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

Jackson‐Houlston, C. M.

doi:10.3366/jvc.2006.11.1.84

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…For example, it is possible that during childhood males have more informal opportunities to encounter nature in urban settings, leading to enhanced NHK (O'Connor et al, 2017). We found no evidence for well-defined gender differences in focus as existed in the 19th century (Jackson-Houlston, 2006). Further research would be necessary to discover whether the contexts of learning might be adjusted to provide better opportunities to engage female children/students (Reiss, 2018).…”

Section: Contexts Of Learningmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Abundant evidence supports the understanding that the British public had a passion for natural history in the 18th and 19th centuries (Allen, 1976), although the salience of specific taxa segregated on gender lines, with female attention focused botanically, while birds and other animals tended to be more salient to males (Jackson-Houlston, 2006). A study of English folknames of birds in use largely during the 19th century indicates not only a rich knowledge of nature among the country folk of the British Isles, but also people with nature, while this was not so in a rural context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

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Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge: Student natural history knowledge and the significance of birds

Gosler¹,

Tilling

2021

People and Nature

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Section: Contexts Of Learningmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge: Student natural history knowledge and the significance of birds

Gosler¹,

Tilling

2021

People and Nature

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Garden Variety: Botany and Multiplicity in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Abolitionism

Kuhn

2015

American Literature

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This essay, by paying attention to botanical language, reveals how Stowe's environmental sensibility affects her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. The theories of plant growth and vitality she draws on as her career develops refute the strict classification and cultivation practices associated with slavery, disrupting the logic used to segregate humans from each other and from the environment. Stowe's characterization of plants reframes our understanding of the relationship between antebellum science and sentimental culture, and upends the essentialist approach to nature by which many ethnologists classified race. Stowe comes to emphasize nature's mutability and interconnectedness, and invites her readers to consider human nature as part of this dynamic natural order.

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‘Emily Lawless and Botany as Foreign Science’

Hansson¹

2011

JLS

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The primary goal of botanical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was to describe, categorise and define plants according to one of the many classification systems used. Despite its basis in subjectively selected criteria, system-building was perceived as an objective science and as soon as a classification method was adopted, it was considered universally applicable. Carl Linnaeus's Sexual System was structured and easy to understand and became one of the most widely used models. System-building and system-modification remained masculine enterprises, but collecting and classification were pursuits open to all, and botany was promoted as an edifying pastime for both men and women in the Enlightenment period. Linnaeus's System was disseminated throughout Europe in both the original Latin and in various translations, and circulated to a wider audience with the help of popular texts like botanical poems, dialogues and letters. The English versions that popularised the system, however, drew attention to the marriage metaphors Linnaeus used, and the sexual-political climate of the time required that women should be protected from sexualised language. Thus a need-or a market-arose for botanical texts addressed specifically to female users. Apart from being linguistically translated, the texts, or rather the knowledge they contained, needed to be put through a process of what Roman Jakobson terms "intralingual translation": a rewording where what might be construed as offensive language was removed (114). Alongside literal translations designed to be faithful to the original, a number of feminised adaptations of the Linnaean system therefore also appeared, initially written by men but increasingly produced by women writers (George 1-21). It could be said, then, that two types of translations were necessary to establish Linnaean taxonomy in Britain: linguistic translations from the original Latin to English and cultural translations from scientific botanical language to popular and what was regarded as feminised forms. The most common understanding of translation is the process of changing a text from one language to another, but it can also be defined as "the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form" ("Translation"). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the example of translating a painting into an engraving or etching, and in the case of written material, the other medium or form could be the translation of a scientific treatise into poetry or fiction. The process often involves transmitting metropolitan ideas to the conditions in the periphery, which draws attention to the cultural-political dimensions of the activity. Since no translation can be perfectly equivalent to the source text, the effort paradoxically accentuates the differences between the linguistic and cultural systems it is intended to erase. One effect of conveying information in a translated or alternative form may therefore be that the shortcomings of the original are uncovered. In the case of interlingual translation...

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

Cited by 7 publications

References 15 publications

Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge: Student natural history knowledge and the significance of birds

Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge: Student natural history knowledge and the significance of birds

Garden Variety: Botany and Multiplicity in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Abolitionism

‘Emily Lawless and Botany as Foreign Science’

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