'Queen Lilies'? The Interpenetration of Scientific, Religious and Gender Discourses in Victorian Representations of Plants

Abstract

Can activities endorsed by Mary Wollstonecraft have been all bad for nineteenth-century women? The practices I have in mind are the verbal and visual study and representation of flowers, as both scientific and leisure pursuits. These activities were of great cultural importance to women in the Victorian period. Wollstonecraft herself took lessons in flower drawing from James Sowerby, 1 whose English Botany was a standard in both illustration and botany for many decades after its initial publication from 1790-1814. Although she disapproved of the way women were constantly figured as flowers, Wollstonecraft approved of botany as a subject of study for girls. 2 To establish the continuity of the ideas involved, the first half of this article outlines modes of thinking that Victorian women inherited from Linnean botany, and from Romantic responses to it, across a broad range of social practices: in systematics, field study, flower painting and illustration, and popular botanical writing. An understanding of these is necessary for an appreciation of the complexities and ambivalences that allowed women to negotiate between discourses competing for hegemonic dominance. Prominent among these, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, are the sexualisation of plants by Linnaeus and his followers, and Paleyan natural theology. 3 This survey draws on the substantial groundwork established from the later 1990s by Ann B. Shteir, Barbara T. Gates and others, which developed illuminating studies of individual women writers of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Gates and Shteir argued that 'in feminism, the extent to which scientific popularisation added both to the diversity of scientific writing and to the diversity of women's writing has been largely overlooked'. 4 More recently, our sense of this diversity has been amplified by demonstrations of the complex polyphony of discourses in popular magazines for a variety of audiences. 5 This polyphony constituted a textual dialogue between a number of writers and readers 'Queen Lilies'? 'Queen Lilies'? 'Queen Lilies'? 'Queen Lilies'?

Conflictos entre arte, ciencia y autoridad. El efecto Matilda en la cultura visual

“…Al mismo tiempo que las ideas de catalogación de la Historia Natural e ilustración botánica penetraban con fuerza en el contexto ilustrado, un gran número de mujeres se orientaban hacia las clases de dibujo para señoritas, pese a las dificultades de entrar en las enseñanzas oficiales. El sistema natural propuesto por Linneo revolucionó la botánica, pero, a su vez, hizo del latín una singular barrera para las estudiantes femeninas (Jackson-Houlston, 2006). Paradójicamente, en historia del arte, se da un fenómeno vinculado a la pintura de flores, cuando esta empieza a asociarse con las cualidades de la mujer, razón por la que comienza su devaluación como género (Porqueres, 1994;Chadwick, 1992).…”