Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present [1 ed.] 9781789140453, 9781780239750

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Copyright © 2018. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, Reaktion Books, Limited,

Copyright © 2018. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

monster s under g la ss

Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, Reaktion Books,

Copyright © 2018. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, Reaktion Books,

M O N S T E RS under

GLASS

A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present

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jane desmarais

reaktion books

Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, Reaktion Books,

For PMLR

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reaktion books ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2018 Copyright © Jane Desmarais 2018 All rights reserved

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 975 0

Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, Reaktion Books,

Contents

Introduction 7 one Heat and Light: The Rise of the Hothouse 15 two ‘Aromatic and Tainted’: The City as Hothouse 45 three Blooming Buttonholes and Flower Fetishes 73 four Florientalism and the ‘Scented Ways’ 99 five Paradises and Torture Gardens 124 six Flowers of Evil: The Fleur Fatale 150

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seven Mind under Glass 179 eight Weeds 207 re fe r e nc e s 219 s e l e c t b i b l i og r ap hy 235 ac know l e d g e m e nt s 241 ph oto ac know l e d g e me n t s 242 i n de x 243

Monsters under Glass : A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, Reaktion Books,

As from corrupted flesh the over-bold Young vines in dense luxuriance rankly grow, And strange weird plants their horrid buds unfold O’er the foul rotting of a corpse below;

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gabriele d’annunzio, ‘Prelude’, 1893

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Introduction What was the greenhouse? It was a jungle, and it was paradise; it was order and disorder. theodore roethke, Notebooks, mid-1940s

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I

n the early nineteenth century growing popular interest in exotic plant collecting and new glass and heating technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets and artists, and from about 1850 onwards we find increasing references in fiction and poetry to exotic plants and hothouses. The hothouse and the hothouse flower, in particular, enter literary language in a highly charged way. Principally because of the treatment by an eccentric coterie of Decadent writers in the second half of the nineteenth century – champions of artifice and the man-made and horrified by the novel aspects of modern culture – the hothouse, the hothouse flower and the tropical plant became key metaphors to describe the experience of living in a rapidly modernizing city-world. In both poetry and prose, the image of the glasshouse and its jungle of exotic plants invariably suggests something alluring yet dangerous about modern culture and sensibilities. Avant-garde writers in England and on the Continent, notably Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde and Maurice Maeterlinck, transformed the notion of the hothouse from a functional material object made of glass and steel to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality and being. More than that, however, their use of the metaphor hinted at the darker, primitive side of modern life, and suggested that beyond the pursuit of perfect beauty 7

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is a process of decay and death. Behind the glass and the stunning floral display inevitably lurk rot and corruption; the more beautiful the flower, the more tragic its deterioration and decomposition. Gardens and glasshouses could be unhappy, fragile places. As the Italian poet Leopardi put it:

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Go into a garden – full of plants, herbs and flowers. As charming as you please, in the loveliest season of the year. Everywhere you look you’ll find pain. The whole vegetable kingdom is in a permanent state of suffering. Over there is a rose – tortured by the sun that gave it life; it shrivels, languishes, fades. And that lily over there is being cruelly sucked by a bee – in its tenderest, most vital parts . . .1 Eden, as many writers remind us, was a short-lived paradise. In the late nineteenth century, Decadent writers recalibrated traditional notions of the garden paradise to disturbing effect. In the satirical horror novel Le Jardin des supplices (Torture Garden, 1898), for example, Octave Mirbeau used the Chinese garden as an allegory of the corruption and hypocrisy of the French government (and European culture in general) in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. Clara leads the narrator into the Torture Garden where he is confronted with a tableau of aestheticized inhumanities, a sickening admixture of stunning exotic flora and human remains. In his quest for fulfilment, Mirbeau warns us, man is essentially cruel. He is a savage gardener, with a penchant for destroying his environment. Such grotesque floral aesthetics were to a large degree a reaction against traditional flower symbolism that equated flowers with beauty and femininity. Writers like Mirbeau rejected the commonplace analogy of flowers and ‘good’ women, concentrating instead on the fleshy and stinky parts of plants. It allowed them to exercise 8

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Introduction

their cynical and splenetic attitude towards a modern world that they viewed as both thrilling and soul-destroying. In the 1880s, when anxieties about female sexuality, falling birth rates, scientific progress, evolution, colonial expansion, disease and immigration were reaching crisis point across Europe, the hothouse flower became a decadent conceit of cultural degeneration. A decade later, avant-garde writers and artists were experimenting with the metaphor of the hothouse, extending its terms of reference to include the realms of the unconscious. The hothouse becomes a paradoxical space, uniting the contradictory ideas of safe containment and dangerous confinement. Hothouses, bell jars, diving bells, aquariums, hospitals – these were modern metaphors that derived from the growing preoccupation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with what was perceived to be an unstable and increasingly fragmented world. The comparison between overheated glass enclosures and overcrowded urban space was relatively common in realist fiction of the nineteenth-century. The conservatory scene in many novels was virtually a cliché, as were the plentiful references to orchids and lilies: shorthand for foreignness and falseness. The metaphors of the hothouse and hothouse flower, however, were more complex and mobile, and cannot always be taken as read. Often we find these figures harbouring subversive or paradoxical ideas about exoticism, which in the nineteenth century signified both the excitement of colonial exploration and adventure and the seductive danger of the unknown. To a great extent, the changeability of the hothouse metaphor was due to the paradox of the literary tradition of Decadence that prevailed intermittently in France and England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Decadence was a transitional literary mode, both conservative and modern in its outlook and prone to a range of definitions and misconceptions. Decadent 9

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writers accorded an astonishing range of significance to the notion of the hothouse. In Decadent literature, the hothouse is a breathtakingly fragrant yet toxic space. It is where insatiable desire uncoils and rises up in all its terrifying aspect, but on a more mundane level, it is also a space where human nature can be seen for what it is and can be acknowledged (even appreciated) in all its beauty and horror. It is a space where opposites attract. In the hothouse, the odiferous and fleshy exotic plant represents a monstrous, often hybridized, version of nature. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the soft parts of (female) human genitalia, the tropical flower is the stuff of dream and nightmare and the precursor to the triffid and vegetable monster plant we find in twentieth-century fantasy fiction, comics and video games. Highly perfumed (sometimes repellently so to the human nose), artificially cultivated and often lasting for only a short time, it brings together two ostensibly contradictory phenomena: beauty and rot. By the fin de siècle the hothouse and hothouse flower are established literary tropes and references to exotic species of plant reveal a widespread fear of the foreign ‘other’. In their stunning fragility the beauty of flowers hints at death and decay. We are more comfortable with the strange fellowship of beauty and rot than our nineteenth-century counterparts, who generally saw nature in idealized terms. Today we complacently accept the juxtaposition of the grotesque and the erotically beautiful in modern and contemporary art. In the boundary-crossing art of Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Nobuyoshi Araki, Georgia O’Keeffe and François Houtin, for example, the alliance of beauty and sexuality and decay is articulated through images that express nature’s sexuality and corruption. It was Witkin’s claim that he wanted to ‘live in an age which sees similar beauty in a flower and in the severed limb of a human being’,2 and in his photographs of 10

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Introduction

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still-life arrangements he shocks the viewer by integrating human deformity and death with images of natural beauty. In a pastiche of the still-life genre in Dutch painting entitled Feast of Fools (1990), he carefully composes a pyramid of rotting fruit and dismembered body parts, at the centre of which is an infant corpse, slumped and blindfolded. Araki’s work is equally provocative. Since the late 1970s he has been fascinated with a form of Japanese bondage called kinbaku, and his series of flower photographs vividly recalls, as do the paintings of O’Keeffe, both female and male genitalia. In the work of topiarist, garden designer and artist Houtin we find the grotesque forms of ancient trees used as framing devices for landscapes of lyrical and decadent beauty. Houtin dramatizes the relationship between cruel, wild nature and its aestheticization in the form of strange and ruined architecture which bears witness to a human presence. In Rêverie (1993) a thin flock of scattering birds can be glimpsed through the arches of an ancient folly, covered in moss, foliage and miniature trees. In Houtin’s etchings the wild and the cultivated exist in baroque imaginary spaces that suggest a fragile environment and decaying grandeur: ‘This is the imaginary garden as theatre, as a setting for nightmare transformation scenes of a kind that throw up memories of the monsters which lurk in the sacro bosco of Bomarzo.’3

François Houtin, Rêverie, 1993, etching. 11

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This book is about the growing fascination with botany, hothouses and exotic plant collecting in the nineteenth century and the resonance of those themes later in the twentieth century. It explores the way that writers and artists in France and England exploited the contemporary craze for the artificial cultivation of flowers as an opportunity for attacking the ‘benign sentimentality of popular floral discourses’,4 and the way that their twentiethcentury counterparts used the clichés of the hothouse and hothouse flower to comment on the contradictions and complexities of modern existence. After a brief survey of the rise of the hothouse from ancient times to the nineteenth century in Chapter One, I discuss the association of the hothouse with the modern city and the use of the hothouse metaphor to describe smelly, overcrowded, urban conditions where desire, both material and libidinal, enjoys unbounded mutation. Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) is my starting point in Chapter Two, in which I consider his radical and contradictory vision of modern culture and his influence on Manet, Zola and Huysmans, who envisaged Paris under the Second Empire (1852–70) as a hothouse and the expression of female sexuality as an exotic bloom. For Huysmans in particular, I argue, the hothouse flower is a potent and subversive metaphor that expresses all the fallen loveliness of modern civilization, and I discuss how in the central chapter of À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), Jean Floressas des Esseintes’ imported collection of exotic plant species evokes a world corrupted by ambiguous hybridity. The subjects of chapters Three and Four are, to borrow Walter Pater’s terms, ‘strange flowers’ and ‘curious odours’.5 Aesthetes and dandies might have professed an intense dislike for nature, but they worshipped the floral signifier, and many took pride in wearing unusual buttonholes or incorporating flower motifs into their work. 12

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Introduction

In Chapter Three I explore dandy flower worship at the fin de siècle and the parodies that ensued in the popular press. In Chapter Four I examine the association of exotic floral perfumes with a nebulous orientalism. Focusing on the early erotic verse of Arthur Symons, I consider the correspondences between the vaporizing qualities of foreign fragrances and the modern preoccupation with the processes of desire, memory and the unconscious. In the fiction of the late nineteenth century, we find numerous sensual and poisoned gardens that refer back to ancient notions of paradise and to the biblical Garden of Eden. In Chapter Five I discuss the significance of the ancient topos of Eden for nineteenth-century writers and explore some of the ways in which they imagined paradise in an increasingly industrialized urban context. With close reference to Mirbeau’s Chinese torture garden in his novel Le Jardin des supplices, I consider the decadent subversion of Eden as a powerful image of degeneration and a shocking critique of the cruelty and corruption of modern European society. Popular fantasies about poisonous gardens and killer female flowers were expressions of a growing cultural anxiety in the nineteenth century about Darwin’s evolutionary theories and rapid social, political and economic change, and while the metaphors of torture gardens and fleurs fatales belong to a longstanding figurative tradition and the ‘language of flowers’, the metaphor of the hothouse and hothouse flower, I suggest, strike a new (dis)chord. Chapter Six examines the floral symbolism in representations of the modern woman, and we return by way of illustration to Huysmans’s À rebours, in which female sexuality appears to Des Esseintes in the form of predatory tropical plants, and to Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices, in which Clara is a man-eating femme fatale whose insatiable sadomasochistic appetites for human degradation expose terrifying cultural anxieties about female sexuality. 13

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Other variations on the hothouse space are the subject of Chapter Seven. The trope of the hothouse metamorphoses in the late nineteenth century, and we find in the work of some avantgarde European poets a growing fascination with a variety of glazed spaces, including the aquarium, the diving bell and the bell jar. These become distinctly modern tropes that express a preoccupation with subjectivity. I explore the image of the glass enclosure as a metaphor of mental space, and I use the poetry of the Belgian Symbolist poets as an example. I focus on a selection of works, including verse by Iwan Gilkin and Georges Rodenbach, and Maurice Maeterlinck’s first poetry collection, Serres chaudes (Hothouses, 1889). By way of an epilogue, my last chapter is entitled ‘Weeds’. It surveys selected metaphors of the hothouse and the man-eating tropical plant in the poetry and visual culture of the twentieth century as expressions of cultural anxieties about the vulnerability of empires to invasion and attack by so-called primitive peoples (once colonized) and to the spread of radical ideologies from East to West. This book is not an exhaustive study of the metaphors of the hothouse and the hothouse flower, but, rather like a cabinet of curiosities, one of its aims is to show that by comparing one thing to another metaphors create bridges for our imagination and allow us to see phenomena, states, ideas and people in complex and suggestive terms. Metaphors are culturally specific, but they are also transporting and expansive. In considering the different configurations of the hothouse and hothouse flower – from unusual metaphor to cliché and common trope – I aim to show how a small group of writers and artists challenged the traditional symbolism of flowers and their cultivation and expressed a range of cultural concerns about civilization and progress that still resonate today.

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one

Heat and Light: The Rise of the Hothouse When the summer time is done And the winter is begun, There are flowers still that do not die; And they often grow in grace, In a dull, unlovely place Where clouds gather and the black winds sigh. george augustus simcox, ‘Hothouse Flowers’, in Poems and Romances (1869)

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T

he public fascination with hothouses and exotic species of hothouse plants goes back to ancient times. We can trace the hothouse back to the Roman emperor Tiberius and his growing off-season cucumbers under transparent stone. In ad 100 Columella describes the use of translucent sheets (mica) to protect young plants, and in Italy in ad 380 roses were forced on by pouring on warm water twice a day. The greatest advances in what we might term hothouse technology, however, occurred from the late fourteenth century in the Renaissance period, culminating in the design and manufacture of great glass exhibition spaces in the nineteenth century. Renaissance gardeners throughout Europe experimented with new species and innovated new techniques that would protect plants in different weather conditions. In Italy, methods and techniques used in the sciences of botany and horticulture reached high levels of innovation. In the late sixteenth century, Italian gardeners used glass bells to protect plants from direct sunlight and to 15

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regulate temperature and shade. Botanic gardens (giardini botanici) became widespread, and non-native plants were cultivated in basic greenhouses (also called glasshouses) for their medicinal properties. The first formal botanic garden was founded in Pisa in 1543, closely followed by those at Padua (1545) and Florence (1550). Larger plants and trees were nurtured inside, and exotic plants and trees sensitive to the colder northern climes were shielded in the greenhouse from inclement weather. The Renaissance greenhouse was basic. It was essentially a storehouse containing plants and trees in beautiful pots that complemented the design of the main house, but gardeners realized that improvements were needed to preserve more temperamental species. Some, like exotic citrus trees, fared better if they were planted directly into soil. And so, instead of potting them and moving them inside, gardeners planted the trees directly in the ground and covered them with a temporary wooden shelter. This timber winter house was eventually replaced by a stone orangery, with a fixed roof and large divided windows facing south. A well-known example is the orangery in the Château d’Anet in the South of France, built from 1547 to 1552 by Philibert de l’Orme for Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry ii of France. The problem of direct planting into soil was partially solved by these permanent structures, and they were an improvement in terms of keeping the temperature ideal. In rough weather the more delicate species brought back by tropical explorers were protected. Wealthy aristocrats favoured the orangery for the cultivation of expensive fruits, such as lemons, oranges, limes and pomegranates – they were an important source of vitamins and flavour in the colder climes of northern Europe. By the seventeenth century, rudimentary greenhouses were popular throughout Europe, proliferating on a grand scale in the Netherlands and England.

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Heat and Light

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Heat and light The most significant factor in hothouse design was glass technology, which developed rapidly from the seventeenth century. But glassmaking was in fact remarkably advanced during the Roman era, and many ancient homes had glass-paned windows. The earliest windows were panes of glassy pebbles laid on a wooden frame, which would let in some light. Clear glass panes were first invented in the late third century, when glassmakers would blow a cylindrical bubble of glass and then slice it lengthwise and flatten out the results in the kiln. During the Dark Ages, however, Roman technology was lost, and while cathedrals across Europe made use of stained glass for their windows, domestic windows were totally unglazed, with only wooden shutters to keep out the cold. Some people took thin animal hides (or parchment) and soaked them in oil to make them as translucent as possible. They also had to keep their windows (and doors) quite small to minimize the draughts, and used curtains or mats to help with insulation. Interiors were dark and fires provided the light. In the fourteenth century glassmakers revived the ancient cylinder glass technique and French glassblowers developed the process known as ‘crown glass’, where a hollow bubble of glass was then centrifugally spun into a flattened disc. By the mid-sixteenth century, window glass was increasingly common, but it was still a luxury. In wealthy residences only the most important rooms boasted glazed windows, and it was not uncommon for the glass to be taken out and stored when the owners were away. Developments in glass manufacture in the seventeenth century meant that orangeries and greenhouses could be glazed, and this had huge benefits, not least the better control of microclimates for the propagation of imported species. The first glazed greenhouse 17

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was designed by Olivier de Serres (1539–1619), who gave his name to the construction. For the rich, the ‘serre’ or ‘glass-house’ was an efficient way of harnessing heat and light in the colder seasons; for the poor, however, de Serres advised waxed canvas sheets. It was not until the late seventeenth century, when new techniques in pouring and rolling glass were patented, that glasshouses became common in public and private gardens. During this period the manufacture of glass was transformed. Glass became a material available to all. In England, glassmakers innovated with lead, and some even used organic material, like seaweed ash. In northern Europe, glassmakers used varieties of forest plants, while their Mediterranean counterparts favoured species growing in coastal regions. The incorporation of plant ash meant that glass could be made stronger, more resilient to the weather. In the eighteenth century, glass sculpture was an established art form, and ambitious projects were of all sizes. In Venice miniature glass gardens were the centrepiece of the Doge’s banqueting tables. Although the use of glass in orangeries and greenhouses was well established in the late seventeenth century, heating was still rather rudimentary. The installation of glass panels meant that greenhouse heating was provided by sunlight through glass (the ‘greenhouse effect’ is now used metaphorically to describe the mechanism of global warming, where the atmosphere replaces the glass). In the winter stoves and open fires created warmth but the heat was uneven and there were too many draughts. In the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, bark stoves were used to create ‘moist heat’, and in 1632, the year when the Oxford Conservatory was built in England, burning charcoal in a metal wagon was the favoured source of heat. With the development of heating channels set into the stone walls and under the floors, the temperature could be regulated and warmth was radiated fairly uniformly throughout. This was later 18

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Heat and Light

replaced by steam and hot-water heating, which created a more tropical microclimate. Orangeries and conservatories with extensive windows but with conventional roofing were built all over Europe in the eighteenth century, ranging from the modest greenhouse in the Chelsea Physic Garden to the winter garden in Prince Potemkin’s estates in St Petersburg. They became highly fashionable additions to domestic space, and the public, keen to expand their knowledge of the natural world, were stimulated to explore and be curious by a new genre of horticultural literature. Philip Miller’s The Gardener’s and Florist’s Dictionary; or, a Complete System of Horticulture (1724) became the most popular standard textbook on gardening in England, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s monumental 46-volume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–88) was one of the ten best-selling series of books in the second half of the eighteenth century. The popular monthly Lady’s Magazine, which ran from 1770 to 1837 and cost sixpence per copy, contained notes on plants and reports of Captain James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific from 1768 to 1779. Through affordable popular publications like this the world of tropical plant species and botanical experiment entered middle-class consciousness. The planting of exotics on home soil was not always well received, however. Some feared that native species of plant would be overwhelmed by imported exotics and driven to extinction. As the impotent Mr Talmann in The Draughtsman’s Contract (dir. Peter Greenaway, 1982) explains, ‘The gardens of England are becoming veritable jungles, such exotics are grossly unsuitable.’ In terms of materials, however, greenhouse design still had some way to go. Glass panes had been incorporated as the best way to admit sunlight into the greenhouse space, but there was intense debate about the angle of the glass panes. The most perfect angle was discovered to be the one that enabled the sun at its height to 19

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light all the area within the greenhouse. It was the Dutch botanist Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), director of the Leiden Botanic Gardens from 1709 to 1730, who realized that the sun’s rays should fall vertically on the glass on the shortest day of the year, and his conception was taken up by Philip Miller (1691–1771), chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden, who proceeded to construct the roofs of his hothouses with two angles. There followed vigorous discussion in the late eighteenth century about the importance of the 45-degree angle, but this was resolved in the following century when Sir George Mackenzie discovered in 1815 that the best kind of glass roof in terms of letting in the sun’s rays was curved. Mackenzie’s discovery greatly impressed the Scottish botanist, garden and cemetery designer John Loudon (1783–1843), who went on to design the first curvilinear hothouse in 1816. Loudon was enthusiastic about the democratic principles in his design, as Isobel Armstrong describes in Victorian Glassworlds: ‘For Loudon, inventor of the spectacular curvilinear form . . . no space is a privileged space. [The dome] circles and unifies: it does not hierarchise.’1 Rather than seeing it as a utilitarian structure inserted into a landscape, Loudon saw the creative potential of the hothouse. For him, it was a ‘“fictive space”, creating the environment’,2 and he advocated its use in public spaces. His Remarks on the Construction of Hothouses was published in 1817.

The Golden Age By the early nineteenth century, the hothouse had arrived. It became a popular feature of public and private garden spaces. The glazed areas increased in size and stone was replaced with wood, followed by the erection of elaborate iron structures. There was an increasing emphasis on artistry and design. Many hothouses were designed 20

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Heat and Light

to resemble the layout of the Renaissance orangery but they had curved rather than flat glass roofs over the central part of the building. Hothouses, or ‘stoves’ as they were known in the nineteenth century, sprung up everywhere. Not only were they display-cases for the finest achievements of architects and gardeners, but they were places of instruction and enlightenment, constructions that testified to industry. Some, like those at the national botanic gardens at Kew, were important centres of botanical research. ‘Without an imitation of warmer climates,’ Abercrombie’s Practical Gardener commented in 1834, ‘travellers alone could survey the beautiful and interesting plants with which Nature has arrayed her local gardens. When Discovery exhibits an extraordinary plant by the pencil of Descriptive Elegance, how inadequate is the picture? In the Hothouse, information is complete, and curiosity gratified.’3 Glass manufacture and production was booming, but the most significant development in England was in 1847 when James Hartley patented a process for producing large, clear sheets of glass. Formerly, glass was manufactured in smaller panes that had a bubbly texture, but this tended to scorch the leaves of plants. Large, clear sheets stabilized with linseed putty in wood frames made the greenhouse more efficient and durable, and with the abolition of the glass tax in 1845, the brick tax in 1850 and the easing of timber duty in 1851, greenhouses for domestic use became affordable for the middle classes. Not everyone approved of these technical innovations. Some saw the widespread use of glass as a vulgar and modern fad. In an essay entitled ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, the American writer Edgar Allan Poe bemoaned: In the matter of glass, generally, we proceed upon false principles. Its leading feature is glitter – and in that one word how much of all that is detestable do we express! . . . The huge 21

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and unmeaning glass chandeliers, prism-cut, gas-lighted, and without shade, which dangle in our most fashionable drawing-rooms, may be cited as the quintessence of all that is false in taste or preposterous in folly.4 In spite of such reservations, improvements to glazing, together with the invention of gas heating and climate control, were the beginning of a gardening revolution. Horticulturalists transformed into green-fingered scientists, using new and improved materials, like cement, asphalt and cast iron, to landscape and build on a scale and with a complexity never seen before. Working in the garden became easier. The first lawnmower was patented by Edwin Budding in 1830, and this was followed by the invention of numerous gadgets and systems, including the plumb-line and level, the watering pot or can, revolving greenhouse frames (to expose plants uniformly to sunlight) and greenhouse railways (for moving tubbed trees). Gardeners began to expand their horticultural expertise and experiment with hybrids and exotic imports. Systematic hybridization was first carried out in England by William Rollisson in the 1790s when he began breeding Cape heaths at a south London nursery, and from the 1820s the production of hybrids became a competitive business, helped by the publication of gardeners’ magazines, in which the technical and artistic aspects of gardening and horticulture were discussed with some intensity. Between 1750 and 1850 over 5,000 species of plants were introduced into England by botanists sponsored by institutions like Kew and private nurseries.5 Horticultural literature was consumed in vast quantities. John Lindley’s The Theory of Horticulture (1840) – renamed The Theory and Practice of Horticulture for wider sales – for example, which provided gardeners with a diy guide to the horticultural problems of 22

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Heat and Light

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Ludwig ii’s Winter Garden.

hardiness, heating, pest control, trenching and drainage, put the science of gardening within reach of the public. The fascination with the exotic and far-flung created a notion of the garden as a place of illusion, and wealthy gardeners began to experiment with juxtaposing the unfamiliar with the commonplace. Chinese pavilions, Egyptian pyramids, Gothic chapels and Roman ruins were reconstructed among the oaks and willows to create a garden Golden Age and evoke a sense of artifice and the picturesque. Waterfalls, cascades and grottoes were incorporated and garden design became eclectic and imaginative. In the 1840s English garden designers experimented with replicating indoor exotic environments. In 1843 John Dillwyn Llewellyn designed a glasshouse for the cultivation of epiphytic orchids at his garden in Penllergare. A hot-water pipe, directed through a boiler, poured heated steam out at the top of a rockery, reflected into spray by a series of stone ledges, 23

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thus giving the effect of a tropical cataract. Orchid species mingled together ‘in beautiful confusion’ with ‘a wild luxuriance’.6 By the mid-nineteenth century, the hothouse was no longer a utilitarian object but a thing of light and beauty. The most extravagant and fantastic hothouse space, however, was the Winter Garden in Munich, inspired by the romantic and obsessive King Ludwig ii of Bavaria. The construction of the Winter Garden began in 1867. It was a vast curved iron and glass construction on the roof of the king’s palace, and it was filled with jungle flora, bridges, pavilions, an Indian town and a lake, and inhabited by swans, alligators and two carved elephants. Accessible only through private apartments, it was intended to be a retreat from official business. Contemporary images show a painted backdrop of the Himalayas, large exotic jungle plants, a stone temple and an elegant rowing boat, and written accounts reveal that a huge artificial moon magically illuminated the flowers and water plants. This hothouse kitsch lasted only thirty years. It was dismantled in 1897. So heavy was the whole construction that the masonry began to crumble and water leaked into the palace quarters below, causing the kitchen staff to go to bed with umbrellas.

People’s palaces Narcissus and tulip and lily The siege of the season abide, While the fog-demons chubby and chilly Throng thriftless and baffled outside. ‘Ode to Kew’, Punch, 19 January 1887

Glasshouse design in the nineteenth century was spectacular. Grand engineering projects reflected the nineteenth century’s passion for 24

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Postcard of the Crystal Palace (and Canadian Building).

scientific achievement and demonstrated a growing national political commitment to public spaces. Opportunities for travel and colonial expansion (with the concomitant importation of exotic species of plant), and a growing interest in botanical taxonomy and horticulture, were the effects of industrial and technological advances and a belief in the power of scientific discovery, especially in the natural sciences. In the nineteenth century the public display of such natural treasures was inspired by glasshouse design, and one hugely influential project was the Great Exhibition building of 1851, designed by Joseph Paxton (1803–1865). Paxton was head gardener to the 6th Duke of Devonshire in Derbyshire, and in 1849–50 he built a glasshouse at Chatsworth to house a gigantic Amazonian water lily (now known as Victoria amazonica) presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Inspired by the Chatsworth glasshouse, which Paxton termed the ‘Great Stove’, he began a more ambitious set of designs for a Great Exhibition building to be erected in Hyde Park, a massive structure covering an 25

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area of 77,000 square metres (19 acres), standing 19.5 metres (64 ft) high on average and rising to over 30.5 metres (100 ft) in the central transept. After the exhibition, the structure, now the Crystal Palace, was dismantled and reassembled in a new location on Sydenham Park in south London in 1854. Initially the public was shocked. They had never seen such a large construction erected (and subsequently dismantled) so quickly. It was as if the Crystal Palace had been conjured out of thin air. And it was so huge that Paxton and his engineers had to commandeer factories to manufacture the glass. Inevitably, there were critics and detractors. John Ruskin described Crystal Palace as a ‘cucumber frame’.7 It was deemed monstrous, and The Times described ‘The eye, accustomed to the solid heavy details of stone . . . wander[ing] along those extensive and transparent aisles, almost distrusting its own conclusions of the reality of what it sees, for the whole looks like a splendid phantom, which the heat of the noonday sun would dissolve.’8 However, the shock soon diffused, and the great glass and iron structure became an inspiration at

Postcard of the interior of the Crystal Palace. 26

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Botanic Gardens, Liverpool.

home and abroad, giving rise to a plethora of ‘crystal palaces on a domestic scale’.9 In the botanic gardens in Sheffield and Liverpool, established in the 1830s and 1840s, hothouses in the form of miniature Crystal Palaces were built to house exotic species brought to England through maritime trade. Crystal Palace, the great conservatory at Enville, Staffordshire (1853–4), and the Temperate House at Kew in 1855 established Britain at the forefront of glazed architecture design, and from the 1860s to the 1890s many towns and cities saw the creation of public glasshouses and winter gardens. Crystal Palace caused an architectural storm and architects and engineers from all over the world vied to rival the ‘People’s Palace’ in Sydenham. Over the next five years, several glass palaces were completed: the New York Crystal Palace (1853), the Glaspalast in 27

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Munich (1854) and the Palais de l’Industrie (1854). Designed for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1855, the Palais was a monumental edifice of cast iron, glass and masonry. It was a vast gothic structure that was hot and airless to walk inside, but its unique feature was the size of the exhibition space that afforded an uninterrupted view from one end to another. Never before had a glazed space been built to such voluminous dimensions.

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The hothouse at home These monumental glazed exhibition spaces for World’s Fairs gave the public ideas. The introduction of exotic plants to European soil had been growing since the 1830s, but the spectacular botanical displays at World’s Fairs brought the steamy jungle and the mountain ridge to people’s doorsteps. Horticulture became a popular home science and was quickly established as a favourite hobby among the middle classes, who showed an avid interest in transplanting plants from far-flung places, especially the ‘new’ world of the Americas, on to native soil. This enthusiasm for transplanting went in step with colonial expansion and the idea that one could domesticate the foreign. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the British Empire was expanding its territories, the British gardening press devoted many pages to information about adapting alien stocks to British soil. By the end of the nineteenth century, such enthusiasm was tempered by a conservative regard for preserving the British imperial identity of the English garden. A wariness about foreign influence pervaded even garden literature. In The Garden of a Commuter’s Wife (1911), Barbara Campbell describes ‘the thrill of oriental suggestion that the lily and iris tribes always bring with them . . . which must be by suggestion only; for if it is allowed to dominate, it becomes incongruous, and would wholly denationalize the garden’.10 28

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The British occupation of new colonial territories and the opening of new ports, like Liverpool, afforded great opportunities for horticultural societies and plant collectors. Robert Fortune, the superintendent of the Horticultural Society’s hothouses in the early 1840s, spent twenty years travelling to China, India and Japan collecting seeds and plants. Fortune’s expeditions were adventurous and lengthy affairs. Without any knowledge of the Chinese language he travelled into the interior of China. The succession of Opium Wars had made this dangerous terrain, but Fortune brought back new plants and new techniques, including the art of the bonsai, and he also smuggled out secrets of growing and making tea. Fortune’s expeditions to the East typified the growing fascination in the nineteenth century with hunting and collecting. ‘Everyone collects today,’ Guy de Maupassant observed in Le Gaulois in 1883, ‘even women.’11 Plant collecting and classification became part of a widespread fashion throughout Europe and America, and the acquisition of rare species of plant in cabinets and glazed cases was an indicator of both connoisseurship and modernity. In 1875 Édouard André of the Revue horticole went on a two-year collecting expedition to South America and returned with some 3,400 ‘new’ specimens. ‘Orchid fever’ was at its height and in the second half of the nineteenth century the flower acquired cult status. This was stimulated by the commercial ambitions of James Veitch, a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society who funded many plant-hunting expeditions and received a Gold Medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851 for the numerous varieties of orchid specimens brought to England by his collectors.12 Hunting for rare species was the favourite pastime of gentlemanadventurers, and in fiction it was the basis for tales about monster plants.13 In H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), the havoc wreaked by the Red Weed that comes to earth with the invading Martians and suffocates everything in its path is a metaphor of the 29

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dangers of colonization, the expression of a deep-rooted anxiety about the consequences of colonialism. The vigour of tropical species of plants in their native habitat was a source of wonder among plant collectors used to seeing much smaller botanical specimens raised under glass. In the imagination of many writers from the 1890s onwards the potential of these specimens to outgrow their glass environments had political and cultural associations with invasion and attack. The containing function of the hothouse is significant in the nineteenth century on both a global-political and an individual level. In Maupassant’s fiction the hothouse is a bourgeois status symbol, and it functions as both a restorative space where love and secrets are shared and a permissive space where individuals transgress social norms. It is invariably an outbuilding or an annex of the main residence, a peripheral space that permits personal revelations. In Chapter Sixteen of the novel Bel Ami (1885), Madame Walter confesses her love to Georges in dark corners or behind a tree in the glass conservatory, and in ‘La Serre’ (The Greenhouse), a story published under the pseudonym ‘Maufrigneuse’ in Gil Blas in June 1883, a wealthy couple from Nantes revitalize their sex life by spying on their maid as she goes to moonlit rendezvous with her lover in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden. The greenhouse is a signifier of self-improvement and industriousness (important values in modern culture), and its rectangular frame structure, along with the potting shed, begins to dominate the suburban landscape by the late nineteenth century. The partitioning and encasing of nature, however, was also a defining feature of the middle-class domestic interior, and from the early nineteenth century, many middle-class homes boasted small display cases of plants, small reptiles and sea creatures brought into the home in bell jars, glass vivariums and aquariums. 30

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Wardian case.

In 1829 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward designed glass cases for keeping plants indoors. He trialled his design by sending two cases to Australia and back. Usually plants did not survive the rough sea crossings, but the Wardian case proved a secure container, and by 31

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the 1840s some makers were producing decorative versions of the cases for home use. Ward publicized the virtues of his glass cases in his book, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (1842, expanded and reissued in 1852), and this generated much excitement among collectors of all kinds, especially fern-collectors (pteridomaniacs), for whom the Wardian case became essential equipment.14 The smog and smoke in densely populated urban areas was a serious drawback for plant collectors (and led to the relocation of many botanic gardens), but the carefully ventilated Wardian case protected delicate species from the outside air. The case was mainly used by botanists and fern-collectors, but it was also an ideal nearly airtight container for keeping small animals and fish. As Rebecca Stott notes: ‘Ward experimented with animals, including goldfish, in a freshwater tank which flourished when aquatic plants were added, but the discovery was a marginal one for he did not pursue the experiment for more than a few days and only with fish and freshwater.’15 By the 1850s a mania for terrariums and aquariums was in full swing. The glazed space, whether it was the large-scale public hothouse, the smaller private greenhouse, the bell jar stuffed with ferns in the drawing-room or the aquarium filled with tiny fish, reflected the century’s vogue for science and spectacle. It was a way of putting safe borders on the unknown and enjoying the weirdness of nature in the comfort of home. It was a luxury, according to the Goncourt brothers (in 1867, they said that it would last no more than twenty years!).16 It was entertainment and education, and it symbolized the extensive power and superiority of Western colonial culture over distant zones. The hothouse was a world within a world within a world, like a nest of Chinese boxes, a miniature theatre of the Sublime. In the imagination of some writers and artists, however, the functional space of the hothouse is subverted. It becomes a site of 32

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anxiety and menace, sexual transgression and psychic suffering, a stage on which struts modern man, his neuroses and erotic fantasies exposed. Richard Wagner used the greenhouse in his song cycle Wesendonck Lieder in 1858. In the third song, ‘Im Treibhaus’ (In the Greenhouse), the hothouse plants, ‘the children of distant zones’, suffer in sympathy with the lover, who waits for the final embrace and death. In the twentieth century the currency of the hothouse motif loses some value. As a fairly ubiquitous middle-class object, its novelty is no longer remarkable, however its symbolism is still exploited by some writers. In Phyllis Hastings’s pulp gothic novel The Conservatory (1973), for example, the hothouse is a symbol of ‘a certain decaying elegance’, displaying ‘only a remnant of its past glories’. For the heroine, Ellie Russell, it is a place of escape ‘from the sick-room atmosphere of the house where partially drawn blinds and subdued voices were considered proper and fitting’.17 our conception of the hothouse has broadened significantly since the first ancient experiments with protected cultivation. With strawberries and tomatoes trucked from Spain whatever the season, with roses flown in from Kenya within 24 hours, fields and fields of polytunnels in Spain and the Netherlands visible from space, and fruit and vegetables swiftly translocated via cool planes to wherever on the globe, the curiosity of the monumental glass structures of the nineteenth century has become less intense. Hot countries have literally become hothouses. The exotic has become domestic. Flowers, as Sarah Maguire describes in the poem ‘The Florist’s at Midnight’, are ‘cargoed across continents / to fade far from home’.18 And yet, in spite of this, the spectacle of the heated glass dome still pulls the crowds. Scientific curiosity about the natural world continues to grow, but today ecology and environmentalism are the prime 33

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motivations. The Eden Project in Cornwall, which opened in 2000, is hothouse technology on an ambitious scale. Comprising of a series of steel and plastic biomes housing thousands of plant species from all over the world, the complex is more than spectacle. Built to test out new green energy initiatives, the Eden Project is predominantly a large-scale experiment in wind energy and geothermal electricity. The phenomenon of containing wild nature under glass or plastic is compelling theatre. In 1996, 49,000 people converged on London’s Kew Gardens to witness the flowering of Amorphophallus titanum (Titan arum), a giant lily imported from the rainforests of Sumatra, and the police were called in to control the crowds. The Amorphophallus, or ‘corpse flower’, as the Indonesians call it, blooms only rarely. In 2002 the crowds massed again and the media attention was intense. Visitors to Kew were avid to see the giant red petals and the enormous phallic stem, and to experience the extraordinary foul odour emitted by the plant. The stench, described by some as a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement, was so strong that it could be picked up from about a kilometre away. When we speak metaphorically of hothouses and hothouse flowers, we are drawing on the nineteenth-century fascination with these things. When we refer to institutions as ‘intellectual hothouses’, we are drawing on the image of plants being forced on. When we describe an individual as being a ‘hothouse flower’, we are summoning a nineteenth-century notion about personalities that are fragile and strange. In Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839), for example, Mrs Wititterly is described as being ‘of a very excitable nature, very delicate, very fragile; a hothouse plant’. Given the immense popularity of the hothouse in the nineteenth century for growing flowers and vegetables off-season, it is interesting to note the pejorative metaphorical sense in which ‘hothouse’ is used. This might be because the notion of hothouse is inextricably linked 34

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Amorphophallus titanum (Titan arum), or corpse flower.

