Plants and literature CritiCal Plant studies: PhilosoPhy, literature, Culture Series Editor Michael Marder University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz Plants and literature essays in CritiCal Plant studies edited by randy laist Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Cover illustration by Jim Horwitz. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence". ISBN: 978-90-420-3748-9 E-BOOK ISBN: 978-94-012-0999-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands Table of Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction Randy Laist, Goodwin College 9 The Progress of Vegetation: Subversion and Vegetarianism in Mansfield Park Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol, Trinity University 19 Plants and the Problem of Authority in the Antebellum U.S. South Lynne Feeley, Duke University 53 Temptation of Fruit: The Symbolism of Fruit in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and in the Works of D. G. Rossetti and J. E. Millais Akemi Yoshida, Nagoya Institute of Technology 75 This is Your Brain on Wheat: The Psychology of the Speculator in Frank Norris’ The Pit Graham Culbertson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 85 Refusing Form: A Reading of Art, Americanism, and Feminism through Plant Imagery in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge Stacey Artman, Rutgers University 103 Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant Life in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Barnes’ Nightwood Ria Banerjee, The Graduate Center, CUNY 123 The Smell of Cottonwood Leaves: Plants and Tayo’s Healing in Silko’s Ceremony Ubaraj Katawal, SUNY Binghamton 147 The Bible’s Paradise and Oryx and Crake’s Paradice: A Comparison of the Relationships Between Humans and Nature Rhona Trauvitch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 165 Iconic/Ironic Greenery: The Cultural Cultivation of Plants in Brecht Evens’ The Making Of Charlotte Pylyser, KU Leuven 181 A Return to Transcendentalism in the Twentieth Century: Emerging Plant-Sympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors Stephanie Lim, California State University, Northridge 197 Mean Green Machine: How the Ecological Politics of Alan Moore’s Reimagination of Swamp Thing Brought Eco-consciousness to Comics Hindi Krinsky, Rutgers University 221 Reproducing Plant Bodies on the Great Plains Aubrey Streit Krug, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 243 Contributors 265 Index 269 Acknowledgements This book owes its existence to the vision, insight, and adventurous- ness of the leadership of the College English Association, who agreed to sponsor a panel in plant studies at the 2013 Modern Language As- sociation conference. Kathrynn Seidler Engberg and her colleagues at the CEA were willing to take a chance on the possibility that plants have something to say that is worth listening to. I am grateful to the MLA for hosting what turned out to be a very animated panel discus- sion, and of course to the panelists, who provided such compelling approaches to the themes of critical plant studies. This book is also deeply indebted to Michael Marder for his ground-breaking scholarship in the philosophy of vegetation and for his initiative in arranging with Rodopi to publish the series of books in critical plant studies of which Plants and Literature is the first vol- ume. Dr. Marder’s writing has challenged conventional attitudes about plants as well as about the very nature of consciousness. His influence on my own personal thinking about vegetation has been considerable, and the impact of his ideas can be discerned throughout all of the es- says in this collection. Of course, this book would not have been possible without the dedicated scholarship, penetrating intelligence, playful imagination, and rigorous professionalism of the contributing essayists. I thank you for the high quality of your contributions and I look forward to main- taining professional friendships that will endure now that this project is complete. I am also grateful to Christa Stevens and the other editors at Rodopi for all of their helpfulness. I would also like to thank Goodwin College for supporting me as I have worked on compiling and editing this book, and I would like to express my eternal gratitude to my wife, Ann, and son, Tony, for both being perfect in every way. Introduction Randy Laist Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower -but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. Alfred, Lord Tennyson Plants play a vital role in the experience of being human. We eat them, we wear them, we inhabit structures built out of plant materials, and we use them for drugs, medicine, cosmetics, ornaments, and sym- bols. Twentieth-century archeologists organized human history around the inorganic objects that survived the centuries – the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age – but the more fundamental story of human progress is the development, diversification, and refinement of our ability to manipulate plants. Not only has agriculture always been the primary source of the bioenergy that has allowed human populations to balloon so prolifically, but the weaving of plants into baskets, the carving of trees into floating vessels, and, possibly, the use of plant- based psychotropic substances to provoke dream-visions have all played a crucial role in the emergence of modern globalized human beings. But plants also live among us as fellow species and, if the view of earth from outer space is any indication, as the dominant form of life on our planet. We are surrounded by them spatially, for the most part, in that land-plants and human beings tend to inhabit similar climates. Plants have played a pivotal role in the evolution of human anatomy. The shape of our hands and fingers are reverse-molds of millions of years of tree branches, even as the shape of our feet and pelvis has been shaped by millions of years of walking through savan- 10 Randy Laist nah grasslands. Certain pre-modern Inuit are said to have lived in an exclusively seal-based culture and to have used no plants for food or any other purpose, but, of course, even this seemingly plant-less socie- ty would be entirely reliant on the phytoplankton populations at the base of the arctic food chain that make the existence of the seals pos- sible. As the prophet Isaiah intuited before biophysical science con- firmed it to be literally so, “All flesh is grass.” Plants are the source of all life on earth, the principle life forms responsible for capturing light from the sun and storing energy in molecules of carbohydrates and other organic substances, the very stuff of which all life is composed. In Genesis, God creates plants on the third day, a full 48 hours before the creation of animals, in accordance with every contemporary third grader’s understanding that plants were here long before animals. What the Bible does not mention is what every modern third grader also knows: that plants will still be here long after human beings are gone. It is impossible to overstate the significance of plants to human life, and yet this simple fact is easily overlooked, taken for granted, or, perhaps, actively repressed in the semantic texture of urban, techno- logical consciousness. Pre-modern societies celebrate their relation- ship with plants through cultural expressions such as harvest ceremo- nies, the use of plants for ritual purposes, and tree worship, and alt- hough many of these traditions have been translated into postmodern forms (Christmas, Halloween, Spring Break), the symbolic connection between the ritual and the plant tends to be drastically attenuated in such contemporary celebrations. Vegetation plays a crucial role in the formative myths of all cultures, from Yggdrassil, the World Tree of Norse lore, to Asvattha, the cosmic tree of the Upanishads, to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. When one scans contemporary culture for evidence of plant- based narratives, however, the most dramatic meta-phenomenon is the defoliation of the cultural imagination. This is a phenomenon that has arguably been underway since agriculture, by mastering a certain por- tion of the plant kingdom, allowed human beings to urbanize and, ironically, to stop having to think about plants all the time. Into the modern era, two hundred or even one hundred years ago, Wordsworth or Whitman could rely on sharing a botanical vocabulary with his readers – a familiarity with the appearance, properties, and geograph- ical distribution of lilacs, yew trees, and hyacinths – that is not availa- Introduction 11 ble to most modern readers. While it is the rare book or movie that does not include plants in some way, one has to dig pretty deeply into the B-movie bin to find narratives that are actually about plants, or in which plants play a central role. The situation is a little different with poetry, a genre which, in many traditions, has a deep symbolic interre- lationship with flowering plants, and contemporary nature poets such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver fight a rearguard action against en- croaching mental defoliation, but in poetry’s most ubiquitous post- modern form, pop music, references to plants are largely limited to monocultures of roses, sugar, cocaine, and marijuana. The scarcity of plant-life in the cultural canon of the contemporary West is particularly striking when contrasted against the ubiquity of stories that feature animals as characters, subjects, and symbols. De- spite the fact that urbanization has taken human beings just as far away from animals as it has taken them from plants, the fewer animals there are in the wild, the more seem to crop up on television, in chil- dren’s toys, in advertisements, and on YouTube.