Carnivorous Plants and Man-Eating Women: Vegetal (New) Womanhood and the Botanical Gothic

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This paper explores the genre of the botanical gothic, a derivative of the fin de siècle adventure novel in which (generally male) British explorers engage in combat with fictitious killer vegetation from the colonial periphery. I argue that the carnivorous plant of the botanical gothic is intimately entangled with another “man-eating” figure: that of the New Woman. Through a reading of H. G. Wells's “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), Algernon Blackwood's “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), and Beatrice Grimshaw's “The Tale of the Scarlet Butterflies” (1908), I demonstrate the extent to which the monstrous plant is implicitly gendered as threateningly female and depicted as a sort of exoticized vegetal femme fatale that lures weak-minded men to their demise. This, I argue, builds upon contemporaneous anxieties surrounding feminine sexual independence and the destabilization of gender roles in order to create an excessively sensualized feminine plant “rival” to supplant—and indeed queer—the normatively gendered dynamic of the local, domestic space. Male subjects in such narratives are emasculated under the threateningly penetrative agencies of the carnivorous plant that becomes a vegetal stand-in, I suggest, for the deviant and “man-eating” sexuality attributed to the New Woman figure herself.