Darwinian Dickinson: The Scandalous Rise and Noble Fall of the Common Clover

Abstract

The bee/flower trope was popular among nineteenth-century women writers, who used it to discuss ways in which courtship protocols tended to favor men while putting women at a disadvantage. By the time Dickinson was writing the majority of her poems involving bees and flowers, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was in print, and I suggest that Darwin's descriptions of co-adaptations between pollinators and flowers influenced how she deployed the trope. I particularly examine a possible connection between Dickinson and Darwin in Fr642, "There is a flower that Bees prefer - ." In that poem, a common clover plant engages in heroic and Darwinian struggles first to survive, and then to ensure her reproductive viability. In addition, I argue that Dickinson uses that poem to justify her practice of competing with other women authors while simultaneously shunning the publicity she feared fame would entail.