BOOK REVIEW: Amy M. King.BLOOM: THE BOTANICAL VERNACULAR IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel Barbara T. Gates (bio) Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, by Amy M. King; pp. xxiii + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £31.00, $49.95. In Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, Amy M. King sets out to show how the Linnaean system of botanical classification and its attendant language influenced English literature. King argues that Linnaeus's work led to a "botanical vernacular," a cultural language that extends well beyond scientific frontiers and into the world of novels. She reminds us that Linnaeus's system, dealing as it does with metaphors of sexual courtship and marriage, applied to plants a language used to discuss human beings and that in a post-Linnaean reversal, plant terms were more commonly applied to human sexual interactions. Primarily, King is concerned with the term "bloom" as it characterizes young women who have become sexually mature. As she explains it, "bloom" can refer both to innocent and provocative behaviors; in so doing, it can also help readers better understand key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (which King calls "classical novels"), both their descriptions and their narratives. To this reviewer, King's argument seems both obvious and a stretch. After Linnaeus, botanical language was indeed used as code for human behaviors, most particularly in sexual primers where the analogy between plants and their parts and human sexual reproduction was carefully drawn. A botanical vernacular—and King's term is a good one—developed in part through increasing amateur interest in botany and filtered into many discourses. Tracing it into nonscientific avenues could offer a fascinating linguistic journey. But as King extends her metaphor to encompass one novel after another, in each case probing a "workable figure that could represent marital sexuality without transgressing the boundaries of decorum" (7), the reader's own bloom can [End Page 510] quickly fade. Does this botanical vernacular consist of only one word and its variants? Is it mainly another way of talking about the marriage plot or, along with gesture and action, of coding texts for readers in the know? And if so—and King does relate her subject to the marriage plot—how deep can her metaphoric readings take us? To a "bloom narrative," seems King's answer (4, and elsewhere), but how effective is she in showing us just what such a narrative is, or why it is important for us to understand? This last question King never quite answers. For the most part,King organizes Bloom chronologically. In order to forge its primary link between the history of science and the evolution of the novel, the book sets out a useful discussion of Linnaeus's work. It continues with readings of eighteenth- century English texts—novels like Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) and poems by Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants (1789) is strategically chosen. Next come close readings of Jane Austen's novels in a chapter titled "Austen's Physicalized Mimeses," where King weds the picturesque garden to sexualized young heroines. When King turns to George Eliot and Henry James for much of the second half of Bloom, readers of Victorian Studies may find the book of most moment. The chapters on Eliot and James are also embedded with readings of novelists like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Finally, the book concludes with a brief, if appropriate, nod to James Joyce's Molly Bloom, who might usefully have been contrasted with Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe. Bloom's strengths and weaknesses might best be probed by address to the chapter "Eliot's Vernaculars: Natural Objects and Revisionary Blooms," primarily because here King extends "bloom narrativity" beyond the bounds of the traditional marriage plot to the subjects of "second blooms" (Middlemarch, 1871-72)and "clandestine bloom" (Adam Bede, 1859) (133). Eliot, King suggests, might even have found the currency of bloom cloying, an interesting idea in and of itself, though one not developed here. What this all amounts to in King's reading of Middlemarch is this: Lydgate mistakes bloom for love in Rosamund, while Casaubon looks for a blooming girl in Dorothea. Then...