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to bringing exotic species on to native soil. In Victorian literature, the associations of hothouse cultivation and the ‘improving’ practices of florists and scientifically minded horticulturalists are largely negative. Hothouse imagery is suggestive of artificiality and falseness. Michael Waters cites many examples of this in his illuminating study The Victorian Garden in Literature (1988).19 In the novels of George Gissing, for instance, hothouse plants suggest false display. In Demos (1886), Adela Waltham’s enthusiasm for Richard Mutimer’s socialist ideas is described as ‘forced into being like a hothouse flower’, and Paula Tyrell in Thyrza (1907) is described as ‘the most exquisite of conservatory flowers’. Hothouse plants, Waters notes, are often compared unfavourably to native species. In Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (1857), William Crimsworth declares suggestively to Hunsden that the sweetness of Frances, ‘my little wild strawberry . . . made me careless of your hothouse grapes’. For some, the tropical plant signified evolutionary processes that were out of control, processes that threatened degeneration and the prospect of universal descent. Taking his cue (reluctantly) from Darwin, Ruskin expressed distaste for floral adaptation and horticultural science. He argued that by cultivating ‘a magnificently developed example of the plant, colossal in size and splendid in organization . . . we shall lose in it that moral ideal which is dependent on its right fulfilment of its appointed functions’.20 In his lecture ‘The Queen of the Air’ (1869), he describes floral adaptation in terms of a biblical fall of flowers and bemoans the ‘serpent charm’ that changes the ranunculus into monkshood; and makes it poisonous. It enters the forget-me-not, and the star of heavenly turquoise is corrupted into the viper’s bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn.21 36

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William Morris was vehemently opposed to ‘carpet bedding’ and the excessive artificiality of florists’ flowers, ‘generally the growth of hot countries, where things sprout over-quick and rank’.22 In an essay in which he praises two of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lyrics, ‘Troy Town’ and ‘Eden Bower’, Swinburne contrasts native and forced-on plant species:

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There is a strength and breadth of style about these poems also which ennobles their sweetness and brightness, giving them a perfume that savours of no hotbed, but of hill flowers that face the sea and sunrise; a colour that grows in no greenhouse, but such as comes with morning upon the mountains.23 In England in the nineteenth century there is an interest in, and respect for, old-fashioned ‘cottage’ plants that recall England’s rural past. Hothouses and exotic species imported from other countries were regarded as signs of an impoverished nouveau-riche taste and a preference for the modern. It was the view of the conservative majority that only a member of the philistine bourgeoisie could cultivate a liking for exotics and showy bedders – geraniums, lobelias, agapanthus. ‘Some old prime favourites’, wrote a commentator in Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘have lost their place in the parterre to make room for the upstart parvenus of vaunting propagators.’24 From about 1875 onwards, and the publication of Darwin’s treatise Insectivorous Plants, man-eating plants begin to proliferate in popular fiction.25 In 1881 Phil Robinson’s ‘The Man-eating Tree’ provoked a series of hoaxes about anthropophagous plants, and in 1894 Wells published his short story ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, in which he dramatizes the dangerous consequences of collecting strange foreign blooms. Wedderburn, an avid orchid-collector, plants in his glasshouse a newly purchased auction lot of plants from 37

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the Andamans and the Indies. Left by Batten, a fellow collector found dead, apparently sucked dry by leeches, the collection contains an unidentified ‘shrivelled rhizome’ which after a few days in the glasshouse comes to life:

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The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals; the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a wonderful bluish purple mingled there with the gold. He could see at once that the genus was altogether a new one. And the insufferable scent! How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes. Wedderburn is overcome by the fragrant exhalations and the rhizome begins to ensnare him in its tentacles, the sucker rootlets fixing themselves on his body with vampiric tenacity. Alerted by his absence at teatime and catching the strange scent of the monstrous plant as she enters the glasshouse, his housekeeper-cousin attacks the monstrous rhizome and pulls him to safety. The identification of exotics with foreign invaders and the arriviste pretensions of the rising middle classes are relatively common in late nineteenth-century fiction, particularly among English writers, but we find a more gendered perspective in the work of European writers. The hothouse is depicted as a feminine space, enclosed, ornamental and often dangerous. From 1850 onwards in France, fleur de serre (hothouse flower) is a familiar term used to describe the modern Parisian woman. Like the horticultural hybrids in the hothouse, she is unnatural and artificial. In failing to accept her social responsibility as wife and mother, she is a screen onto which patriarchal and cultural anxieties about degeneration are projected. In the nineteenth century, the hothouse and hothouse flower symbolize the terrifying and monstrous consequences of an 38

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over-refined civilization estranged from nature and reliant on science and technology. The analogies between the city and the hothouse and between horticultural hybrids and women point to a growing unease with progress and modernity. When late nineteenth-century Decadent writers deploy the metaphors, they exploit them for multiple layers of meaning. In both English and French, the word ‘hothouse’ (serre-chaude) is an obsolete figurative term for ‘brothel’. In an epigram Ben Jonson uses ‘hothouse’ to describe a whore-house:

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Where lately harbor’d many a famous whore, A purging bill, now fix’d upon the door, Tells you it is a hothouse; so it may, And still be a whore-house: they’re synonyma. More than two hundred years later, Baudelaire makes reference to this analogy in his novella La Fanfarlo (1847), in which the bedroom of a femme fatale is described as resembling a hothouse. Although serre-chaude ceases to be a term for brothel from the 1850s, Decadent usage of the metaphor resonates with this association. In fiction the hothouse is primarily a spatial metaphor, resonating with associations with the Great Exhibition glasshouses, horticultural experimentation and plant collecting, but the subtext often draws upon its old associations with illicit sex and brothel bohemianism. Writers like Zola and Huysmans exploit the slippage between these associations to hint at the colonial expansion of France under the Second Empire. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and capitalizing on the growing vogue for exotic plants and glazed spaces, the ‘hothouse’ acquires a curious literary pedigree. As Michael Riffaterre has commented, 39

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I doubt that this gardening device has in reality been responsible for enough sensational experiences to generate so much literary weirdness, and I doubt that the weirdness would have much effect upon the reader if that effect depended only upon his own familiarity with the thing itself, upon the referential meaning of the signifiers corresponding to it.26 And yet in spite of the utilitarian banality of the object it accumulates a range of meanings. It becomes reliable shorthand for overgrown and overblown natural desire. Hothouses can be social, cultural or political, but they all share the quality of being intense places where growth is accelerated. In the satirical American magazine Puck of 5 April 1882, for example, the artist makes a dig at the many politicians ‘rushing the season’. Each of the plants is a potential candidate for the White House that can be seen through the open doorway. The then-president, Chester A. Arthur – in power merely because James Garfield was assassinated – is portrayed as part of the genus ‘Accidentalia’. In the nineteenth century man stood against nature, and modern writers, especially the Decadents, championed the attempts of man through science and art to rise above natural processes and cycles, in spite (perhaps even especially because) of the fact that it was doomed to fail. The beauty of the hothouse flower and its inevitable decline was for the Decadents a perfect symbol of the short-lived pleasures of existence. The overpowering allure and fragrance of the exotic plant evoked the intoxicating realms of love and desire, but they also signified sexual monstrosity. For avant-garde writers and artists working at the fin de siècle, the hothouse flower was a more abstract symbol, a vehicle for describing uninhibited thoughts and desires. And for artists and writers of popular fantasy fiction in the early years of the twentieth century the stranglehold of giant and grotesque species of tropical plants became a way of articulating a 40

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host of fears; of the universal consequences of Darwin’s evolutionary theories; of what Stephen Arata has termed ‘reverse colonization’;27 and of the penetration of communist ideologies. More recently, in the late twentieth century, in poems like Frank Ormsby’s ‘At the Jaffé Memorial Fountain, Botanic Gardens’ (1986) and Sean O’Brien’s ‘hms Glasshouse’ (1991), the image of the tropical plant and glasshouse carries a political message about a society in decay. In ‘hms Glasshouse’, similar to the way that Maeterlinck transcodes the gardening bell jar (cloche) into a marine image – a ‘Cloche à plongeur’ (diving bell) – O’Brien exploits the evocative associations of the greenhouse and the submarine with stifling atmospheres and (moral and political) passivity:

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. . . We taste Its air of rot and counter-rot, attend Its vegetable politics, and watch.28 A metaphor that begins its life rather straightforwardly, as a way of describing overpopulated urban space, evolves over a period of a hundred years to describe female sexuality, the dangers of evolution and colonization, the unconscious and insidious political influence. The theme of corrupted beauty and decay runs through. Such is the cumulative power of metaphors. The metaphor of the hothouse flower grows out of a long tradition of flower symbolism, but its use by emergent modernist writers resonates with ambivalence towards its subject. Like the orchid, woman as hothouse flower signifies beauty and corruption, ‘an exotic monster among things of beauty’, ‘the epitome of the bizarre amongst flowers because of its strange and multifarious shape’.29 It reveals the beauty of the female form, but it simultaneously articulates subconscious anxieties about that very thing. 41

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Joseph Keppler, ‘Rushing the Season’, Puck, 5 April 1882.

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The metaphors of the hothouse and hothouse flower are extraordinarily rich. They suggest nature in a state of confined cultivation, species dislocated from their natural habitats and reared in unnatural ones, nature fragile and dependent on perfect conditions, nature at the whim of man and artifice. Through the figurative use of the hothouse and hothouse flower, some modern writers and artists articulated an ambivalence towards nature that would be a defining feature of their work. Nature is awesome, the Decadents grudgingly admitted, but man should at least attempt to rise above repetitive and cyclical natural processes. Nature always wins in the end, but that does not mean man should submit; on the contrary, it is man’s duty to rival nature and celebrate artifice. Artifice is the perfect cloak of our base natural selves. To lead a life where artifice is paramount would be, as Huysmans puts it, ‘a decided slap in the face for that old Mother Nature’.30

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‘Aromatic and Tainted’: The City as Hothouse [The] hothouse joined them in their lovemaking, burned with the heat of their passion. Through the oppressive air, by the white light of the moon, they took in the strangeness of the world around them, as the plants seemed vaguely to move about and embrace one another. émile zola, La Curée (1871)

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I

n the nineteenth century the growing popularity of botanic gardens and public hothouses and the use of glass and cast iron in monumental engineering projects, such as the pioneering Crystal Palace, inspired writers, historians and journalists to see the modern world in new terms. As a microcosm of accelerated exotic growth, the hothouse was a metaphor of escape, fulfilling a desire for paradise that had risen out of fears of the appalling conditions that came with rapid industrialization. Walking along the labyrinth of intersecting pathways in these mini jungles, visitors could enjoy a heightened olfactory experience and imagine faraway places. Steamy, overcrowded, pungent, the hothouse was an unspoilt oasis of wonder embedded in the modern city. Urban renewal in the nineteenth century was a predominantly middle-class phenomenon in that the middle classes benefited much more than the poor from the new buildings and freshly landscaped parks and gardens. The modern city was a dark and dangerous place for many working people, but it was a playground for the middle classes. As they accumulated more wealth, they 45

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sought a lifestyle that was pseudo-aristocratic and expensive. Major industrialists erected palatial residences with extensive parks and large winter gardens that displayed collections of art and plants side by side. Under a curved glass roof, the museum and the palm garden could be brought together, offering the middle classes a sense of cultural edification and aesthetic pleasure. In John Kibble’s ‘Palace’ in Glasgow (1872), white marble statues based on the ancient myths were displayed along gravel paths in the midst of tropical flora, and in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (1904) an art collection surrounded a palm garden with fountains, benches and marble statues beneath a central dome. Aquariums and aviaries in winter gardens provided special points of interest. Arranged like the plants in a hothouse, in accordance with the geography of the globe, fishes, reptiles and birds were presented in habitats that included natural and painted scenery. The Unter den Linden aquarium in Berlin (1869) took the visitor step by step from the world of birds to grottoes displaying amphibians and fishes. From the mid-nineteenth century the practice of displaying natural specimens of flora and fauna alongside man-made objects became increasingly common. The contents of a winter garden were not just for passive spectatorship, they were also for consumption. In all the major European cities there were grand architectural projects that used the original glasshouse model to enclose under one roof every kind of human activity. There were several plans to extend the Crystal Palace, for example, into a boundless structural element of the city of London. In 1855 Paxton put before the Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements a plan for the ‘Great Victorian Way’, which was to consist of a glass ring encircling the central business district of London. Under the glass roof were to be assembled reading rooms, exhibition halls, concert halls, public assembly rooms, baths, cafés, business 46

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premises and a market. With the help of technology, the climate of these man-made environments of recreation and consumption was to be controlled to enable exotic plants to flourish alongside displays of goods and services to buy. This was a vision of the city as hothouse and pleasure dome. Aristide Boucicault’s Bon Marché store in Paris opened in 1838, but when it was rebuilt in 1852 it was modelled on the Crystal Palace, which Boucicault had seen the previous year when he visited the Great Exhibition. Under the glass roof of the remodelled Bon Marché, the consumer environment was deliberately exotic, filled with tropical plants and flooded with natural light. At the heart of the designs of both the Bon Marché and the Crystal Palace was an oriental hothouse aesthetic borrowed from the arcades of Paris. Sometimes called ‘bazaars’, the arcades were worlds unto themselves, glazed passages that ran between streets, with scenic interiors and luxury goods on display. They were the inspiration behind the grand architectural designs in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly department stores and exhibition spaces ‘which at once evoked the Garden and the idealized city: Arcadia. The Crystal Palace was a hypertrophied arcade; the Bon Marché was a captive Crystal Palace.’1

Paris Between 1850 and 1880 the economic expansion and development of European cities led to rapid urbanization, but by far the greatest transformation to occur was in the city of Paris. Rebuilt and reorganized to glorify the achievements of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoléon iii), it was transformed into a consumerist paradise, and became by the fin de siècle the cultural capital of Europe. In the 1850s and ’60s Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, appointed 47

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Prefect of the Seine, transformed Paris by destroying much of the medieval city for Louis-Napoléon, who sought systematic and ruthless urban renewal. Three hundred and fifty thousand people, Haussmann himself estimated, were displaced to the outskirts of the city during this period; people were uprooted as houses and shops were demolished for the building of new commercial sites, such as the market complex of Les Halles and the rue de Rivoli. Among the many transformations were new sewers, gas lighting, public parks, freed-up road traffic and wide avenues and boulevards. By establishing the army barracks in the city centre, in each arrondissement Haussmann centralized control of the city’s population. The narrow back streets, where rioters could flee and hide, were substituted with wide-open boulevards that radiated from large circus junctions. For the first time, the city’s armies had a clear

‘View of the interior of the horticultural exposition, Lille’, L’Illustration (1863). 48

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view of potential proletarian insurrection and it was now much easier to anticipate and suppress the behaviour of rebellious mobs. The poor were displaced to the outskirts and there were discernible boundaries between the wealthy and slum districts. During this period new horticulture became increasingly visible with nurseries, garden-shops and florists. George Sand declared the ‘new taste for flowers’ that she saw at the horticulture section of the 1867 Exposition Universelle as ‘an essential element in civilization’.2 Narrow medieval back alleys were cleared for a modern metropolis of parks, garden squares and tree-lined boulevards, and the design of the city’s most modern park, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, boasted hills and lakes. The interventions of Haussmann’s design team reconceptualized Paris as the centre of Western civilization, a spectacle of renewal and refurbishment, health and beauty. For some, this came at a price. The historian Hippolyte Taine described the renovations of Paris as having created ‘an overheated hothouse, aromatic and tainted’,3 whereas the writer Georges Rodenbach found it stimulating compared to his native Belgium, writing to Émile Verhaeren in 1878 that ‘in Paris, one lives at twice the pace, and is in a hothouse, and suddenly the sap rises and thought flowers’.4 The demolition of the old parts of the city and the rebuilding of central Paris gave the city the sparkle of confection, and people flocked to enjoy the vibrant shop-fronts and the new leisure spaces. Popular images of Paris between 1860 and 1890 resonate with the avant-garde vision of the Impressionists, including Monet, Pissarro, Manet, Sisley and Degas. These artists brought attention to the physicality of paint and colour on canvas and to effects of light and movement. They exploited the changing cityscape of Paris and new viewpoints created by the widened and straightened boulevards and bourgeois apartments with high balconies with rooftop views, and they also painted subjects drawn directly from the contemporary 49

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world, where nature is controlled, even manicured, and human activity is paramount. The Impressionists’ view of modern life shows a secular middle-class culture outside, on display, people eating, drinking, picnicking, strolling, playing, watching the world. Nature is a backdrop to the theatre of human leisure, crowded into the new urban spaces – race courses, pavement cafés, railway stations, winter gardens and public parks.

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Manet In the painting Music in the Tuileries (1862) Édouard Manet depicts a modern Eden scene. Wealthy Parisians are crowded among the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens. They are dressed in their finery, watching the world go by and being watched by the world. Nature in the painting has a structural role. The architectural columns of thin tree trunks help the eye to scan the concert crowd in a zigzagging movement from left to right, from foreground to background, from the two bonneted women on the left who meet our gaze to the densely populated but indistinct further reaches of the gardens. Gathered informally in small groups under the trees, these people are clearly at leisure, but in spite of their proximity to one another, there is little interrelationship. Unlike the bucolic fêtes of Renoir, there is no physical activity, no dancing or flirting. In spite of the title, Manet’s painting invites us to look rather than imagine and hear the music. Paradoxically, this is a claustrophobic and interiorized image of the outside world. With only a small patch of sky visible between the treetops, there is little breathing space, little opportunity to escape the concert crowd. Manet portrays Parisian society as a hothouse. Modern Parisian culture is on display, and we appreciate its elite demographic and its self-conscious stylishness. Two children in their best clothes play 50

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with buckets and spades in the centre foreground, and a well-dressed gentleman doffs his hat to a group of women on the right. Society arranges itself decorously beneath the trees of the Tuileries, but the anonymity of individuals, their proximity to one another and the density of the concert crowd suggest a hothouse space. The claustrophobic setting prefigures the primitivist jungle landscapes of Henri Rousseau later in the century, but it also hints at the urban cityscapes evoked by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in his verse collection Les Fleurs du mal. Behind the woman in the blue bonnet on the left of Manet’s painting we can just make out the blurred figure of Baudelaire, top-hatted in a frock coat, his face smudged, striking in its foregrounded indistinctness. He cuts an anonymous figure in the hothouse scene; he is a fleeting and featureless element of a painting that clearly depicts the characteristics of modern life. In Music in the Tuileries, nature is hothoused and subject to the man-made. The relegation of nature is a theme in modern writing of the period. A growing number of writers in the nineteenth century rejected Romantic attitudes towards nature and the idea that external nature has a moral life. Theirs was an urban and interior aesthetic. They preferred the wilder manifestations of nature to be strictly in abeyance. From the 1850s in France, the modern view of nature reflected a cultural energy that was directed towards new, densely populated urban areas, towards cities like Paris where there was little natural beauty. Except as a form of escape, the countryside held little interest for city-dwellers. For some writers, nature was regarded as man’s oppressor, and natural beauty only a reminder that states of perfection are subjective and fleeting. This was the view of Baudelaire, whose jaundiced and soul-weary denunciations of modernity and modernization were articulated through images that inverted conventional notions of the 51

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Édouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries, 1862, oil on canvas.

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natural and ideal. Not for him the decorous forms of flower poetry, with its roots in pastoral verse and prayer. Instead, he preferred Les Fleurs du mal (1857; censored, and reissued in 1861) in which all bloom (in both the botanical and sexual sense) is blighted. In nature Baudelaire sees only the tedious circuitry of the life cycle that ends in corruption and death. In pursuit of beauty and the higher forms of imagination, he looked to the modern spectacle of contemporary Paris. In the fashion and manners of individuals swarming the hothouse city and the crowded boulevards he found aesthetic pleasure and inspiration. He drew particular attention to the women who – like hothouse flowers – dressed up to be seen as they strolled along the newly built boulevards. For Baudelaire, adornment and artifice are the only ways to trump nature, and yet beneath all enhanced beauty, he insists, is the spectre of rot and death. This is the principal theme of Les Fleurs du mal, poems that bring together Romantic and modern attitudes to nature and culture, and liberate the flower motif from its sentimental associations with idealized love. As Théophile Gautier commented in his 1868 Preface to the volume: If his bouquet is composed of strange flowers, of metallic colourings and exotic perfumes, the calyx of which, instead of joy, contains bitter tears and drops of aqua-tofana, he can reply that he planted but a few into the black soil, saturating them in putrefaction, as the soil of a cemetery dissolves the corpses of preceding centuries among mephitic miasmas. Undoubtedly roses, marguerites, violets, are the more agreeable spring flowers; but he thinks little of them in the black mud with which the pavements of the town are covered.5

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Les Fleurs du mal The modernization of Paris captivated Baudelaire, but his feelings were far from being a celebration of the new city. He lamented the razing to the ground of the old Carrousel neighbourhood (between the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace) in 1852 (two days after Napoléon iii had come to power) and the demise of the shabby-chic social life there. What once had been a haven for bohemians and dissident artists among the local tradesmen and entertainers was now what Richard Terdiman has described as a ‘new ersatz imperial reality’ replacing the old economy of ‘merchandising, theatre and prostitution’.6 In ‘Le Cygne’ (The Swan), Baudelaire describes the poet’s isolation and loss and imagines the past, present and future as a flow of repeated experiences, conjoining ancient Troy with modern Paris. In this poem, he creates a layered and restless vision of urban renewal and human displacement. The elemental imagery of the poem – water, rock, earth, air – literally (over)flows from Andromache’s tears and the swelling mock-meagre Simois River in the first stanza to metaphorically flood the poet’s fertile memory in the second. The poem introduces its themes as a stream of consciousness, but by the third stanza the contrasting river images of majesty and poverty have exhausted themselves and only ‘puddle-stain’ remains. The human potential and loss figured by Andromache crying recedes and a barren modern landscape with a single swan is brought into focus. A swan, who had escaped from his captivity, And scuffing his splayed feet along the paving stones, He trailed his white array of feathers in the dirt, Close by a dried out ditch the bird opened his beak,7 55

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Water gives way to the dry earth and the dust of an emergent but lifeless modern cityscape, in the debris of which the swan trails its feathers. At the end of the first section, the bird unites all the elements in his invocation to the heavens; bathed in city dust, neck outstretched to ‘the ironic sky’, the bird cries for water and thunder. Baudelaire describes modern Paris as a palimpsest, where traces of the past appear in the present, but he also conveys a powerful sense of the city as a transitional space, as a space that is both old and new, transforming moment by moment. The modern city is teeming with people on the move. From the aerial perspective of a lofty balcony, people are like insects. ‘City of swarming, city full of dreams’, the first line of ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ (Seven Old Men), offers an image of narrow spaces proliferating with colonies of ant-like crowds in the city streets.8 This urban landscape is exciting and stimulates the imagination in extraordinary ways, Baudelaire suggests, but at the same time the flux of modern life is overwhelming and dehumanizing. It has destabilizing effects on the individual and his sense of place. In his descriptions of modern Paris, Baudelaire’s rapid visual shifts in perspective and sense of psychological unfixity offer a dynamic view of the claustrophobic modern city. The seductive beauty of a lover could metamorphose from one moment to another into a figure of stinking repulsion. Turning to his lover in ‘Une Charogne’ (A Carcass), the poet reminds her that through death she will inevitably become dead meat, like the animal carcass in the gutter before them, ‘legs . . . spread out like a lecherous whore, / Sweating out poisonous fumes’.9 There is no escape from disease and death. Such rapid mental transitions characterize some of Baudelaire’s most complex poems, volte-faces that are compounded by a sense of tension or dissolution in the poet’s verse structures and articulations. This tension, present in 56

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both his lyric poetry and his critical essays, is revealing of both the exhaustion and the vitality of what he called the ‘heroism of modern life’. Fashion and finery, Baudelaire comments in his essay ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), is ‘one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul’ and

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must therefore be thought of as a symptom of the taste for the ideal that floats on the surface in the human brain, above all the coarse, earthy and disgusting things that life according to nature accumulates, as a sublime distortion of nature, or rather as a permanent and constantly renewed effort to reform nature.10 Paris became, as Walter Benjamin famously described, the ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, and Baudelaire the quintessential figure of modernity. Baudelaire’s vision of modern Paris came as a shock to his readers and few appreciated his cynical evaluation of Haussmann’s efforts to transform the city, but following the publication of Les Fleurs du mal writers began to find new metaphors for what was happening in and to urban spaces, and the ambiguity of the enclosed space of the glasshouse – a space that both tames and unleashes, dignifies and distorts nature – served to describe some of the paradoxical aspects of urban living.

Fairs and spectacles The currency of the term ‘hothouse’ in the work of French writers in the second half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly due to the vogue for hothouses and winter gardens and to the dizzying 57

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spectacle of crowds in the city’s spaces. The day-to-day overcrowding was intensified by tourist ‘seasons’, people flocking from all over the world to experience large-scale events, like the series of World’s Fairs and Exhibitions where they could witness at first hand new architectural projects, such as the Palais de l’Industrie. In response to Louis-Napoléon’s desire to rival the Crystal Palace in London, architect Jean-Marie-Victor Viel and engineer Alexis Barrault built the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Elysées in 1854, where it stayed until 1900. Taking up 90,000 hectares of interior space and measuring 35 metres between the floor and the keystone, the Palais de l’Industrie was an ambitious project. It was not the most elegant construction. The exterior, built of cast iron covered in masonry, was deemed monumentally ugly and generated a public outcry. Octave Mirbeau described it as a ‘bull trampling through a bed of roses’.11 Nonetheless, the towering architectural sculpture was a potent symbol of the outreach of French culture to all parts of the globe. Successive fairs in Paris brought the orient to the West, and showcased a myriad of vibrant exotic flora from India, China and Japan. There was enormous enthusiasm for Japanese horticulture at this time, and Japanese gardens were showcased at the Expositions Universelles of 1878, 1889 and 1900 in Paris as well as 1873 in Vienna. In the Paris Salons two artists submitting under the ‘Natures mortes’ (still-life) section reflected the contemporary fascination with imported exotic flora. Their paintings are preoccupied with the wealth and abundance of nature, clearly signifying the proprietary and commercial urges of modern French culture. In Gabriel Thurner’s Back from the Market flowers and vegetables are piled upon a crate containing live birds, and in Boarding the Flowers, by the prodigious flower-painter Georges Jeannin for the same Salon, giant triffid-like palms and large papery-petalled flowers bypass 58

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the gangplank to cascade in a shower from a moored wooden vessel on to the water. A major tourist attraction was the glasshouse at the Jardin des Plantes, designed by Charles de Rohault de Fleury in 1833–4. The building was symmetrical in design with curvilinear wings based on English glasshouse design that he had seen while visiting England as a student in 1833. It was the first large glasshouse on the Continent to have a space frame made entirely of iron and its multi-storey cast-iron facade served also as the roof support. One contemporary guide was effusive in its praise:

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Face to face with this spacious, light and graceful building . . . with its vigorous vegetation, its many colours visible through its thousands of windows, with its terraces decorated with vases and tropical plants, one imagines oneself transported

Georges Jeannin, Boarding the Flowers, 1880, oil on canvas. 59

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under oriental skies in the middle of one of those mysterious gardens of which one reads marvellous descriptions in the stories of The Thousand and One Nights.12 From the mid-nineteenth century, architects and designers were in thrall to the new building materials of glass and iron that could be used to create buildings of astonishing spans and heights. Following the popularity of hothouses and the sense of space and pleasure they afforded, large new commercial spaces were built. Glass-covered botanical gardens and winter gardens, such as the Jardins d’Hiver in Paris and Lyons, were opened for the amusement of the public. The Jardin d’Hiver in Paris was built in 1847 from a design by H. Meynadier and M. Rigolet and it stood in the newly laid-out Champs-Elysées. An earlier, smaller winter garden, built in 1846, had not found favour with the Parisian public because of its small area and lack of height, and was demolished after only six months. The new building was conceived on a more generous scale; apart from an extensive garden it contained a ballroom, a café, a reading room and living quarters for the gardeners. Both ends of the building and the side-walls of the transept were covered with mirrors, and steam heating kept the building at a comfortable, steady temperature, even on the coldest winter day. Other projects followed, and from 1855 an additional eighteen greenhouses and an orangery were built in Paris, providing the city’s middle classes with enclosed natural spaces that were protected from pollution and unpleasant urban smells.

Zola Manet’s hothouse image of the Tuileries and Baudelaire’s splenetic visions of modern Paris find their more satirical counterpart in the 60

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novels of Émile Zola (1840–1902), whose Rougon-Macquart series of novels documents the social, political and economic life of France under the Second Empire. In Zola’s novels Paris is a city where the currencies of sex and money flow fast and furious, where desire for financial gain is synonymous with sexual adventure and conquest. From the wheeling and dealing in the financial areas of the city bustling with investment to the avaricious consumerism in thriving commercial areas lined with department stores selling luxury goods, Zola satirizes the urban space as a hothouse, overcrowded and fermenting with libidinal energy and greed. In the work of French Realist writers, we find many references to rare plants and many scenes set in gardens. In novels such as Edmond Duranty’s Le Malheur d’Henriette Gérard (The Unhappiness of Henriette Gérard, 1861), the Goncourts’ Renée Mauperin (1864), Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1869) and Zola’s La Conquête de Plassans (The Conquest of Plassans, 1874), gardens are ‘often evocative contexts for moments of heightened emotion, or escape from social contraints’.13 However, the hothouse becomes a particularly significant literary motif for Zola in the 1870s and ’80s, not surprisingly given his zeal for collecting and his interest in cataloguing the plants in the Jardin des Plantes for his novel La Curée (The Kill), published in 1872. In this novel – discussed more fully in Chapter Six, the Saccards’ hothouse is a site of monstrous corruption. Exotic foliage provides humid cover for the incestuous passion between Renée Saccard and her stepson, their liaison a symbol of the more widespread corruption among financiers and politicians. The hothouse is the place where dreams of conquest and incestuous desire are realized with tragic consequences. The painstaking detail in Zola’s descriptions of tropical plant species, including the ‘bloody caresses’ of the caladium plant (one of the most popular hothouse plants in the late nineteenth 61

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century) draws on the general understanding, significance and currency of botany in the second half of the nineteenth century, and invokes a sense of crisis about the consequences of sexual and cultural domination. Botany, as Amy King claims in Bloom (2003), had become a ‘cultural touchstone’; ‘in combination with the sexual language of flowers that formed its classification system’, botany was ‘a topic through which questions of social and sexual import could be discussed’.14 In Zola’s descriptions of plants there lurks a sense of cruelty and pain that hints at the sadistic impulses of the lovers. Beneath the seductive beauty there is the suggestion of conflict and war:

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By their side the twisted, red-streaked leaves of the begonias and the white spear-headed leaves of the caladiums provided a vague series of bruises and pallors, which the lovers could not understand, though at times they discerned curves as of hips and knees, prone on the ground beneath the brutality of blood-stained kisses.15 Zola created an intellectual hothouse at his country retreat in Médan, 32 km (20 miles) outside Paris. He bought the building in 1878 out of the proceeds of his seventh novel, L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop, 1877), and the ‘rabbit hutch’, as he called it, became the meeting-place for writers of the Naturalist school. One visitor to Zola’s Médan retreat was the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, who based his early prose style on the principles of Zola’s Naturalism. In a prose poem, ‘Claudine’, from Le Drageoir aux épices (A Dish of Spices, 1874), for example, Huysmans describes the process of physical decay with Zola’s painterly relish for colour and texture. In this extract, he compares the carcass of a cow in a butcher’s shop to a hothouse with Naturalist precision: 62

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As in a hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot out on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp white against the red medley of quivering flesh.16

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By the time he came to write his Decadent novel À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), Huysmans had abandoned the principles of Naturalism, but the eccentric aesthetic tastes of the novel’s hero, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, show the hallmarks of Zola’s passion for cataloguing and taxonomy. In a passage describing Baudelaire’s penetrative insights to the dark recesses of the human mind in vegetative terms, he draws on an inverted nature trope, portraying the self as an ‘inexhaustible mine’ with tunnels leading to a glass enclosure filled with terrible diseases: There, close to those frontiers which are the dwelling-place of aberrations and diseases of the mind – the tetanus of mysticism, the delirious fevers of lechery, the typhoid and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, incubating beneath the dreary bell-glass of Ennui, the terrifying climacteric of emotions and of ideas.17 This garden is no delight; it is where nameless weeds proliferate and choke without hindrance and where evil thoughts take organic shape. The reference to ‘typhoid and yellow fevers of crime’ suggests how remote this bell-glass is from the ‘normal’ location of self, and in its allusion to diseases caught in faraway places, conflates vegetable and animal to describe the unholy union of ‘emotions and . . . ideas’. In Robert Baldick’s 1959 translation the passage 63

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pulsates with images of reproduction (‘flourish’, ‘breeding-ground’, ‘hatching’) to convey the vitality of those parts of the human psyche that hanker for the dark side, which teem with unspeakable urges and desires, and which crave for a life of extremes.18 This is a significant theme in Huysmans’s À rebours, at the centre of which the metaphors of the hothouse and tropical flowers acquire a dramatic significance.

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Huysmans’s À rebours À rebours is a compartmentalized and interiorized novel (like many Decadent works, including Gautier’s Fortunio, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) and is structured around a series of well-formed, self-contained scenes. As Séverine Jouve argues in Obsessions et perversions dans la littérature et les demeures à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle (1996), a study of the correspondences between themes and their imagined relation to the actual house interiors of writers such as the Goncourts, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Robert de Montesquiou, most of À rebours takes place inside Des Esseintes’ house in Fontenay. The rooms, particularly the library and the dining-room, which appear most frequently throughout the novel, are related to the decadent obsessions of cataloguing and appetite – concerns at the heart of Des Esseintes’ neurosis.19 The powerful sense of both space and place in À rebours derives from trips Huysmans made to the Parisian suburb of Fontenayaux-Roses and to Jutigny with his mistress Anna Meunier in the early 1880s. In 1881 Huysmans spent three months convalescing in Fontenay-aux-Roses, where the highly perfumed Bengal rose was cultivated in the sixteenth century for the perfumiers at the Court of Versailles. His letters to his friend Théodore Hannon at 64

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this time reveal that the district of Fontenay-aux-Roses gave him all kinds of ideas for À rebours and that he was spending his time ‘re-reading Baudelaire and planting “almost artificial flowers”’ in the garden.20 Huysmans modelled his hero on various real-life eccentrics, including King Ludwig ii of Bavaria, Edmond de Goncourt, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Francis Poictevin, Baudelaire and, most famously, Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921). Their homes were monuments to baroque personal fantasies, and reptiles, relics of prehistoric times and exotic faraway places, were popular adornments. Ludwig ii owned mechanical lizards that travelled about the painted forests of his rooftop Winter Garden in Munich, while Montesquiou unsuccessfully tried to accommodate a live giant tortoise in his Paris apartment. Unfortunately, the tortoise did not survive, expiring from the toxic shock of gilt paint applied to its shell.21 Of all the possible models for Des Esseintes, Montesquiou was indisputably the aesthete and dandy who impressed Huysmans the most. À rebours begins with the theme of debility and decline. Feeling worn out and attributing this ennui to hereditary degeneracy, Des Esseintes retires from a hectic life of debauchery and retreats into a life of luxurious solitude. He surrounds himself with human artistry as he despises all that is natural in the world, preferring instead to live within his designer house, each room decorated to give a sense of limitless adventure and sensation. Paradoxes proliferate. In an attempt to escape the Parisian humdrum, Des Esseintes stays at home, and by way of taking nourishment without the mess and bother of oral gratification, he feeds à rebours, by means of a peptone enema three times a day. Only momentarily in the novel does Des Esseintes believe that he has found the optimum conditions for his survival, and at these times, he goes against nature. However, Des Esseintes does not thrive 65

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in his self-imposed isolation for long, and he weakens and degenerates as these conditions become unsustainable. The house at Fontenay is a hothouse that harbours unnatural desires and overdeveloped tastes, a place where he aims to eliminate the natural imperative for bodily functions that he finds distasteful. Des Esseintes strives for perfect self-cultivation, achievable only, he is forced to admit, through modern scientific methods. As the garden architect Robert B. Leuchars asserted in 1851, ‘Cultivation becomes more certain as it becomes more scientific.’22 The hothouse and the tropical flower lend structural and thematic coherence to À rebours. The entire novel is a hothouse or a forcing-house, in effect. The non-action takes place in a series of enclosed spaces that relate to particular human functions. At the very centre of the novel (Chapter Eight), which describes the entrance hall of the house, is a description of Des Esseintes’ collection of exotic plants. Des Esseintes is a human extension of his tropical plant collection, their rarity a reflection of his aristocratic lineage, their fragility and state of decomposition a symbol of his own etiolated condition.

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Hothouse flowers Chapter Eight of À rebours is devoted to descriptions of Des Esseintes’ collection of exotic plants. His collecting takes three forms. First, he buys rare specimens from the specialist greenhouses in the avenue de Châtillon and in the Aunay Valley, but, dissatisfied with the real thing, he then collects fake plants made from a list of materials found in a theatrical costumier, ‘gums and threads, percalines and taffetas, papers and velvets’.23 He wearies quickly of this obsession, however, and, not satisfied with real plants that look as if they are made out of dress material and artificial flowers 66

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that have the appearance of the real thing, Des Esseintes goes a step further and purchases strange species of tropical plants that imitate artificial plants that look real. Determined to distance himself from the predictable banality of natural processes, he bases his collection of imported plants on layered variations of beauty and gruesomeness. This third stage of his collecting epitomizes the theme of À rebours. The plants are disembarked and fill the entrance hall of the house at Fontenay. The hall becomes both a miniature quayside and a hothouse, in which species of rare and exotic plant are tiered and grouped according to their place of origin. Together the newly arrived plants boast of a global exoticism. There is the Anthurium from Columbia, the Amorphophallus from Cochin China, the orchid from India, the fly-trap from the Antilles and the Cattleya orchid from New Granada. Like Zola in La Curée, Huysmans uses a variety of names for the plants. Blending together the scientific Latin names of individual plants with the names of plant species and vernacular names, he creates a sense of artificial hybridity, evoking both the highly popular and successful horticultural practice of hybridization and the colonial reach of the French Second Empire and its insatiable appetite for appropriating foreign treasures as its own. All is not what it seems, however, for the rare beauty of these plants emanates paradoxically from their physical appearance that suggests wounding and infection. Assembled like captives taken and rounded up by colonialist military forces, they bear the physical signs of damage and decay. Collected together in Des Esseintes’ entrance hall, they signify in ambiguous ways. On the one hand, they are collectors’ prizes, bought in to satisfy the aesthetic taste of a French aristocrat, but on the other, they also suggest a barbarian invasion: ‘crossed swords, kris, spear-heads, making a pile of green weapons 67

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above which floated, like so many barbaric pennants, flowers in dazzling, strident hues’.24 In their gruesome beauty the plants recall the casualties of military invasion, and they are laid out – or exhibited – like the wounded and dying in a military hospital. The flowers of the Echinopsis, for example, are described as ‘the vile pink of amputated stumps’, and the Nidularium has ‘saber-shaped leaves opening to reveal flayed, gaping flesh’.25 Surveying his entire collection, Des Esseintes reflects on ‘the magnificent horrors of their gangrened limbs’.26 In their colour, textures and form the plants imitate, even surpass, man-made objects and animal and human tissue: the majority, as though eaten away by syphilis and leprosy, exhibited livid flesh marbled with roseola and damasked with dartres; others were the bright pink of scars that are healing, or the brownish tint of scabs in the process of forming; others were blistering from cautery or puffing up from burns; still others revealed hairy surfaces pitted by ulcers and embossed with chancres; and then, finally, there were some which looked as though they were covered with dressings, plastered with black mercurial ointment, with green unguents made from atropine, or sprinkled with the glittery-yellow dust of iodoform powder.27 The catalogue of skins, substances and surfaces in this passage is rhetorical exaggeration, blending the discourses of colonialism, medicine and botany, but, as Des Esseintes reflects, ‘It all comes down to syphilis.’28 In the nineteenth century syphilis evoked all kinds of horrors in the popular imagination. Highly infectious, rapidly spread by prostitutes and their middle-class clients in the cities, and with a capacity for trans-generational infection, syphilis 68

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was a threat to individuals, families and the national health. Late nineteenth-century France, in crisis over falling birth rates, perceived venereal disease as an epidemic; it was feared as a terrible social and economic blight. Ideas of sexual excess and social degeneration in the medico-scientific discourses on notions of hereditarianism sent conservative critics into fevers of moral outrage. On the one hand, Des Esseintes’ flowers evoke the fear of invasion, or reverse colonization, by the barbarian tribes of French military outposts in Africa and the Orient, but on closer inspection, they also suggest anxieties that are more home-grown, anxieties about modern attitudes to sex and sexuality, and to the phenomenon of sexual promiscuity associated with the modern city. The fear of cultural degeneration was widespread in France in the 1880s. The publication in 1857 of Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’éspèce humaine by Dr Bénédict Augustin Morel initiated arguments about degeneration that located its causes and effects (Boulangism, syndicalism, anarchism, Decadence, socialism, feminism, the Dreyfus Affair) in evolutionary atrophy. From the 1880s, these debates intensified around scientific research into patterns of disease (such as syphilis), trans-generational and venereal, which, as Des Esseintes comments to himself, ‘still raged, in the guise of carefully concealed pain’.29 In Des Esseintes’ imagination, the exotic plants conjure images that touch on a range of cultural preoccupations and anxieties about sexual and cultural otherness. The attraction of these strange and exotic species is counterbalanced by a fascination with their predatory and primitive ugliness. Des Esseintes is ambivalent. It is not clear whether he is horrified by their peculiar appearance or delighted by their originality. The monstrosity of his collection resonates with an overriding anxiety about universal common descent and Darwin’s ideas about the survival of human, animal 69

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and plant species. Like Des Esseintes himself – an exotic relic of French nobility – the flowers are symbols of decadence and descendancy. Des Esseintes is the last in a declining family line. As the representative of outmoded aristocracy, he cuts a bathetic figure whose primary aim – to seclude himself and avoid the more banal effects of cultural degeneration – is from the outset presented as bound to fail. À rebours was a sensation on publication. So essentially decadent was Des Esseintes’ lifestyle that the poet and critic Arthur Symons described the novel as a ‘breviary for its worshippers’.30 The novel’s appearance in 1884 identified the hothouse metaphor with a distinctive Decadent literary tradition obsessed with the themes of beauty and degeneration. It was immediately acknowledged as a major avant-garde work of the nineteenth century and signalled a departure from conventional fiction. It was not translated into English until 1922, but it achieved notoriety among the British avant-garde three decades earlier as it was rumoured to be the unnamed yellow book in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Wilde’s novel Dorian is beguiled by a book sent to him by Lord Henry Wotton and it becomes the handbook of his own hedonist selfdestruction. Fascinated by ‘that peculiar jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and archaism, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases’, Dorian is captivated especially by the metaphors, which he describes as ‘monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour’.31 Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray are probably the most famous fictional dandies of the late nineteenth century, their bizarre tastes and obsessions an indicator of the cultural anxieties surrounding science, progress and utilitarian ideas in Europe at the fin de siècle. Their championing of the art of decoration was a rebuttal of the idea that everything should serve a biological law or economic purpose. 70

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As I will discuss in the following chapter, in their worship and fetishization of new floral fashions, particularly exotic varieties of flower like the orchid, dahlia and lily, dandies turned the Romantic awe of nature on its head, advocating art and artifice as significant modern ideals instead.

