Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture by Theresa M. Kelley

Abstract

Theresa M. Kelley. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+342. $55. In recent years, a good deal of important work has been done on close relationship between literature and rise of natural history as a dominant cultural activity late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of these studies have focused upon close ties between natural history and colonialism, and rightly so, because sheer number of specimens, illustrations, and descriptions of foreign natures that appeared Britain at time was inseparably bound up with increasing commercial and imperial reach of Britain. The excitement occasioned by new natures, especially foreign plants, was driven by spectacular rise during eighteenth century of science of botany and emergence--across a wide spectrum of British society--of an extensive cultural interest gardening. These changes, along with rising inland exploration, expansion of global trade, and improvements print technology, made it possible for plants (and illustrations of them) to flood into Britain like never before. The love of plants was integrally bound up with scientific networks and with plant trade, as science of botany became a dominant element aesthetics and consumer habits of an imperial nation. In her deeply engaging and erudite book Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, Theresa M. Kelley acknowledges this account of hegemony of botany during Romantic period, but she wants to tell a different story. Against emphasis upon ways which scientific taxonomies constituted a means of surveying and controlling natures from a distance, making plant knowledge exchangeable among scientists while supplying shopping lists for consumers, Kelley is interested those aspects of botany during Romantic period that were not about consumption, utility, and control, but instead were transgressive undercutting imperial and taxonomic certainties. This is a book which figurative dimensions of plants do not function, as others have argued, to store and consolidate power, but instead to emancipate those who view or read them. Kelley is committed to seeing figural errancy and difference as inherently emancipatory, and to finding close reading a form of freedom. She consequently asks us to see and understand Romantic plants a different way by encouraging us to consider ways which formal and material nature of plants create productive uncertainties and instabilities about their identity and being. For romantic writers and botanists, she writes, plants invited an attraction to material and figurative differences that pushed against epistemic mastery.... Equally invisible and equally unclassifiable ... are aesthetic pleasure and invitation to figure that move just beneath surface of global botanizing as a commercial and imperial venture (1-5). Kelley's book is populated by plants whose material and figurative natures, hands of writers, illustrators, and, one should stress, an outstanding literary critic, undercut scientific and epistemological certainties. The Romantic fascination with plants can often seem just as strange and alien to us as plants that they so avidly collected, exchanged, described, illustrated, and sought to classify. Take, for instance, Mungo Park's excited account of his discovery of a miniscule moss specimen growing heart of Africa. In one of most famous botanical passages Romantic travel literature, Park recounts how, having been robbed of all he possessed and left abandoned in midst of a vast wilderness ... naked and alone; surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage, he was tempted to give up and lie down and perish despair, when suddenly the extraordinary beauty of a small moss, fructification, irresistibly caught my eye. …