discourse within contemporary views of myth‟s organic quality and enduring aesthetic significance as a product of the imagination. Like modern critics of myth, nineteenth-century writers valued myth as literature or art and as adaptable and evolving. I follow the botanical evolution of the Proserpina myth, as a historical, literary construct, from its reception in the late eighteenth-century botanical poetry of Catherine Maria Fanshawe and Erasmus Darwin through the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth and into its Victorian evolution as a narrative of change in the fiction of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell and the prose of John Ruskin. Language, form and structure, morality and science, are concerns which literature, botany and myth all share in the nineteenth century, as the Victorians attempt to articulate their relationship to a changing natural world. The myth‟s reception by my nominated writers reveals three readings of female sexuality as passive, active or ambivalent, based upon the identification of girl and flower as a contested site between conflicting sides of a maternal or sexual nature. Proserpina‟s coming-of-age highlights the tension within nature and indicates predominant attitudes toward or preferences for moral nature, scientific nature or ambivalence, which ultimately signify corresponding perceptions of social change. Nature is sacred, violated by industrialism and in need of preservation and protection, or nature is ripe and ready for scientific exploration and industrial development. The Victorian preoccupation with myth, flowers and the feminine is evident in the appropriation and interpretation of the popular myth of Proserpina as a narrative of change capturing an ambivalence toward industrial society: a fractured consciousness caught between nostalgia and progress that is in keeping with the narrative‟s double cast, looking backward to childhood and forward to romance or marriage. An innocent female protagonist and daughter figure, nurtured by a rural, maternal nature, is threatened by the entrance or intrusion of a male seducer/suitor figure associated with the industrial, scientific world. The heroine exists as a contested site of innocence, threatened like the landscape itself. Contents Acknowledgements Introduction. Botanizing Myth: Proserpina, Myth Reception 1 and the Nineteenth-Century Evolution of Myth Chapter 1. “The little botanizing beauty”: Catherine Maria 34 Fanshawe and Erasmus Darwin Chapter 2. “In the bud” of girlhood: William Wordsworth 63 and Shirley Hibberd Chapter 3. The Rose, the Conservatory and Proserpina‟s Arm: 99 George Eliot and The Mill on the Floss Chapter 4. The Nosegay, The Railroad and A Sketch of Ceres: 144 Elizabeth Gaskell and Cousin Phillis Chapter 5. “Unbind[ing] our bouquet”: John Ruskin 188 and Proserpina Epilogue. “Through all the forms and faces of things” 234 Bibliography 242 Appendix 284 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Nicola Trott, the head of department, Dr. John Coyle, and the Faculty of Arts secretary, Kathleen Johnston. I would also like to thank Anne-Marie Bruner-Tracey, Dr. Pauline Machika, Dr. Robert and Mrs. Kim McMahon, Dr. Don and Mrs. Carol Moore, Dr. Meiko O‟Halloran, Dr. Akiko Ono, Ian Stewart, and Dr. Sharon Weltman. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of library staff at the Glasgow University Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the Bodleian Library. I am grateful to my parents, Basil and Peggy, and my brother, Jimmy, for their continued support. 1 Introduction Botanizing Myth: Proserpina, Myth Reception and the Nineteenth-Century Evolution of Myth Have ye not heard how Ceres‟ child, Proserpina, in evil hour, Gathering plants and flow‟rets wild, Herself a fairer flow‟r, By gloomy Dis was cropt, as poets tell, Torn from Sicilian plains with him to dwell, A hapless Bride, reluctant Queen of Hell. Or have ye read that classic story, Unmindful of the allegory? Examine well the moral tale, Unravel each mysterious part, Divest it of the Muse‟s veil, And bid it speak devoid of art.1 Addressing the issue of women‟s participation in botany, Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765-1834) questions her readers about reading myth in her late-eighteenth century botanical poem “Epistle on the Subjects of Botany.” Fanshawe exhorts her readers to treat the mythological story of Proserpina with the same scientific scrutiny they apply to their botanical subjects. She claims that a careful reading of the classical myth of Proserpina yields a cautionary tale with a contemporary warning about female botanizing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fanshawe‟s allegory of the myth, the moral of the story which she contemporizes or historicizes, forms the centre of the poem which is framed by a contemporary address to female readers to exercise caution in their botanical pursuits. It is of course Fanshawe‟s own version of the myth her readers should attend to and what she presents in the lines that follow is her contemporary rewriting of the myth. Fanshawe suggests a reading of myth within a specific historical, cultural moment and 1 Catherine Maria Fanshawe, “Epistle on the Subjects of Botany, Containing A Tale and Much Good Advice. By A Lover of Botanists,” lines 53-65; The Literary Remains of Catherine Maria Fanshawe, With notes by the Late Rev. William Harness (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1876) 17-25. This verse epistle was privately printed in two posthumous collections of Fanshawe‟s poetry: Memorials of Miss Catherine Maria Fanshawe compiled and edited by the Revd William Harness in 1865, and The Literary Remains, Pickering‟s reprint of Harness‟s volume issued in 1876. Internal evidence within the poem suggests a composition date of c.1785-1795. 2 in so doing prompts larger questions about myth interpretation, the universality and origins of myth, and the significance of historical context in the explanation of myth. Myth Criticism and The Reception of Myth: Archetypal or Historicist Fanshawe‟s poem draws attention to two different critical approaches within twentieth-century criticism of myth as literature: is myth part of a universal archetype or pattern rising out of an ancient origin, or is it a historical construct separable from its origin and equally important in its reinterpretation? According to Hans Blumenberg, it is precisely because myths are subject to historical (re)interpretation that they are worth studying. The myth that is “varied and transformed by its receptions, in the forms in which it is related to […] history, deserves to be made a subject of study if only because such a study also takes in the historical situations and needs that were affected by the myth and were disposed to „work‟ on it.‟ ”2 Drawing primarily upon the myth criticism of Blumenberg in his Work on Myth, Anthony John Harding asserts Blumenberg‟s claim that “the „receptions‟ of myth, and the associated „historical situations and needs‟ ” provide not only the context but “the very form in which „the myth‟ becomes an object of knowledge.”3 In his study of the English Romantic poets, Harding emphasizes the historical circumstances surrounding the reception and interpretation of myth during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including the poets‟ engagement with Milton‟s works and hence his own representations of myth): “All the poets were critical readers, that is, they realized that a myth only exists and lives as it is transposed and translated.”4 Here Harding echoes the terminology of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Blumenberg, among others, that “the very existence of a myth depends on its being transposed
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