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Thomas Gainsborough, Captain William Wade of Bath, 1771, oil on canvas.

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three

Blooming Buttonholes and Flower Fetishes The Hollyhock is not, and never can be a florists’ flower, any more than a horse can be a lap dog. It is essentially an outdoor plant. Its properties are almost limited to the form of the plant. A lady would as soon think of having a pig in a parlour, as a ramping spike of Hollyhock in a bouquet; and even a coachman, who on state days is expected to wear a nosegay as large as a cauliflower, would look awkward with six feet of Hollyhock in his button hole. The Gardener and Practical Florist (1843)

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T

he wearing of flowers on the body in the form of garlands, corsages and buttonholes has a long history going back to ancient Persia, but the more exotic floral buttonhole is a nineteenthcentury affectation that came into vogue with the rise of the male dandy figure. Traditionally, the floral buttonhole or boutonnière was reserved for special occasions, like weddings and funerals, but from the eighteenth century onwards and with the design of closer fitting garments for men, a sprig of flowers in the lapel was increasingly regarded as a stylish flourish to smart dress. In the 1740s flower gardens became popular and floral patterns began to appear in the design of men’s clothing. In Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of the English landed gentry elegance, wealth and status are conferred by small details of dress. In his portrait of Captain William Wade of Bath (1771), for example, Captain Wade’s riding coat is decorated with a small complementary bouquet of real flowers in his top buttonhole. 73

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The inclusion of a buttonhole in gentleman’s dress went hand in hand with a closer cut of jacket and trouser. By the 1790s men’s dress was more refined and close-fitting, a style popularized by George ‘Beau’ Brummel (1778–1840), who was an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, and an associate of the Prince Regent. As a student, Brummel had a reputation for being unusually hygienic. His appearance was neat and clean and in public he presented himself clean-shaven with short hair ‘à la Brutus’ (a shrewd move for the time because a wig-powder tax was introduced in 1795). On the Continent he was known for his immaculate dress, which consisted of a plain, dark-blue frock coat with cravat and trademark snug-fitting trousers, and in France in particular he was all the bohemian rage. The novelist Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly celebrated Brummel’s dress in 1845 in an essay entitled ‘De Dandyisme et de Georges Brummel’ (The Anatomy of Dandyism) and proclaimed himself Knight of the Order of Springtime. In his Deuxième Memorandum of 1838 Barbey wrote, ‘I sacrifice a rose each evening to my buttonhole . . . roses are the Order of the Garter of that Great Monarch called Nature.’1 By the mid-nineteenth century Brummel’s dress code inspired the apparel of dandies with an anti-bourgeois agenda. His advocacy of elegant simplicity found its French counterpart in the dress of Baudelaire, who preferred a more conservative mode of dandified dress. Dandyism, proclaimed Baudelaire in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, was ‘an unwritten code that . . . moulded so proud a brotherhood’; it was ‘the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages’.2 Among nineteenth-century dandies it was customary to adopt natural emblems and motifs as part of their image and self-publicity, and the more extroverted characters assumed personal emblems that signified either the idea of metamorphosis or the triumph of artifice over nature. The buttonhole was a symbol of this and a signature of individualism. As Wilde famously quipped, ‘a well-made 74

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button-hole is the only link between Art and Nature.’3 Flowers, insects and birds were favourite motifs. James McNeill Whistler converted his monogram ‘JW’ into a stylized butterfly (inflected after 1876 with a scorpion’s tail when responding in writing to critics), while Robert de Montesquiou preferred to tie his cravat in the shape of a bat. Following his hero Whistler’s cue, Aubrey Beardsley inscribed his early black-and-white drawings with a crescent of flying birds (later he signed with an upturned candelabrum), and in his images and border designs, especially for Thomas Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur, flora and fauna proliferate and intertwine. In many of his drawings, he cheekily marries images of natural beauty (trees, flowers, leaves, birds) with the grotesque, and some of his more abstract designs suggest nature as deformed, wild, hothoused and diseased. Late nineteenth-century aesthetes traded on each other’s fashion ideas. Early in his career, the novelist George Moore self-published a collection of poems inspired by Baudelaire entitled The Flowers of Passion (1877), which was maliciously attacked by the critics, and so signal was the image of Wilde wearing a large Malmaison carnation that Robert Hichens published (anonymously at first) a novel, The Green Carnation (1894), which was used later as evidence against Wilde in his trial. A well-chosen fragrant boutonnière was a signifier of wealth and taste in Wilde’s day and favourite buttonholes included carnations, parma violets, gardenias, poppies and orchids. Even the undecadent liberal politician and statesman Joseph Chamberlain wore an orchid in his buttonhole. Pale or white carnations were popular and women and men in the nineteenth century used individual flowers or bouquets to convey coded messages to admirers and potential suitors. A solid-coloured carnation of any hue signified positive interest while a striped variety signalled a conclusive ‘no’. 75

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In the 1890s Wilde preferred to have his carnations dyed green. The green carnation was supposedly a coded sign of homosexuality in Paris, and it was part of Wilde’s dress on public occasions, complementing his silk hat, fur-lined overcoat and mauve gloves. Wilde’s flower fetishes were satirized in Hichens’s The Green Carnation; Esmé Amarinth is a barely-concealed caricature of Wilde who coins the phrase: ‘The arsenic flower of an exquisite life.’ Esmé avoids nature, exclaiming on reaching the country: ‘thank Heaven! there are no nightingales to ruin the music of the stillness with their well-meant but ill-produced voices.’ 4 So widely discussed was the novel that a rumour circulated that Wilde himself was the author, but in a letter of 1 October 1894 he wrote: ‘I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The Flower is a work of art. The book is not.’5 Wilde’s green carnation became a symbol of gay culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Noël Coward wrote a musical called Bitter Sweet in 1929 where green carnations appear in the lyrics as a way of distinguishing homosexual men), but the Irish writer’s favourite flowers were the lily and the sunflower. In his rooms in Magdalen College two large blue china vases contained fragrant sprays of lilies, and his garden in Oxford was full of them. In Act One of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience (1881), Wilde is caricatured as Bunthorne, who comments, ‘It is the wail of the poet’s heart on discovering that everything is commonplace. To understand it, cling passionately to one another and think of faint lilies.’6 In the 1890s the lily became the signature of the modern Romantic poet. Alongside the sunflower, it was regarded as the supreme decorative motif. In a lecture given at Chickering Hall in New York in January 1882, Wilde proclaimed: 76

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You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let me tell you the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art.7 The beauty of the lily has been recognized for millennia. As Jennifer Potter has documented in her fascinating study Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World (2013), along with the saffron crocus, lilies adorned the royal frescoes painted by the Bronze Age Minoans of Crete and Thera in the eastern Mediterranean. The ancient Greeks used the lily flower as a key ingredient in perfume and ointment and throughout the Middle Ages the lily was associated with the purity of the Virgin Mary. For centuries many varieties were imported from west and east and cultivated in the botanical gardens of Europe. The white Madonna lily (Lilium candidum), grown for more than 3,500 years, was celebrated for its luminescent beauty, but from the sixteenth century onwards its primacy was rivalled by the importation of many other new varieties, including the white and red lilies of Constantinople, described by John Gerard with great delight in Herball (1597). North American varieties were particularly popular. Often named after great naturalist explorers (Lilium catesbaei after Mark Catesby, the English naturalist, and Lilium michauxii after the Frenchman André Michaux), these flowers symbolized the discovery of new frontiers.8 From the seventeenth century the rare beauty of Asiatic varieties of lily from China, Korea and Japan was recorded by European horticulturalists, but it was difficult to transport consignments of 77

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living flowers such a distance. It was not until the early 1800s that William Kerr, the first resident plant collector at Kew, sent back living varieties of lily to England, among them the tiger lily (Lilium lancifolium), which adapted well to the English climate and soon became a staple of the English garden. Members of the aesthetic movement in England frequently used the lily motif. It appears in the Annunciation scenes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and in John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–6). In the first of Whistler’s three ‘Symphony in White’ paintings the image of the lily evokes the modern craze for Japonisme. The lily’s phallic shape, sweet fragrance and exquisite colouring were qualities much admired by French and English Decadent poets, but in the late nineteenth century it was Wilde’s lily fetish that gave the flower its iconic decadent status. The sunflower, on the other hand – Wilde’s other favourite flower – with its thick stem, large brown plate-like head and ruff of bright yellow petals, could not claim any Eastern mystique. Originating in the Americas, in what is now the southwestern United States, Helianthus annuus can be traced back fifty million years.9 It was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century by Spanish explorers, quickly establishing in the hotter climates of Spain and Italy and gaining an erroneous reputation for heliotropism (only green plants turn to follow the sun; by the time the young green shoots have matured and the sunflower is full grown, its head is fixed in position). By the nineteenth century, as Potter notes, the sunflower was waning in popularity, regarded as too large and brutish for the Victorian kitchen garden and outmoded by smaller ornamental exotic plants. William Morris’s incorporation of the sunflower into his wallpaper designs was the beginning of a small vogue among aesthetic circles and aficionados of the decorative arts in the late nineteenth century, but the identification of the sunflower with

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.

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Linley Sambourne, ‘O. W.’, Punch (25 June 1881).

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aestheticism is largely due to Wilde’s appropriation of the flower alongside the lily on his lecture tour of America in 1882.

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Parody The dandy’s flower fetishes led to merciless parody in the pages of the popular conservative press. Such flower worship was viewed as an affront to traditional notions of masculinity and national vigour. In a satirical sketch entitled ‘The Decadent Guys (A Colour-study in Green Carnations)’ in Punch magazine of 1894, two Guys spend an autumn evening in surreal conversation before they are wheeled away by a policeman and incinerated. Their conversation revolves around the matter of sartorial elegance, for which they both praise each other lavishly. Speaking in a contradictory Wildean mode, Fustian Flitters compliments Lord Raggie Tattersall: ‘you are looking very well this afternoon. You would be perfectly charming in a red wig and a cocked-hat, and a checked ulster with purple and green shadows in the folds.’ In their buttonhole they each wear a magenta cauliflower, which Raggie describes as their ‘mystic emblem – the symbol that is such a true symbol in possessing no meaning whatever – the Magenta Cauliflower!’10 In this sketch, Punch attacks the vacuity of aestheticism and its preoccupation with l’art pour l’art. Aesthetes and dandies were sitting targets for this kind of send-up, for up until the end of the nineteenth century publicity-conscious dandies cultivated elaborate floral signatures and outlandish dress codes. A key theme of their ‘look’ was appearing to modify and improve – to out-do – nature, and this was expressed in a variety of flamboyant and provocative ways. Peacock feathers, pungent lilies and rampant vegetable matter were used to adorn conservative formal dress, and certain individuals became known for their eccentric tastes in fashion. 80

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From 1880 Punch magazine featured two characters by George du Maurier, who pilloried the aesthetic movement from 1873 to 1882. Jellaby Postlethwaite, aesthetic poet, and Maudle, aesthetic painter, were two parodies of Oscar Wilde and the limp and languid gestures of the aesthetic movement. The journalists and illustrators of Punch seized upon aspects of the aesthetic pose and comically exposed them for being empty gestures towards art. Taking the lily fetish of Wilde and company as a symbol of selfindulgent narcissism, for example, ‘A Maudle-in Ballad’ sends up the aesthetic preoccupation with fleeting impressions and its recherché, precious style (here parodied in a whole gamut of poetic paraphernalia: repetitions, punctuation, internal and end-rhymes, assonance, alliteration, metaphor, simile, arcane language). In his over-musing on a lily flower just past its best, the anonymous poet identifies himself in the drooping leaves and gives the plant a mock pauper’s burial: My lank limp lily, my long lithe lily, My languid lily-love fragile and thin, With dank leaves dangling and flower-flap chilly, That shines like the shin of a Highland gilly! Mottled and moist as a cold toad’s skin! Lustrous and leper-white, splendid and splay! Art thou not Utter and wholly akin To my own wan soul and my own wan chin, And my own wan nose-tip, tilted to sway The peacock’s feather, sweeter than sin, That I bought for a halfpenny yesterday? ... I have watered with chlorodine, tears of chagrin, The churchyard mould I have planted thee in, 81

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Upside down in an intense way, In a rough red flower-pot, sweeter than sin, That I bought for a halfpenny yesterday?11 In England, where Decadence was regarded as a French affectation and a moral outrage, the popular press was relentless in sending up the effeminate male’s attachment to flowers and perfume. In the lampoons by Punch upon the effete and indolent avant-garde, the magazine not only encapsulated the general disapproval of the Victorians towards aesthetic types and dandies, but caricatured (and interestingly clarified) modern versions of Decadence to the contemporary reader. Punch was relentless in its satire of aestheticism and Decadence, tendencies and traditions in art that it regarded as ridiculous and pretentious, and representative of the moral ‘flabbiness’ of the fin de siècle. In France, where eccentric dandyism was more enthusiastically embraced, aesthetes such as Pierre Loti, Jean Lorrain, Judith Gautier and Robert de Montesquiou eschewed moral censure and created shrines in their homes to their own outrageous, fantastic and exotic tastes. In Jean Lorrain’s apartment a plaster head of John the Baptist ‘bled’ down the wall, the red paint soaking into the expensive oriental rug beneath. Judith Gautier, one of the most popular and influential Salon hostesses of modern Paris, owned a jewel-encrusted tortoise that wandered among the sumptuous, perfume-drenched corridors of her Paris apartment on the rue de Berri, and the cross-dressing writer and publisher Rachilde (née Marguerite Eymery), known as ‘Mademoiselle Baudelaire’, wore men’s suits and cravats. Rachilde’s most famous novel was Monsieur Vénus, first published in Belgium in 1884, and read by Wilde during his honeymoon in Paris. The story tells of Raoule de Vénérande, a female aristocrat who creates her own aesthetic ideal by styling herself as a man and 82

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turning a lower-class artificial flower-maker, Jacques Silvert, into her submissive ‘mistress’, whom she sexually abuses and later kills, grafting his body parts onto a mechanical wax model to immortalize him. In the novel the themes of metamorphosis and blurred distinctions are taken to extremes and are symbolized early on through the flower motif. When Raoule first encounters Jacques he is enveloped by a garland of ‘very big roses of fleshy satin with velvety grenadine tracings . . . that slipped between his legs, threaded their way right up to his shoulders, and came curling round his neck’.12 Commissioning him to design a costume for a fancy-dress ball, Raoule too seeks to transform herself as a Nymphaea (white or yellow water lilies associated in Greek mythology with water-maidens), and demands ‘a tunic of white cashmere spangled with green beads and rushes’.13 In nineteenth-century France, role-playing was a favourite activity, and dressing up as mythical characters was popular among the wealthy classes. In a cyanotype and watercolour dating from about 1886, Robert de Montesquiou poses as the detached head of John the Baptist on a silver charger.14 His head rests awkwardly on a dish, the illusion of severance achieved by the dark gloom of the room beyond the window frame. Draped over the window-sill, signalling his refined taste and admiration for the Arts and Crafts movement, is a richly patterned honeysuckle fabric by Morris & Company.

Bats and blue hydrangeas Attracting the attention of the public was easy for the outrageous Montesquiou – the real-life aesthete behind Huysmans’s character Des Esseintes. He adopted two personal emblems, the bat and the blue hydrangea, the one suggesting melancholy and the other dissimilarity and unnaturalness. Montesquiou had once owned Paul 83

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Paul Helleu (1859–1927), Blue Hydrangea and Bats, pastel.

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Helleu’s pastel Blue Hydrangea and Bats, and in a letter he described how these natural objects came to symbolize his being: I felt that this refractory plant associated with this rebellious bird would dominate my life, because the two together would make use of me, to extract, for the one, in its abnormal azure blue, and the other, in its colourless anxiety, the thousand and one, perhaps even the thousand and three reasons why they had been designated, among all others, and for ever and ever, to represent the double sign of the joining of Dissimilarity and of Melancholy . . . I am approaching my own twilight, an hour when, more than ever, the company of the winged creature of dusk is appropriate, as well as that of the flower on which the moonlight lingers . . . And all about these troubling clusters would continue the wheeling flight of my ‘grey sisters’ until the moment has come for the one, 84

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to shed its petals, and for the others, to scatter about the last scene of action of their gardener and of their shepherd.15 The bat was a common motif on oriental lacquerware, textiles, jades and bronzes, where it signified happiness and longevity, and Montesquiou probably discovered this association through his connoisseurship and collection of oriental artefacts. He was also very knowledgeable about European painting, and he would have been familiar with Albrecht Dürer’s painting Melencolia (1514), in which the bat is shown retreating open-jawed from the rays of the sun. Montesquiou owned a long-eared bat (Myotis evotis), which he kept in a lacquer cage and described as ‘a metempsychosis of Ludwig ii of Bavaria’,16 and in a three-quarter oil portrait by Giovanni Boldini, Montesquiou is shown sporting a moustache that resembles a bat suspended upside-down.17 He led a rarefied life, mixing with the wealthy, notorious and bizarre, and occupied himself with writing esoteric aesthetic poetry under the pseudonym of ‘le Chauvesouris’ (the Bat), publishing a volume of verse, Les Chauves-souris, in 1907. Montesquiou discovered the blue hydrangea (Hydrangea hortensia) while shopping for exotic plants at a Parisian florist’s some time in the 1880s. The plant was introduced to Europe from Japan and China, and it quickly attracted Montesquiou’s attention because its colour varied according to pH balance and chemical constituents in the soil. Montesquiou was very attracted to the hydrangea’s chromatic capability. Its apparent unnaturalness was a quality that chimed with his own personality and being, and he made lavish use of the hydrangea in his decorative interiors and poetry. ‘I own seven pictures of hortensias gardened by Helleu,’ he wrote, ‘whose clusters, bluegreen or yellowing, give off reflections, on silver platters, like bouquets of dead turquoises.’18 85

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In his volume of verse entitled Les Hortensias bleus (Blue Hydrangeas, 1906), he parades the fin-de-siècle vogue for collecting Japonerie, Chinoiserie and eclectic oriental works, including fans, lanterns, dragon beds, lacquer screens and bonsai trees. Montesquiou was ‘a kind of poet-collector’;19 words to him were like rare and sensual objects, and he delighted in arranging them as he would collectors’ pieces in a cabinet, corresponding sounds, textures and colours, allowing sensations, thoughts and flights of imagination (rather than ideas) to affect the reader. An example of this is the poem ‘Fleurs et Plumes’ (Flowers and Feathers) from Les Hortensias bleus, here translated by Derek Mahon (2014): A Persian pen-box, on the lid flowers and wings, its golden lacquer glazed with glowing things, I love it: perched high among the hazel trees birds to be taken only with azure tweezers – hummingbirds, speckled birds, and in the dense network of the dappled trunks and patches of sweetbriar, rose, daffodil and peach, while in their midst an iris seems to advance its petal lances into sharpened blades. For one-and-twenty birds packed on the branches a single butterfly, – why only one? Curious! . . . Their flowery feathers lie in place, a symbol of the writing you breathe in from bluebird quills inside the writing case. Montesquiou was a celebrity figure at the fin de siècle. The last scion of the aristocratic family of Montesquiou-Fezensac, he spent a solitary childhood at a Jesuit school and at his grandfather’s chateau. ‘Magnificence and mystery, fragile things and things forbidden, 86

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G. Baldini, Count Robert de Montesquiou, 1897, oil on canvas.

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formed the child’s taste,’ remarked one critic.20 He was brought up by a series of servants and by his grandfather, who initiated his grandson in the realm of the supernatural, ‘fill[ing] notebooks with automatic writing and entertain[ing] the children with thought transference’.21 This influenced the young Montesquiou so much that he believed himself to have supernatural powers throughout his life. As an adult, according to literary anecdote, Montesquiou led an extremely extravagant lifestyle on the Quai d’Orsay and it was said of him that ‘his only vice’ was ‘a passion for Beauty’.22 He completely restructured the interior of his attic apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, taking down the partition walls in the spirit of Gautier’s novel Fortunio and opening up the space to create what he called the ‘cavern of an Arabian tale’.23 Graham Robertson, Montesquiou’s English friend, evokes the decadent interior: It was curious to leave the stately, almost austere rooms of the old Comte and to climb up a dark stairway, through tunnels of tapestry to the eyrie which Comte Robert had elected to inhabit, and to come into the exotic atmosphere of his extraordinary rooms, like a vague dream of the Arabian Nights translated into Japanese: the room of all shades of red, one wall deep crimson, the next rose colour, the third paler rose, and the last the faintest almond pink; the grey room where all was grey and for which he used to ransack Paris weekly to find grey flowers; the bedroom, where a black dragon was apparently waddling away with the bed on his back, carrying the pillow in a coil of his tail and peering out at the foot with glassy, rolling eyes; the bathroom, where one gazed through filmy gauzes painted with fish into a green gloom that might have been ‘full fathoms five’ under waves. It was all queer, disturbing, baroque, yet individual and even 88

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beautiful, and as a transmutation of a set of unpromising attics into a tiny fairy palace, little short of a conjuring trick.24 The dressing room was called the Hortensia Room, partly in tribute to Louis-Napoléon’s mother, Queen Hortense, from whom Montesquiou claimed descent, and partly because hydrangeas and water lilies were the fashion in modern art. Montesquiou’s apartment had floral motifs in abundance: ‘Painted, moulded, carved, cast in green bronze, hortensias bloomed, climbed, writhed and swooned in fashionable convulsions.’25 And in a glass conservatory, where he housed his favourite works by Baudelaire, Swinburne and Edmond de Goncourt, Montesquiou juxtaposed his love of art and nature. Books ‘were displayed on low shelves as a background for a small forest of Japanese dwarfed trees, a rare collection of miniature oaks, century-old pines, and tiny delicate maples . . . all no bigger than cabbages’.26 The green carnation, magenta cauliflower and blue hydrangea were clever visual codes that suggested an otherness and foreignness (in Montesquiou’s case, an affected orientalism), a mismatch and dissimilarity, that echoed the outsider status of aesthetes in the late nineteenth century. As an elite group that occupied the periphery of mainstream culture, they exploited the new media for opportunities to self-advertise. They used the ‘home interview’ and advertisements to publicize their work and devised special trademarks as part of their public image. This awareness of their reception in the wider world and this sensitivity to the rapidly evolving media became characteristic of the avant-garde at the fin de siècle. Even the marginalized and esoteric coterie of Decadents and dandies working from London and Paris were inspired to self-publicize through the popular press, and the figureheads of this deliberate cultivation of self in England were Wilde and Beardsley.27 89

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Peacocks and pleasure domes ‘If I am not grotesque,’ Aubrey Beardsley said, ‘I am nothing.’28 Regarded by many critics as the last Pre-Raphaelite, Beardsley created organic borders and erotic fine-line drawings that had enormous appeal for Symbolists. In Beardsley’s art the critics saw a ‘vision personelle et rare’, a style that revealed a morbid and grotesque imagination.29 Montesquiou was particularly impressed by the young English artist and wrote two essays on him. In the essay that appeared in a volume entitled Professionnelles Beautés (Professional Beauties, 1905), so-called after English upper-class women whose profession consisted solely of being beautiful, Montesquiou delivered an incantatory oration, highlighting the antique and erotic images from the later work of Beardsley and layering them, one on top of the other, in order to recreate the sensation of flicking through an album of Beardsley’s drawings:

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peacock feathers, torch flames and their obscene drippings shaped like tiny stalactites, dressing-tables of actresses, powder-puffs, Louis xiv wigs, bulky mauchons, untied shoes, the black velvet masks of the underworld . . . 30 For Montesquiou, the decorative flourishes of Beardsley’s line, the accumulation of artifice and ornament and his attention to feminine dress and accessories, marked him out as a genius of his time. The appreciation was mutual. The interior design of Beardsley’s home in Pimlico replicated the colour scheme of the black and orange of Des Esseintes’ rooms in À rebours, and he immersed himself in the work of nineteenth-century French writers, including Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert and Baudelaire, fraternizing with the European avant-garde in the casinos of Dieppe. 90

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Beardsley’s graphic style evolved dramatically in the 1890s, moving away from the minimalist designs for the Yellow Book inspired by French line-block towards a more detailed and embellished style that imitated eighteenth-century engravings. The drawings he made to accompany his mock-rococo pornographic romance The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser – revised as Under the Hill and published in 1896 in The Savoy magazine31 – correspond perfectly with the elaborately artificial literary style that includes digressively arcane inventories of Tannhäuser’s tastes in food, furnishings, jewels, books and flowers. The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser follows the traditional storyline in Wagner’s opera. Tannhäuser is riding by the Horselberg when he sees Venus. She beckons him into a cave where he spends the next seven years in hedonistic exile. Conscience-stricken, he eventually decides to leave and seeks absolution from the pope, but the pope replies that it is as impossible to pardon him as it is for his staff to grow leaves. Tannhäuser retreats in despair and three days later leaves sprout from the pope’s staff. The pope sends for him, but Tannhäuser has returned to Venus. In Beardsley’s version of the medieval myth, the drama is focused exclusively on the Bacchanalian revels and diverse sexual encounters of Tannhäuser under Venus’s cornucopian hospitality. In the first chapter Tannhäuser enters the Venusberg: The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of the moths remained open, and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. The 91

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Aubrey Beardsley, The Abbé, 1896, Indian ink on paper.

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pillars were fashioned in some pale stone, and rose up like hymns in the praise of Venus, for, from cap to base, each one was carved with loving sculptures, showing such a cunning invention and such a curious knowledge that Tannhäuser lingered not a little in reviewing them. ... A wild rose had caught upon the trimmings of his muff, and in the first flush of displeasure he would have struck it brusquely away, and most severely punished the offending flower. But the ruffled mood lasted only a moment, for there was something so delicately incongruous in the hardy petal’s invasion of so delicate a thing, that Tannhäuser withheld the finger of resentment, and vowed that the wild rose should stay where it had clung – a passport, as it were, from the upper to the lower world.32 Tannhäuser strikes ‘a few chords of accompaniment ever so lightly upon his little lute’,33 which arouses the gaudy, voluptuous-bodied moths that surround him. The opening of the novel and indeed of the mons veneris itself is a self-indulgent symphony of the aesthetically pleasing and erotically stimulating. In Under the Hill the Tannhäuser character is re-named Abbé Fanfreluche (the French pronunciation of ‘A. B.’, the initials of Aubrey Beardsley, and fanfreluche, old French slang for copulation) and the accompanying picture of the Abbé visually reinforces the prevailing atmosphere of heavy enchantment, the sense of overabundance and oppressive fertility. In the text, the song he plays works like an aphrodisiac spell, and wreathes ‘itself about the subtle columns till the moths were touched with passion, and moved quaintly in their sleep’.34 Detail and ornament abound: ‘His hand, slim and gracious as La Marquise du Deffand’s in the drawing by 93

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Carmontelle, played nervously about the gold hair that fell upon his shoulders like a finely curled peruke, and from point to point of a precise toilet, the fingers wandered, quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.’35 Beardsley’s drawing is remarkable for the way it echoes the proliferating imagery in Continental magazines and journals, where female sexuality is metaphorically described in terms of insects, fruit and flowers. In La Vie Parisienne female types were linked to specific varieties of flower and insect. In an 1883 centrefold entitled ‘Papillons de jour et papillons de nuit’, women are represented as butterflies and moths, the nocturnal giant emperor moth figuring a type of woman who is sensual and full of appetite.36 In Beardsley’s illustration the Abbé stands himself like a huge moth drying its wings after some monstrous metamorphosis: the antennae-like neck of the lute accentuates the ornamentation of the Abbé’s organic finery, which chimes with the lush and exotic background. The way his curls, for instance, become the plumes of his hat, then become the caviar-like foliage obscuring the sky, emphasizes the claustrophobic fusion of nature and artifice, and as in Manet’s painting Music in the Tuileries, we breathe fresh air through a small patch of sky. Profusion, saturation, excess. The Abbé Fanfreluche dominates the natural setting, frowning down at the rose on his muff, which is indistinguishable from the organic patterns on his suit. Beardsley depicts nature as overripe, over-fragrant and decadent. The overstuffed moths on the left of the picture, one of which is half-human, are mirrored in the decaying exotic blooms on the right. Leaves curl in surrender and large petals droop, revealing full seed pods and erect pistils. Beardsley, who, in this drawing, was described as betraying the care of the gardener rather than the discriminating touch of the landscape painter,37 panders to our sensual delight, creating a synthesis of human form and textual and visual ornament. 94

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This picture epitomizes the Decadent attitude to nature and artifice. The puffed-up figure of the Abbé and the way in which he overwhelms his natural surroundings suggest the primacy of decoration and human artifice. More than that, the picture exudes self-consciousness, a characteristic tendency of avant-garde art and culture at the end of the nineteenth century.38 The Abbé himself, as many critics have noted, is a confusion of genders. He is ostensibly male, but he has the physical attributes of a woman with his broad hips and tapering thighs. In gender terms we might describe him as a hybrid, but unlike plants and flowers that are hybridized to create strong hardy varieties, the Abbé appears merely decorative and rather emasculated. The exotic flora frame the open wings of his cloak, and seem to wilt in his presence. The idea of beauty’s transience, including the Abbé’s, is illustrated clearly, and while he may appear triumphant, the half-human butterfly in the top left of the illustration suggests otherwise. This insect links the Abbé to his surroundings. He is magnificent now, but this will not last; like the nature that surrounds him, he will succumb to the natural forces of degeneration and decay. Beardsley advertises femininity to striking effect in his detailed line drawing of the effeminate Abbé. This chevalier is less than manly, irritated by the prick of a minute rose thorn, and he is without any signature of masculine endeavour. He is the antithesis of the medieval knight bravely hacking back briars to reveal a recumbent damsel. Instead, the Abbé is useless; an emasculated parody of ornament and small detail (notice his slim finger extending from the muff). He is an embodiment of the association between decadence, excess and femininity popular at the end of the nineteenth century.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

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The dense floral aestheticism of Beardsley’s L’Abbé and his accompanying story, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, is of course a pastiche of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in serialized form in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1891, and which in turn is a homage to Huysmans’s À rebours (among many other French works). The opening paragraphs of The Picture of Dorian Gray wilfully confuse the natural and the artificial and we, like the feminine and aestheticized Dorian, are meant to appreciate the scene as ‘a kind of momentary Japanese effect’. The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window . . . making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio.39 The garden scene that opens Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a work of art, and it is intended to be a place of overwhelming natural sensory delight. We inhale the heavy fragrances of honeysuckle and laburnum and luxuriate in early summer languor. The impression 96

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of nature in harmonious accord is the most significant aspect. We are aware from the beginning, by the contrived perfection of the scene, that nature here is idealized, aestheticized. But (human) nature is fragile; it will not remain beautiful. By the end of the novel, this urban Eden has faded, and we are displaced to the east of the city with its dark slums and opium dens, finally mounting the dark stairs to an attic space. The novel, like the hero’s world, becomes increasingly interiorized, increasingly gothic and Decadent. In a synthesis of the visual, olfactory and aural, Wilde creates a synaesthetic effect, endowing the language with the sensuality of a painting. Our attention at the beginning of the novel is directed by a series of natural scents and artificial perfumes, from the garden exterior and ‘the heavy scent of the lilac’ to the interior of the studio and the perfume of Lord Wotton’s ‘innumerable cigarettes’. For a writer who declared an indifference to music, these opening paragraphs are suggestively musical, and the assonance and alliteration contribute to this (‘The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine’).40 The opening impression, signed off with the ‘bourdon note of a distant organ’, is one of harmony and fullness. Wilde’s prose is fragrant and suggestive. The perfume of the first chapter strikes an artificial note, or at least a French one, for in English writing strong smells (particularly of the bodily variety) tend to be neutralized. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, as John Sutherland has remarked, the opening sentences ‘fairly reek’.41 He goes on: ‘It is not inconceivable that the flowers, blooms and blossoms which Wilde describes (lilac, rose, laburnum, thorn) might just coincide on the branch in mid-June – but not in the full odiferousness about which the first chapter is eloquent.’ 42 In the heavy scented atmosphere Wilde reminds us of 97

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the fragile perfection of all things bright and beautiful. As I show in the next chapter, the intersensoriality of modern writing in late nineteenth-century Decadent writing, and the references to perfume and olfactory processes, lend the floral trope new dimensions suggestive of memory and longing, and in the early poetry of Arthur Symons we encounter the fragrance of flowers as a modern metaphor of intangible desire.

