Some of the more egregious Anglosphere imperial scientists' descriptions of racialized women as 'murderous' plants and insects, 18th-19th centuries
(Originally posted elsewhere on 9 January 2021.)
Scientists and naturalists in Britain and the US, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes seemed to wake up, roll out of bed, and think: “Okay, time to describe women, non-white people, and colonial subjects as carnivorous plants and pestilent insects in hyper-sexualized ways that cast them as oddly-alluring threats to established hierarchies.”
There’s much to say about how/why, which I’ve detailed elsewhere. Here, though, it might be nice to have direct examples from scholarship simply placed in conversation.
—
Carnivorous or insectivorous plants have long induced fascination [...]. There are many amateur botanical societies that focus upon them. The first living specimen of Dionaea muscipula Ellis ex L. came to the attention of the populace of London in 1768, an event that ‘caused a sensation throughout Europe’ [...]. Prior to this event, John Bartram had sent Patrick Collinson, a London botanical collector, several plant parts, after the specimen sent by Governor Dobbs of North Carolina had failed to arrive (Magee, 2007). Bartram used a popular name for D. muscipula, tipitiwitchet, a somewhat ribald Elizabethan term for vulva (McKinley postscript to Nelson, 1990). This connection between female sexuality and carnivorous plants continued into 19th century England and may have had something to do with their popularity and continued public fascination. [...] These ‘queer flowers’, as Grant Allen described insectivorous plants in 1884, reached a zenith of popular and artistic attention during the mid to late 19th century. Allen’s essay demonstrated the lure of the insectivorous plant as a floral femme fatale and in richly descriptive language described its ‘murderous propensities’ [...].
Text above by: Mark W. Chase, Maarten J.M. Christenhusz, Dawn Sanders, and Michael F. Fay, “Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory,” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, vol. 161, no. 4 (December 2009).
-------
[Extreme content warning for this one: child abuse.]
A comparison of the personified “European” flowers with those from the other continents in The Temple of Flora reveals some of the Orientalist, racial, and gendered conventions that connected plants to colonial experiences or aspirations. In The Temple of Flora, Thornton deploys images and texts based on both the iconography of the Four Continents and the Linnaean sexual system to emphasize the productive yet dangerous sexuality of Europe’s others. These personified images of plant life embody British attitudes toward colonized people and resources, and the tenuous boundaries between personified plants and objectified humans become blurry. [...] Dr. George Shaw (1751-1813), the keeper of the natural history section of the British Museum from 1807 to 1813, personifies this plant [stapelia] for Thornton in a commissioned poem, describing the stapelia either as a “hag” with a “gorgon shape, rough arms, and scowling eyes,” a “dire enchantress” who casts “horrid spells” in her “magic rites,” or a cannibalistic, bloodthirsty “mother” who bears maggots and lures poisonous animals like toads and snakes close to her and eats them […]. The cannibalistic female allegories of America find their counterparts in Thornton’s flesh-eating American plants. For male botanists in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the venus flytrap defied classification as a specimen on the boundaries between animal and plant. Naturalists such as John and William Bartram, Benjamin Rush, Peter Collinson, and others attributed humanlike passions and sensitivities to the plant […]. The object of peculiar fascination, of both scientific curiosity and eroticism, the venus flytrap was named in Latin after the goddess of love and was later commonly referred to by the salacious nickname “tipi-tiwitchet” or “twitching fur stole.” Botanist Peter Collinson (1694-1768) exclaimed that he was “ready to Burst with Desire for Root, Seed, or Specimen of the Wagish Tipitiwitchet Sensitive.” He hoped to obtain one from the botanist and North Carolina governor Arthur Dobbs (1689 -- 1765) but lamented that it would probably not be possible because the seventy-three-year-old man had already married a fifteen-year-old bride, whom Collinson referred to as a “Tipitiwitchet,” for him to “play with.”
Text above by: Miranda Mollendorf, “Allegories of Alterity: Flora’s Children as the Four Continents,” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (2016). [Emphasis mine.]
—
And while Gothic monsters can express a multitude of alienations, the particular anxieties evoked by botanical monstrosities at this time were tied to imperialism [...]. Like the corpse flower, perilous plants were closely associated with the tropics in the Victorian imagination. This was a deliberate manufacture: in 1874, the American Edmund Spencer (not to be confused with his more famous, earlier English namesake) presented as fact a fictional explorer’s encounter with an African tribe that offered human sacrifices to a man-eating tree. [...] Such plants therefore became part of the imperialist mythos about the bizarre and dangerous recesses of the so-called primitive parts of the world, there to test the mettle of white explorers. [...] An entire genre of imperial gothic literature evolved to deal with the perils of foreign elements invading English bodies and English lands, as the colonizers had themselves inflicted on distant countries. Either out of provocation or opportunism, the once safely remote monsters of the colonized world retrace the explorers’ steps back to the metropole. Such monsters range from Kipling’s heathen curses to Haggard’s sorcerous queens, but also includes potential ecological threats such as H. G. Wells’s “The Empire of the Ants” (1905), in which organized, aggressive ants establish themselves as potential rivals to Britain’s global dominion.
