Analogies from the Vegetable Creation: The Botanical Logic of Edgeworth's Belinda

Abstract

Natural objects in the world of Maria Edgeworth's 1801 novel Belinda express both the cultural capital of scientific learning and moral truth grounded in empirical observation. This is especially true of the novel's treatment of plants. Drawing on the contexts of Maria Edgeworth's own biographical connections to botanists such as her half-brother Michael Pakenham Edgeworth (1812-1881), John Huddlestone Wynne's Fables of Flowers (1773), and Edgeworth's co-authored treatise Practical Education (1798), this essay analyzes the roles of exotic plants in Belinda in order to parse the ways that these living natural objects functioned within and despite networks of empire. The novel's "botanical logic" emerges through an application of critical plant studies and object-oriented ontology (OOO) to three of the novel's episodes: the well-known aloe in Lady Delacour's gala; Charles Percival's duckweed; and the extended subplot between Clarence and Virginia. Although Edgeworth's novel settles on an anthropocentric hierarchy placing human over plant, botanical analogies allow Edgeworth's fiction to explore more ecologically equitable ways of seeing the natural world, ones in which natural philosophy offers a new language to describe romantic wonder.