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four

Florientalism and the ‘Scented Ways’ The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket. raymond chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

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T

he rise of the hothouse in the nineteenth century and the importation and cultivation of exotic varieties of plant had a striking impact on the perfume industry. Oil from flowers had been used in perfume-making since ancient times. The Egyptians and the Greeks used flowers in their perfumes, steeping, straining and pressing them, and macerating the flower petals and spices with oils and fats to create scents and ointments for both men and women. In the eleventh century the art of distilling perfume from flowers (a process using water and steam) was perfected by the Persians, who developed a perfume industry that specialized in producing a fine fragranced rose water celebrated for its healing and cleansing properties. Throughout the centuries perfume was used to combat plague and pestilence. The inhalation of certain odorous substances, like incense, myrrh, violet, mint and lemon balm, as well as a con c oction of sandalwood, camphor, storax and roses called a pomme de cèdre (cedar apple), was thought to offer protection against the bubonic plague, and physicians disinfected the homes of the dead with strong scents and balms. In the seventeenth century 99

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professional perfumer-fumigators smoked out infected houses with aromatic substances that melted in hot pans. It was not until the nineteenth century that perfume became a luxury commodity associated with fantasy and desire. It was a central component in social and cultural codes of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour and the wearing of perfume spoke volumes about character and social standing. While virtuous women of good taste preferred floral scents, prostitutes and courtesans favoured heavy animalbased or jasmine fragrances (‘animalics’) that hinted of lust and earthy sexuality. In the first half of the nineteenth century when the perfume industry revolved around the great perfume houses of Paris, light eaux de cologne and sweet floral scents, particularly rose perfumes, were highly popular. In the prosperous years of the Second Empire in France, when Paris rivalled London in its modernity and became the cultural capital of the world, the demand was increasingly for more subtle and complex fragrances. On the Continent, the preference among the new bourgeois class was for alluring and feral exotic scents that celebrated bohemian pleasure and recalled the aromatic corridors of ancient palaces and the heat of the desert. An amorphous and geographically imprecise image of the Orient was invented and enhanced by the creation of vaporizing perfumes that contained strong fragrances like musk, lily, narcissus, tuberose, civet, patchouli, neroli and thyme, documented in popular works on the history of perfume use and manufacture, such as Eugène Rimmel’s The Book of Perfumes (1864) and Richard Christiani’s A Comprehensive Treatise on Perfumery (1877). The European imagination was greatly excited by the luxury of oriental culture, portrayed by many writers and artists as sensual and vibrant. In poems and novels we find references to rose-perfumed gardens that picture the Orient as erotic and sultry. In 1886 Richard 100

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Florientalism and the ‘Scented Ways’

Burton caused a stir in small circles with his privately published free translation – from a French edition – of a fifteenth-century Arabic sex manual.1 ‘When we speak of the East,’ commented Richard Le Gallienne in his history of fragrance, The Romance of Perfume (1928), ‘generally the first enveloping thought in our minds is that of piled up roseate clouds of perfume, a rolling curtain of sweet odours, through which come gleams of faraway enchanted lands of mystery and romance, mosques and palms and rose gardens filled with moonlight and nightingales.’2 Perfume was an expanding and lucrative business in the nineteenth century, dominated in the second half by French perfume houses like Guerlain and Rimmel, which from the 1880s began to create families of perfumes identifiable by their synthetic components. The manufacture of non-natural substances that imitated natural floral fragrances was made possible by advances in distillation techniques from the 1820s, but this did not happen on an industrial scale until half a century later. In 1876 the first factory to specialize in synthetic scents was built in Paris. The invention of chemical fragrances like coumarin (derived from the tonka bean and with the smell of new-mown hay) and vanillin broadened the perfume spectrum and became key notes in popular perfumes like Houbigant’s Fougère royale, the favourite scent of Maupassant, and the first ‘oriental’ perfume, Aimé Guerlain’s Jicky. In French posters and advertisements perfume was directed at the female consumer and associated with a brand of glamorous cupidity. Perfume was synonymous with women making up at dressing tables, and the seductive potential of perfume – ‘olfactionism’,3 as Havelock Ellis refers to it in The Psychology of Sex – was underlined by representations of ‘sexual chemistry’ between men and women. In a poster for the Exposition Universelle Paris in 1889 advertising the Gellé Frères perfume Régina, two wealthy bourgeois men sit 101

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comfortably in the dressing room of a scantily clad actress, smiling and in the process of powdering her face and neck. On her dressing table we see a mirror, a light and a perfume atomizer stand, and on another table in the foreground, hairbrushes, a plate filled with calling cards, a red box of Brisas de Palermo (Palermo Breezes) and three different-sized bottles of Gellé Frères perfume.4 The colonialist expansion of France in the 1850s and ’60s brought the Middle and Far East to the new French bourgeois consumer who demanded perfumes that evoked far-flung places. There was a craze for strong scents, including jasmine, tuberose, vetiver and patchouli, and chemical and technological innovations in the manufacture of perfumes, perfume bottles and vaporizers excited a public eager to show off its wealth and taste. In 1862 the Paris Chamber of Commerce estimated that the French perfume industry brought in a staggering 20 million francs per year.5 Perfume was in the air – it was also poured into baths, squirted into mouths, massaged into bodies and rubbed into silk and linen. At the Expositions Universelles in Paris new perfumes and eaux de colognes attracted the crowds and fuelled a buying frenzy for oriental scents like Mexican rosewood and ylang-ylang (Tagalog for ‘flower of flowers’). Among the new floral scents, the aromatic and sulfurous patchouli was much in demand. Originating from Indonesia, it appeared in Europe in about 1830 in the form of an insecticide, and was used in dried-leaf form as a moth-proofing agent by Indian weavers who wrapped cashmere shawls in patchouli leaves before exporting them to Europe. As the perfume industry expanded, so there was considerable scientific interest in the nature of smell, its communion with the body and its impact on the intellect and the emotions. Many believed that perfume represented the ‘soul’ of flowers. This was certainly the poet Swinburne’s view and Maurice Maeterlinck 102

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pondered this in his essay ‘Perfumes’, in which he ruminates that the ‘uselessness’ of perfume ‘must hide some fair secret’.6 There were various ‘aroma theories’, experiments on the physiology of and pathology of smelling, new technological inventions to measure smell, research conducted on the invisibility of fragrances, and an intense fascination with the relationship between disease and miasma (particles of decomposed matter or miasmata). The nineteenth-century desire to see smell was a consequence of needing to learn about and combat diseases like cholera. In 1850 Arthur Hill Hassall published a study of Thames water pollution, which included colour plates illustrating the microscopic organic forms. His findings were satirized by a Punch illustration of the hideous life-forms found in London well-water, which, having filtered through the city’s graveyards, contained a dilute but potent solution of the bodies of aldermen, churchwardens, undertakers, bailiffs and slopsellers.7 The role of perfumes in signalling corruption and prompting instinctive responses of attraction and repulsion found its way into the literary imagination. Bottled perfume was invariably described in poetic terms in spite of the fact that the perfume bottle itself, from 1885 to 1900, was unexceptionally shaped, often geometric and unadorned. Théophile Gautier described the provocative and vertiginous expansiveness of scent as ‘olfactory ecstasies which transport one to the paradises of perfumes, of marvellous flowers, balancing their calices like censors which send out aromatic scents of penetrating subtlety’,8 and in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Le Flacon’ (The Flask) the release of perfume from a bottle is imagined in terms of the unfettered ornament of butterfly wings: A thousand thoughts, tombed chrysalises, slept here Quietly quivering in the heavy shade 103

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Who now, shaking their wings, take to the air Azure-tinted, rose-glazed, gold-inlaid.9 Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert evoked the power of intoxicating Eastern perfumes in their writing, equating the expansiveness of strong scent with the allure of the sexualized woman. In ‘Hérodias’ (one of Flaubert’s Trois Contes (Three Tales) published in 1877), the sexual and political power of Herodias is signalled by her fragrant presence. As Herod enters her chamber, he is met by the pungent odour of ‘cinnamon smoking in a porphyry bowl’.10 In France under the Second Empire the fashion was for overpowering fragrances that recalled dreamy romance in the torrid southern or Eastern heat. As Jean Robiquet recalls in his 1925 memoir, the popular imagination conjured up ‘Spanish serenades and Venetian moonlight’. Reflecting on his grandmother’s tastes in perfume, he noted that ‘It mattered little if they sometimes gave her a tiny headache . . . If the olfactory memories of my earliest youth are exact, it seems to me that women back then often still allowed themselves certain bold compositions of which a Parisian woman of 1925 would be rightly terrified’.11 Poets were particularly eloquent on the symbolic associations of perfume. In the journal La Dernière Mode, founded between September and December 1874 by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, he describes dream-provoking powers of scents like opoponax, exora, ylang-ylang and Celtic spikenard: ‘when inhaled’, he comments, they ‘inspire dreams just as their names do when merely spoken’.12 One of the most knowledgeable poets in the field of smell was Robert de Montesquiou. In Le Chef des odeurs suaves (The Master of Sweet Smells, 1907) he celebrates the fragrance of flowers, their variety and their suggestiveness, claiming that they ‘speak to the five senses which become one’.13 He waxed 104

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lyrical on the capacity of perfume to take us on a journey to ‘l’au delà’, or ‘the Beyond’, and associated perfume with nebulous, immeasurable desire. Montesquiou was an ‘olfactif’ ne plus ultra. He decorated his residence at 96 avenue Maillot in the suburb of Neuilly with different fragrances for different rooms. ‘A perfume burner was placed in the room where one eats,’ noted a journalist in La Liberté, ‘another, in the room where one smokes; another in the bedroom: another in the room where one chats . . . according to the nature of the conversation, the scents differ, and that the one which encourages flirtation is not the one that encourages political discussion.’14 The receptiveness of French writers to the world of the senses, particularly smell, and the sensuality of their work inspired aesthetes across the Channel to experiment with intersensoriality and synaesthesia. Oscar Wilde’s description of the garden of the Escorial in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ (1891) marries sensory delight with an underlying sense of decadence: The purple butterflies fluttered about with gold dust on their wings . . . the little lizards crept out of the crevices of the wall, and lay basking in the white glare; and the pomegranates split and cracked with the heat, and showed their bleeding red hearts. Even the pale yellow lemons, that hung in such profusion from the mouldering trellis and along the dim arcades, seemed to have caught a richer colour from the wonderful sunlight, and the magnolia trees opened their great globe-like blossoms of folded ivory, and filled the air with a sweet heavy perfume.15 And when he imagined the performance of his drama Salomé (1893), he visualized it in terms of a ‘symphony of yellow’. He envisaged all 105

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the actors dressed in yellow and the orchestra was to be replaced by braziers of perfume: ‘Think,’ he said, ‘the scented clouds rising and partly veiling the stage from time to time . . . a new perfume for each emotion.’16

‘Questionable smells’

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Not all perfumes were pleasant to the nose, however. The city was full of what Huysmans called ‘questionable smells’. In a prose poem entitled ‘Le Gousset’ (The Armpit, 1880) he blends the art of the perfumer and the wine connoisseur to raise olfactory discrimination to a new level. Unlike rustic working women whose sleeves exude the ‘pungent scent of goat’, the armpits of city women offer a synthesis of desirable fragrances: Unfiltered by cambric or linen, which refines it or disperses it as a handkerchief does when you pour cologne on it, the perfume given off by these female arms is less clarified, less delicate, less pure in an open ball-gown. Then, an aroma of valerianate of ammonia and of urine is at times brutally accentuated, and sometimes even a light fragrance of prussic acid, a faint hint of bruised or overripe peach blends with a whiff of perfumes and powders.17 Huysmans was fascinated by the relationship between natural and synthetic fragrances and it becomes a theme in Chapter Ten of À rebours, in which he delights in the chemical processes of perfume-making, equating them with the sophisticated techniques of a great artist: except for the inimitable jasmine, which does not admit of any counterfeit, any copy, any approximation even, all 106

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flowers are represented exactly by blends of alcohols and spirits, which usurp the very personality of the model, endowing it with that elusive something, that extra quality, that heady bouquet, that rare touch which is the stamp of a work of art.18 In his later novel En rade (Becalmed, 1887), Huysmans’s olfactory obsession takes a macabre turn. The main character, Jacques Marles, has a daydream in which ptomaine, an oil extracted from corpses, is bottled and sold as a deluxe memory aid. With its faint scent of hawthorne, musk, seringa, orange blossom or rose, so the provocative daydream suggests, ptomaine might serve as a powerful trigger to affective memory. Stimulated by the floral notes of ptomaine, individuals could conjure up the lives of their dead relatives. Ptomaine could even, Huysmans suggests, be used to flavour food: ‘Why not use this scented oil the same way one uses essences of almond and cinnamon, vanilla and cloves, in order to make cake fillings so delicious?’19 The theme of perverse olfactionism is developed in Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume, in which the nefarious scentless perfume apprentice and serial murderer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille goes on the trail of the perfect scent in France. Grenouille learns how to trap scent in oil, not just in water, and he experiments with animals, discovering that he has to kill the animals in order to get a scent that is not polluted with faecal odours that arise out of fear. Süskind’s novel is full of unpleasant smells, and they are particularly associated with Paris, where, the narrator tells us, ‘the stench was foulest’. With some relish, his nose identifies the individual smells: ‘The smell of a sweating horse meant just as much to him as the tender green bouquet of a bursting rosebud, the acrid stench of a bug was no less worthy than the aroma rising from larded veal roast in an aristocrat’s kitchen.’20 107

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In the late nineteenth century, as the overpowering stink of the city overwhelmed its inhabitants so there was an increasing interest in fragrances that could mask the unpleasant smells produced not only by transport, factories, restaurants and poorly functioning sewerage systems, but by the human body. In 1999, a hundred years after the opening of the Paris Métro, the perfume industry was galvanized to design a fresh deodorizing scent with a ‘hint of spring flowers’ that would cancel out the smell of homeless people who spent their days in the stations and used the corridors and platforms as lavatories.

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Fatal florientalism Pungency, rather than freshness, is the keynote of the hothouse flower and tropical plant, and in the late nineteenth century the metaphor of the hothouse flower synthesized notions of intoxication and toxicity. In Maupassant’s short story ‘L’Endormeuse’ (The Magic Couch, 1889) a hothouse is the setting for voluntary euthanasia. For those unfortunates for whom poverty and misery are overwhelming – and Maupassant comments that ‘The middle class has a large contingent’ – the hothouse is a sanctuary from the outside world, where a deathly gas is infused with the scent of flowers.21 The club secretary informs the narrator that ‘We change the flower and the perfume at will, for our gas, which is quite imperceptible, gives death the fragrance of the suicide’s favourite flower.’22 In this paradisiacal terminus all the senses are catered for: It was a wide corridor, a sort of greenhouse in which panes of glass of pale blue, tender pink and delicate green gave the poetic charm of landscapes to the inclosing walls. In this 108

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pretty salon there were divans, magnificent palms, flowers, especially roses of balmy fragrance, books on the tables, the Revue de Deux Mondes, cigars in government boxes, and, what surprised me, Vichy pastilles in a bonbonnière.23

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In Zola’s novel La Faute de L’Abbé Mouret (The Sin of Father Mouret, 1875), sixteen-year-old Albine is the embodiment of the heady scent of country flowers. She inhabits ‘Paradou’, a private park and forest, into which wanders the super-sensitive priest Serge Mouret, devoted to the Virgin Mary. Serge falls seriously ill and is nursed back to health by Albine, but his recovery invigorates him with an intense awareness of the physical world, at the centre of which is the sublimely erotic Albine, her body ‘a great rose’.24 As the sexual attraction between Serge and Albine intensifies, so the landscape echoes their eroticism and emanates a ‘heavy smell of fertility’.25 Their consequent fall from grace is prefigured in the riot of fading blooms that emanate a deathly stink: Here scabious brought out deep mourning. Brigades of poppies marched in formation, reeking of death, blossoming in heavy flowers, brightly febrile. Tragic anemones formed afflicted mobs of bruised colours, their faces ashy from some pestilential wind. Squat daturas opened violet trumpets, where insects tired of living came to drink the poison of suicide. Marigolds buried their blossoms under choked leaves, burst into the bodies of dying stars, already releasing the plague of their decomposition. And there was still more sadness; fleshy ranunculuses, showing the dull colour of rusted metal; hyacinths and tuberoses, breathing poison gas, dying in their own perfume.26

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Albine’s death at the end of the novel is a symphony of music and perfume. Submerged on her deathbed beneath all varieties of flower, she fades away to a floral fantasia of ‘musky notes’ and ‘roses’.27 This drowning by flowers is a synaesthetic tour de force, with canticles of heliotrope, trillings of Mirabilis (belles-de-nuit) and a final diminuendo composed of hyacinths and tuberoses. For Zola the botanical was sexual and sex was botanical. Men and women lived in a world that constantly reminded them of their primitive impulses. He exploited to the full the sensualism and suggestiveness of all kinds of flowers – both native and non-native varieties – using them as metaphors of a broad and subtly shifting range of associations to do with sexuality, criminality, illness and degeneration. Along with many other realist writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Zola exploited the physical curiosities of exotic plants, their size, shape, smell and sexual ‘behaviour’, as symbols of dangerous foreignness. Symbolist writers, on the other hand, did not treat scent as an unmediated reality, but rather as an evanescent phenomenon that hinted at other worlds, particularly the spirit worlds and the realm of death. In Fyodor Sologub’s stylized fairy tale ‘The Poisoned Garden’ (1908), the Beautiful Lady is described as a fleur fatale and is as deadly poisonous as the imported flowers that grow in her garden, among them vanilla, cyclamen, datura and tuberose, ‘wicked and unhappy flowers, dying as they destroy’.28 Their collective fragrance, the result of the effects of transplantation, cross-breeding and grafting, suggests to the Youth, who is bewitched by the Beautiful Lady in the garden, erotic and spiritual seduction. Freshness and pungency form a fatal alliance, as between ‘sweet and bitter, ceremonial and mournful, as during the triumphant mysteries of a funeral mass’.29 As they kiss, they are poisoned by the perfume that collects on the Beautiful Lady’s breath ‘fragrant 110

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with ambergris, musk and tuberose . . . like the fine silver chains of a lit censer’.30 Sologub’s moonlit anti-Eden is a symbolist evocation of a doomed and corrupt world where man’s meddling interventions – manifested in the importation of tropical plants, mixing their juices with the poisonous resin of Anchar (a spice used in Indian pickling) – disrupts the native floral culture. Nature’s revenge is to subject the lovers to an insidious and intoxicating humiliation and death. The aromatic exhalations of the hothouse flower embodied in the breath of the Beautiful Lady, Sologub warns us, can rapidly become the deathly fumes of the charnel house. The association between the overpowering and sickly sweet fragrance of the hothouse and a corrupt and fetid outside world is vividly evoked by Raymond Chandler in his novel The Big Sleep (1939). The stifling heat and the monstrous odiferous vegetation of General Sternwood’s greenhouse serve as a reminder for the ‘rather gaudy life’ he once lived. The hothouse is a microcosm of Los Angeles during the Great Depression, its climbing plants symbols of the sensuous and sinister life of the urban jungle. The General explains the necessity of the setting: You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly. There’s very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat.’31 In the 1946 film (dir. Howard Hawks), the scene is full of incongruity. The pale General sits in a wheelchair with a shawl round his shoulders among the thick hairy branches, his knees covered 111

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with a blanket, while Marlowe, played by an impeccably dressed and heavily perspiring Humphrey Bogart, loosens his tie and wipes at his neck with a handkerchief. ‘Do you like orchids?’ the General asks, quickly following with ‘They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.’32 Chandler was drawing on the nineteenth-century association of the orchid with sex and corruption, but before that the flower signified in different ways. As Jennifer Potter demonstrates in Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World (2013), a study of the cultural history of the lotus, lily, sunflower, opium poppy, rose, tulip and orchid, certain flowers were associated with a range of cultural meanings that changed over time.33 The association of orchids, for example, with steamy sensuality goes back to Theophrastus and Dioscorides who named the plant ‘orchis’, the Greek word for testicles, but in China and Japan the orchid symbolized grace and elegance and in flower arranging is a favourite flower along with the azalea, peony, wisteria, lotus, chrysanthemum and maple. In the nineteenth century when orchid mania was at its height, Charles Darwin discovered the secrets of the orchid’s sexual life. The mechanisms by which orchid plants cross-pollinated were, Darwin realized, ingenious and profuse and a major factor in the plant’s tenacity to survive as a species.34 John Ruskin, on the other hand, denied the orchid’s sexual prowess, prudishly renaming the plant family ‘Ophrydae’, the Greek word for eyebrow, in his Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (1875–86).35 One of the most popular and odorous flowers in the nineteenth century was the tuberose. A white-blossomed tuberous plant (not related to the rose) that originated in Mexico, the tuberose has a full and animalic scent that intensifies at night, described in Piesse’s Art of Perfumery (1857) as ‘a nosegay in itself, and reminds one of 112

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Scene in the General’s hothouse from The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946).

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a well-stocked garden at evening close’.36 As Catherine Maxwell explains, the tuberose fragrance is complex, hinting at sex and putrid body smells: Among that bouquet initial notes may strike one as camphoraceous, a medicinal scent of wintergreen or Vicks vapo-rub induced by methyl salicylate, a natural compound found in the flower. Also present is eugenol, a spicy isolate of clove oil, more usually associated with carnations. And then there is a strange rubber note.37 Because of its sultry scent, the flower was widely regarded in the late nineteenth century as a flower associated with harlotry and vice, and in the work of fin-de-siècle poets such as Marc-André Raffalovich, 113

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Mary Robinson and Theodore Wratislaw, as Maxwell demonstrates, the tuberose is associated with a range of meanings – sexuality, death, criminality, poison – that find expression in the twentieth century in a range of iconic perfumes: Fracas (1948); Poison (1985); Tubéreuse Criminelle (1998); Carnal Flower (2005); and Beyond Love (2007).38 In Raffalovich’s volume of homoerotic verse, Tuberose and Meadowsweet (1885), the scent of tuberose signifies a heady voluptuousness and abandon to the pleasurable instant:

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Here in the vague and close confined room All senses are as one acutely blent, When speechless, touching not, in silent gloom We yearn and languish with a single scent, Relentlessly and subtly odorous, Here in the vague and close confined room And of Lethean pleasures redolent, The strong inevitable tuberose Surrounds irradiating to a tomb, Where half-unconsciousness is well content. Here in the vague and close confined room All senses are as one acutely blent.39 Erotic lassitude is a motif in late nineteenth-century Decadent poetry, but in the 1880s and ’90s a small number of poets, including Arthur Symons, Raffalovich and Wratislaw, begin to explore exotic perfume as the portal to an otherworldly universe. In their imagination, perfumes evocative of the Orient still carry with them the primeval power of eros, but they also evoke intangible, invisible and spiritual realms, and in ways similar to music and memory suggest the vaporization of the fleeting lived moment.

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‘Scented ways’: Arthur Symons Arthur Symons (1865–1945) was a leading poet, critic and translator of the fin de siècle, and his achievements include several volumes of verse, editorship of The Savoy magazine and promotion of the French Symbolists. He stood at the crossroads of tradition and modernity. An admirer of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and a friend and champion of Mallarmé and Verlaine, Symons liked to experiment with traditional verse forms, the precision and integrity of some of his best poems reflecting the techniques of the French Impressionists and foreshadowing the Imagist poets of the next generation.40 In his poetry perfume is used predominantly as a signifier of intangible desire, as a metaphor for boundless immateriality. His 1895 verse collection, London Nights (revised 1897), is a self-conscious and sustained treatment of desire that transcends any physical notion of London, beginning with the arousal of desire and its capricious effects and concluding more sombrely with reflections on yearning, physical passion and loss. Symons’s preoccupation is with the perfume cloud, the vaporizing moment of scent, the point at which fragrance diffuses and images refract. Unlike Wilde, who uses floral fragrances and heavy perfume to underscore decoration and artifice, Symons connects the evocative power of perfume with imagination and desire. Symons might name the perfume on the odd occasion (White Heliotrope, Peau d’Espagne, Patchouli, Lily of the Valley), but the material fact of fragrance is not as significant as the metaphor, which Symons uses repeatedly in his poetry. In London Nights the more abstract realms of ‘life’, ‘thought’ and ‘ways’ are described as perfumed. In Symons’s poetry perfume is not just a simple signifier of artifice and the triumph of man over Nature. Neither is it the usual endorsement we find in Symons of the influence of modern French culture, which conservative critics branded as ‘tainted 115

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whiffs from across the Channel’.41 Rather perfume functions as a powerful metaphor for the resistant agency of affective memory. The paradox at the heart of Symons’s notions about Decadent poetics, that poetry should ‘fix’ ‘fleetingly’ ‘the quintessence of things’, is distinctively modern and looks back to the psychological instabilities of Baudelaire’s poetry and forward to the melancholy and romantic modernism of T. S. Eliot. As Maxwell comments,

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Symons’s decadent mnemonic perfumes do not completely fade away but become the ghosts of fragrance in one of his grudging inheritors, so that we find them informing the lilacs of The Waste Land that help mix ‘Memory and desire’, the hyacinths of ‘Portrait of a Lady’ that recall ‘things that other people have desired’, or the ‘perfume of a dress’ that perhaps makes J. Alfred Prufrock ‘digress’.42 In his poems Symons uses perfume, like music in fact, with all its associations and suggestiveness, as a central metaphor. Exotic fragrances, like patchouli, are particularly evocative. They not only conjure up images of the remembered and desired object, but through the form of the poem suggest (rather than imitate) the act of remembering also. Perfume performs another role too, and this distinguishes Symons as a more accomplished and experimental writer than his fellow 1890s poets (with the exception perhaps of Ernest Dowson). Perfume triggers images, memories, and yet at the same time resists clear possession of them, creating a distance between the poem and its personal origins. As Symons puts it in his poem ‘Memory’: ‘Fragrant memories / Come and go.’ 43 In London Nights Symons makes delicate and ambiguous play with the notions of erotic desire and the transience of memory. 116

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He creates a carefully circumscribed and thus consistent hothouse world of eroticized artifice, across which flits a troupe of dancers and ‘footlight fanc[ies]’. The poems in their entirety evoke with some despair ‘the perfumed life’ (‘To Muriel: At the Opera’).44 In London Nights we encounter the quintessence of fin-de-siècle poetry, a poetry of sensation and, arguably, Symons at his poetic best. ‘My life is like a music-hall’, ventures the poet in ‘Prologue’, and in the highly reflexive lyrics that follow in this first section, the impression he gives us is of London’s theatreland as a place of compressed longing, a space of countless looks and glances, both desirous and arousing desire. In a number of poems from London Nights, Symons anticipates what perfumers call the ‘Proust phenomenon’, that is, the use of smell to evoke involuntary memories from the past. In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913), Proust used the taste and smell of a madeleine dipped several times in tea to elicit in the narrator a moment of joy and elation and a feeling of immortality. We find this iconic madeleine moment in the poetry of Symons, who uses perfume to suggest both the powerful impact of remembered experience (‘In the Temple’) and the inherently transient quality of remembering itself (‘At the Ambassadeurs’). The distancing and standardizing effects of triggered memory are cleverly sidestepped by Symons as he invokes the sense of smell, which enables him to keep closer contact with the feelings of the actual experience (yearning, desire, loss) for as long as the poem lasts. Huysmans attempted to elucidate this phenomenon in one of his Croquis Parisiens (Parisian Sketches) entitled ‘les folies-bergère en 1879’: It’s in this way that the most disparate places and things come together, through an analogy that seems bizarre at first sight. You evoke in the place you happen to be, the pleasures of the place you are not. This topsy-turvy fact 117

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cuts both ways. Like when a fleeting pleasure inspired by the present is diverted just as it’s fading and coming to an end, and is renewed and prolonged in another which, seen through the eyes of memory, becomes at one and the same time both sweeter and more real.45 In the controversial poem ‘Stella Maris’, for example, which was published in the Decadent periodical The Yellow Book in 1894, Symons aestheticizes his encounter with a ‘Juliet of the night’ to such an extent that the beauty of his underaged lover supersedes the shame and guilt (not that his critics appreciated this): ‘And I, remembering, would declare / that joy, not shame, is ours to share.’ 46 The poem uses both the intermittence of the lighthouse beam and the ebb and flow of waves against shore and rocks to suggest something about the waves of memory that come and go. The memory of the young girl returns to the poet more strongly as the poem progresses, but as she materializes through remembrance it is not clear whether this will be a safe or dangerous re-experience. Like the lighthouse beam that both attracts and warns seafarers, the processes of memory are ambiguous and overwhelm the poet. In spite of the powerful nature of olfactory reminiscence, the object of the reminiscence remains tangled in a complex of thoughts and the effort in the last section of the poem is concentrated on justifying the sex and on redeeming the poet and his lover.

White Heliotrope At the heart of London Nights is a poem, ‘White Heliotrope’, in which Symons corresponds olfaction, memory and desire. He uses the popular perfume White Heliotrope to create mnemonically a fleeting impression not only of a past sexual encounter, but of the 118

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transience inherent in memory itself. Perfume is both material and immaterial; it functions as the nominal subject of the poem and its vaporizing qualities are suggested in the places where regular rhythms of the poem falter. White heliotrope, or Arborecum alba, is an old-fashioned, Victorian plant that has a vanilla, baby powder fragrance. In its synthetic state, heliotropin or piperonal, it is used as an ingredient in many perfumes, along with lily, rose and musk. The scent White Linen by Estée Lauder, for example, contains late Victorian base notes of white cedarwood, patchouli and white heliotrope. In this poem Symons exploits the sweet fragrance of the perfume to suggest what he calls in his poem ‘Paris’ ‘the scented ways’,47 a vague reference to illicit eroticism. ‘White Heliotrope’ opens with the drained and drowsy atmosphere of remembered post-coitus. Here is the poem in full:

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The feverish room and that white bed, The tumbled skirts upon a chair, The novel flung half-open, where Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints, are spread; The mirror that has sucked your face Into its secret deep of deeps, And there mysteriously keeps Forgotten memories of grace; And you, half dressed and half awake, Your slant eyes strangely watching me, And I, who watch you drowsily, With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

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This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) Will rise, a ghost of memory, if Ever again my handkerchief Is scented with White Heliotrope.48 The poem presents a remembered intimate scene. A woman reclines among a disarray of ‘Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints’, watching the speaker, who watches her from a distance. The speaker describes the recalled scene in quite strict iambic tetrameter in four stanzas of four lines, and yet the form of the poem yields occasionally to various irregularities of rhythm that suggest indistinctness, a ghosting of the memory. It is the effect of memory rather than the emotions engendered by remembering that preoccupies the speaker, whose eyes ‘having slept not, ache’. The atmosphere is soft and drowsy, and in the first stanza the repetition of ‘half’ – in a ‘novel flung half-open’, ‘half dressed and half awake’ – suggests a soft exhalation of breath, echoed in the ‘white bed’, the ‘hat, hair-pins’, ‘having’, ‘hope’ and ‘handkerchief’, filling the poem with breaths and sighs. In the second line of the final stanza, the words ‘Will rise’ are notable for their position following the bracketed query, as they suggest a swelling of the poem to its climax and also serve as part of the sexual imagery that is strewn throughout the poem. This touch of sexuality is subtle at first, but it becomes pronounced on re-reading, as ‘sucked’, ‘tumbled’, ‘spread’, ‘flung half-open’, ‘secret deep of deeps’, ‘feverish’, and finally ‘this . . . will rise’ combine to impress us with the sensation of vigorous sexual activity. All this is evoked for the speaker by the heady scent of White Heliotrope, a ‘ghost of memory’ rising from the perfume of his handkerchief. Once released from its bottle, fragrance lasts only a short while, and like desire, perfume, so Symons suggests, intoxicates but 120

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then evaporates. The paradox suggested by Symons’s poems is the fact that memory, like desire, is impossible to contain or ‘fix’. The resuscitated sensation of desire for a past moment only intensifies the impossibility of being able to possess it for longer than it lasts. In ‘White Heliotrope’, the sighs and breaths across the poem unify the series of refracted images, but they also soften and dim our perception, and as with ‘Memory’, what remains is the reflexive impression or the sensation of reminiscence itself. Symons paints a vivid picture of this in ‘Stella Maris’, in which ‘The glancing of the lighthouse light’ suggests something potent about the searching quality of remembrance: For, surely as I see to-night The glancing of the lighthouse light Against the sky, across the bay, As, turn by turn, it falls my way, So surely do I see your eyes Out of the empty night arise . . .49

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Memory Symons was not concerned only with the problem of definition and the capture of the elusive romantic moment. In the fifth and final section of London Nights, he suggests something further about the relationship between the processes of memory and the objects which memory recalls to the present. In the poem ‘Memory’, for example, Symons combines the idea of the object of reminiscence, ‘the thought of you remaining’, with musings on the transience of memory itself, which erases the object almost as soon as it appears to the mind, so that it becomes ‘A hid sweetness, in my brain’.50 The poem refuses to yield its subject – the poet’s loved one – to the 121

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reader; thoughts of her stay recessed in the way that perfume lingers in the folds of cloth, but although the poem is not able to recreate her (that is the point), she is more because ‘Other moments I may know / That shall waft me, in their going, / As a breath blown to and fro’.51 What we are left with is the fragrance of the memories, but not the memories themselves. What we are left with, in short, are the cloud-like formations of memory: memory as a vaporizing, distancing agency that resists our attempts to possess and decipher. What Symons is creating is a world in which man is subject to the vicissitudes of the unconscious. In a later poem, ‘Hallucination’ (1902), he apostrophizes: ‘Dreams are the truth: let the world fade!’ As sensations intensify and longings reach a crescendo, the clarity upon which we rely for direction deserts us. Words fail, and the poet is overwhelmed by a correspondence of the senses:

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Giddy expectancy consumes My senses; but what breath perfumes The air with scents of heliotrope? I sicken with a wild desire, I drown in sweetness, till it seems As if the after-taste of dreams Came back into my mouth like fire.52 In London Nights, especially in those poems that are about memory and desire, such as ‘White Heliotrope’, Symons experiments with the suggestive range of poetry. For him the poem is a perfume bottle, a container of sensations, impressions and effusions, a place where fleeting reality is momentarily captured. We find the most vivid representation of this idea in modern French verse in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and particularly at the fin de siècle in the writings of Robert 122

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de Montesquiou, who commented in ‘Pays des aromates’ (Land of Fragrances) that a poem is ‘un bal des odeurs’ (a dance of odours).53 But in Symons’s most fragrant collection of verse, London Nights, the references to perfume signal the disengagement of modern poetry with ‘exteriority’ and ‘rhetoric’ and herald a more subjective contemplation of immateriality, ‘by which the soul of things can be made visible’.54

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fıve

Paradises and Torture Gardens From the broad calyxes of great Indian flowers like natural urns and perfume braziers, rose wild and penetrating odours; violent and acrid scents as intoxicating as wine or opium. Fountains of rose-water sprang up into the air like living things, spraying the carved lintels of the arcades and falling back again with harmonious murmurings in a fine rain into their basins of rock crystal. théophile gautier, Fortunio (1837)

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T

he garden paradise is an ancient topoi and its source lies buried in ancient civilizations, in the sacred books of India and in Egyptian wall paintings. The earliest known literary expression can be found in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, who, in the course of his adventures, comes upon the land of Dilmun, a paradise on earth where food and water are plenty, where old age, grief and death are unknown. Some two or three hundred years later, this idea of paradise is inscribed in the Old Testament and associated with the eastward garden. In the Book of Genesis God’s initial act after creating the earth and its original inhabitants is to plant a garden in Eden, where ‘he put the man whom he had formed’ (Genesis 1:8). The word ‘paradise’ derives from the ancient Persian word pairidaēza, which described a royal pleasure garden or park, a walled oasis (pairi, the word for ‘around’, and diz, ‘to mould, to form’), and later became the Hebrew pardēs and the Greek cognate paradeisos. Despite its associations with male deities, like the Hellenic Adonis, the walled garden is traditionally a sacred and 124

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feminine space. Enclosed and fertile, and susceptible to cyclical changes, it suggests the female body, the vulva and the womb. The sacred garden is the place of Aphrodite and Inanna, but also the Bride of the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, an epithalamium, or celebration of love, between Christ and the Virgin Mary. In the Bible the garden is portrayed simultaneously as the Bride herself, as her home, and naturally as a place of pleasures. The orchard, the site of erotic union, is described as full of lush vegetation and natural beauty. In the garden paradise, nature is in a benevolent state in spite of being cultivated by human hands. It is a place of pleasure and growth, where love flourishes and the burdens and infelicities of social existence can be transcended. This Arcadian view derives from the classical poet Theocritus, but more significantly from Virgil’s Bucolica, or Eclogues. In Virgil’s fourth Eclogue the paradisiacal Golden Age is evoked, a time when peace and harmony prevailed, when man lived modestly, innocently and happily. In both Theocritus and Virgil the garden is a microcosm of nature and love brought together in conditions of idle repose. The Arcadian garden is a locus amoenus, or pleasant or ‘lovely place’, a pastoral idyll.1 During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the JudaeoChristian notion of the garden of Eden continues to preoccupy writers and artists, but the garden also loses some of its idyllic status and acquires significance as a place where civilizing influences are felt but do not dominate. With its shady bowers, nooks and grottoes, it becomes, in contrast to conventional society, a space of illicit erotic encounters. In medieval courtly literature the commonplace image of the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, has woman at its centre. Its most elaborate portrayal is found in Guillaume de Lorris’ part of Le Roman de la rose.2 As Gail 125

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Finney comments in The Counterfeit Idyll (1984), ‘The garden here, viewed in a dream, embodies an allegorical idealization of courtly life and love. It is literally a Garden of Delight, owned by Mirth and populated by figures like Idleness, Gladness, Courtesy, Generosity, Beauty, Youth, and the God of Love.’3 In the Renaissance epic the emphasis is on the illusory nature of the earthly paradise.4 The garden becomes a symbolically challenging space for the male hero figure, and in the works of Petrarch, Poliziano, Ariosto, Trissino, Tasso, Camoens and Spenser the hero’s sense of duty, honour, responsibility and devotion are overcome by the female powers of luxury, ease and sensual love. Woman in the Renaissance garden is a seductive figure who has strayed from the path of Christian virtue. In the eighteenth century the concept of the garden space as feminine, erotic and illicit, as separate from the conventions and pressures of mainstream society, finds a subtler, more complex expression in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) Julie designs a garden on her father’s estate, where she lives with her Russian husband, Wolmar. The garden, which she keeps firmly locked and names ‘Elysium’, is a symbol of virtue and denial. When her true love, Saint-Preux, visits Julie and her husband, he learns that she has not set foot in Elysium since her wedding day. Julie’s locked garden is a compartmentalization of an aspect of herself that she cannot fulfil; it preserves her feelings and allows her not to act upon them, until the very end. After many years of faithful marriage, Julie confesses in a last letter to Saint-Preux that she has always loved him, and in the fever of a fatal illness she calls out his name. In Rousseau’s novel the garden is a conservation area. Its locked status symbolizes Julie’s lack of access to her true desires. As a space 126

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that is outside but not invulnerable to the social conventions of love and matrimony, the garden becomes a metaphor for the female heart, an idea that finds increasing currency in the nineteenth century among Romantic and realist fiction writers, including Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. In their writings the garden often represents a haven of natural values in comparison with the artificial social conventions of the house and city. The association between the natural garden and truth continues into the next century. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) the garden settings are where the truth about love is revealed. Emma Bovary’s garden in Tostes reveals to her the reality of her situation. In its changeless aspects, ‘the foxgloves and wallflowers in their places, the nettles still growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen spreading along the three windows’,5 the garden mirrors her own boredom. In an effort to make herself feel madly in love with her husband Charles she paces up and down the garden by moonlight reciting love poetry but to no avail. Frustrated by the dullness of the countryside and bourgeois life, Emma hankers after the excitement of the city: ‘In her longing, she confounded gilded sensuality with heart’s delight, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling. Was not love like an Indian plant, requiring a prepared soil, a special temperature?’6

Garden as ‘otherplace’ In the nineteenth century, fictional notions of the garden incorporate both the pastoral dream and the idealized Christian myth of Eden. Eden becomes a more personal concept during this time as Christian beliefs and religion are called into question. In literary representations the garden image becomes a powerful evocation of ‘otherplace’, a realm in which individuals may escape from the 127

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incursions of modern life and reconnect with more primitive, more natural wishes and impulses. Nineteenth-century garden images incorporated, as Finney argues, a ‘new, relativized transcendence, which endows the role of the garden as earthly paradise with more significance than ever before’.7 In fiction we find many scenes where private negotiations and secret trysts take place among the flowers. Eden is progressively interiorized. Not only gardens, but other sites not wholly visible to outsiders, including shrubberies, summer houses, conservatories and hothouses, offer a space removed from the main house. They are settings of amatory and often clandestine encounters, where feelings, both natural and unnatural, may find expression and reflection in the floral surroundings. They are settings that appeal to the senses with an emotionally heightened atmosphere, and action often takes place by the light of the moon. The garden room, or conservatory, is a key feature and a setting that represents a space liberated from the pressures of everyday reality, where intimate encounters may take place out of main view. In his 1882 novella L’Adultera (The Woman Taken in Adultery), Theodor Fontane describes a winter garden as an erotic place where the sultry atmosphere could be unexpectedly liberating: A few steps further and they found themselves at the entrance to a tropical forest, while the vast glass buildings towered over them. Here stood the splendid examples of van der Straaten’s collection: palms, dracaenas, tree ferns, and a winding staircase spiralled its way upward till it reached the dome and then went round this too, and further into one of the high galleries of the nave. En route no word was spoken . . . Truly it was a fantastic foliage, formed of leafy crowns, almost closed over, and all over the girders and ribs 128

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of the vaults climbed orchids, filling the whole dome with their scent. One breathed blissfully but with difficulty in this dense foliage, and it was as if a hundred secrets spoke, and Melanie felt that this intoxicating scent was making her nervousness vanish. She recollected those external impressions, of natural things dependent on air and light, which require cool places in order to be fresh themselves. Crossing over a snowfield, in a frantic journey, and in biting east wind – there would her spirit be exalted and the bold courage of her soul return. But this soft relaxing air made her weak and relaxed, and the armour of her mind slackened, withdrew, and fell.8 In England conservatories were traditionally used for light recreational activities, such as reading, lounging and taking tea, but in much fiction they could also be more emotionally charged spaces, secret locations where lovers meet. In Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe (1881), the narrator tells us that ‘lovers (in earnest or not in earnest) discovered, in a dimly-lit conservatory with many recesses, that ideal of discreet retirement which combines solitude and society under one roof’.9 This is an other-world where exotic plants, overpowering fragrances and contrasts of heat and light, shadows and luminosity, conspire to create a location for ambiguous and immoral behaviour. In Chapter Ten of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), Maggie Tulliver attends a dance at Stephen Guest’s home of Park House. Maggie is led by Stephen away from the ‘stifling’ ballroom to the conservatory, where she feels a ‘new consciousness’ and a ‘burning sense of irretrievable confusion’, which is then compounded by Stephen grabbing her arm, outstretched to touch a rose, and showering kisses on it.10 The association between unbridled sexual desire and enclosed garden spaces becomes a cliché by the early twentieth century. 129

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In The Man of Property (1906), the first novel of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, there are heightened passions among the hothouse flowers. On visiting Soames’s house in Montpelier Square, cousin June comes across her fiancé, the architect Phil Bosinney, and Soames’s wife, Irene, talking intimately among the flowers in the court:

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It was from there that the scent of the azaleas came, and, standing with their backs to her, their faces buried in the golden-pink blossoms, stood her lover and Irene. Silent but unashamed, with flaming cheeks and angry eyes, the girl watched . . . A wave of azalea scent drifted into June’s face; she felt sick and dizzy . . . ‘I must see you there – ’ ‘The answer seemed to the girl to come softly, with a tremble from amongst the blossoms: ‘So I do’. And she stepped into the open space of the window. ‘How stuffy it is here!’ she said; ‘I can’t bear this scent!’11 The restrained suggestiveness of traditional garden symbolism typified in parlour songs such as Tennyson’s ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ (1855) gives way to more vulgar word play in post-Victorian culture. In the lyrics of George Formby’s ‘In a Little Wigan Garden’ (1934), for example, the grand cultivated gardens of Kew pale into insignificance beside the working-class vegetable garden in Wigan with its cucumber frame and cabbage patch. Desire is no longer imagined in terms of the weeping rose and whispering lily that wait expectantly with the lover at the gate. In Formby’s song the trysting place is unromantic and rotten, a lamentable backdrop to love. Full of sexual innuendo, Formby paints a picture of young love struggling to find a cosy hideaway among the harmless creepy-crawlies, away from the 130

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industrial smog and grime. The intentions of the singer are barely disguised as the girl sits on his knee to watch his rhubarb growing. The increasing sexual explicitness of garden symbolism finds various outlets in the popular culture of the late twentieth century. Western advertising agencies use the image of gardens and meadows to sell the most unnatural products. In 1973 the Cadbury’s Flake commercial capitalized on the growing popular interest in the work of Impressionist paintings. A doe-eyed young woman wearing a smock and large straw hat sits deep in a field of poppies painting a watercolour and enjoying a bar of Flake chocolate before being caught in a summer shower. In 1999, when centenary exhibitions were focused on decadent France at the fin de siècle, the Flake Girl became a young Parisian woman relaxing in a summery garden overlooking the Eiffel Tower. As she bites into the Flake chocolate bar in her ice cream, the garden sprinklers are set off and she is drenched in refreshing water. We find the same ejaculatory sprinkler image in the featurelength animation for children Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-rabbit (2005, dir. Nick Park and Steve Box), when Lady Tottington takes Wallace up to her heavenly rooftop hothouse, a reference to the crazy project of King Ludwig ii of Bavaria. Pulling on the golden leg of a putto, she and Wallace ascend via an elevator to a baroque greenhouse space full of oversized vegetables. As the sun sinks, the lights inside the giant glass domes throw suggestive shadows on the surrounding walls, and overcome with desire in this ‘veritable vegetable paradise’, Wallace’s inner rabbit begins to reveal itself in twitching and lip smacking. His appetite is whetted further by the appearance of Lady Totty’s gigantic ‘carotte de Chantenay’ and the sunflower-shaped sprinklers moisten and vibrate in anticipation. 131

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The Cadbury commercials and Aardman Animations use visual imagery that draws cleverly on traditional notions of the garden and the hothouse and on popular notions of decadence and selfindulgence. The animation and the advert use double entendre to powerful effect, but the marketing of Cadbury’s Flake legitimizes the consumer’s desire for luxury, excess and sexual pleasure by locating them in places of natural beauty. We laugh at Lady Totty’s unwitting come-ons to the beast in Wallace, but the Flake commercials arouse our desire for the product. The lush garden imagery is a unique selling point. The garden paradise has become a ubiquitous image on billboards and in television commercials. We enter it as a reward for making the right economic choice, and this choice depends on our recognizing a good thing when we sense it; whether it is a fabric conditioner that simulates garden freshness, a butter that glows like sun on corn, or car insurance that propels us to a desert island retreat. The control we have over our own pleasure is partial at best, but the imagery is persuasive and intoxicating. As soon as we make this choice, we enter a consumer paradise of which Willy Wonka would be envious, where there is an unlimited supply of natural light and goodness. This, we are led to believe, is heaven. Not only have we bought the right product, so the advertisers reassure us, but we have bought into a notion of perfection that is ancient and obvious. The superlative straplines say it all (‘loveliest’, ‘brightest’, ‘smoothest’). The motifs of the paradise garden are instantly recognizable: voluminous blue summer sky, streaming sun, lush grass and soft-focus flower shots, sometimes with flitting birds and leaping puppies. Even the young, fresh, healthful humans bounce with delight in this harmonious vision of domesticated nature.