Text above be: Zoe Chadwick, “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature,” The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates (October 2017).
-------
“The transformation of cleaning from a matter of dilettantish dusting to a sanitary crusade against ‘dangerous enemies within,’” in Ehrenreich and English’s words, placed women ideologically (though never materially) at the center of a new discourse of national health oriented around the home as an ecological space. This scalar revisioning of the domestic – what Jennifer Fleissner calls the dis/course of the “the great indoors” – proved a kind of mirror image of the Rooseveltian Wild West, with women at the front lines of a new frontier harboring both danger and the promise of revitalization. “Our enemies are no longer Indians and wild animals,” writes Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female professor and founder of the American domestic science movement, “[t]hose were the days of big things. Today is the day of the infinitely little. To see our cruelest enemies, we must use the microscope.” [...] During the latter half of the nineteenth century, developments in the fields of public health and domestic science transformed the modern home into a space of dangerous multispecies entanglements. In response, state-sponsored hygiene initiatives aimed at the reproduction of white futurity recruited housekeepers as domestic guardians against nature’s encroachments. [...] By the turn of the century, the highest level of insect research in the country, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology, had fully absorbed the emergent cultural discourses around women’s newfound proximity to their domestic co-inhabitants. A widely circulated public memo titled “The House Centipede” written by Bureau Chief Charles Marlatt, begins with the assertion that [“] the house centipede, particularly within the last 20 or 25 years, has become altogether too common an object in dwelling houses in the Middle and Northern States for the peace of mind of the inmates. […] It may often be seen darting across floors with very great speed, occasionally stopping suddenly and remaining absolutely motionless, presently to resume its rapid movements, often darting directly at inmates of the house, particularly women, evidently with a desire to conceal itself beneath their dresses, and thus creating much consternation.[“] Posing as a practical, informative tract “of interest to housewives throughout the United States,” the memo in fact deploys a complex rhetorical vocabulary that figures housekeeping as kind of psychosexual drama between woman and insect, the stakes of which are nothing less than the security of both home and nation. “The house centipede is a Southern species,” the memo notes, “its normal habitat being in the southern tier of States and southwestward through Texas into Mexico.” [...] To be sure, the Bureau’s memo fits neatly into a familiar [...] historicist narrative whereby domestic discourse – understood as a kind of “soft” or “maternal” power – works toward the consolidation of American empire and the reification of sexual difference. From this perspective, the document’s recourse to the logic of [...] the unreciprocated love of centipedes for women [...] can be said to link what Kyla Schuller calls the “biopolitics of feeling” with what Amy Kaplan theorizes as “manifest domesticity,” such that the (white) woman’s heightened capacity to be affected by her environmental milieu consolidates her authority “to police domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness both within and without.”
Text above by: David Hollingshead, “Women, insects, modernity: American domestic ecologies in the late nineteenth century,” Feminist Modernist Studies (August 2020).
-------
Considering the broader selection of newspaper hoaxes alongside the dozens of botanical fictions that appeared around the same time, one will also notice certain repetitive themes and settings accompanying the Darwinian unease. For one, we can observe the pronounced influence of the so-called “orchid fever” that still gripped Europe in the later 19th century, a time when orchid hunting in exotic locations had become a pastime for the more adventurous gentlemen of means, and, in fiction, the most common excuse to write a tale of a monster plant. ]...] In fact, in America during the late 1920s and early 1930s, we see another surge in the popularity of monstrous plant narratives, precisely around the time that the evolution controversy had come to a head during the national media sensation that was the Scopes Monkey Trial. This was also the dawning of speculative fiction’s pulp era [...]. The monster plant narratives of the pulps no doubt inherited this tension from their turn-of-the-century forebears, a simultaneous recognition that these animal-like monsters must be somehow natural, like the real carnivorous plants so carefully anatomized by Darwin, and that their very existence also threatens to destroy distinctions between the animal and plant kingdoms – as well as the hierarchy that those distinctions support.
Text above by: T.S. Miller, “Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies.”
—
Yikes.
