‘Emily Lawless and Botany as Foreign Science’

Abstract

The primary goal of botanical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was to describe, categorise and define plants according to one of the many classification systems used. Despite its basis in subjectively selected criteria, system-building was perceived as an objective science and as soon as a classification method was adopted, it was considered universally applicable. Carl Linnaeus’s Sexual System was structured and easy to understand and became one of the most widely used models. System-building and system-modification remained masculine enterprises, but collecting and classification were pursuits open to all, and botany was promoted as an edifying pastime for both men and women in the Enlightenment period. Linnaeus’s System was disseminated throughout Europe in both the original Latin and in various translations, and circulated to a wider audience with the help of popular texts like botanical poems, dialogues and letters. The English versions that popularised the system, however, drew attention to the marriage metaphors Linnaeus used, and the sexual-political climate of the time required that women should be protected from sexualised language. Thus a need – or a market – arose for botanical texts addressed specifically to female users. Apart from being linguistically translated, the texts, or rather the knowledge they contained, needed to be put through a process of what Roman Jakobson terms “intralingual translation”: a rewording where what might be construed as offensive language was removed (114). Alongside literal translations designed to be faithful to the original, a number of feminised adaptations of the Linnaean system therefore also appeared, initially written by men but increasingly produced by women writers (George 1-21). It could be said, then, that two types of translations were necessary to establish Linnaean taxonomy in Britain: linguistic translations from the original Latin to English and cultural translations from scientific botanical language to popular and what was regarded as feminised forms. The most common understanding of translation is the process of changing a text from one language to another, but it can also be defined as “the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form” (“Translation”). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the example of translating a painting into an engraving or etching, and in the case of written material, the other medium or form could be the translation of a scientific treatise into poetry or fiction. The process often involves transmitting metropolitan ideas to the conditions in the periphery, which draws attention to the cultural-political dimensions of the activity. Since no translation can be perfectly equivalent to the source text, the effort paradoxically accentuates the differences between the linguistic and cultural systems it is intended to erase. One effect of conveying information in a translated or alternative form may therefore be that the shortcomings of the original are uncovered. In the case of interlingual translations, the impossibility of exact equivalence is frequently noted as a problem. Intralingual translations, on the other hand, are not expected to be completely faithful to the original, and as a result they create spaces for variations, commentary and subversion. By remaining outside the norms of scientific writing, popular botanical works may expand the subject and include dimensions not normally found in a scientific text, such as subjective or emotional responses to the natural world.