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Decadent gardens In the nineteenth century some writers reacted against the idealization of the garden space and created instead an image of the garden as a corrupt and corrupting space, a toxic landscape that reminds us of our frailty and inevitable degeneration. This garden is an inversion of the garden paradise, with its emphasis on colour harmony and light, delicate floral fragrances, and man and beast in perfect coexistence. The decadent garden is more like a baroque curiosity cabinet, with exquisite treasures and grotesque collectors’ items placed side by side. It is a space where desire and cruelty intersect. Man is not a gentle shepherd at peace tending his flocks on sloping pastures; he is an artist-decorator seeking only to improve on the natural world, to impose his laws on the forces of nature. Decadent writers use both the exterior garden and the interiorized exotic garden of the hothouse – nature contained and compartmentalized – as a framing device for the expression of unnatural desire and perverse longing. As Jean de Palacio describes, the decadent garden is an enclave of obsessions and transgressions.12 In Octave Mirbeau’s short story ‘Le Petit Pavillon’ (The Little Summer-house, 1901), the narrator advertises his summer-house retreat in the hope it will attract trysting couples longing for privacy in beautiful surroundings. He rents it out to a mysterious, grey-faced former property lawyer, Jean-Jules-Joseph Lagoffin. Curious at first about the absence of Lagoffin after handing over the rent, the narrator eventually pays a visit the summer house. To his horror, he discovers that Lagoffin has used the trysting place as a torturechamber for one of his underage female victims. The Decadent retreat becomes a hideaway for nefarious criminal activity, a place where social mores are not only transcended, but transgressed. 133

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In Mirbeau’s story the exterior of the summer house is covered in Virginia creeper, about which the narrator jokes: ‘ho! ho! there must be no creeper on the inside, and no virgins either.’13 The interior reflects what the narrator hopes will happen. On the walls are mirrors and licentious paintings, some by Fragonard. Secluded and occluded by nature, this retreat is a Decadent space. The creeping vegetation hides the house from view, and functions as an accessory to Lagoffin’s hideous plans. We find a similar correspondence between nature, artifice and crime in Jean Lorrain’s short story ‘La Princesse aux lys rouges’ (Princess of the Red Lilies, 1894), in which the pale and beautiful Audovere is indistinguishable from the lilies she tears and shreds. Each time she destroys a plant, a nobleman dies. Audovere’s cruelty is legend, and so when a dying man comes to the door of her palace, she ignores his pleas for help. This inspires the lilies in the garden to rise up against their cruel mistress, and they begin to grow more profusely, overwhelming her with their scent until she dies. In their beauty, putrefaction and deathly stench, the lilies symbolize avenging nature, and in its most extreme form, the Decadent garden paradise becomes a torture garden. In Decadent fiction paradise is often glazed and compartmentalized, characterized by a vivid and hyper-sensual orientalism that contrasts with the drab monotony of modern urban existence. The Decadent garden paradise is where beauty and rot exist in indeterminate relation. The prototype is found in Théophile Gautier’s novel Fortunio (1837, first published as El Dorado in 1836), in which the most beautiful place is the hothouse. It is the central feature of Chapter 24, ‘An Arabian Night’s Entertainment’. Nestled within a complex of buildings on the edge of Paris, Fortunio constructs a fairy-tale haven, an ‘Eldorado’ or Palace of Gold, fit to rival Roman excess and splendour. 134

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The pleasure he takes from this place is the fact that it secretly co-exists with grey, muddy Paris streets on the other side of the perimeter walls, invisible to any visitor inside the pleasure dome: ‘on the other side of the wall a little world revolved, warm, golden, melodious, scented; a world of women, birds and flowers, an enchanted palace’.14 At the centre of the Eldorado complex is the hothouse, an early geodesic dome, engineered to produce a ‘fine equable climate’ and a ‘crystalline atmosphere’, and one of Fortunio’s greatest pleasures is to mingle his ‘native barbarism with civilized life, to be one and the same time a satrap and a young man of fashion, a Beau Brummel and a Sardanapalus’.15 In the hothouse nature is adapted to intoxicate the senses. It is a synaesthetic experience in which humming-birds and birds of paradise flutter and glitter like ‘living flowers’,16 and where the atmosphere is artificially scented. In Fortunio nature offers a consummately aesthetic experience. Nature is art (‘the broad calyxes of great Indian flowers like natural urns and perfume braziers’).17 This paradise is an oriental haven where man is able to control his own pleasure.

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Tissot, Manet and Zola In the late nineteenth century various artists depict the greenhouse as a modern feminine space. In the glass conservatories of his elegant Parisian villa and his London home in St John’s Wood, furnished with oak parquet and blue tapestries, James Tissot painted wealthy and beautiful women posing among the palms and chrysanthemums. In the paintings In the Greenhouse (c. 1869) and Chrysanthemums (c. 1874–6) the women and the exotic floral setting are depicted as complementary, the colours and textures of their clothes and headwear integrated with the giant floral arrangements. In In the 135

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Greenhouse, the woman carries a yellow-backed book, a symbol of her fashionable modernity. In 1878 and 1879 Édouard Manet used the greenhouse conservatory of the painter Otto Rosen as a studio for nine months. While staying at 70 rue d’Amsterdam in Paris, Manet painted a portrait of his wife, Suzanne, in the greenhouse, seated comfortably on a bench, hands folded and with a dreamy look on her face. The spear-shaped leaves and trailing blooms are clustered round, admitting no light. His painting In the Greenhouse, also made during this period, shows the same bench, on which sits a woman and leans a man. Again, the floral background is a dense and encroaching screen. The couple in the painting are Jules Guillemet and his wife. They owned a clothing shop and were friends of the artist. The man leans over the back of the bench lost in thought and his wife stares ahead, slightly glassy-eyed, unengaged and distant. Several critics commented on the interiorized young couple, including Huysmans, who in a review of ‘Le Salon de 1879’ (published in L’Art moderne, 1883), described ‘the figures detached from the green envelope that surrounds them’,18 but in May 1879 a caricature of the painting appeared in Le Journal amusant depicting an amorous greenhouse encounter in the style of Manet. The caption runs: ‘an innocent young person cornered in the conservatory by an infamous seducer’.19 The association of the greenhouse with seduction and betrayal is established by Émile Zola in his novel La Curée (The Kill, 1872), a narrative that follows the fortunes of Aristide Saccard, his wife, Renée, and his son, Maxime. In La Curée there are two hothouses, the macrocosmic city of Paris that Saccard ‘would have proposed in all seriousness to put . . . under an immense bell-jar, so as transform it into a hothouse for forcing pineapples and sugar-cane’,20 and the microcosmic hothouse between the drawing room and Renée’s 136

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James Tissot, In the Greenhouse, c. 1869, oil on canvas.

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Édouard Manet, Mme Manet in the Greenhouse, 1879, oil on canvas.

bedroom in which she and Maxime commit incest. This suffocating and lush environment is both a fertile and corrupting space, where the lovers are transported with sexual desire for one another: ‘The sap that rose in the tree-trunks penetrated them, filling them with a mad longing for immediate growth, for gigantic procreation.’21 Later, this sap becomes poisonous to Renée, making ‘bestial caprices sprout in her brain’.22 But the orchestra of perfumes in the hothouse signals the more dangerous consequences of boundless physical arousal: ‘At times the vanilla plant sang with dove-like cooings; then came the rough notes of the stanhopeas, whose striped throats have the putrid breath of convalescent invalids.’23 This hothouse, we are given to understand, is a place of open knowledge, where transgressors are aware of the boundaries they overstep. At the beginning of their affair Renée and Maxime are conscious agents 138

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in their downfall, relishing ‘the criminal fruit of an overheated soil, with the dull fear of this terrifying hotbed’.24 Zola’s hothouse is a haven and a hell. It teems with exotic plants from all over the world that are beautiful and deadly. It is an ambiguous space where roles reverse. In the hothouse Renée adopts a masculine role (‘It was above all in the hothouse that Renée was the man’) while the effete Maxime is forced to submit to her overpowering animal advances (‘She gloated over Maxime, her prey lying beneath her’).25 Vegetable and animal are complicit. The flowers take on the attributes of the couple, the curved leaves of the begonia contrasting with the white pointed spears of the caladium. By the end of the scene, Renée appears to have assumed monstrous proportions. She is ‘swollen with desire’, and her violent and virile kisses evoke the natural life-cycle: ‘Her mouth opened with the hungry, bleeding brilliancy of the Chinese hibiscus . . . Her kisses bloomed and faded

Édouard Manet, In the Greenhouse, 1879, oil on canvas. 139

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like the red flowers of the great mallow, which last scarcely a few hours and are endlessly renewed, like the bruised, insatiable lips of a giant Messalina.’26 Zola’s decadent treatment of the hothouse scene in La Curée reconfigures the conventional conservatory scene and makes woman a deadly exotic, a fleur fatale. She is the source of corruption and perversion. Not only does Renée seduce her stepson in the hothouse, but she metamorphoses into a predatory male figure. Her desire is of such monstrous proportions that it inverts the natural order. This is a concept that Huysmans would borrow for his novel À rebours, and a theme that Mirbeau would develop to horrific effect in his novel Le Jardin des supplices.

Mirbeau and Monet Then she leaned sharply over a plant, a thalictus whose long fine stalk with many branches was raised stiffly in a clear violet colour beside the avenue. Each auxiliary branch emerged from a sheath that shone like ivory in the form of sex organs and terminated in a bunch of minuscule flowers huddled close together and covered with pollen. Copyright © 2018. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

‘Here it is! Here it is! Oh, my darling!’ octave mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices (1899)

The steamy sexual eroticism of La Curée pales into insignificance beside Octave Mirbeau’s decadent horror novel, Le Jardin des supplices. Oscar Wilde described it as ‘a sort of grey adder’,27 a tale of barbarism and baroque torture, where the ancient arts of sex and horticulture are brought together. In this novel the classical idea of the garden as a locus amoenus is completely reversed. The relationship between art and nature is presented as sadistic and tormenting. To 140

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proceed through Mirbeau’s Chinese torture garden is to renounce all human will and follow the path to an ecstatic and awful death. At its culminating point there is little distinction between pleasure and pain, and the oriental paradise, decorated with remnants of entrails and skin from human torture-victims, becomes a living hell that recalls the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Mirbeau (1848–1917) was born into a conservative, rural bourgeois family and educated by the Jesuits. After leaving school, he went to study law in Paris and then became an officer in the Army of the Loire during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After the war he became a journalist for monarchist newspapers, writing art and theatre criticism as well as reactionary political articles. In the late 1870s and early ’80s he held local political office and worked on the Paris Stock Exchange, but in 1885 Mirbeau was converted to anarchism, and remained intensely antimilitarist and anticlerical until his death, associating with Jean Grave, Zo d’Axa, Sébastien Faure and Félix Fénéon, all prominent anarchist figures whom he passionately defended during the famous ‘Trial of the Thirty’ in 1894. During the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau, along with Anatole France and Marcel Proust, was among the most prominent Dreyfusards. The Dreyfus Affair became the underlying inspiration for his fourth novel, Le Jardin des supplices, begun in 1892 and published in full in 1899. So disgusted was Mirbeau by what he regarded as the atavistic barbarism of the Dreyfus case that he dedicated his ‘pages of Murder and Blood’ to ‘the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern men’.28 Divided into two parts, we are meant to see in the novel parallels between the so-called civilization of Western society – epitomized by English and French law, which is satirized through an abbreviated lifestory of the author of the manuscript – and the decadence and 141

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corruption of the Eastern world. The second part of the novel is a fantastic allegory and describes the sadistic practices of the East, including a detailed account of the Torture Garden that the narrator discovers through his relationship with a beautiful, enigmatic Englishwoman in China. Clara, a femme fatale, has rejected the rigid customs of Europe for the ancient, exotic traditions of Imperial China. The anonymous narrator is a corrupt and cynical Frenchman who journeys by sea to the Far East on a spurious scientific mission as an embryologist. Deeply attracted to Clara’s paradoxical nature, her grace and integrity and her lack of conventional morality, he abandons his plans to live in Ceylon and goes to stay with her in her house in a small town south of Canton. Their relationship is intensely sexual and sadistic, and the narrator repeatedly describes her heightened and hardened physical arousal by reports and scenes of murder and brutality. The depths of Clara’s depravity are revealed by a series of weekly journeys from her house to the Convict-Meat-Market, the Prison and the Torture Garden, this last a pièce de resistance of unmitigated inhumanity and suffering. In a passage where beauty and cruelty are seamlessly interwoven, we are offered a glimpse of the natural economy of the garden and of Clara’s excited and sadistic engagement with imperial Chinese art: In the shadow of a massive tamarisk we noticed a sort of rococo armchair. The armrests comprised alternately of a saw and a blade of sharpened steel, and the back and the seat were formed from iron pikes joined together. A fragment of flesh hung on one of these pikes. Clara lightly and skilfully lifted it up with the tip of her parasol and threw it to the voracious peacocks which hurled themselves on it with a beating of wings and whilst striking out with their beaks.29 142

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The novel contains many detailed descriptions of the exotic flora in the Torture Garden proliferating on a base of human humus and flecked and spattered with the remains of human skin and blood, attached to petals and leaves through the force of violent mutilations and murders. The paradoxes about life and death, nature and art, desire and cruelty, are made clear in the human community that serves the Garden. There are artisans, gardeners and potters maintaining the foliage and tending the delicate plants, but there are also torturers and hangmen concealed within this natural beauty, performing skinnings and baroque acts of cruelty on petty criminals who find themselves surviving the barbarities of the Prison. The transition from beauty to cruelty is at times so subtly effected that, like the narrator, we become voyeuristic witnesses to the most extreme acts of inhumanity against man. ‘Art,’ declares the executioner to Clara, ‘consists in knowing how to kill, according to rituals of beauty, something about which the Chinese alone know the divine secret.’30 He goes on: if you knew the cheerless nonsense, the sentimental wretchedness, the decadent follies our poets declaim about flowers! It’s frightening! Some say they’re perverse! Perverse – flowers! I don’t know what they’ll think up next! Have you heard such ridiculous nonsense, milady? Flowers are violent, cruel, terrible and splendid . . . like love! He gathered a nearby buttercup whose golden capitulum shook indolently above the grass and, slowly and lovingly, turned it between his large red fingers with extreme delicacy. In places dried blood flaked off his fingers.31 It was not uncommon for nineteenth-century gardens to have an oriental component. The importation of exotic species of plant 143

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and tree, and the construction of pagodas and curved bridges in public gardens, signified a fascination with the material culture of the East that intensified from the mid-nineteenth century. The World Exhibitions played their part in bringing eastern horticulture to Europe and America, but travel to the Far East was limited until the end of the nineteenth century. By this time, the Orient had been a part of the European imagination for more than a hundred years. Napoléon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 set in motion an intense fascination for all aspects of ‘oriental’ culture, and artist-travellers, including Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), popularized romantic images of oriental life through paintings of horse-racing, men playing draughts and women of the harem at their domestic chores. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries popular understanding of Chinese and Japanese culture was still comfortably vague. For the Romantics, oriental gardens demonstrated man’s desire to control and manipulate nature. In Rousseau’s Julie, for example, Saint Preux describes how Chinese gardens were done with such art that the art was invisible, but in so expensive a manner and maintained at such great cost that this thought took away all the pleasure I could have derived from beholding them. There were rocks, grottoes, artificial waterfalls in flat and sandy places where only well water is to be had; there were flowers and rare plants from every climate of China and Tartary combined and raised in a single soil. It is true one saw there neither lovely avenues nor regular compartments; but one saw piled up in profusion marvels that can only be found dispersed and separate. Nature there appeared in a thousand different guises, and the whole taken together was not natural.32 144

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This skill in using artifice to triumph over nature, making the unnatural seem natural, is given a dramatic twist in the second part of Le Jardin des supplices. In Mirbeau’s novel, the exotic setting is based on powerful stereotypes of orientalism as a culture of beauty and brutality. The main influence, however, on Mirbeau’s torture garden was not the ornamental wonders of the East; it was Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny. Mirbeau had a passion for gardening and spent afternoons at Giverny with Edmond de Goncourt, and he frequently swapped gardening tips with Monet and Gustave Caillebotte. ‘Who knows,’ mused Goncourt, ‘if it wasn’t the dear memory of these flowers that one day exhaled their aroma of lotus and mangrove over the charnel house of Le Jardin des supplices?’33 Mirbeau’s own garden, at Les Damps near Pont-de-l’Arche, was a short distance from Giverny, the planting of which he described in literary terms: ‘The air is filled with so much glimmering, so much quivering, so many pollens, and the towering sunflowers turn their yellow discs, they blaze and glow, and the tall tufts of the harpaliums pour out the gold of their inexhaustible flowering.’34 Mirbeau’s fictional torture garden is modelled not on his own garden, however, but almost exactly on Giverny. Symmetrical, aligned, with a long path down the middle leading to a pool on which floated nymphéas, or water lilies, and traversed by a Japanese bridge, Monet’s garden finds its spectacular and perverse parallel in Mirbeau’s novel: A vast pool crossed by the arch of a wooden bridge, painted bright green, marked the centre of the garden in the hollow of a small valley where a number of sinuous avenues and paths lined with flowers had been designed with flexibility in a harmonious undulation. Water-lilies and nulumbriums enlivened the water with their processional leaves and stray 145

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yellow, mauve, white, pink and purple corollas. Clusters of irises soared up on delicate stems with strange symbolic birds seemingly perched on their tops.35 If the design of Mirbeau’s torture garden is meant to evoke the magnificent artistry of Chinese imperial gardens, where the emphasis is on the balance between man and nature, then the correspondence between horticulture and sadism suggests imperial gardening more broadly. The Roman emperor Nero is reputed to have illuminated his gardens with human torches, and in the seventeenth century Jahangir, the governor of the Mughal empire, presided over the abundant province of Kashmir, luxuriating in the variety and perfume of the plants. He ordered punishments to take place in the gardens; offenders were planted in the ground, their heads exposed to the harsh rays of the sun. These imperial paradises were places of violence and delight, symbolic of dynastic power and cruel individual will. The literary motif of the garden darkens in the late nineteenth century. The ancient topoi of paradise is subverted by realist writers who describe the light natural garden space in terms other than idyllic, and in the work of Decadent and modern writers the fertile garden is transformed into a space revealing natural beauty and nature’s evil. The opening stanzas of the elegy for Baudelaire, ‘Ave Atque Vale’, plunge us into what Patricia Clements describes as Swinburne’s ‘darkened floral imagery’,36 with images of benign nature transformed, of ‘half-faded fiery blossoms’ and ‘lovely leafbuds poisonous’.37 With Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in hand, Swinburne rhetorically declares: O gardener of strange flowers, what buds, what bloom, Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom? 146

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Claude Monet, Pathway in Monet’s Garden at Giverny, 1900, oil on canvas.

Swinburne knew the answer to this of course. In his essay ‘Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’ (1862), he maintained that Baudelaire ‘ha[d] chosen to dwell mainly upon sad and strange things – the weariness of pain and the bitterness of pleasure’, going on to describe Les Fleurs du mal as having ‘a languid, lurid beauty of close and threatening weather – a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hothouse scents in it’.38 We find a similarly ‘mournful garden’ in Michel Houellebecq’s poem ‘Le Jardin aux fougères’ (The Dark Garden), but here Houellebecq describes ‘plant life’ in sinister and portentous terms, as a reminder of the frustration and futility of human existence: 147

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We walked into a ferny garden where everything seemed much quieter than before. Once through the wicket, we saw no more sun; each wandered the deserted path alone. You glanced uneasily, you caught your breath as a slick snake slid to the undergrowth; amidst all that chaotic vegetation the flowers put on a petal exhibition. Impatient creatures, we roam paradise haunted by sorrow, conscious of disgrace, the thought of sex persistently to the fore. We are, we exist, we want to exist some more,

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nothing to lose; but plant life, so resigned, brings sinister, invasive death to mind. In a dark garden the body decomposes; our decomposing bodies drown in roses.39 The obsession with the garden paradise is both a continuation of the classical interest in the nature and location of the garden of Eden and a reflection of modern concerns. Man’s attempts to dominate nature with ingenious artifice, and the popular interest in the hothouse and exotic flower, are consequences of expanding empires, botanical vogues and new opportunities for travel and exploration. At the heart of the metaphors of the paradise and torture garden is the figure of woman, but from the mid-nineteenth century, the association between woman and garden takes a darker turn. The floral symbolism around the figure of the femme fatale in particular allows writers and artists to explore the relationship between sex, 148

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beauty and death in highly sensual terms. In the next chapter we consider the emergence of the femme fatale figure in the nineteenth century as a response to the changing role and position of women, and the interest among some writers and artists in describing her in terms of a flower of evil.

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six

Flowers of Evil: The Fleur Fatale Today, flowers form an essential part of women’s life, a luxury that is both the rarest and the simplest . . . for flowers and leaves have a definite personality and a tangible influence: they say all sorts of things and suggest so many others! They conjure up so many hopeful dreams; they have no living language, only the language of flowers: the language of love itself. La Vie Parisienne (February 1876)

‘Look carefully, my darling,’ said Clara. ‘Look everywhere. We’re in the most beautiful and interesting part of the garden. Look! Those flowers, oh, those flowers!’ octave mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices (1899)

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W

oman has long been associated with gardens and flowers, her body symbolized by the hortus conclusus, a symbol of woman’s fertility and purity. In the nineteenth century, inspired by plant collecting and gardening, the booming floral perfume industry and the pan-European vogue for exotics, writers and artists drew on a broad botanical spectrum for their flower symbolism. Although poets and painters continued to associate woman with traditional floral emblems like the lily and the rose – ancient symbols of love, beauty and death – the signification of the ‘language of flowers’ changed. The metaphorical use of some traditional flowers became more diverse, and some Decadent and modern writers and artists, as I show in this chapter, attempted to rid the ‘language of flowers’ 150

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Flowers of Evil

of some of its sentimental associations and use the tropes of tropical and exotic plant species to aestheticize and demonize the female body as a locus of social and cultural degeneration. The nineteenth century was the great age of natural history and flower cultivation. Flower gardens were popular among all classes, as were interior floral decoration and wearing flowers. Corsages and boutonnières were part of the formal dress code and the design of bouquets and the manufacture of artificial flowers became established art forms across Europe and America. The worship of flowers symbolized the civilization of wild nature, and in popular literature and art the metaphorical meanings of flowers were extensive and subtle.1 In the mid-nineteenth century the Pre-Raphaelites popularized the close study of garden, field and woodland. Their paintings signalled a radical departure from academic art practice. In their attempt to revitalize British art, which for a long while had been dominated by the principles of the Royal Academy and the study of classical antiquity, the Pre-Raphaelites advocated the close observation of nature and transformed the status of flower painting. In the early nineteenth century the still-life study was associated with the feminine arts of ‘accomplishment’ and regarded as an inferior genre, but in the 1850s the Pre-Raphaelites raised the status of flower painting by incorporating painstaking plein-air studies of the English meadow and hedgerow into their large oil paintings. They took an almost scientific interest in the natural world. In John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–2) Shakespeare’s doomed heroine floats downstream clutching a bunch of flowers. She is surrounded by a host of native plants, including violets, pansies, daisies, fritillaries, poppies, loosestrife, forget-me-nots, nettles and willows, each symbolizing aspects of the story and echoing the references to flowers in Ophelia’s speech in Act iv, scene v. Not everyone was impressed (Tennyson criticized Millais for including 151

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John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–2, oil on canvas.

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varieties of flower that do not bloom at the same time of year, and the Art Journal described the botanical realism of Ophelia as ‘vegetable anomalies’2), but the attention to natural detail in this painting is striking. As Jason Rosenfeld has commented, ‘The botanical specificity and close-up view of vegetation painted with a magnified sense of detail make this painting the most remarkable fine-art exponent of growing popular trends in the study of natural history in the period.’3 In Dante Gabriel’s Rossetti’s portraits of Fanny Cornforth, Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris the flower symbolism tells a story but has a predominantly decorative function. In Bocca Baciata (1859) the marigolds that signify grief and regret in the ‘language of flowers’ create a colour harmony with the figure’s necklace, earrings and hair, and in The Beloved (‘The Bride’) (1865–6), the flowers on the green kimono of the central figure echo the foliage in the background. In Rossetti’s poetry and paintings the emphasis on the sensory qualities of flowers, skin, hair, jewels and textiles is both erotic and aesthetic. In his sonnet titled ‘Body’s Beauty’, the claustrophobic opulence of the scene in which Lilith contemplates herself is suggested by sensuous sibilant language: The rose and poppy are her flowers: for where Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare? 4 The Pre-Raphaelites were not the only artists in the midnineteenth century to associate feminine allure with stunning and abundant natural beauty. There are numerous paintings and illustrations that depict women reclining on woodland floors, dancing in bright meadows or inhaling the fragrance of delicate bouquets. Women are depicted as Dionysian spirits, adorned, garlanded and 154

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beloved (or The Bride), 1865–6, oil on canvas.

smothered with flowers, and notions of feminine purity and sensual beauty are frequently conveyed through traditional flower symbolism. A woman smelling flowers was a familiar image in paintings and perfume advertisements, and many artists used the image to endorse conservative notions about femininity. The association of women with roses, for example, was a way of promoting an idealized view of womanhood that emphasized innocence, purity 155

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and devotion. In Part Fifth, Chapter Five of Jude the Obscure (1895), Thomas Hardy uses roses to shine a significant light on Sue Bridehead’s repressed conventional femininity, her ‘usually pale cheeks reflecting the pink of the tinted roses at which she gazed . . . she learnt the names of this variety and that, and put her face within an inch of their blooms to smell them’, and in John William Waterhouse’s painting The Soul of the Rose (1908), a Pre-Raphaelite beauty is depicted in the throes of imagining some romantic encounter, her thoughts triggered, the image suggests, by the sweet odour of a rose she holds to her nose and lips. But the juxtaposition of woman and flowers could be interpreted in a variety of ways. The feminine act of smelling flowers, for example, offers a range of readings. As Christina Bradstreet argues, ‘Whether the female figure is shown daintily tilting the rose to her face, presenting the blossom to her lover, or lustily burying her nose into a lavish bloom, the simple gesture of smelling flowers can present a number of different meanings including eligibility for polite courtship, sexual impropriety, and the fantasy of sexual abandon.’5

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Rose and lily In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), revellers drown in a shower of rose petals released from the ceiling of a Roman banqueting hall. According to the Augustan History it was common practice among the emperors Elagabalus and Nero to thrill their guests by tipping on to them a false ceiling full of roses and violets. In Alma-Tadema’s painting the glimpses of naked female body parts suggest a riot of sensory experience. Scantily clad women writhe seductively under mounds of rose-petals. Drowsy and intoxicated by the fragrant veils of flowers, the women offer themselves up to the voyeurism of the (typically middle-class male) spectator. 156

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The image of the rose acts as a signifier in a variety of ways in the nineteenth century. Pictured with a fragrant rose bloom, woman could be interpreted as a delicate and demure home-maker, an image that endorsed a range of conservative ideologies of middle-class femininity. The rose was a standard of femininity, projecting an idealized image of the female imagination. In a lithograph by Edmond Aman-Jean, for example, entitled Perfume or Woman with a Rose (1891), the woman buries her nose into a rose flower that she tips gently towards her with her fingers. She has a faraway look in her eye, suggesting transportation to the realm of dream or memory. In the imagination of artists like Aubrey Beardsley and Félicien Rops, by contrast, the rose and the lily have very different connotations and they become highly charged erotic metaphors. In his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s tragic drama Salomé, Aubrey Beardsley uses stylized and decorative images of the rose and lily to evoke the possessive desire of Salomé for Iokanaan. In Wilde’s play Salomé is a veiled and insubstantial figure, appearing to the reader through the reported observations of others who are transfixed by the way she waxes and wanes like the moon, and she is described in terms of fragrant flowers: ‘She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver,’ says the Young Syrian.6 In Beardsley’s illustrations the rose is a recurrent motif. An arabesque of rose blooms forms an ejaculatory plume between the thighs of the dancer in The Stomach Dance, and there are decorative trellises of thorny rose-stems in A Platonic Lament, John and Salome and The Eyes of Herod. In The Climax a lily stem rises with open petals from the dark pool below. If the expression on Salomé’s face is not enough to convince us of her aggression and greed towards the prophet Iokanaan, then the symbolism of the lily in the picture makes it clear. Grasping the decapitated head of Iokanaan between both hands, she fixes her gaze on his closed dead eyes. 157

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888, oil on canvas.

Her sexual desire is metaphorically figured in the phallic lily stems and the part of her tunic that penetrates the long vertical ribbon of blood. Originally a symbol of fertility in Christian and pagan traditions, the lily, and the spear-shaped gladioli to a lesser extent, become powerful projections of male desire. In Rops’s erotic etching La Fleur lascive orientale (The Lascivious Oriental Flower), published as a frontispiece to a collection of stories in 1884, oriental women entwine themselves around erect lily-stems, their pleasure reciprocated in the thrusting stamens. Enslaved by their sexual desire, the women become part of the flowers they straddle and mount, intoxicated by the sweet-putrid scent and the liquor produced deep in the calyx. The women are brazen prostitutes (signalled by their thigh-high stockings), and Rops creates a Baudelairean correspondence between their resemblance to flowers and their licentious behaviour. Collectively, they are a harem of oriental flower-girls, engaged in the expert service of satisfying male desire. 158

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Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, 1894, ink on paper.

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Rops was an amateur botanist and cultivated a variety of exotic and tropical plants on the family estate.7 He favoured flowers that produced intoxicating and heady fragrances, and he surrounded himself in his studio apartment with the sweet and cloying fragrance of opopanax and cyclamen. The faint odour of putrefaction produced by the molecule indol, found in such plants as the gardenia, lily of the valley, hyacinth, honeysuckle and osmanthus, appealed greatly to Decadents and Symbolists, who delighted in unusual olfactory blends. The sweet and putrid scent of the more exotic species of plant suggested decomposing human bodies and was thought to be aphrodisiac.8 Rops and Beardsley use flowers as suggestive metaphors for sex and perverse sexual desires, including sadomasochistic sex and necrophilia. The depiction of calyxes, pistils and stamen leave no doubt about their relation to human genitalia and the penetrative sexual act, but the ambiguity remains between the beauty of these images and their moral depravity. The genteel ‘language of flowers’ and the traditional associations of flowers with beauty and purity are travestied. Rops’s and Beardsley’s women are active and sexual; in Rops’s drawings, they are prostitutes, and in Beardsley’s they are often cross-gendered. They are, in effect, modern hybrids. In the late nineteenth century, as Elizabeth K. Menon has commented, this ‘sexualization of women as flowers’ was a new phenomenon.9 From the 1860s La Vie Parisienne published many images that used symbols combining women with flowers. In ‘Femmes et fleurs’ of November 1876, the carnation woman is described as a fickle flirt, the rose woman a ‘modern Venus’, and the tulip a foolish type, and in a centrefold titled ‘Bouquet de femmes’ of March 1883, women become the flowers themselves. In this image, the hyacinth’s cold exterior is described as a mask concealing passion, and the orchid is obsessed with luxury. With a keen eye on new Continental 160

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Félicien Rops, The Lascivious Oriental Flower, 1880–82, etching.

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trends, Beardsley makes a similar association in his drawings and synthesizes nature with the female form. The dense trails and garlands of hothouse flowers in Beardsley’s border illustrations for Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1893) provide a provocative feminine framing for the central images. In La Beale Isoud at Joyous Gard ripe-breasted pears shaped like female torsos dangle from thin branches in contrast to the more phallic clusters of tall, straight trees in the central image. Beardsley’s floral-visual rhetoric originates, of course, in his own imagination, for unlike the Pre-Raphaelites he did not study nature directly. He was a connoisseur of French literature, however, and cultivated a sophisticated Gallic persona, well versed in the literature of Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Zola. In both versions of The Toilette of Salome the work of Baudelaire and Zola appears provocatively on the delicate Japanese lacquer shelves, Zola’s Nana featuring quite prominently. In Zola’s novels, flowers, like food and appetite, are often metaphors for sex and sexuality. His carefully researched floral metaphors are homages to the power and creativity of Nature that in Zola’s view dominates man’s existence in the universe. In this extract from La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (The Sin of Father Mouret, 1875), for example, roses and their stray petals fall upon Albine’s youthful body, figuring the emergence of her womanhood and her sexual attractiveness: Under her fingers, it was raining roses, wide tender petals possessing the exquisite roundness and barely blushing purity of a virgin’s breast. Like a living snowfall, the roses already hid her feet crossed in the grass. Roses came to her knees, covering her skirts, drowning her to her waist; whilst three stray rose petals, blown to the beginning of the valley of her bust, seemed to be three bits of her adorable nudity.10 162

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By the early twentieth century, the ‘language of flowers’ used to describe women and female sexuality is extensive and complex. Writers and artists across Europe incorporate exotic and tropical blooms alongside more traditional varieties of plant. Symbolist artists, as Philippe Jullian describes in The Symbolists (1973), developed a complete language based on flowers that denoted the immaterial and intangible realms of human experience. Individuals made certain flowers their hallmarks. The Primitives, such as Carlos Schwabe, loved the lily (especially for its faecal base-notes). For Jean Lorrain, who encountered Monet’s paintings of lilies in 1900, the lily was a symbol of an ethereal fairy world; it was the portal to the world of dreams. He described the paintings as ‘Painted fantasies . . . Blue luminosities, moist transparencies’.11 Like Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique, Lorrain also favoured the tall stems of the iris, and in his poem ‘Les Iris noirs’ (The Black Irises, 1895), dedicated to Madame Oppenheim, it was dyed black and became a phallic symbol: ‘Long silk petals and funereal calyces, / I am, proud black irises, avid for your darkness.’12 Orchids, found frequently on Émile Gallé’s vases, were not so popular among the Symbolists, but blue hydrangeas, the trademark of Montesquiou, were painted by Paul Helleu and the intimist Henri Le Sidaner. Violets were the flowers of Lesbos for Renée Vivien, and dead roses and dead leaves were ubiquitous, from the fiction of Poe, the paintings of Millais and the poetry of Verlaine to the Arts and Crafts of William Morris & Company and the mass-produced decorative arts of Art Nouveau.13

Modern woman Throughout Europe in the nineteenth century the rise of modern woman was widely perceived to be the cause of degeneration, a 163

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Henri Le Sidaner, White Garden at Dusk, 1912, oil on canvas.

social disease that would spread and infect the rest of society. This fear was intensified by the possibility that even a respectable married woman could suddenly develop sybaritic and lustful desires. In Catulle Mendès’ novel La Première maîtresse (The First Mistress, 1887), for example, the social danger of Madame Honorine d’Arlement is intensified by the fact that she is a bourgeois widow and a sexually devouring femme fatale who transgresses the polite social norms and conventions surrounding bereavement. Women were supposed to be sexless beings. As the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing put it, ‘If she [a woman] is normally developed mentally, and well bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so the whole world would become a brothel.’14 Many scientists used Darwin’s ideas to prove that women were stupid, evil or passive. According to Darwinian theory, women were ‘anabolic’ beings rather than ‘katabolic’ ones, that is, passive rather than active, and this was a crucial and necessary differentiation in the process of evolution. In Differences in the Nervous Organisation 164

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of Man and Woman (1891), the biologist Harry Campbell argued that woman’s anabolic nature was a vital component in women’s increased stamina and helped prepare them for the arduousness of motherhood: ‘The fact that women bear rest well, and also rapidly store up energy, i.e., increase in weight, enables us frequently to produce striking effects merely by putting them to bed and feeding them up.’15 By the end of the century, scientists and social commentators were certain that they had established the relationship between female emancipation, un-womanliness and criminality. Edward Carpenter in Love’s Coming of Age (1896) described the modern woman as essentially unlike a woman: she was interested in neither men nor children, was intellectual or ‘brain-cultured’, and inclined to lesbianism.16 The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, to whom Max Nordau dedicated his Entartung (Degeneration, 1892), produced an ‘objective’ scientific study of The Female Offender, and identified the psychology of the female criminal with that of the emancipated modern woman. The female criminal, he asserted, ‘is excessively erotic, weak in maternal feeling, inclined to dissipation, astute and audacious, and dominates weaker beings sometimes by suggestion, at others by muscular force; while her love of violent exercise, her vices, and even her dress, increase her resemblance to the sterner sex.’17 The cultural crisis about woman’s role in society created a moral panic. Modern woman and her independence from patriarchal expectations led to fears about liberal female attitudes to sex and relationships. The well-being of society was at risk if women abandoned their conventional roles as housewives and mothers. Towards the end of the century, debates about the value of marriage, the education of girls, the rights of women and the plight of unmarried women filled the pages of newspapers, periodicals and fiction. Marriage 165

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was a contentious issue. Leading feminists argued that it equated to an unnatural state of imprisonment. In her article ‘Marriage’ for the Westminster Review in 1888, the novelist Mona Caird described the institution as the ‘hot-house cultivation’ of women.18 The consequences of female independence for cultural health were envisaged as dire. Modern woman was pictured as a harbinger of chaos and death. In an illustration entitled Death Spreading Confusion (n.d.), Rops depicts Death as a woman from whose ragged mantle infants are scattered over a dark cityscape. She strides the city oblivious to the plight of the small beings flung here and everywhere. Modern woman was widely regarded as a source of degeneration and disease. Indeed, the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales (1864–89) listed ‘Women’ as a class of medical ailment.19 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards and in response to the changing social, political and economic role and position of women, writers and artists begin to popularize different versions of womanhood. At one end of the spectrum was the New Woman, a stereotype of the educated, financially independent modern womanabout-town. A common figure in the New fiction and drama of the 1880s and ’90s, she is depicted by graphic artists (the New Woman was not the subject of High Art) as smoking, reading and cycling and by woman writers as creative and sexually liberated. At the other end was the femme fatale, a masochistic projection of male fantasies about female sexuality. Cruel and sensuous, the femme fatale tempts and torments men with her lubricious charms, and in her more historical incarnation has the power to bring down entire civilizations. Sometimes, as in the case of Salomé, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, she does both. The analogy between dangerous women and tropical plants characterized by gigantic leaf structures, strangling vines and roots and flowers that suggest human body parts signalled the visceral 166

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horror felt by many towards the sexually expressive modern woman and the cultural hysteria accumulating around overcrowding in cities, the spread of disease, immigration and the threat of foreign invasion. To a great extent, the horror and the hysteria was generated by the dissolution of boundaries – female/male; human/plant – and uncanny resemblances between ostensibly different categories of organism. That plant morphology and physiology could be compared with human variations intrigued Darwin in the 1870s (culminating with the publication of his Insectivorous Plants in 1875) and stimulated artists and writers to use monster plants to encode evolutionary anxiety. From the 1880s popular writers obsess about monster plants ‘usually possessed of some combination of extraordinary speed, inescapable tentacles, soporific and/or toxic exudations, parasitic seeds, and a thirst for human blood’.20 The terror of the monstrous hybrid fixates on its penetrative capabilities, and in this respect it shares attributes with other aggressive hybrid monsters, including the vampire and werewolf, popular bogies of the late nineteenth century. We find the body-snatching plant in a range of fin-de-siècle fiction and visual art, and the currency of this metaphor owes much to Sigmund Freud’s work at the turn of the century on the sexual symbolism of flowers. In Marsh Plants (1905) by the Austrian Symbolist artist Alfred Kubin, produced the same year as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a woman floats Ophelia-like downstream, a degenerating floating corpse. Kubin depicts woman with a nightmare intensity. His paintings suggest a deep revulsion for the female body and horror at its reproductive capabilities. Great fungi and exotic plants, including most notably the calla lily, rise from her body parts, her genital areas producing exotic growths that suggest a poxy, overripe sexuality on the brink of disease. She is a fleur fatale such as Goya might have imagined, a dark spectral fantasy image that projects on to the female 167

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form fin-de-siècle anxieties about sexual and social degeneration. The trope of woman as flower in Kubin’s imagination is ‘a nightmare vision of woman’, who becomes, according to Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity (1986), ‘a palpitating mass of petals reaching for the male in order to encompass him, calling him to be drained by her pistils yearning for fertilization’.21 In the nineteenth century the calla lily becomes a principal floral accompaniment in female portraits signifying feminine beauty and purity, but it was also a flower associated with plague and death. In Hubert von Herkomer’s painting of Queen Victoria on Her Deathbed (1901), not only is her deathbed strewn with flowers associated with mourning, including the rose, azalea, violet and lily, but her corpse is ‘wrapped in a spathe-like shroud from which emerges, like the spadix, her pallid face’.22 The ambiguous symbolism of the flower intensifies in the twentieth century, and the equivalence of female and male genitalia with parts of the lily flower in particular becomes a popular trope that inverts traditional Virginal associations of the lily and suggests instead corrupting sexuality and mortality. In Salvador Dalí’s painting The Great Masturbator (1929), for example, the calla is a significant motif in the representation of a male fantasy about fellatio. The flower rises from the breast of a female figure (resembling Dalí’s wife, Gala) whose face tilts upwards to face a male crotch. In Georgia O’Keeffe’s calla paintings of the 1920s the traditional associations of the lily with purity and femininity compete with a more sexually provocative symbolism. O’Keeffe’s ‘wonder is feminine, and so her world naturally is one in which flowers unfold; and in that sense are not merely paintings of, say, calla lilies but are at the same time portraits of feminine states of feeling and mind’.23 In Decadent fiction the central narrative drive is generated by the figure of the atavistic female monster who after committing an 168

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Alfred Kubin, Marsh Plants, 1903–6, wash, pen and ink on paper.

acte gratuit is finally destroyed.24 In Huysmans’s À rebours, women are marginalized as either servants or harlots and they appear as handmaidens to Des Esseintes’ pursuit of pleasure. There are no positive, dimensional female characters in the novel. Woman is either subservient or made physically peripheral to the main character’s life. Des Esseintes’ female servant, for example, is relegated to a different level of the house, out of view to our hero, and she is made to wear the habit of a nun when moving from the house to the wood-shed. More often than not, women are instruments of pleasure and objets d’art, like the black waitress serving at the Black Feast or the figure of Salomé in Moreau’s painting, described as having the ‘charms of some great venereal flower that had burgeoned in a sacrilegious seedbed, and grown to maturity in a Hothouse of impiety’.25 Throughout Chapter Eight of À rebours, the tropical plants trigger thoughts and memories – the Cattleya, a rare orchid, exudes ‘the most disagreeable of memories’26 – but the monstrosity of the these exotics is what most impresses Des Esseintes. Mesmerized by the spots and striations on the leaves and petals of the plants, he 169

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begins to reflect on the persistence of syphilis throughout history, the processes of evolution and the way that ‘from father to son all creatures passed on to one another the everlasting legacy, the eternal disease which ravaged the ancestors of man, which actually hollowed out the bones of the old fossils now being exhumed’.27 In his musings he generates a paradoxical image of nature as both beautiful and corrupt. On a visible level the flowers are beautiful in their colour and form, but their attractiveness hints at a monstrous perversion of natural process, at crime and moral depravity: ‘long black stalks ridged with scars like the scourged limbs of negro slaves’.28 The intervention of the horticulturalist who grafts, mixes, cuts and cross-pollinates manifests itself to Des Esseintes as a metaphor of accomplished yet dangerous hybridity.29 In his nightmare the monstrous hybrid appears in the form of a woman whose skin is flecked with the signs of syphilis. ‘It’s the Flower,’ he says to himself.30 The woman metamorphoses from a pale, prone figure lying on the ground to a monstrous and overpowering synthesis of female lust and proliferating disease. Tropical plants erupt from the ground and from her body: ‘Nepenthes pitchers hung from her ears’; ‘the Amorphophallus shot up on all sides, thrusting towards that belly which rose and fell like a sea’; and ‘the wild Nidularium blossom[ed] between her upraised thighs, opening wide its sword-shaped petals above the bloody interior’.31

Flowers of evil Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal offers a conception of female sexuality as something to be both desired and feared. Woman is a sensual goddess who hypnotizes her male worshipper with erotic charms, but at the same time she is predatory and cruel, a vampire figure sapping the life-blood of her victims. Originally titled Les Lesbiennes 170

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(The Lesbians), Les Fleurs du mal was intended as a hymn to erotic torment. For Baudelaire the lesbian was a figure damned by society and by God to suffer in a limbo world on the edge of hell, doomed to suffer the insatiability of lust and desire. Like the poet, the lesbian is an outcast, condemned by acts of passion and with the sole prospect of a sterile existence. For Baudelaire, woman is a mysterious and complex terrain. In her physical attributes, the curves of her body, the fragrant waves of her hair, the simpering sparkle of her eyes, the poet finds correspondences between the material and immaterial worlds that lift the individual out of reality into a transcendent sphere of fantasy and desire. The oscillating, rocking verse rhythms in Les Fleurs du mal suggest a maternal embrace that engages all the senses. In poems full of movement and transformation, such as ‘Parfum exotique’ (Exotic Perfume) and ‘Le Serpent qui danse’ (The Dancing Serpent), Baudelaire describes the encounter with a woman’s body in terms of exploring a new world, the prospect of which fills him with excitement and a sense of well-being. In ‘Parfum exotique’ the scent of the woman transports the poet to a ‘lazy island’, harbouring a boat from the stormy sea.32 In the rhythmic ‘Le Serpent qui danse’ the poet’s dreamy soul is a ship tipping and rolling on the open sea of woman. At certain moments in the poem both the poet and his lover become boats, he ‘a brave ship awakening’, she ‘a splendid barque / That rocks from side to side and wets / With seas its tipping yards’, heading for the sky and new horizons.33 Les Fleurs du mal is full of powerful images of female beauty and sensuality, but they repeatedly invoke death and destruction. Baudelaire’s portrayal of female homosexuality celebrates the physical delights of sexual passion, but he continually undercuts the intoxicating erotic energy with images of decomposition, torment and emptiness. In ‘Lesbos’ the girls have ‘hollow eyes’ and ‘draw in 171

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Thomas Theodor Heine, The Flowers of Evil, 1895, oil on canvas.

mirrors sterile ecstasies’,34 and in ‘Femmes damnées’ (Condemned Women) the women are ‘Like pensive cattle’, who ‘Spell out the love of fretful girlishness, / Carving the fresh green wood of tender trees.’35 Baudelaire’s concept of the ‘flower of evil’ and the association of beauty and cruelty finds visual expression in the work of many artists and writers from the 1860s onwards, and his admirers, including Rops and Edmond André Rocher, powerfully exploit the duality of good and evil. The most explicit representation of this idea can perhaps be found in the work of the German painter and illustrator Thomas Theodor Heine. In his painting The Flowers of Evil (1895), a 172

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naked black man guides the hand of a thin white woman to pluck an orchid. The stems of the plant curl and flare aggressively towards the woman whose vacant stare evokes a sense of emptiness and lack of appetite. She appears not to act of her own free will and her possession of the flower presages destruction (storm clouds) and death (the funerary urn). The orchid is a metaphor for the physical beauty and colour the woman lacks. By taking the flower she will transform, but this transformation will be sexual and deadly (this is implied by the black man). The flower of evil, Heine suggests, is paradoxical, because it is also the flower of vitality and beauty. Without it, woman is condemned to a fruitless body.

Mirbeau/Clara

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The analogy between flowers and sex finds its most shocking expression in Le Jardin des supplices. Mirbeau’s Clara is one of the most repugnant femmes fatales in nineteenth-century fiction. She feasts and climaxes on human degradation arranged aesthetically in a garden of exquisitely beautiful flowers, and she guides the narrator through a grove of sadism and barbarity: On high stalks, scaly and stained black like snakeskins, were enormous spars, kind of funnel-shaped cornets with the dark violet of putrefaction inside, and the greenish yellow of decomposition outside, like the open thoraxes of dead animals. Long, blood-red spadices, imitating monstrous phalluses, came forth from these cornets. Attracted by the corpse-like odour that these horrible plants exhaled, flies hovered in concentrated swarms, swallowed up at the bottom of the spar, which was adorned from top to bottom with silky contractiles that enlaced the flies and held them prisoner 173

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more effectively than any spider’s web. Along the stem, the digitalized leaves were clenched and twisted like the hands of men under torture.36 In the Torture Garden life swarms and putrefies in a kaleidoscope of colour and pattern. At every turn, Clara delights in the suggestion of butchery and violence contained in the appearance of the flowers and trees: ‘anthurium that was like bleeding pleura’, ‘tigridia opening up from mutilated throats’ and ‘wild labiates with firm, fleshy pulp and veritable human lips – Clara’s lips – that were screaming from the tops of their tender stems’.37 The garden evokes a world of human crime and suffering and Clara urges her lover to appreciate the beauty of it, ‘because decay is the eternal resurrection of life’.38 Mirbeau’s extensive use of flower tropes and multiple references to the way that flowers embody a human corporeality clearly derives from Huysmans’s treatment of flowers in À rebours, but in Mirbeau’s novel, the sado-eroticism harbours a political and cultural outrage that is figured in the idea of hybridization. The innovative practices of interbreeding and renaming plants had been pioneered in France in the 1850s by Alfred Bleu, but Mirbeau equates hybridization with political corruption, referring to the ‘clumsy horticulturalists whose only thought is to destroy the beauty of plants by disrespectful practices and criminal hybridization’.39 In the Torture Garden, by contrast, gardeners collect the rarest blooms from mountain-tops and deserts and nourish them on the blood of humans, lending their form and colour new intensities and strangeness. Clara shares the attributes of these Torture Garden flowers. She is both beautiful and monstrous and thrives on the sight and smell of human suffering that sends her to ecstatic heights of sexual pleasure. Her body blossoms at the smell of rancid meat and the 174

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sight of prisoners incarcerated in prison, and she craves to be a flower. ‘Pleasure manifests through Clara’s body as floral aesthetics,’ as Romana Byrne has described,40 and as the bell sounds and the novel reaches its own climax, floral descriptions are infused with references to the human body:

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Then she leaned sharply over a plant, a thalictus whose long fine stalk with many branches was raised stiffly in a clear violet colour beside the avenue. Each auxiliary branch emerged from a sheath that shone like ivory in the form of sex organs and terminated in a bunch of minuscule flowers huddled close together and covered in pollen. ‘Here it is! Here it is! Oh, my darling!’ In fact, a powerful phosphatic odour, an odour of semen, wafted up from that plant. Clara plucked the stem and forced me to breathe the strange odour as she smeared my face with its pollen.41 By the end of the nineteenth century, a number of cultural anxieties and male fantasies were projected into the trope of the fleur fatale. As women became more independent of the traditional wife and mother roles and ideas about female sexuality became more liberal, so new symbols of womanhood and femininity evolved. The Pre-Raphaelite association of flowers with femininity was parodied in the popular press and satirized for its outmoded naivety. In 1895 Mirbeau commented, ‘This precious flower of an entire aesthetic’: ‘their princesses with lanky bodies and faces like poisonous flowers – who pass on cloud-like stairs to banks of silly moons’.42 New floral metaphors reflected an ambivalence towards modern urban womanhood, which on the one hand was viewed as a new marketable commodity and on the other was regarded as a danger to society. 175

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Sexual woman, many believed, was the harbinger of disease and death. She was a monster of a mother. The equation, Mirbeau insists, was clear and logical:

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Within her woman has an elemental cosmic force, an invincible force of destruction that is like that of nature . . . she embodies the whole of nature! Being a matrix of life she is, accordingly, the matrix of death . . . since it is through death that life is perpetually reborn . . . and to suppress death would be to kill life at the unique source of fecundity . . .43 Much like the cultural attitudes of the West towards Eastern cultures and to foreign influence more generally, the negative association of women with hothouse flowers reflected a primitive fear of the ‘other’. In the second half of the nineteenth century the association between women and flowers is still derived from the ‘language of flowers’ tradition, but by the fin de siècle the symbolism is less stable and more nuanced. The floral poetics of Mallarmé, for example, draws on the traditional ‘language of flowers’, but reconfigures and extends the conventional associations to embrace a richer, more abstract range of meaning. In ‘Les Fleurs’ (The Flowers) for example, a poem that contains the first illusion to ‘Hérodiade’ (through whom Mallarmé would reimagine the legendary Salomé figure), he evokes many varieties of flower signifying radiant feminine beauty – gladiolus, hyacinth, myrtle – but he departs from tradition with the coupling of the erotic red rose and the chaste white lilies.44 These flowers emerge at the centre of the poem in an erotically charged way. The rose is ‘a woman’s flesh’ and the white lilies ‘tumbling . . . their dreamy way to weeping moonlight’.45 The ‘savage radiant blood’ of the ‘cruel rose’ is compared with the ‘sobbing white’ of the lily to create a sense of defilement, 176

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suffering and sorrow that alludes to the eroticism and violence of the biblical legend.46 The association between human sexuality and flowers finds its modern mystical expression in the work of D. H. Lawrence, who studied botany at university and who believed passionately in the interconnectedness of human and plant life.47 Throughout his novels, essays and poetry, the process of flowering and the condition of floweriness are used as metaphors of a rapturous mystical state in which all forms of life are interconnected. In Women in Love (1920), the relationship of men and women both to each other and to the natural world is symbolized by flowers (Birkin sees Gudrun and Gerald as ‘pure flowers of dark corruption’),48 but in other novels, Lawrence’s female characters are particularly gifted with realizing the sensual significance of flowers. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lady Chatterley identifies her own sexual awakening with the bloom of flowers, and in Sons and Lovers (1913) Mrs Morel is lifted out of herself by the sight of ‘tall white lilies . . . reeling in the moonlight’.49 In the early decades of the twentieth century, many poets turned their backs on traditional nature poetry. The fin-de-siècle obsession with a feminine floral aesthetics, with lilies and roses, was replaced by close observation of the industrial landscape, war and the urban scene. As Molly Mahood comments, poets ‘were too taken up with the advances of technology and the impasse of rival ideologies to go about the woodland in search of wild cherry trees’.50 The metaphors of the hothouse and the tropical plant are used by science fiction and fantasy writers to evoke the growing anxiety about the cultural politics of Eastern Bloc countries. The hothouse of the nineteenth century is no longer a status symbol, an extension of the middle-class house and garden, or a trysting place for lovers at odds with conventional society. It becomes, like the inventor’s 177

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shed, a place of barely contained aberration and difference, a space where madness happens. In the next chapter I explore the broader significance of glazed spaces for artists and writers at the fin de siècle and argue that they offer disturbing analogies between physical and mental space.

178

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Mind under Glass Absurdity grows like a fatal flower In the leaf mold senses, of hearts, and intellects. Nothing more, neither of heroes nor of new saviours; And we remain to wallow in native reason. émile verhaeren, ‘Fatal Flower’, from The Evenings (1887)

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W

e find the most intense and sustained usage of the hothouse metaphor in the work of the Belgian Symbolists at the end of the nineteenth century, an unsurprising fact given the horticultural prowess of Belgium since the early 1900s. Ghent led the way in the cultivation of ornamental species like azalea and begonia imported from China and Japan, and the Botanical Garden was founded as part of the university in 1817. Between 1874 and 1895, a monumental complex of heated greenhouses was built in Laeken, north of Brussels. Commissioned by King Leopold ii and designed by Alphonse Balat, they were a triumph of modern engineering and a major scientific repository of plant species worldwide. For the Belgian Symbolists ‘hothouse’ was not a gendered concept evoking sexual threat or danger, but suggested subjective states of mind that reflect states of entrapment, stasis and isolation. In the twentieth century, these mental states acquire a particularly powerful cultural and political currency and they are identified with institutionalization (specifically incarceration) and mental illness. We find permutations of the hothouse metaphor in, for example, Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie (1944), Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) and Harold Pinter’s play The 179

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Hothouse, written in 1958 (first performed in 1980). In Pinter’s black comedy, the setting is suggestive of both a ‘rest home’ and a ‘sanatorium’, where the ‘resident’ is also a ‘patient’, and an ‘inmate’. The institution’s director, aptly named Roote, is a corrupt abuser, guilty of murder and rape, who is eventually supplanted by the ambitious Gibbs, but whose transgressions lead to an anarchic uprising by the ‘residents’. We can trace the twentieth-century use of the hothouse metaphor to the work of Symbolist poets and painters at the fin de siècle. In the poems of the Young Belgian Movement in particular the metaphor of the hothouse denotes an interiorized poetics in which the self and the soul are dislocated from common reality. In the first part of this chapter, I consider the themes of stagnation, isolation and enclosure in the work of Belgian Symbolists, and their transcoding of the hothouse metaphor into a generic preoccupation with glazed spaces as existential signifiers. In the second part, I compare the metaphor of the hothouse with another glazed space, the aquarium, and explore the ways in which analogies between physical and mental space (articulated in terms of glazed containers) anticipate the prevalence of the metaphors of the hospital and psychiatric asylum in the first half of the twentieth century.

Belgian Symbolism In the poetry of the Belgian Symbolists, we enter desolate realms of experience. We are far from the lustful overheated space of Zola’s La Curée, but close to the realms of dream and nightmare that characterize Huysmans’s fiction, and the hothouse (along with sites of convalescence and submergence like the hospital and diving bell) serves as a powerful metaphor of the realms of memory, reverie and fantasy. In Symbolist poetry, enclosed spaces are often drained of life 180

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Mind under Glass

or without a fixed internal structure; they form landscapes of nebulous symbols. The aggressive and predatory femme fatale is transposed into the still sphinx, and the material world is remote and silent. A primary aim of the Symbolists was to produce art that was idéative; they sought to express imaginative realms and emotional states, and represent visions of what they termed ‘l’au delà’ – world(s) beyond the one we take for reality. At the end of the nineteenth century, as a reaction to the rapid expansion of city spaces and overcrowding, there is a paradoxical fascination with both the potential of science to control and limit nature and the idea that nature is illimitably free with the potential to run riot. We find pervasive, over-ripe organic imagery across the spectrum of the arts. Natural forms and structures are found everywhere in the decorative and applied arts, and from about 1890 to 1910 the influence of Art Nouveau is manifest in homes across Europe. Nature moves indoors, and stylized floral patterns ‘transform these intimate spaces into visual hothouses . . . revealing a fundamental duality that animates such imagery’.1 The creeping, curving, curling arabesque is found in Aubrey Beardsley’s border designs for Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1893), in William Morris’s designs for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1896), in Otto Eckmann’s design framing a poem by Christian Morgenstern (published in the German journal Pan, 1896), in Alphonse Mucha’s posters, and in the glass vases of Émile Gallé. Art Nouveau artists accentuate the relationship between the natural and the feminine. In the illustrations of the Dutch artist Georges de Feure, the rhythmic curves of the female form are echoed in the exotic and abundant vegetation. At the fin de siècle, there are a proliferating number of schools and movements across Europe, but from about 1880 to 1900 the dominant avant-garde movement is Symbolism, a late flowering 181

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of the Romantic spirit and a tradition defined by its exploration of the non-material realms and the unconscious. The Symbolists were enthusiastic and worshipful followers of Baudelaire, youthful and energetic, brimming with experiment and innovation that manifested in a large number of journals and international exhibitions, lectures and societies, including Les Vingt (1883–93), La Libre esthétique (1893–1914) and Le Salon d’art idéaliste (1896–8). Philippe Jullian depicts the Symbolist movement in arboreal terms, which resembled a dense forest; its branches sought to hide the factories and the railways, its pungent fruits held the key to ‘anywhere out of the world’, and its luxuriant blossoms inspired Art Nouveau. The roots of the trees thrust themselves deep into the subsoil of Celtic and Norse legends, while the saplings, taken from exotic species of trees issuing from Florence, Byzantium and even India, produced poisonous blossoms side by side with healthy ones originating in England . . . It is here that the pale purple light of Maurice Denis’ paintings colours the sky, and that the water which trickles through the roots of the trees feeds the orchids soon to be found on the vases of Gallé and the creepers which then entwine the houses of Horta.2 Baudelaire’s identification of beauty and rot and his savage exposure of the duality of the human soul provide the source for fin-de-siècle obsessions with dark desires and interiorized perspectives. As Des Esseintes comments in À rebours, Baudelaire’s poetry is ‘close to those frontiers which are the dwelling-place of aberrations and diseases of the mind’.3 The imagination of young Belgians, geographically close to Paris and the vibrant bohemian culture of that city, was inspired 182

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by the radical floral poetics of Baudelaire, which they adapted to express a sense of personal and spiritual stagnation. The sense of renewal and experiment among Belgian Symbolists (and the national pride felt by ordinary Belgians in the 1880s in their fifty-year-old nation state) is counterpointed by a more introspective ennui, summed up by Donald Flannell Friedman as a ‘pervasive Schopenhaurian pessimism with its mystique of introversion, withdrawal from the societal and contingent to allow an unfolding of the shoreless sea of interiority’.4 This pessimism originated from a vigorous disdain of industrialization and materialism and from an aversion to the banality of the modern world. Using the metaphors of the hothouse, the bell jar and the aquarium, Symbolists evoked a sense of timeless enclosure and suffocation. The declining power of the Church and a growing interest in neopaganism and psychical research reflected an anxious pessimism about the new century and a desire to escape. The pastoral imagery of late eighteenth-century Romanticism was replaced by a worldweary urban pessimism, and instead of a benevolent God presiding over Nature we find in Decadent and Symbolist works the image of an evil gardener fashioning nature in cruel ways. In Mirbeau’s novel Le Jardin des supplices, the fat gardener embodies the expertise of both the botanist and executioner, and in Iwan Gilkin’s poem ‘Le Mauvais Jardinier’ (The Wicked Gardener), from his collection La Nuit (Night, 1897),5 the evil hothouse gardeners furtively sow the seeds of their deathly blooms: Their mighty flowers, magnificent and rare, Where heavy, heady perfumes flow, Open their venomous vases with pride. Death blooms in their savage splendour.6

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By the late 1880s, largely owing to Huysmans’s depiction of monstrous tropical varieties that synthesize the attributes of both the male and the female (like the Amorphophallus), the trope of the hothouse flower is ambiguously gendered and stigmatized as dangerously ‘other’, as foreign. The floral aesthetics of writers like Huysmans and Mirbeau exploit the visual beauty and olfactory strangeness of exotic species to hint at the destructive power of the female sexual impulse. The hothouse space, on the other hand, might not be gendered, but in Symbolist verse the image still carries negative associations. Among poets of the Young Belgian Movement associated with the review La Jeune Belgique (which ran from December 1881 to December 1897), the hothouse is a signifier of dis-ease and depression. La Jeune Belgique heralded a literary revival of new aesthetic writing and among its contributors were Max Waller, Émile Verhaeren, Max Elskamp, Charles Van Lerberghe, Maurice Maeterlinck and Georges Rodenbach. These writers came together in an effort to counter what they saw as an elitist tendency in Belgian culture, and although they did not live up to their own radical ideals, they did produce innovative technical and conceptual works of fiction and poetry, and made a substantial contribution to the developing aesthetics of post-Romantic literature, anticipating in the use of silences, questioning and repetition the work of modernist dramatists like Samuel Beckett and Antonin Artaud. The work of Verhaeren, Maeterlinck and Rodenbach, in particular, successfully conveys the elusive and evanescent moods and secrets of interiority. Influenced by the extensive sea ports and waterways of Belgium, particularly the seaport of Antwerp and the canal networks of Ghent and Bruges, known as the ‘Venice of the North’, Belgian writers extend the generic metaphor of glazed space to include the water-filled space of the aquarium.7 184

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Belgian writing at this time was rooted in a cult of objects and in the spirit of geographic place. Poets used concrete imagery to suggest abstract states of mind and the exterior became an index to the interior. As Verhaeren summarized in an article in the 1887 L’Art moderne, ‘One begins with things seen, heard, felt, tasted in order to give rise to evocation.’8 The hothouse, bell jar, diving bell and machinery of the aquarium resonated in cultural terms and, according to Bernard Miall, typified ‘the isolation and insulation caused by a false civilization and an unusual religion, so productive of hypocrisy, fear, and confusion that each man is a prisoner within himself, unable to reach his fellow’.9

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Stagnation, isolation, enclosure In the paintings and graphic work of Jean Delville, Léon Spilliaert and Fernand Khnopff, we encounter images of a subjective world that evoke anxiety and depression. Khnopff was born in Bruges and retained a special affinity to the place throughout his life, and in his paintings he depicts the walled city as a deserted city of stagnant reflections. An oneiric aura pervades and there is a sense of a world in suspended animation, a shadowy world shrouded in silence. In the pastel An Abandoned Town (1904), we encounter a building by the sea, a monument in an empty square and a sense of being on the edge of nothing but water and sky. The rain clouds threaten and the atmosphere is gloomy and sombre. The novelist and poet Georges Rodenbach once described his soul as free, like the silent space enclosed by a glass dome: ‘Thus my soul alone, and which nothing influences! / It is as if enclosed in glass and in silence, / Given over to its own interior spectacle.’10 He used this statement for the epigraph of his novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), which is in many ways the literary equivalent of Khnopff’s desolate 185

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landscapes. In Bruges-la-Morte the prevailing mood of decadence is physically articulated in the sombre medieval architecture, and a sense of immobility, suspension and stagnation is vividly evoked by the reflective surface of the grey-green canals connected by damp, moss-covered bridges. Rodenbach’s Bruges suggests a city in temporal suspension and there is an unambiguous and overwhelming sense of mourning and melancholy. How melancholy is the grey of the streets of Bruges, where every day is like All Saints’ Day! A grey that seems to be made by mixing the white of the nuns’ head-dresses with the black of the priests’ cassocks, constantly passing here and pervasive. A mystery this grey, this perpetual half mourning.11

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Both Ghent and Bruges experienced a decline from medieval power and grandeur after the fifteenth century, but whereas Ghent (the horticultural centre of Europe at the fin de siècle) became infused with the modernizing commercial spirit of northern Flanders, exemplified by the great port city of Antwerp, Bruges seemed to resign itself to inexorable decay. This is the image we find in Bruges-la-Morte: The closed houses exhaled a funereal atmosphere, windowpanes like eyes clouded in death throes, crow-steps tracing stairways of crepe in the water. He walked along the Quai Vert, the Quai de Miroir and continued out towards the Pont du Moulin, melancholy suburbs lined with poplars. And everywhere the chill spray, the little salt notes of the parish bells on his head, as if sprinkled from an aspergillum for some absolution.12

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This numb mournfulness characterizes the work of the Belgian poets working in the 1880s and ’90s. Their verse expresses a feeling of compromised linguistic identity and social and cultural alienation. In Verhaeren’s Les Villes tentaculaires (Sprawling Towns, 1896) and his later volume, La Multiple splendeur (Multiple Splendour, 1906), we return to a dualistic theme first articulated by Baudelaire: a fear of the dehumanizing aspects of urbanization but also an admiration of the modern world. In the poetry of Maeterlinck we encounter a fatalistic pessimism.

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Maeterlinck Maeterlinck was born in Ghent and trained to be a lawyer, but after a trip to Paris where he met the writer Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, he decided in 1896 to move there. Maeterlinck was predominantly a writer of lyrical dramas, and his first play, La Princesse Maleine (1889), was an outstanding success. His first work, however, was a collection of poems, Serres chaudes (Hothouses, 1889), in which dreamscapes and recessed thoughts are represented in terms of inaction, fatalism and mysticism. Enclosed glass structures are a recurring motif, signifying the interior spaces of the mind or soul, and the idea of glimpsing worlds from within or without these spaces conveys a sense of isolation and human disconnectedness.13 In the Introduction to An Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets (1992), Friedman distinguishes between two types of poem in Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes: landscapes of analogies often in the form of hallucinations, and litanies of waiting and dejection addressed to an absent deity (these latter are more succinct). The hothouse, he argues, is a paradigm for the unconscious and the glass containers stand for spiritual enclosure. In reading the poems the reader is led away from expectations of narrative clarity to experience conditions 187

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of entrevoir or entr’ouvrir (dim perception and half-openness). The hothouse is a place where we confront the contingent and the ineffable. Throughout the poem ‘Serre chaude’ (Hothouse) we are presented with a series of apostrophes that serve as invocations to contemplate but not to comprehend in a rational sense: Think of a madwoman haled before judges, a man-of-war in full sail on the canal . . .14

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Maeterlinck exploits images for their subjective meanings, and in this poem, we encounter organic images of suffocation and enervation. In ‘Feuillage du coeur’ (Heart’s Foliage), the poet’s feelings are portrayed as dense, water-clogged, clinging vegetation in which a lily, ‘rigid, weak and pale’, grows towards the light of the moon.15 A sense of foul airlessness and debility prevails. In ‘Attouchements’ (Contacts) the hothouse is transcoded into another variant of the enclosed space, the hospital, and the poet is confined ‘like a host of invalids / in a hothouse on a rainy day’.16 In ‘Cloches de verre’ (Glass Bell-jars), the condition of being segregated and apart from the world is suggested by the glass dome of the bell jar: Strange plants eternally sheltered under glass bell-jars while the wind stirs my senses outdoors!17 The ‘theatre of displacement’, or ‘hallucinated poetics’, as Friedman characterizes Maeterlinck’s poems, creates a sense of disorientation, rupture and spiritual uncertainty punctuated by moments of drama.18 Images of strange beauty appear in the poetry, but there is no flowing narrative. Instead, we are given a series of self-contained images or 188

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situations symbolizing the melancholic and helpless interiority of the poet’s self. Not everyone appreciated Maeterlinck’s evocations of interiority. Max Nordau, in his polemical denunciation of the avant-garde, Entartung (Degeneration, 1892), parodies Maeterlinck’s ‘fugitive thoughts’ and pronounces them ‘the workings of a shattered brain’:

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Consciousness no longer elaborates a leading or central idea. Representations emerge just as the wholly mechanical association of ideas arouses them. There is no attention seeking to bring order into the tumult of images as they come and go, to separate the unconnected, to suppress those that contradict each other, and to group those which are allied into a single logical series.19 The ‘tumult of images’ brings the reader round repeatedly to a sense of inaction and frustration. The cumulative effect of these images serves to emphasize the poem’s artifice and generate the paradox inherent in the hothouse metaphor that Michael Riffaterre summarizes as ‘the frustration of being caged and at the same time able to see what one is cut off from’.20 This is essentially the predicament of Des Esseintes, and the defining paradox of literary Decadence. In Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes we recognize the dualities of Baudelaire and the Symbolist musicality of Mallarmé, but unlike Mallarmé’s inaccessible and highly suggestive verse structures, Maeterlinck’s poems show, through their language and form, a tension between the poet’s consciousness (of the world and of language) and unrepressed subconscious thoughts. The external world is depicted in simple terms and through a series of synonymous images (hothouse, aquarium, bell jar, hospital), but these images carry with them various connotations. Baudelairean images of natural 189

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purity correspond with those suggesting putridity and unwholesomeness: ‘among fevers strew lilies / on the quagmires roses’.21 A morbid, yet sensitive, despair is prevalent. It is not clear whether this emanates from the poet or the world he perceives, and we seem to travel no distances, physical, spiritual or moral. The ambiguity of Maeterlinck’s hothouse (are we inside looking out, or outside looking in? are we imprisoned or shut out?) suggests something unresolvable about isolation and depression. As Michael Riffaterre proposes in his essay ‘Decadent Features in Maeterlinck’s Poetry’ (1974), the opposition between inside and outside ‘generates a narrative expressing the alternation, the shuttling back and forth between yearning and repulsion, between the wish to explore and the fear of being engulfed’.22 Riffaterre’s essay on Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes remains the only full study of the hothouse metaphor. His analysis of Maeterlinck’s verse demonstrates that the hothouse is no longer associated with the modern material world and the city, as in Zola, but used to express a cumulative engagement with abstractions and negations and the realm of the subconscious that refuses to come clear. The variants of the image of the hothouse, such as the bell jar and diving bell, subtly transport the reader from air to water, but this transcoding, as Riffaterre terms it, intensifies the sensation of being unable to act. As he argues, the variants are ‘narratives of failure’: ‘The poem is not an achievement, it is the story of the inability to express.’23 The transcoding of the spaces of the hothouse, aquarium and sickroom/hospital are recognizable metaphorical fusions in the twentieth century. In ‘Death Under Glass’, Weldon Kees describes a walk through the rooms of the hothouse ‘like tanks . . . Enclosed with all such steaming endocarp and chlorophyll, / Which pollened jungle air can never dim’, like the suffocating descent into water. 190

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The image of jungle obtains, but the last line evokes the struggle of a nightmare or a fever and compares the grabbing of long-stemmed weeds with the tearing of clothing.24 Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Fever 1030’ (from Ariel, 1965) also associates the hothouse with overwhelming repression (in this case, of the speaker’s identity) and its fleeting allusion is associated with purgatory and violence and a sense of suspended animation:

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Hothouse baby in its crib, The ghastly orchid Hanging its hanging garden in the air.25 The hothouse is a deathly place that drains vitality and hope. This is a recurring motif in modern poetry that can be traced to the stifling city spaces of French Decadence and the claustrophobic landscapes of the Belgian Symbolists. The alignment of the hothouse and the hospital, however, creates little sense of beauty. In Thom Gunn’s poem ‘Memory Unsettled’ (1992), the sick and dying have a ‘terrible hothouse cough / And terrible hothouse shiver’.26 The jungle of the hothouse evokes an underworld purgatory of suffering and banishment, and the journey down is sometimes depicted as the conditions of submersion and drowning. With the Symbolists we descend the dark realms of consciousness.

Sub-marine The images of still, cold water that pervade the work of Belgian Symbolists evoke the northern landscapes of Belgium. In the work of Maeterlinck and Khnopff, images suggest the aqueous depths of dreams and thoughts, conveying a sense of mental inertia and spiritual gloom. As Friedman comments, ‘The watery depths and 191

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blindly meandering passageways of the canal city provide a structural paradigm for both the unconscious mind and a stygian zone, site of narcotized underworld voyage, by turns paradisal and infernal, lenitive and tormented.’27 In Khnopff’s painting The Secret Reflection (1902), a sphinx-like woman touches a plaster image of herself attached to the wall, below which is represented an image of buildings reflected in dark, unmoving water. The image is grey and contemplative, and an eerie and silent atmosphere prevails. In Maeterlinck’s ‘Reflets’ (Reflections), the speaker conveys the sensation of falling and submersion, and conjures an image of the universe that is eternally inverted: ‘palms, lilies, roses – all upside down – / weep into the waters.’28 In ‘Cloche à plongeur’ (Diving Bell), Maeterlinck contrasts the silent interior of the diving bell and the teeming life of the ocean without – ‘the dahlias of undersea groves’ and ‘the Gulf-Stream’s fiery tongues’ – to create a sense of tedium and enervation.29 Encased in glass, the speaker of ‘Cloche à plongeur’ and ‘Serre d’ennui’ (Hothouse Ennui) is not enlivened by what he sees through the glass because it reflects only his own weary soul. The colours of blue, green and purple recur throughout these poems, suggesting unfathomable depths, but in their intensity they also suggest melancholy and death. In spite of the exclamation mark, the tone of the opening line of ‘Serre d’Ennui’ – ‘O this heart perpetually blue!’ – is downbeat.

Aquarium The popularity of the hothouse and aquarium as poetic metaphors can be traced in a rather logical and straightforward way back to the advances in industrial glass technology in the early nineteenth century, but the culture of collecting, cataloguing and display has a long history. During the Renaissance period cabinets of wonders 192

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were constructed to conserve and display maritime treasures gathered from expeditions to far-flung places, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collecting had become a global obsession. There were numerous trends, such as ‘Conchyliomanie’, the passion for collecting seashells, and as knowledge of the deep sea broadened and submarine technology developed (a diving chamber with lighthouse was first designed by Wilhelm Bauer in 1866), more and more people became curious about the terrifying beauty of the sub-marine world. The practice of keeping fish in water-filled containers goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. Pliny the Elder records in the first century ad that people kept fish outside in ornamental ponds or in opaque marble tanks, sometimes for decoration. The Chinese kept goldfish as early as the year 1000, but by the tenth century they had become the pets of China’s ruling emperors, and eight centuries later, largely owing to increased trading with Asia, goldfish were established pets across Europe and as popular as the canary and budgerigar. Breakthroughs in the design of self-contained water ecosystems made of glass were not made until the 1830s when the prototype of the aquarium was inspired by nearly air-tight tanks for keeping delicate plants, and in the 1850s, the mania for plant-collecting was intense. Throughout the British Isles and, to a lesser degree, America and the British Empire, men, women and children were seized by pteridomania – a love of ferns. Favoured by the ancient Greeks and long used for medicinal purposes, the cultivation of ferns became a symbol of the scientific and cultural accomplishments of the age, and from the mid-nineteenth century up until the First World War, hundreds of lavishly illustrated books on cultivating and collecting ferns appeared. Exotic new species of fern were imported from tropical regions in nearly airtight glass tanks and became a coveted status symbol 193

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for collectors. They were miniature hothouses in effect, and their designer, a surgeon from London called Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, realized that the conditions in these glass tanks were equivalent to a microclimate that could be useful for keeping fish in water. In 1841 he successfully kept live and toy fish in one of these tanks with water and there started a vogue across Europe for designing all types of glass display cases, the manufacture of which was greatly aided by the repeal of the glass tax in Great Britain in 1845. In 1854 Philip Henry Gosse coined the term ‘aquarium’ for water-filled tanks in his book The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea. This book, filled with beautiful high-quality illustrations produced by Gosse himself caused a sensation on publication, making Gosse about £805 (approximately £68,000 today). He records his observations of coastal life and instructs his readers how to build a miniature ocean and how to maintain the delicate ecosystem: The accumulation of the green deposit, however, on the rocks and stones in the Tank, must not be cleaned away, but be cordially welcomed. The spores of the Green Algae, thus profusely scattered, soon form, all over the bottom and on all projections, a tender growth, which gives off oxygenbubbles in outstanding numbers, conducing immensely to the health of the animals. As soon as this begins to assume a woolly or downy appearance, the success of the Aquarium may be considered as no longer problematical; fronds of various species will now develop themselves, and attain their full dimensions; and all that will be needful, is to keep them within moderate limits, by an occasional plucking of the more vigorous among them, or a diminution of their luxuriance.30 194

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Gosse makes the weird and wonderful behaviour of ocean creatures seem familiar and homely. In his description of the strange attachment of the servant-anemone (Actinia parasitica) for his mastercrab (Pagurus bernhardus), we are encouraged to interpret their relationship in human terms. He paints a familiar picture of human inequality:

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In the rude and blundering manner in which the bearer performs his office, it cannot be but that the poor Actinia gets many a hard knock, and many a rough squeeze, among the rocks and stones over which his servant travels; but he appears to bear these mischances with great philosophy: I know of no species which lives so constantly expanded. A rude shock will indeed cause it to withdraw its tentacles, and contract its disk into that button-like shape which is common to the genus; but this is only for a moment: it instantly expands again, and remains full blown in spite of all its draggings about. Its skin also is peculiarly tough and leathery; a provision, doubtless, against the accidents to which its vagrant life exposes it.31 His enthusiastic and evangelical lectures (Gosse was a member of the Plymouth Brethren and saw natural science as a revelation of God’s presence) and publications on the subject of coastal collecting provided the impetus for what was to become a cultural hysteria about aquariums. ‘The aquarium was on everybody’s lip,’ Henry D. Butler declared in his book, The Family Aquarium (1858); ‘The aquarium rang in everybody’s ear. Morning, noon, and night, it was nothing but the aquarium.’32 Like the hothouse and the botanical gardens that showcased tropical flora, the aquarium provided an underwater theatre of 195

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‘The Fountain Aquarium’, illustration from Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1856).

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‘Octagonal and Rectangular Tanks’, illustration from Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1856).

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strange aquatic species and in the 1850s everyone wanted to have one in their home. As part of a self-improvement ethos among the middle classes, aquariums were seen as a useful educational tool for children, who were encouraged to keep small creatures, such as fish, as pets. By 1860 this fad was largely over, as the middle classes became wearied with the trouble it took to maintain the clean-water environment. However, by that time large public aquariums were being constructed and more ambitious ocean expeditions were being organized.

Aquarium poetics

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, the aquarium becomes a metaphor for dream space, a sub-conscious sub-marine theatre of irrational impulses and strange creatures. In Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea, 1866), Victor Hugo refers to the dark depths of the sea as ‘analogous to the realm of night and dreams’. They are, he states, ‘the Aquarium of Night’. He evokes a terrifying and inhospitable landscape: There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes, wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennæ, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey. To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible 198

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point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There, in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantom-like, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts. 33 A couple of decades later, in the work of Decadents and Symbolists, the aquarium becomes a common abstraction of the imagination and dreams, a ‘perfect subject for the aesthetic focused on change and transformation’.34 During this period, a wide range of research and books was published on the subject of dreams, including the psychological studies of Paul Radestock and Wilhelm Wundt, containing substantial sections on the physiology of dreams, X. B. Saintine’s imaginative La Seconde Vie: rêves, visions et cauchmars (The Second Life: Dreams, Daydreams, Visions and Nightmares, 1864), Paul Max Simon’s Le Monde des rêves (The World of Dreams, 1888) and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Huysmans was fascinated by the symbolic theatre of dreams and its relationship to everyday reality, and in a letter to Arij Prins in March 1886 declared, ‘I am for the art of dreams as much as the art of reality.’ He was particularly admiring of Odilon Redon’s work, which prompted him to write to Jules Destrée in December 1885, ‘You really have to have seen them in order to understand just how far this art of dreams can go.’35 Redon had a lifelong fascination with the sea, and some of his colour paintings and pastels depict the delicate, luminous, shimmering world of small sea creatures – anemones, coral, sea-horses, shells and tiny fish. Like Jules Michelet in his study of the sea, La Mer (1861), he was entranced by the phenomenal power of the ocean and its correspondence with the mysterious realm of the unconscious, and his paintings titled 199

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Odilon Redon, Ophelia among the Flowers, c. 1900–1905, pastel on paper. (Redon made several compositions on this theme between 1900 and 1908.)

Underwater, Aquarium and Beneath the Sea offer visual metaphors for metamorphosis and transformation. Fascinated by Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Redon portrays her surrounded by water and flowers in his noirs, pastels and oil paintings. In his pastel of circa 1900–1905, the luminous yellow and orange flowers around her neck float weightless in the water that surrounds Ophelia, her head upturned, her eyes closed. She merges with her water and flowers, dematerializing into harmonies of shape and colour. In the aquarium poetics of Symbolist writers the natural sub-marine world is a spectacle. It is artificial and performative beneath the human gaze, and mysterious and unknown underwater realms betray the aesthetic of manufacture. In Chapter Two of Huysmans’s À rebours, for example, Des Esseintes inserts an aquarium between the inner and outer walls of his dining room, with 200

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portholes that direct the natural water-filtered light from outside into the room. In Jules Laforgue’s version of the myth of Salome, one of his parodies in Les Moralités legendaires (Moral Tales, 1887), he narrates the tour of the princes round the Tetrarch’s palace. They come upon the silent show in the aquarium and there follows an interlude of theatrical Surrealism. The sublime beauty of the scene is undercut by a hybrid realism whereby Laforgue blends descriptions of architectural details with seemingly arbitrary references to human body parts, disease, vegetables and fashion. The incongruity of these images bring to mind Huysmans’s collections of hothouse plants in À rebours, but Laforgue’s is a masterclass in parody, both celebrating and caricaturing decadent lack of purpose:

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As far as the eye can see, meadows enamelled with white sea anemones, fat ripe onions, bulbs with violet membranes, bits of tripe straying here and there and seeming to make a new life for itself, stumps with antennae winking at the neighbouring coral, a thousand aimless warts; a whole fetal, claustral, vibrating flora, trembling with the eternal dream of one day being able in whispers to congratulate itself on the state of things . . .36 For other Symbolist writers, the shifting landscape of the sea-bed and the dream-like space of the aquarium had negative connotations. For them it suggested an alien space of blurred forms and odd transmutations. Maeterlinck uses images of confinement and submersion to symbolize the stifled soul, and in his poetry we repeatedly encounter the poet submerged in the contemplation of his dying soul. While the hothouse suggests a stuffy overwhelming space, the aquarium is a cooler, danker space, suggesting the cold, murky depths of the subconscious. Maeterlinck’s spaces are ethereal 201

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and inhospitable, and it is difficult to focus. In his poem ‘Aquarium’ (Fishpond), the poet contemplates the death of his feminine soul whom he can see even though she has closed his eyelids, blinding him and rendering him ineffective. The poem is full of paradox: ‘In depths of pain her lips seem sealed / a world away, yet I see them stir’.37 We are left with the sensation of looking inwards and looking through, which is compared to being underwater or looking through the water’s surface. For Rodenbach, the aquarium is a metaphor for human sleep, a state where the mind is active in mysterious ways. In his poem ‘L’aquarium d’abord ne semble pas vivant . . .’ (At first, the aquarium seems not to be alive . . .), from his collection Les Vies encloses (The Enclosed Lives, 1896), the poet observes the reflections and shadows of the mind as he would specimens from the ocean in an aquarium. In the long central section of the poem, he draws attention to the silent pain and anguish of the watery realm that

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suffers, though appearing to sleep, And feels passing through its melancholy lethargy The thousand shadows, with which it trembles endlessly, And which opens, in its surface, an enlarged wound.38 This is a vision of an ‘occult life’, mysterious, esoteric and disturbing, but in other poems, such as ‘L’Ame sous-marine’ (The Submarine Soul) and ‘L’Aquarium mental’ (The Aquarium of the Mind), Rodenbach uses the glass enclosure to form an image of psychic retreat, a refuge from the world and all its temptations and tensions. Defended in this way from the demands and invasions of external reality, the unconscious is protected and at peace. The hothouse and the aquarium were products of an age enthusiastic about scientific discovery, and as such, they are spaces that 202

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connote vitality, growth and transformation. In the imagination of Decadents, Symbolists and modern writers, the metaphors of the hothouse and the aquarium evolve and develop more complex associations with eroticism, putrescence and death. The image of London in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907), for example, is one of atavistic depletion. London is ‘a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off’, its inhabitants comparable to strange organic creatures that wriggle and flop on the sea floor.39 The anarchists in the sweaty metropolis, Conrad implies, are merely ‘bottom feeders’, human detritus. By the twentieth century the metaphors of the hothouse and aquarium acquire a new connotative complexity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, for example, members of the Japanese avant-garde, including translator (of Maupassant) Akiba Toshihiko and tanka poet Kitahara Hakushū, were fascinated by new translations of Western fin-de-siècle poetry, and produced verse that celebrates greenhouse gardening and the cultivation of hothouse flowers. In the second part of Akiba’s poem ‘Okutsuki’ (Grave), which bears the title of ‘Omoide’ (Memory), the greenhouse functions as a framing device for memory that is visualized in floral terms: The rose flowers have vanished without trace. Vainly, the trumpet creeper. Meanders as a vine of memory.40 For the American poet Theodore Roethke, brought up on his father’s vast market-garden estate in Saginaw, Michigan, growing up among the greenhouses was an extraordinary sensory experience that left him with a lifetime of impressions. The greenhouses were, he said in reference to their appearance in his second book, The Lost 203

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Son and Other Poems (1948), ‘both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere GermanAmericans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful’.41 They were symbols of art itself and the struggle involved in the ‘civilizing’ poetic process that imposes a transparent structure (the form of the poem) over its subject. In ‘Big Wind’, Roethke evokes the battle of the rose-house to survive bad weather in mythical terms. The rose-house becomes a ship on a storm-tossed sea, Lunging into the lashing Wind driving water So far down the river.42

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In Robert Lowell’s poem ‘For the Union Dead’ (1960), the image of the ‘old South Boston Aquarium’ also recalls the childhood wonder and curiosity we find in the early poems of Roethke, but here it is for the ‘dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile’. In its dereliction and neglect the aquarium provokes a meditation on the relationship of the present to history. The speaker is prompted to recall the destruction of the American Civil War and reflect on the decadence of modern south Boston: The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.43 Similarly, in Sean O’Brien’s title poem of his collection hms Glasshouse (1991) a derelict park greenhouse is transformed into a military submarine, ‘its periscope down, its orders sealed’. In this 204

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suburban edgeland, O’Brien evokes the resignation and guilt of the 1980s generation about past conflicts. The fragility of the glass space is a metaphor for the tenuousness of history and politics. In Duncan Bush’s poem ‘Aquarium du Trocadéro’, from the collection entitled Aquarium (1983), the spectacle of the ‘amnesic, doped fish’ is described in cinematic terms, and the fish, illuminated by ‘Cinemascope screens in the dim light’, adopt artificial roles in the poet’s imagination. Tiny perch Hang motionless, like mobiles while pike have the ‘neurasthenic, mad grin . . . of the Hollywood killer’.44 In Richard Hugo’s ‘Death in the Aquarium’ (1983), the suicide of a man in an aquarium

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. . . in full sight of the red Irish lord and the rare albino sea perch . . . prompts the speaker to ask, ‘Where should we die given / a choice? In a hothouse?’ 45 In 1995 the French journalist and writer Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke that ended his career as editor of Elle magazine. When he emerged from a deep coma in the Hôpital Maritime at Berck, on the northeast coast of France, he was able only to blink his left eyelid, and was diagnosed as suffering from the rare disease called ‘locked-in syndrome’, which left him unable to breathe, swallow or eat without assistance. Using only his ability to blink, and with 205

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the help of a specialized nurse, he began to write his sensational memoir, Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 1997), released ten years later as a critically acclaimed film (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2007). Using the metaphors of the deep-sea diver submerged in a heavy old-fashioned diving suit and the butterfly for the immobile state of his body and the fluttering state of his mind, Bauby documented his sense of being plunged into a profoundly melancholy and silent world. ‘Something like a giant invisible divingbell holds my whole body prisoner,’ he wrote. ‘I have been confined . . . like a hermit crab dug into his rock.’ 46 These hothouses, aquariums and diving bells are far removed from places of retreat and escape that we find in Romantic literature. Filtered through the splenetic and surreal tendencies of Decadence and Symbolism, they become modern metaphors for human isolation and serve as continuous reminders of human destructiveness. They leave unsettling impressions of man’s relationship to the natural world, and dramatize his retreat from or defeat by forces beyond his control and his failure to look after the environment; they are metaphors of individual despair, political inadequacy and social delinquency. The glass enclosure expresses something barely visible but ultimately irretrievable about the human condition. In the twentieth century, man encounters a new post-Romantic Sublime. The awe and terror generated by the experience of monumental and uncultivated nature – cataracts and mountain ranges, prairies and oceans – depicted by German and American landscape painters in the early nineteenth century are transposed on to the monstrous tropical hybrids of the vegetable world. Monster plants and rampant weeds, as I discuss in the next and concluding chapter, take their revenge on the human incapacity to rival nature in the raw. They rapidly outgrow their containers and become the terrifying spectacle of our wildest nightmares. 206

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eight

Weeds This vegetable world, which to us appears so placid, so resigned, in which all seems acquiescence, silence, obedience, meditation, is, on the contrary, that in which impatience, the revolt against destiny are the most vehement and stubborn. maurice maeterlinck, ‘The Intelligence of Flowers’ (1907)

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C

ommon to both the metaphor of the hothouse and the hothouse plant is the idea of alienation, the idea of being estranged from both oneself and from a sense of belonging to a place. As I have suggested in the previous chapters, the sense of personal, social and cultural alienation intensifies from the mid-nineteenth century as modern city culture across Europe is established. In France Baudelaire and Zola create an image of the city that is both seductive and dangerous. It is a hothouse of passion and degeneracy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the hothouse metaphor is applied by Symbolists to describe mental states, and we encounter this association in an intense form in the poetry of the Belgian Symbolists, who use the metaphor of the glass container – the bell jar or aquarium – to suggest the strange and unfathomable reaches of consciousness and memory. For science fiction and fantasy writers in the second half of the twentieth century, the monster tropical plant becomes a significant trope in apocalyptic narratives about the future. The fragility of the human species and the vulnerability of both nature and culture become recurrent and powerful themes. In Brian Aldiss’s 1961 sci-fi classic Hothouse, the whole earth is conceived of as a hothouse and 207

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the very notion of civilization is sharply questioned. Humans are reduced in number and size and are subject to a rapidly proliferating and sentient vegetable kingdom that exercises exotic and imperial dominion. The fictional plants – killerwillows, trappersnappers, wiltmilts, berrywishes, pluggyrugs and snaptrap trees – threaten the primitive human life that survives, and a giant banyan tree covers the continent on the ‘day side’ of the earth:

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Highly organized destruction was in progress, a battle without generals waged for uncounted thousands of years. Or perhaps one side had a general, for the land was covered with that one inexhaustible tree which had grown and spread and sprawled and swallowed everything from shore to shore. Its neighbours had been starved, its enemies overgrown.1 While modernist writers scale down and diffuse the metaphor of the hothouse, which appears in poetry and fiction in the form of bell jars and diving bells, the metaphors of the hothouse flower and tropical plant from the fin de siècle onwards increase in number and variation. In contrast, they are scaled up and signify in different ways. The threat of extinction and invasion in particular is increasingly visualized in terms of what T. S. Miller has described as ‘nineteenth-century narratives of betentacled plant doom . . . born of an anxiety about universal common descent’.2 In popular fantasy fiction of the 1920s and ’30s, giant plants are depicted as encroaching and carnivorous, metaphorical reminders of human vulnerability to evolution and/or invasion by a foreign, alien ‘other’. And later, American pulp fiction writers fixate on the idea of ‘plant intelligence’, an idea that had preoccupied Maeterlinck several decades earlier, who, in his essay on ‘The Intelligence of Flowers’, remarks 208

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on the way in which the ‘initiative’ and sentience of all plants and flowers both pre-empt and correspond with human endeavour: When we examine closely their little inventions, their diverse methods, we are reminded of those enthralling exhibitions of machine-tools, of machines for making machinery, in which the mechanical genius of man reveals all its resources. But our mechanical genius dates from yesterday, whereas floral mechanism has been at work for thousands of years.3 Nature is awesome – the Romantics were eloquent on this – but it can also be a powerful source of disquiet and, as Miller argues, ‘a source of overwhelming terror’.4 Writers in the 1920s and ’30s made much of this. In Arthur Strangland’s tale ‘The Lake of Life’, the discovery of a race of intelligent plant-men arouses a strong fear for survival:

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And in the very ether about them both men sensed in subconscious depth the inimical alignment against them of plants and trees – of their cytoplasmic consciousness radiating an alien enmity for all things flesh and blood.5 The horror of many plant narratives is offset with irony and humour. Produced in 1960 and directed by Roger Corman, the low-budget comedy-fantasy film The Little Shop of Horrors became a cult classic. It was remade into a popular Broadway (and London) musical show in the 1980s and then into a big-budget remake film in 1986 (dir. Frank Oz). The Little Shop of Horrors features a nerdy flower-shop assistant, Seymour, who cultivates a carnivorous plant which, needing human flesh and blood for food, then teaches the nerd to become a murderer. In both the stage and later film version, 209

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‘Audrey ii’ is a giant anthropomorphized Venus flytrap, a monster plant puppet large enough to swallow characters. In the original Broadway performance its branches and roots dangled over the stage and into the audience; in the 1986 film version, during the song ‘Feed Me (Git It)’, it is alternately threatening and seductive, sending one of its phallic roots to penetrate Seymour’s zippered waistcoat. Flowers play a key role in many films, of course, including perhaps most notably the symbolic geranium in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), the only living organic thing that dies just as the relationship between Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin breaks apart, the carpet of wildflowers in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St Francis, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1950), and the lavish flower scene in the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby (dir. Baz Luhrmann), where Gatsby reunites with his beloved Daisy. But the motif of the hothouse is much rarer. In Le Jour se

Seymour in the flower shop, from The Little Shop of Horrors (dir. Roger Corman, 1960). 210

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Seymour feeds Audrey Jr, from The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

lève (Daybreak, dir. Marcel Carné, 1939), the oppressive flower-filled space of a greenhouse is the setting for a classic love scene in which François and Francine discuss escaping to the countryside, and in The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawk, 1946), the heat and vegetation of General Sternwood’s conservatory serve as a metaphor for the stifling corruption of Los Angeles. The symbolism of orchids in Hawks’s film is given racial intensity a couple of decades later in In the Heat of the Night (dir. Norman Jewison, 1967). In order that Mr Endicott’s mansion looked sufficiently old-South aristocratic, the film crew added a greenhouse and filled it with $15,000 of orchids. The preference of the detective Mr Tibbs for ‘epiphytics’ is turned by the plantation owner, Mr Endicott, into an opportunity for racial slur: ‘Why, isn’t that remarkable!’ he says, ‘That of all the orchids in this place, you should prefer the epiphytics . . . Because, like the Negro, they need care and feedin’ and cultivatin’. And that takes time.’ 211

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The motif of the corner flower shop has an interesting history. It figures particularly in American gangster films, including for example Scarface (dir. Howard Hawks, 1932) and The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (dir. Roger Corman, 1967). Its origins derive from the florist’s business run by a well-known thug and later leader of the Irish North Side Gang during the infamous Chicago bootlegging era, Charles Dean O’Banion. James Cagney based his character in The Public Enemy (dir. William A. Wellman, 1931) on O’Banion, whose cover for his illicit income was William Schofield’s River North Flower Shop, at the corner of West Chicago Avenue and North State Street. O’Banion was a noted flower arranger, and his shop provided floral arrangements for virtually all of Chicago’s gangland funerals. His constant provocations for more income, wider territories and his temperamental aggression towards his fellow crooks like Al Capone, however, resulted in his own murder. Four of Capone’s men entered his flower shop one morning in November 1924 and killed O’Banion as he was calmly clipping chrysanthemums in the back room. Metaphors of flowers, hothouses and florist shops are cumulative, and as Richard Mabey points out in The Cabaret of Plants, they derive their ‘mysterious glamour’ from the ‘language of flowers’ in the nineteenth century.6 Referring to the orchid, Mabey points out that they ‘become more than themselves, even the most humdrum basking in the reflected glamour of the family mantra – orchid: the bloom of the exotic romance and the privileged hothouse’.7 In particular, the resemblance of flowers – particularly exotics – to human anatomy stimulates the human mind to seek correspondences between animal and plant life and fosters ideas about plant sentience and intelligence. In 1740 the horticulturalist Philip Miller remarked how the flowers sometimes look like ‘a naked Man, sometimes a Butter-fly, a Drone, a Pigeon, an Ape, a Lizard, a Parrot, a Fly, and other Things’.8 212

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Weeds

In the twentieth century the anthropomorphism of flowers and trees is given a dark twist, and extraterrestrial killer plants that invade earth acquire a powerful eco-political currency, especially among writers, film-makers and video game developers. From Cleopatra in The Addams Family series and the Krynoids in Doctor Who to the Sapient Pearwood in the novels of Terry Pratchett and the Fanged Geranium and the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter novels, there is no end to our fascination with eco-horror narratives. They thrill us, but they also serve to remind us of our political and cultural vulnerability. During the Cold War such horror films served to warn about the loss of autonomy typified by the communist regime of Soviet Russia. Among the most well-known examples of this genre are the film The Thing from Another World (dir. Christian Nyby, 1951, adapted from John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?) and Don Siegel’s allegorical Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which alien plant spores grow into giant plant pods and give gory foaming birth within the confines of Dr Bennell’s greenhouse. We can trace the twentieth-century fascination with ecoinvasion to H. G. Wells. In his novel The War of the Worlds (serialized in 1897), Martian invaders bring red weed to Earth, and it reproduces mysteriously and profusely as it comes into contact with water, choking streams and rivers: From this position a shrubbery hid the greater portion of Putney, but we could see the river below, a bubbly mass of red weed, and the low parts of Lambeth flooded and red. The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters.9

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The monster plant is an alien invasion that ultimately succumbs to its lack of immunity against bacteria and disease. Unlike the terrestrial plants that have ‘acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases’, the red weed rots without much resistance.10 Wells’s narrative invokes Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and the immunity that derives from exposure to bacterial diseases, but he also underscores his novel with the metaphors of health and sickness that were in wide circulation at the end of the nineteenth century. The view of modernity as a sickly phenomenon was common in Western culture, but its resurgence at the approach of the fin de siècle reflected the widespread cultural dis-ease, fear and anxiety that characterized this period. Metaphors of disease and death had always prevailed in some form or other – Aristotle invoked the corruption and decay of the state by the metaphor of the collapse of body unity, and Machiavelli likewise saw the well-being of society as residing in the balance between the different parts which corresponded metaphorically to the equilibrium between the four ‘humours’ – but the prevalence of these metaphors accelerated and intensified throughout the nineteenth century as people and govern ments struggled to cope with radical social, political, scientific, economic and technological change. Wells’s red weed anticipates a profusion of monster plant fables in the twentieth century, culminating in probably the most wellknown science-fiction novel by John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which the world’s population is made blind by witnessing a meteor shower and vulnerable to perambulatory and carnivorous genetically engineered plants called ‘triffids’. Published just before the first H-bomb test in the Pacific, Wyndham’s novel is preoccupied with the fragile bounds of science, war and human survival, and is saturated with Cold War ‘weed anxiety’, as Mabey terms it: 214

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Cover of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1963).

The twentieth century, with its global trade and world wars and ubiquitous paranoia, bought with it not just new weeds, but new conceptions of what weeds might be, and do. Weed anxiety took root. The vagabond plants were seen not just as nuisances, but as actively dangerous. They could invade cities, subvert civilized life, be part of the paraphernalia of modern warfare.11 Weeds not only grow and proliferate in abandon, but they are famously resistant to killer chemicals like glyphosate and atrazine. 215

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They symbolize unpalatable truths about human existence like neglect and poverty and they grow even in the most gentrified areas. In their unruly persistence they represent a triffidian blight on the ‘civilized’ landscape. In the case of Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), which is regularly rooted out of London gardens, weeds even have the potential to lower house prices. The control of weeds is often imagined as a war, a battle against unsightly nature. Very occasionally, however, weeds acquire a more sexy reputation. None more so than Toxicodendron radicans, better known as poison ivy, a plant originating in North America and brought into Europe by plant collectors in the late eighteenth century. In contact with human skin, the three-leaved plant creates a violent allergic reaction – rashes, fevers and blisters. The effects of its poisonous compound, urushiol, can be experienced indirectly, from a handshake or a towel, even from the smoke of smouldering poison ivy leaves on a bonfire. In 1959, in a popular song by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, the evil effects of this plant were likened to the predatory nature of a woman. The lyrics warn that it will take huge quantities of calamine lotion to counteract her dangerous and invasive effects. A decade later, the association of the plant with a criminal woman is given voluptuous form in the Batman comics. Poison Ivy is the nickname of the fictional character of Dr Pamela Lillian Isley, a femme fatale whose first kiss is poison, the second its antidote. She arrives on the comic scene in 1966 as an ivy-clad temptress, wearing a one-piece strapless green bathing suit, covered with leaves that form her bracelets, necklace and crown. She wears green high heels and yellow-green nylon stockings with leaves painted on them. Poison Ivy is the embodiment of Cold War invasion anxiety, but she is also a universal symbol of dangerous hybridity. Deadly to the touch, specializing in powerful floral toxins and immune to all poisons, viruses, 216

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bacteria and fungi, Poison Ivy is a terrifying symbol of assimilation. Not only can she consciously control and adapt her appearance but she can control plants with her mind. In the Introduction to this book, I suggested that metaphors create bridges between one thing and another and allow us to imagine aspects of our existence in subtle and complex ways. The web of correspondences and patterns that I have traced in the preceding chapters reveal a rich range of associations between the hothouse and anxieties about modernization that include fears about the changing role and status of women. In the majority of cases these associations express profound fear and concern about social, cultural, economic and political change. The metaphor of the plant monster, frequently envisaged in terms of an alien species invading from another country or planet, is a recurring nightmare image that speaks of deep-rooted insecurities about identity and ‘home’. It forces us to reconceptualize our relationship to nature. As Miller suggests, by showing us our fears and exposing the strict instrumentalist hierarchies that have dominated our historical relations with plants, monster plants can spur us to rethink our many relationships with the real plants in our lives, which are, after all, really at the foundation of our lives and life on this planet.12

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References

Introduction 1 Quoted in Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, The Decadent Gardener (Sawtry, Cambs., 1996), p. 59. 2 Joel-Peter Witkin, quoted in Frans Schouten et al., Grotesque: Natural Historical and Formaldehyde Photography (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 15. 3 Roy Strong, epigraph to catalogue, François Houtin: Brocéliande Forest of Dreams, exh. cat., Francis Kyle Gallery, London (2013). 4 Suzanne Braswell, ‘Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms’, French Forum, xxxviii/1 (Winter 2013), pp. 69–87: p. 69. 5 Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2010), p. 120.

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1 Heat and Light: The Rise of the Hothouse 1 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford, 2008), p. 175. 2 Ibid., p. 176. 3 John Abercrombie, Abercrombie’s Practical Gardener (London, 1834), p. 420. 4 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Philosophy of Furniture’, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, vi/5 (1840), pp. 243–45: p. 244. 5 There was an influx of new species, including dahlia, bluebell, Easter lily, cosmos, yarrow, gladiolus, strawflower, Japanese iris, zinnia, morning glory, tigerlily, kousa dogwood and poinsettia. See Amy H. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford, 2003), p. 74. 6 Quoted in Brent Elliott, Victorian Gardens (London, 1986), pp. 30 and 31.

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7 John Ruskin, Præterita (Orpington, 1886), vol. i, p. 67. 8 The Times, 1851, quoted in Jeffery Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London, 1999), p. 160. 9 National Magazine, i (1851), p. 206. 10 Quoted in D. Kellaway, ed., Women Gardeners (London, 1995), p. 68. 11 Guy de Maupassant, ‘Bibelots’, in Chroniques (Paris, 1980), vol. ii, p. 183. Quoted in Emily Apter, ‘Cabinet Secrets: Fetishism, Prostitution, and the Fin de Siècle Interiors’, Assemblage, ix (June 1989), pp. 6–19: p. 14. 12 See Lynn Voskuil, ‘The Victorian Novel and Horticulture’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford, 2013), pp. 549–68. 13 Celebrated monster-plant writers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century include H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, William Hope Hodgson and, later, H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. See T. S. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, xxiii/3 (2012), pp. 460–79. 14 Sarah Whittingham, Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania (London, 2012). 15 Rebecca Stott, Theatres of Glass: The Woman Who Brought the Sea to the City (London, 2003), p. 111. 16 E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal de la vie littéraire, ii (25 December 1867), cited in Marion Baudet, ‘Le Jardin décadent: de l’intimité dévoilée à l’intimité dévoyée’, in Jardins et intimité dans la littérature européenne (1750–1920), ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths et al. (Clermont-Ferrand, 2008), p. 357: ‘luxe tout nouveau . . ., et qui n’a pas plus de vingt ans de date’. 17 Phyllis Hastings, The Conservatory (London, 1973), p. 16. 18 Sarah Maguire, ‘The Florist’s at Midnight’, in The Florist’s at Midnight (London, 2001), p. 1. 19 See Michael Waters, The Victorian Garden in Literature (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 125–9. 20 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London, 1851), vol. ii, pt 3, p. 104. 21 Lecture 2, section 87. In his notes to this lecture, he mentions Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as a book he wanted to buy: see M. M. Mahood, ‘Ruskin’s Flowers of Evil’, in The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 147–82. 22 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris (Cambridge, 2012), vol. xxii, pp. 89–90. 220

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23 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London, 1875), p. 97. 24 Anonymous, ‘The Garden’, Blackwood’s Magazine, lxxiii (1853), p. 133. 25 See Chad Arment, ed., Flora Curiosa: Cryptobotany, Mysterious Fungi, Sentient Trees, and Deadly Plants in Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy (Landisville, pa, 2008) and Botanica Delira: More Stories of Strange, Undiscovered, and Murderous Vegetation (Landisville, 2010). 26 Michael Riffaterre, ‘Decadent Features in Maeterlinck’s Poetry’, Language and Style, vii/1 (Winter 1974), pp. 3–19: p. 5. 27 Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, iii/4 (Summer 1990), p. 623. 28 Sean O’Brien, ‘hms Glasshouse’, in HMS Glasshouse (Oxford, 1991), p. 33. 29 Riffaterre, ‘Decadent Features in Maeterlinck’s Poetry’, p. 5. 30 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford, 1998), p. 171.

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2 ‘Aromatic and Tainted’: The City as Hothouse 1 Mark Pimlott, Without and Within: Essays on the Territory and the Interior (Rotterdam, 2007), p. 128. 2 George Sand, ‘La Rêverie à Paris, in Paris Guide (Paris, 1867), vol. ii, p. 1201. 3 Hippolyte Taine, Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de M. Frédéric-Thomas Graindorge (Paris, 1867), referenced in Eugen Weber, ‘Introduction: Decadence on a Private Income’, Journal of Contemporary History, xvii/1, Decadence (January 1982), pp. 1–20: p. 13. 4 See Alan Hollingworth’s Introduction to Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, trans. Mike Mitchell and Will Stone (Sawtry, Cambs., 2009), p. 13. 5 Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, His Life and Work, trans. Guy Thorne (London, 1915), pp. 24–5. 6 Richard Terdiman, ‘Searching for Swans: Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”’, in Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s ‘The Flowers of Evil’ (New York, 2000), p. 120. 7 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Swan’, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford, 1993), pp. 172–6: p. 175. 8 Baudelaire, ‘Seven Old Men’, The Flowers of Evil, pp. 176–81: p. 177. 9 Baudelaire, ‘A Carcass’, The Flowers of Evil, pp. 58–63: p. 59. 10 Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London, 1972), p. 426. 11 Octave Mirbeau, ‘Pourquoi les expositions?’, Revue des deux mondes, cxxxii (1895), p. 892: ‘le Palais de l’Industrie qui scandalise les 221

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

arbres, les fleurs, au milieu desquels il apparaît, dans la grâce d’un bœuf foulant un parterre de roses.’ M. Acarie-Baron, Album du Jardin des Plantes de Paris (Paris, 1838), p. 11. Clare A. P. Willsdon, ‘Making the Modern Garden’, in Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London (2016), p. 32. Amy H. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford, 2003), p. 51. Émile Zola, The Kill, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford, 2004), p. 159. J.-K. Huysmans, ‘Claudine’, in Le Drageoir aux épices, oeuvres complètes, i, p. 36 (trans. Arthur Symons, in Figures of Several Centuries (London, 1916), p. 174). J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford, 1998), p. 117. J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 146–7. Séverine Jouve, Obsessions et Perversions dans la littérature et les demeures à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1996). See also Jessica Gossling, ‘“Things worldly and things spiritual”: Huysmans’s À rebours and the House at Fontenay’, in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Oxford, 2017), pp. 66–82. J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, Cambs., 2008), p. 16. See Robert Baldick, The Life of Joris-Karl Huysmans (Oxford, 1955), p. 81. Robert B. Leuchars, A Practical Treatise on the Construction, Heating, and Ventilation of Hothouses; including conservation, green-houses, graperies, and other kinds of horticultural structures. With practical directions for their management in regard to heat, light, and air (Boston, ma, 1851), p. 8. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Mauldon, p. 73. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. Matthew Creasy (Manchester, 2014), p. 106. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 140. 222

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3 Blooming Buttonholes and Flower Fetishes 1 Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Deuxième Memorandum (1838) (Paris, 1906), p. 91. 2 Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London, 1972), pp. 420 and 421. 3 Oscar Wilde, ‘Phrases and Philosophies’, in The Writings of Oscar Wilde (London, 1907), p. 141. 4 Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (New York, 1895), p. 100. 5 Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (London, 2000), p. 617. Quoted in Nicholas Freeman, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh, 2011), p. 14. 6 The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, vol. ii, ed. Ian Bradley (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 143. 7 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), p. 158. 8 See Jennifer Potter, ‘Lily’, in Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World (London, 2013), pp. 33–64. 9 See Potter, ‘Sunflower’, in Seven Flowers, pp. 65–96. 10 Anonymous, ‘The Decadent Guys (A Colour-study in Green Carnations)’, Punch, cvii (10 November 1894), p. 225. 11 Anonymous, ‘A Maudle-in Ballad, to His Lily’, Punch, lxxx (9 April 1881), p. 161. 12 Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus, trans. Melanie Hawthorne (New York, 2004), p. 8. 13 Ibid., p. 12. 14 Robert de Montesquiou as the head of John the Baptist, c. 1886, cyanotype and watercolour, Paris, private collection. Handwriting in gold on the left and right of the image reads ‘J’aime le jade couleur des yeux d’Hérodiade et l’améthyste couleur des yeux de JeanBaptiste.’ (I love the jade colour of Herodias’s eyes and the amethyst colour of John the Baptist’s). 15 Quoted in Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (New York and Paris, 1995), p. 38. 16 Ibid., p. 36. 17 Ibid., p. 125. 18 Quoted ibid., p. 130. 19 This is Philippe Jullian’s view. See his Robert de Montesquiou: A Fin-desiècle Prince, trans. John Haylock and Francis King (London, 1967), p. 130. 20 Ibid., p. 28. 223

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21 Ibid., p. 29. 22 Ibid., p. 12. 23 Robert de Montesquiou, Pas effacés, mémoires (Paris, 1923), p. 97, trans. and quoted in Edgar Munhall, Whister and Montesquiou, p. 35. 24 G. Robertson, Life Was Worth Living (New York and London, 1931), p. 100. 25 Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals (London, 1962), p. 50. 26 Ibid. 27 See Matthew Sturgis, ‘The Cult of Celebrity’, in Passionate Attitudes (London, 1995), pp. 115–81: p. 115. 28 A. H. Lawrence, ‘Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and His Work’, Idler, xi/2 (March 1897), pp. 188–202: p. 198. 29 See Jane Haville Desmarais, The Beardsley Industry (Aldershot, 1998), p. 112. 30 Robert de Montesquiou, ‘Le Pervers’, in Professionnelles Beautés (Paris, 1905), p. 104. 31 See The Savoy, vols i and ii (January and April 1896). 32 Aubrey Beardsley, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, 2012), pp. 210–11. 33 Ibid., p. 211. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., p. 210. 36 See Elizabeth K. Menon, Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (Urbana and Chicago, il, 2006), pp. 139–41. 37 Quoted in H. M Strong, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’, Westminster Review, cliv (July 1900), pp. 86–94: p. 91. 38 See Chapter Two of Desmarais, The Beardsley Industry, pp. 29–51. 39 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 7. 40 Ibid. 41 John Sutherland, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Oxford, 1997), p. 196. 42 Ibid., pp. 196–7.

4 Florientalism and the ‘Scented Ways’ 1 Richard Burton, The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (privately printed, 1886). 2 Richard Le Gallienne, The Romance of Perfume (New York and Paris, 1928), pp. 382–97. 224

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3 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man, 4 vols (New York, 1936), vol. ii, p. 75: ‘Even in ordinary normal persons, personal odour tends to play a not inconsiderable part in sexual attractions and sexual repulsions. This is sometimes termed “olfactionism”.’ 4 Richard Stamelman, Perfume: A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present (New York, 2006), p. 159. 5 Ibid., p. 93. 6 See Catherine Maxwell, ‘Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence’, in Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, ed. Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 201–25; Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘Perfumes’, in Life and Flowers, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London, 1907), p. 303. 7 For a detailed study of olfaction, see Christina Bradstreet, ‘Scented Visions: The Nineteenth-century Olfactory Imagination’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of London (2008). 8 Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire: His Life and Work, trans. Guy Thorne (London, 1915), p. 73. 9 Translation by Derek Mahon, August 2012. 10 Gustave Flaubert, ‘Herodias’, in Three Tales, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford, 2009), pp. 71–105; p. 92. 11 Quoted in Stamelman, Perfume, p. 95. 12 See ibid., p. 146. 13 Robert de Montesquiou, Le Chef des odeurs suaves (Paris, 1907), p. 277, quoted in Stamelman, Perfume, p. 147. 14 Quoted in Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (New York and Paris, 1995), pp. 47–8. 15 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, in The Complete Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small (London, 1994), pp. 97–114: p. 97. 16 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1988), p. 351. 17 J.-K. Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, Cambs., 2004), p. 127. 18 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford, 1998), p. 93. 19 J.-K. Huysmans, Stranded (En Rade), trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, Cambs., 2010), p. 180. 20 Patrick Süskind, Perfume (London, 1985), Chapter 7, pp. 38–9. 21 Guy de Maupassant, ‘The Magic Couch’, in The Complete Works, Google ebook, accessed 23 July 2016, n.p. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 225

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24 Émile Zola, The Sin of Father Mouret, trans. Sandy Petrey (Lincoln, ne, and London, 1969), p. 123. 25 Ibid., p. 185. 26 Ibid., p. 132. 27 Ibid., p. 289, p. 290. 28 Fyodor Sologub, ‘The Poisoned Garden’, trans. Margo Shohl Rosen with Grigory Dashevsky, in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence, ed. Kirsten Lodge (Sawtry, Cambs., 2007), p. 123. 29 Ibid., p. 120. 30 Ibid., p. 131. 31 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (London, 1999), p. 8. 32 The word ‘corruption’ here is a substitute for the original ‘prostitutes’. 33 See Jennifer Potter, Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World (London, 2013). 34 In the orchid, Maurice Maeterlinck argued in his essay on ‘The Intelligence of Flowers’, we find ‘the most perfect and the most harmonious manifestations of vegetable intelligence’ (see Life and Flowers, trans. Teixeira, p. 255). 35 Potter, Seven Flowers, p. 215. 36 Piesse’s Art of Perfumery and the Methods of Obtaining the Odours of Plants, the Growth and General Flower Farm System of Raising Fragrant Herbs, ed. Charles H. Piesse, 5th edn (London, 1891), p. 223. 37 Catherine Maxwell, ‘Carnal Flowers, Charnel Flowers: Perfume in the Decadent Literary Imagination’, in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Oxford, 2017), pp. 32–50: p. 33. 38 Ibid., p. 57. 39 Ibid., p. 231. 40 See Arthur Symons, Selected Early Poems, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Cambridge, 2017). 41 Margaret Armour, ‘Aubrey Beardsley and the Decadents’, Magazine of Art, xx (1896), p. 12: she refers to the ‘tainted whiffs from across the Channel that lodge the Gallic germs in our lungs’. 42 Catherine Maxwell, ‘Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence’, in Decadent Poetics, ed. Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 220. 43 Arthur Symons, ‘Memory’, in London Nights, 2nd edn (London, 1897), p. 100. 44 Symons, London Nights, p. 51. 45 Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, p. 38. 46 Symons, ‘Stella Maris’, in London Nights, pp. 40–44: p. 41. 226

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47 48 49 50 51 52

Symons, ‘Paris’, in London Nights, p. 89. Symons, ‘White Heliotrope’, in London Nights, p. 50. Symons, ‘Stella Maris’, in London Nights, p. 40. Symons, ‘Memory’, in London Nights, p. 100. Ibid. Arthur Symons, ‘Hallucination’, in Poems (London, 1902), vol. i, p. 119. 53 Robert de Montesquiou, ‘Pays des aromates’, in Robert de Montesquiou and Marcel Proust, Professeur de beauté (Paris, 1999), p. 110. 54 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. Matthew Creasy (Manchester, 2014), p. 8.

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5 Paradises and Torture Gardens 1 See Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, nj, 1953). 2 Le Roman de la Rose, 11. 521ff. 3 Gail Finney, The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Tübingen, 1984), p. 19. 4 See A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, nj, 1966). 5 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth, 1950), p. 57. 6 Ibid., p. 72. 7 Finney, The Counterfeit Idyll, p. 13. 8 Theodor Fontane, L’Adultera (Munich, 1969), pp. 72, 73, cited in Georg Kohlmaier and Barna von Sartory, Houses of Glass: A Nineteenth-century Building Type, trans. John C. Harvey (Cambridge, ma, 1986), p. 36. 9 Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe (London, 1881), vol. ii, p. 6. 10 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Ware, 1993), p. 416. 11 John Galsworthy, The Man of Property, in The Forsyte Saga (Ware, 2001), p. 88. 12 Jean de Palacio, Figures et formes de la Décadence (Paris, 1994), p. 105. 13 Octave Mirbeau, ‘The Little Summer-house’, in French Decadent Tales, trans. Stephen Romer (Oxford, 2013), pp. 87–91: p. 87. 14 Théophile Gautier, Fortunio (London, 1915), translator unknown, p. 282. 15 Ibid., p. 273. 16 Ibid., p. 278. 227

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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36 37 38 39

Ibid., p. 281. J.-K. Huysmans, ‘Le Salon de 1879’, L’Art moderne, 1883, p. 35. Le Journal amusant, 17 May 1879, p. 2. Émile Zola, The Kill, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford, 2004), p. 98. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid. Ibid. Zola, The Kill, pp. 160, 161. For a Freudian reading of the hothouse in La Curée see Charles Bernheimer, ‘Writing Against (Female) Nature’, Poetics Today, vi/1–2 (1985), pp. 311–24: pp. 316–17. Oscar Wilde, letter to Frank Harris, May 1899, in The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1962), p. 795. Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden, trans. Michael Richardson (Sawtry, Cambs., 2003), p. 3. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 159. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise [1761], trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, nh, 1997), p. 397. Cited by Edmond Pilon, Octave Mirbeau (Paris, 1903), p. 8. Referenced in Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish (Ithaca, ny, 1991), p. 166. George Sand, ‘La Rêverie à Paris’, Paris Guide (Paris, 1867), vol. ii, pp. 1194–203: p. 1201, quoted in Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London (2016), p. 57. Mirbeau, Torture Garden, p. 136. For a detailed analysis of Mirbeau’s torture garden and Giverny see Emily Apter, ‘The Garden of Scopic Perversion from Monet to Mirbeau’, October, xlvii (Winter 1988), pp. 91–115. See Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton, nj, 1985), p. 94. A. C. Swinburne, Selected Verse, ed. Alex Wong (Manchester, 2015), pp. 260–67: pp. 260 and 261. Swinburne, ‘Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’, Spectator, xiii (September 1862), pp. 417–27: p. 419. Michel Houellebecq, ‘Le Jardin aux fougères’, in Poésies (Paris, 2001), p. 201, trans. Derek Mahon as ‘The Dark Garden’ in Echo’s Grove (Loughcrew, Co. Meath, 2013), p. 183.

228

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6 Flowers of Evil: The Fleur Fatale 1 See Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville and London, 1995), and Suzanne Braswell, ‘Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms’, French Forum, xxxviii/1 (Winter 2013), pp. 69–87, for a discussion of the way in which Mallarmé and Huysmans efface and subvert the traditional ‘language of flowers’ tradition adumbrated in popular nineteenthcentury reference works, including Charlotte de Latour, Le Langage des Fleurs (1819); Anon., Alphabet des fleurs pour l’instruction de la jeunesse orné des gravures (Paris, 1843); B. de Saint-Aubin, Langage des Fleurs, bouquet symbolique, hommage aux dames (1858); Pierre Zaccone, Nouveau Langage des fleurs, avec leur valeur symbolique et leur emploi pour l’expression des pensées (1871). 2 ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy. The Eighty-fourth’, Art Journal, xiv (1 June 1852), pp. 165–76: p. 174. 3 See Tim Barringer, Alison Smith and Jason Rosenfield, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-garde (London, 2012), p. 96; and Jason Rosenfield, ‘New Languages of Nature in Victorian England: The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, Natural History and Modern Architecture in the 1850s’, PhD Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1999), pp. 172–208. 4 D. G. Rossetti, ‘Body’s Beauty’, The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence (London, 1898), p. 95. 5 Christina Bradstreet, ‘“Wicked with Roses”: Floral Femininity and the Erotics of Scent’, Nineteenth-century Art Worldwide, vi/1 (Spring 2007), www.19thc-artworldwide.org. 6 Oscar Wilde, Salome, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford, 2008), p. 66. 7 Maurice Kunel, Félicien Rops: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Brussels, 1943), p. 6. 8 See Catherine Maxwell, ‘Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence’, in Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Jason Hall and Alex Murray (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 201–25: p. 211. 9 See Elizabeth K. Menon, Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (Urbana and Chicago, il, 2006). 10 Émile Zola, The Sin of Father Mouret, trans. Sandy Petrey (Lincoln, ne, and London, 1969), p. 120. 11 Quoted by Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus and Self-reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago, il, 1994), p. 180. 229

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12 My translation. Jean Lorrain, ‘Les Iris Noirs’, Le Courrier français (April 1895), p. 20. 13 See Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists (Oxford, 1973), pp. 20–21. 14 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. C. G. Chaddock (London, 1892), p. 13. 15 Harry Campbell, Differences in the Nervous Organisation of Man and Woman (London, 1891), p. 171. 16 Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (Manchester, 1896), pp. 66–7. 17 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender, translator unknown (New York, 1895), p. 187. 18 See Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, in A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles and Drama of the 1890s, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (London, 2001), p. 187. 19 Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, ed. A. Dechambre, 4th ser. (Paris, 1864–89); cited in Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader (New York, 1998), p. 18. There was no such classification for ‘Men’. 20 T. S. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, xxiii/3 (2012), pp. 460–79: p. 466. 21 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-desiècle Culture (New York and Oxford, 1986), p. 241. 22 Charles C. Eldredge, ‘Calla Moderna: “Such a Strange Flower”’, in Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860–1940 (New Haven, ct, 2003), p. 13. 23 Louis Kalonyme, ‘The Arts in New York’, Arts and Decoration, xxxvii (1933), p. 59; quoted in Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 27. 24 A good example is Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite. Mœurs antiques (Paris, 1896). 25 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford and New York, 1998), p. 49. 26 Ibid., p. 76. 27 Ibid., p. 77. 28 Ibid., p. 75. 29 Huysmans may have had the work of Alfred Bleu (1835–1901) in mind. He was a horticulturalist whose specialism was creating hybrid forms of the begonia and caladium, extremely popular varieties of hothouse flower in the mid-nineteenth century. 30 Huysmans, Against Nature, p. 80. 31 Ibid., pp. 80 and 81. 32 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Exotic Perfume’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford, 1993), pp. 48–9: p. 49. 230

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33 Baudelaire, ‘Dancing Serpent’, in The Flowers of Evil, pp. 56–9: pp. 57 and 59. 34 Baudelaire, ‘Lesbos’, in The Flowers of Evil, pp. 232–9: p. 235. 35 Baudelaire, ‘Condemned Women’, in The Flowers of Evil, pp. 244–7: pp. 245 and 247. 36 Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden, trans. Michael Richardson (Sawtry, Cambs., 1995), p. 168. 37 Ibid., p. 166. 38 Ibid., p. 117. 39 Ibid., p. 134. 40 Romana Byrne, Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (New York and London, 2013), pp. 58–9. 41 Mirbeau, Torture Garden, p. 147. 42 Mirbeau, quoted and translated in Susan P. Casteras, ‘Debts to Pre-Raphaelitism: A Pan-European Phenomenon’, in Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism, ed. Thomas J. Tobin (Albany, ny, 2005), p. 129. 43 Mirbeau, Torture Garden, p. 33. 44 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘The Flowers’, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford, 2006), pp. 14–15. 45 Ibid., p. 15. 46 See Suzanne Braswell, ‘Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms’, French Forum, xxxviii/1 (Winter 2013), pp. 69–87. 47 See the excellent chapter on ‘D. H. Lawrence, botanist’, in M. M. Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 183–225. 48 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 193. 49 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London, 2000), p. 34. 50 Mahood, The Poet as Botanist, p. 227.

7 Mind under Glass 1 Suzanne Braswell, ‘Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms’, French Forum, xxxviii/1 (Winter 2013), pp. 69–87: p. 78. 2 Philippe Jullian, Introduction, French Symbolist Painters: Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon and their Followers (London, 1972), p. 7. 3 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford, 1998), p. 117. 4 Donald Flanell Friedman, ‘Belgian Symbolist Poetry: Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice, ed. Steven Ttösy de Zepetnek and Milan V. Dimić with Irene Sywenky (Paris, 1999), pp. 365–74: p. 366. 231

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5 Iwan Gilkin, ‘Le Mauvais Jardinier’, La Nuit (Paris, 1897), p. 48. 6 Translation by Peter Coles, 2016. 7 For a discussion of Jules Laforgue’s use of aquatic and aquarium imagery to suggest the unconscious realms, a kind of Buddhist nirvana, see Michèle Hannoosh, Parody and Decadence: Laforgue’s ‘Moralités Légendaires’ (Columbus, oh, 1989), pp. 158–60. 8 Émile Verhaeren, ‘Le Symbolisme’, L’Art moderne (April 1887), pp. 115–18: p. 115. Translation by Donald Flanell Friedman, in ‘Rodenbach, Hellens, Lemonnier: Paradisal and Infernal Modalities of Belgian Dead City Prose’, Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, ed. Philip Mosley (London, 1996), pp. 99–112: p. 100. 9 See Bernard Miall, ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Maeterlinck’s Poems (London, 1915), p. ix. 10 Georges Rodenbach, ‘Aquarium Mentale’, Mercure de France, xvii (March 1896), p. 294. 11 Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, trans. Mike Mitchell and Will Stone (Sawtry, Cambs., 2005), p. 61. 12 Ibid., p. 33. 13 See David Gullentops, ‘L’Espace poétique dans Serres chaudes de Maeterlinck’, Études littéraires, xxx/3 (Summer 1998), pp. 93–106. 14 Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses: Poems, 1889, trans. Richard Howard (Princeton, nj, 2003), pp. 2–3: p. 3. 15 Ibid., pp. 20–21: p. 21. 16 Ibid., pp. 82–7: p. 83. 17 Ibid., pp. 12–15: p. 13. 18 See Friedman, ‘Belgian Symbolist Poetry: Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 365–74, and Donald Flanell Friedman, trans. and ed., An Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets (New York and London, 1992). 19 Max Nordau, Degeneration, translator unknown (New York, 1895), p. 227. 20 Michael Riffaterre, ‘Decadent Features in Maeterlinck’s Poetry’, Language and Style, vii/1 (Winter 1974), pp. 3–19: p. 14. 21 Maeterlinck, Hothouses, pp. 34–5: p. 35. 22 Ibid., p. 9. 23 Ibid. 24 Weldon Kees, ‘Death Under Glass’, in The Collected Poems (Lincoln, ne, 2003), p. 83. 25 Sylvia Plath, ‘Fever 103°’, Ariel (London, 1999), p. 52. 26 Thom Gunn, ‘Memory Unsettled’, The Man With Night Sweats (London, 1992), p. 75. 232

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27 Friedman, ‘Belgian Symbolist Poetry: Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism’, p. 369. 28 Maeterlinck, Hothouses, pp. 64–5: p. 65. 29 Ibid., pp. 56–9: p. 57. 30 Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (London, 1854), pp. 274–5. 31 Ibid., pp. 140–41. 32 Quoted by Bernd Brunner in The Ocean at Home (London, 2011), p. 54. The full title of Butler’s book: The Family Aquarium; or, Aqua Vivarium: A ‘New Pleasure for the Domestic Circle’: Being a Familiar and Complete Instructor upon the Subject of the Construction, Fitting-up, Stocking, and Maintenance of the Fluvial and Marina Aquaria, or ‘River and Ocean Gardens’ (New York, 1858). 33 Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, trans. W. Moy Thomas (London, 1911), Book vi, p. 131. 34 Jodi Hauptman, Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon (New York, 2005), p. 40. 35 Quoted in J.-K. Huysmans, Stranded (En Rade), trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, Cambs., 2010), p. 12. 36 Jules Laforgue, Moral Tales, trans. William Jay Smith (London, 1985), p. 95. 37 Maeterlinck, Hothouses, pp. 60–61: p. 61. 38 Friedman, An Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets, pp. 24–5: p. 25. 39 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (London, 1947), p. 147. 40 For a fuller discussion see Dennitza Gabrakova, ‘Hothouse Weeds: Poetic Responses to the Botanical Garden in Modern Japan’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, xxxviii/4 (December 2005), pp. 123–41. 41 Theodore Roethke, ‘An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems’, in On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills Jr (Seattle and London, 1965), pp. 8–9. 42 Theodore Roethke, ‘Big Wind’, The Lost Son and Other Poems (London, 1949), p. 16. 43 Robert Lowell, ‘For the Union Dead’, For the Union Dead (London, 1964), pp. 70–72: p. 72. 44 Duncan Bush, ‘Aquarium du Trocadéro’, in Aquarium (Bridgend, 1983), pp. 26–7. 45 Richard Hugo, ‘Death in the Aquarium’, in Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (New York, 1984), pp. 445–6. 46 Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (London, 2008), p. 11. 233

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8 Weeds

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1 Brian Aldiss, Hothouse (London, 1962), p. 45. 2 See T. S. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, xxiii/3 (2012), pp. 460–79: p. 471. 3 Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘The Intelligence of Flowers’, in Life and Flowers, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London, 1907), pp. 249–50. 4 Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, p. 467. 5 Arthur G. Strangland, ‘The Lake of Life’, Wonder Stories (November 1932), pp. 505–13: p. 510; cited in Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, p. 467. 6 Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination (London, 2015). 7 Ibid., p. 285. 8 Quoted ibid. 9 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London, 1898), p. 267. 10 Ibid., p. 243. 11 Richard Mabey, Weeds (London, 2010). From 1960 onwards the metaphor of the rampant weed for undesirable foreign influence becomes commonplace. The subtitle of Mabey’s Weeds says it all: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilization and Changed the Way We Think About Nature. 12 Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, p. 472.

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—–, ‘“Wicked with Roses”: Floral Femininity and the Erotics of Scent’, Nineteenth-century Art Worldwide, vi/1 (Spring 2007), www.19thc-artworldwide.org Braswell, Suzanne, ‘Mallarmé, Huysmans, and the Poetics of Hothouse Blooms’, French Forum, xxxviii/1 (Winter 2013), pp. 69–87 Buhler Lynes, Barbara, Georgia O’Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860–1940 (New Haven, ct, 2003) Bush, Duncan, ‘Aquarium du Trocadéro’, Aquarium (Bridgend, 1983) Byrne, Romana, Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (New York and London, 2013) Campbell, Harry, Differences in the Nervous Organisation of Man and Woman (London, 1891) Carpenter, Edward, Love’s Coming of Age (Manchester, 1896) Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep (London, 1999) Collins, Wilkie, The Black Robe (London, 1881) Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent (London, 1947) Desmarais, Jane Haville, The Beardsley Industry (Aldershot, 1998) —–, and Chris Baldick, eds, Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems (Cambridge, 2017) —–, and Chris Baldick, eds, Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (Manchester, 2012) —–, and Alice Condé, eds, Decadence and the Senses (Oxford, 2017) Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (New York and Oxford, 1986) Eliot, George, The Mill on the Floss (Ware, 1993) Elliott, Brent, Victorian Gardens (London, 1986) Ellis, Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man, 4 vols (New York, 1936), vol. ii Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987) Finney, Gail, The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-century Fiction (Tübingen, 1984) Flanell Friedman, Donald, trans. and ed., An Anthology of Belgian Symbolist Poets (New York and London, 1992) —–, ‘Belgian Symbolist Poetry: Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice, ed. Steven Ttösy de Zepetnek and Milan V. Dimić with Irene Sywenky (Paris, 1999), pp. 365–74 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth, 1950) Freeman, Nicholas, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh, 2011) 236

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Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. C. G. Chaddock (London, 1892) Laforgue, Jules, Moral Tales, trans. William Jay Smith (London, 1985) Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers (London, 2000) —–, Women in Love (Harmondsworth, 1980) Le Gallienne, Richard, The Romance of Perfume (New York and Paris, 1928) Leuchars, Robert B., A Practical Treatise on the Construction, Heating, and Ventilation of Hothouses; including conservation, green-houses, graperies, and other kinds of horticultural structures. With practical directions for their management in regard to heat, light, and air (Boston, ma, 1851) Levine, Steven Z., Monet, Narcissus and Self-reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago, il, 1994) Lodge, Kirsten, ed., The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence (Sawtry, Cambs., 2007) Lombroso, Cesare, and William Ferrero, The Female Offender, translator unknown (New York, 1895) Louÿs, Pierre, Aphrodite. Mœurs antiques (Paris, 1896) Lucan, Medlar, and Durian Gray, The Decadent Gardener (Sawtry, Cambs., 1996) Mabey, Richard, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination (London, 2015) —–, Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilization and Changed the Way We Think About Nature (London, 2010) Maeterlinck, Maurice, Hothouses: Poems, 1889, trans. Richard Howard (Princeton, nj, 2003) —–, Life and Flowers, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London, 1907) Maguire, Sarah, ‘The Florist’s at Midnight’, in The Florist’s at Midnight (London, 2001) Mahon, Derek, Echo’s Grove (Loughcrew, Co. Meath, 2013) Mahood, M. M., The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge, 2008) Mallarmé, Stéphane, ‘The Flowers’, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E. H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore (Oxford, 2006) Maxwell, Catherine, ‘Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence’, in Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, ed. Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 201–25 Menon, Elizabeth K., Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (Urbana and Chicago, il, 2006) Miller, T. S., ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, xxiii/3 (2012), pp. 460–79 Mills, Ralph J., ed., On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke (Seattle and London, 1965) 238

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Acknowledgements

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T

his book is the product of many off-the-cuff conversations, seminar discussions, and reading others’ work, notably the numerous books by Richard Mabey (particularly Weeds), The Poet as Botanist by Molly Mahood and Rebecca Stott’s Theatres of Glass. I am however first of all indebted to all those Goldsmiths students who over the years have helped shape my thoughts about hothouses, hothouse flowers and decadence / Decadence. I was listening all the time. For insights into the rich associations of the hothouse and hothouse flower, my thanks go to May Beldray, Alice Condé, Sophie Corser, Britt Fraeyman, Calder Gillie, Jessica Gossling, Karl Hatton, Katharina Herold, Sara Jafari, Katy Layton-Jones, and the Pulp Librarian. Alice Condé deserves a double mention as without her editorial assistance in the final stages the book would never have been published. I am hugely appreciative of the critical comments and suggestions of hothouse experts, colleagues, friends and fellow scholars: Chris Baldick, Caroline Blinder, Ed Diestelkampf, Maura Dooley, David Lambert, Sarah Maguire, Catherine Maxwell, Philip McGowan, Phyllis Richardson, Deac Rossell, David Rose, David Weir and Linda Zatlin. To my very patient editors, Martha Jay and Aimee Selby, thank you for your encouragement and forbearance in what was a long haul. And for financial assistance with the reproduction and permissions of the illustrative material I am immensely grateful to the trustees of the Marc Fitch Fund. The generous grant from the mff made all the difference. As always, thank you to Derek Mahon for providing perfect translations, and to the Gallery Press for permission to publish Mahon’s translation of Houellebecq’s ‘Dark Garden’. And finally, to Peter, Maisie, Louis and Raphael: I owe you so much, but time certainly.

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Photo Acknowledgements

T

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he author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interests of brevity: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin: pp. 138, 139; author’s collection: p. 11; from Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (London, 1856): pp. 196, 197; from The Illustrated Exhibitor (1851): p. 31; from L’Illustration, vol. xlii (1863): p. 48; Katy Layton-Jones: pp. 25, 26, 27; Library of Congress, Washington, dc: pp. 42–3; Los Angeles County Museum of Art: p. 161; Musée d’Orsay, Paris: p. 87; photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. rmn-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt: p. 59; Musées royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique, Brussels: p. 164; National Gallery, London: pp. 52–3, 200; courtesy of Nevill Keating Pictures: p. 84; private collection: pp. 23, 72, 137, 147, 172; Edward Linley Sambourne, ‘Punch’s Fancy Portraits’ no. 37, Punch (25 June 1881), courtesy of Punch Ltd.: p. 79; © Eberhard Spangenberg, Munich/dacs 2017: p. 169; United States Botanic Garden: p. 35; © Victoria and Albert Museum, London: pp. 92, 159; from John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (London, 1963)/reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd: p. 215.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

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Abercrombie’s Practical Gardener 21 Akiba Toshihiko 203 Aldiss, Brian 207–8 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 156, 158 Aman-Jean, Edmond 157 André, Édouard 29 aquarium 9, 14, 30, 32, 46, 180, 183–5, 189, 190–206 Araki, Nobuyoshi 10, 11 Arata, Stephen 41 Armstrong, Isobel 20 Baldick, Robert 63–4 Baldini, G., Count Robert de Montesquiou 87 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée 65, 74 Barrault, Alexis 58 Bauby, Jean-Dominique 205–6 Baudelaire, Charles 7, 63, 65, 75, 89, 90, 116, 122, 147, 162, 182–3, 187, 189–90 ‘Une Charogne’ 56 ‘Le Cygne’ 55–6 La Fanfarlo 39 ‘Femmes damnées’ 172

‘Le Flacon’ 103–4 Les Fleurs du mal 12, 51, 54–7, 64, 146–7, 170–72 ‘Lesbos’ 171–2 ‘Parfum exotique’ 171 ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ 57, 74 ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ 56 ‘Le Serpent qui danse’ 171 Beardsley, Aubrey 75, 89–91, 157–8, 159, 160, 162, 181 The Abbé 92, 93–5 The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (Under the Hill) 91 beauty 10–11, 41, 54, 67, 70, 88, 95, 126, 134, 142, 145, 149, 150, 155, 172, 182, 188, 193, 201 feminine 168, 171, 176 bell jar 9, 14, 15–16, 30, 32, 41, 63, 136, 188 Benjamin, Walter 57 Big Sleep, The (film) 99, 111–12, 113, 211 Boerhaave, Herman 20 Boldini, Giovanni 85 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon 47 Boucicault, Aristide 47 Bradstreet, Christina 156

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Brontë, Charlotte 36 Brummel, George ‘Beau’ 74 Budding, Edwin 22 Burton, Richard 100–101 Bush, Duncan 205 Butler, Henry D. 195 buttonhole 12, 73–5, 80 Byrne, Romana 175 Cadbury 131 Caillebotte, Gustave 145 Caird, Mona 166 Campbell, Barbara 28 Campbell, Harry 165 Campbell, John W. 213 Carpenter, Edward 165 Chamberlain, Joseph 75 Château d’Anet 16 Chatsworth 25 Chelsea Physic Garden 19, 20 Christiani, Richard 100 city culture 12, 45–50, 55–7, 61, 69, 97, 108, 136, 181, 186, 207 Clements, Patricia 146 Collins, Wilkie 129 colonization 30, 41, 69 Columella 15 Conrad, Joseph 203 conservatory 9, 30, 33, 89, 128–9, 136, 140, 211 Cook, James 19 Coward, Noël 76 Crystal Palace 25, 26, 26–8, 45, 46–7 dahlia 192 Dalí, Salvador 168 dandyism 74, 80, 82 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 6 Darwin, Charles 13, 36, 37, 41, 69, 112, 164–5, 167, 214

De l’Orme, Philibert 16 decadence (state of decline) 70, 95, 105, 132, 141, 186, 204 Decadence (literary tradition) 9–10, 82, 189, 191, 206 Delacroix, Eugène 144 Dickens, Charles 34 Dijkstra, Bram 168 diving bell 9, 14, 41, 180, 185, 190, 192, 193, 206, 208 Draughtsman’s Contract, The (film) 19 Dreyfus Affair 8, 69, 141 Duranty, Edmond 61 Dürer, Albrecht 85 Eckmann, Otto 181 Eden Project 34 Eliot, George 129 Ellis, Havelock 101 Enville 27 exoticism 23–4, 37, 58, 67 see also orientalism femme fatale 13, 39, 148–9, 164, 166–70 Feure, Georges de 181 Finney, Gail 126, 128 Flaubert, Gustave 61, 90, 104, 127, 162 fleur fatale 13, 110, 140, 167, 175 fleur de serre 38 flowers death by 108 florist shops (and gangsters) 212 ‘language of’ 13, 150–51, 154, 160, 163, 176, 212 Fontane, Theodore 128–9 Formby, George 130–31 Fortune, Robert 29 France, Anatole 141 244

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Freud, Sigmund 167, 199 Friedman, Donald Flannell 183, 187, 188, 191–2

Hichens, Robert 75, 76 hospital 9, 180, 188, 189, 190, 191 Houellebecq, Michel 147–8 Houtin, François 10, 11 Hugo, Richard 205 Hugo, Victor 198–9 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 7, 12, 39, 44, 62, 136, 180, 199 À rebours 13, 63–70, 90, 96, 106–7, 140, 169–70, 174, 184, 200–201 Le Drageoir aux épices 62 En rade 107 ‘les folies-bergère en 1879’ 117–18 ‘Le Gousset’ 106 hybridization 22, 67, 174 hydrangea 84, 85, 86, 89, 163

Gainsborough, Thomas 72, 73 Gallé, Émile 163, 181, 182 Galsworthy, John 130 garden botanic garden 16, 20, 21, 27, 32, 41, 45 Eden 8, 13, 50, 97, 111, 124, 125, 127–8, 148 hortus conclusus 125, 150 Gardener and Practical Florist, The 73 Gautier, Judith 82 Gautier, Théophile 54, 88, 103, 124, 134–5 Gerard, John 77 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 144 Gilbert and Sullivan 76 Gilkin, Iwan 14, 183 Gissing, George, 36 Glaspalast, Munich 27–8 glass technology 17–24, 192 Goncourt, Jules and Edmond de 32, 61, 64, 65, 89, 145 Gosse, Philip Henry 194–5, 196, 197 Great Gatsby, The (2013 film) 210 Greenaway, Peter 19 Gunn, Thom 191

Impressionism 49–50, 115 In the Heat of the Night (film) 211 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film) 213 iris 86, 146, 163 Jahangir 146 Japanese knotweed 216 Japonisme 77, 96, 162 Jardin d’Hiver 60 Jardin des Plantes 59, 61 Jeannin, Georges 58–9, 59 Jonson, Ben 39 Jour se lève, Le (film) 210–11 Jullian, Philippe 163, 182

Hardy, Thomas 156 Hartley, James 21 Hassall, Arthur Hill 103 Hastings, Phyllis 33 Haussmann, Georges Eugène 47–9, 57 Heine, Thomas Theodor 172, 173 Helleu, Paul 83–5, 84, 163 Herkomer, Hubert von 168

Kees, Weldon 190–91 Keppler, Joseph 42–3 Kerr, William 78 Kew Gardens 21, 22, 27, 34, 78, 130 ‘Ode to Kew’ 24 Khnopff, Fernand 185, 191, 192 Kibble, John 46 245

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King, Amy 62 Kitahara Hakushū 203 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 164 Kubin, Alfred 167–8, 169 Lady’s Magazine, The 19 Laforgue, Jules 201 Lalique, René 163 Lawrence, D. H. 177 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, Comte de Buffon 19 Le Gallienne, Richard 101 Leiden Botanic Gardens 20 Leopardi 8 Le Sidaner, Henri 163, 164 lily 9, 28, 76–80, 81, 150, 157–8, 163, 168, 176, 177, 188 Amorphophallus titanum 34, 35 calla (Zantedeschia aethiopica) 167, 168 Lilium candidum 77 Lilium catesbaei 77 Lilium michauxii 77 tiger (Lilium lancifolium) 78 water (Victoria amazonica) 25 Lindley, John 22 Little Shop of Horrors, The 209–10, 210, 211 Liverpool Botanic Gardens 27 Llewellyn, John Dillwyn 23 Lombroso, Cesare 165 Lorrain, Jean 82, 134, 163 Loti, Pierre 82 Loudon, John 20 Lowell, Robert 204 Ludwig ii, King of Bavaria 65, 85, 131 Winter Garden 23, 24 Mabey, Richard 212, 214–15 Mackenzie, George 20

Maeterlinck, Maurice 7, 41, 102–3, 184, 201–2, 208–9 ‘The Intelligence of Flowers’ 207, 208–9 Serres chaudes 14, 179, 187–90, 191–2 Maguire, Sarah 33 Mahon, Derek 86 Mahood, Molly 177 Mallarmé, Stéphane 64, 104, 115, 122, 176, 189 Malory, Thomas 75 Manet, Édouard 12, 136, 138, 139 Music in the Tuileries 50–51, 52–3, 94 Mapplethorpe, Robert 10 Maupassant, Guy de 29, 30, 101, 108–9, 203 Maxwell, Catherine 113–14, 116 Mendès, Catulle 164 Menon, Elizabeth K. 160 Meynadier, H. 60 Miall, Bernard 185 Millais, John Everett 163 Ophelia 151, 152–3, 154 Miller, Philip 19, 20, 212 Miller, T. S. 208, 209, 217 Mirbeau, Octave 58 Le Jardin des supplices 8, 13, 140– 46, 150, 173–6, 183, 184 ‘Le Petit Pavillon’ 133–4 Monet, Claude 145–6, 147 Montesquiou, Robert de 64, 75, 82, 83–89, 87, 163 Les Chauves-souris 85 Le Chef des odeurs suaves 104–5 ‘Fleurs et Plumes’ 86 Les Hortensias bleus 86 ‘Pays des aromates’ 123 Professionnelles Beautés 90 246

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Moore, George 75 Morel, Bénédict Augustin 69 Morris, William 37, 78, 83, 163, 181 Mucha, Alphonse 163, 181

Poison Ivy 216 Potemkin, Prince Grigory 19 Potter, Jennifer 77, 78, 112 Pre-Raphaelites 151, 175 Proust, Marcel 117, 141 pteridomania 32, 193–4 Puck 40 Punch 24, 79, 80, 81–2, 103

Nero 146 New Woman 166 New York Crystal Palace 27 Nordau, Max 165, 189 Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 46

Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) 82–3 Raffalovich, Marc-André 113–14 Redon, Odilon 199–200, 200 Renoir, Auguste 50 Renoir, Jean 210 Riffaterre, Michael 39–40, 189–90 Rigolet, M. 60 Rimmel, Eugène 100 Robertson, Graham 88 Robinson, Mary 114 Robinson, Phil 37 Robiquet, Jean 104 Rocher, Edmond André 172 Rodenbach, Georges 14, 49, 184, 185–6, 202 Roethke, Theodore 7, 203–4 Rohault de Fleury, Charles de 59 Rollisson, William 22 Rops, Félicien 157, 158, 160, 161, 166, 172 rose 15, 33, 58, 64, 74, 83, 93, 96, 99, 100, 110, 119, 150, 155, 156–7, 162, 163, 168, 176 Rosenfeld, Jason 154 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 37, 78, 154, 155 rot see beauty Rousseau, Henri 51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 126–7, 144 Ruskin, John 26, 36, 112

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O’Brien, Sean 41, 204–5 O’Keeffe, Georgia 10, 11, 168 olfaction(ism) 10, 12, 101, 107, 118 see also perfume Ophelia 151–4, 152–3, 167, 200, 202 orangery 16, 21, 60 orchid 9, 23, 24, 29, 37–8, 41, 67, 70, 71, 75, 111, 112, 129, 160, 163, 173, 182, 191, 211–12 Cattleya 67, 169 orientalism 13, 28, 29, 58, 60, 77–8, 85, 88–9, 100–104, 115, 134, 142–5, 179 Ormsby, Frank 41 Oxford Conservatory 18 Palacio, Jean de 133 Palais de l’Industrie 28, 58 paradise 124–6, 131–4, 146, 148 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 210 patchouli 100, 102, 115, 116, 119 Pater, Walter 12 Paxton, Joseph 25–6, 46 perfume 13, 77, 82, 97–8, 99–106 and memory and desire 115–23 Piesse, Charles H. 112–13 Pinter, Harold 179–80 Plath, Sylvia 179, 191 Pliny the Elder 193 Poe, Edgar Allan 21–2 247

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Sambourne, Linley 79 Sand, George 49 Sargent, John Singer 78 Schwabe, Carlos 163 Serres, Olivier de 18 sexuality 12, 13, 41, 69, 76, 94, 100, 110, 114, 120, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 175, 177 Sheffield Botanic Gardens 27 Sologub, Fyodor 110–11 Stott, Rebecca 32 Strangland, Arthur 209 sunflower 76, 78–80, 112, 145 Süskind, Patrick 107 Sutherland, John 97 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 37, 89, 102, 146–7 Symbolism (Belgian) 14, 181–5 Symons, Arthur 13, 70, 115–23 ‘Hallucination’ 122 London Nights 115–18, 123 ‘Memory’ 121–2 ‘Stella Maris’ 118, 121 ‘White Heliotrope’ 118–21 syphilis 68–9, 170 Taine, Hippolyte 49 Tennyson, Alfred 130, 151–2 Terdiman, Richard 55 Thing from Another World, The (film) 213 Thurner, Gabriel 58 Tissot, James 135–6, 137 triffid 10, 214, 215 tuberose 109, 110, 111, 112–14

Vie Parisienne, La (magazine) 94, 150, 160 Viel, Jean-Marie-Victor 58 Vivien, Renée 163 Wade, William 72 Wagner, Richard 33, 91 Wallace and Gromit 131 Ward, Nathaniel Bagshaw 31–2, 194 Wardian case 31 Waterhouse, John William 156 Waters, Michael 36 Wells, H. G. 29–30, 37–8, 213–14 Whistler, James McNeill 75, 78 white heliotrope 119 Wilde, Oscar 7, 74–6, 79, 80, 82, 89, 115, 140 ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ 105 parody of 81 The Picture of Dorian Gray 64, 70, 96–8 Salomé 105–6, 157 Williams, Tennessee 179 Witkin, Joel-Peter 10–11 Wratislaw, Theodore 114 Wyndham, John 214, 215 Zola, Émile 12, 39, 61–3, 110, 162, 190, 207 L’Assommoir 62 La Conquête de Plassans 61 La Curée 45, 61, 67, 136, 138–40 La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret 109–10, 162

Unter den Linden 46 Veitch, James 29 Verhaeren, Émile 49, 184–5, 187 Verlaine, Paul 115, 122, 163

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