Abstract
Situating Anna Mendelssohn within the nineteenth-century, highly feminised genres of floral poetry, anthologies, and dictionaries, this essay argues that flowers become a means by which Mendelssohn performs feminist oscillations between sentimentality and sublimity. Through genetic criticism and close reading, the essay attends particularly to Mendelssohn's archived and published instantiations of tulips from 1974 to 1995, culminating in her great poem 'Silk & Wild Tulips' (1995). By tracking floral motifs in Mendelssohn's work, the essay unearths the thorough labour of her editorial processes, as well as some innately conservative strands of her artistry and ideology. At their most ideal, Mendelssohn's flowers stand for an inarticulable, as-yet-unattainable, and distinctly feminised form of communication, and in this guise, they are a catalyst by which Mendelssohn strives to redefine her masculinist avant-garde inheritance. Numerous unpublished archival materials are referenced, among them, Mendelssohn's prison diaries, marginalia, pamphlets, prose typescripts, and poem manuscripts.
Highlights
OPEN ACCESS doing winding flowers / glad, given markers[1] rather than bloom out to die / deep blue irises fold in tighter2
Sara Crangle, University of Sussex, UK, S.Crangle@sussex.ac.uk doing winding flowers / glad, given markers[1] rather than bloom out to die / deep blue irises fold in tighter[2]. She takes to the hills / in a land with no night, all light, in a wandering with primroses / acurling round her feet.[3] give me some books which aren’t about fields / give me a bunch of primroses.[4]
Anna Mendelssohn died on 16 November 2009
Summary
OPEN ACCESS doing winding flowers / glad, given markers[1] rather than bloom out to die / deep blue irises fold in tighter[2]. ‘I don’t want to be a lady novelist | In a summer dress’ Mendelssohn writes in Implacable Art, but she often envisions the self as a bourgeois patroness, genteelly dispensing democracy at her leisured whim.[55] With fantasy privilege comes gothic knowledge: toys and luxuriant outerwear are forged from bones and horn, or fragments of the living.[56] This Victorian drawing-room of verbal curiosities is violated by the reductive, threatening diagnosis of a male perpetrator who is a near-constant presence in Mendelssohn’s writing.57 ‘Mendleson’ he accuses of irrationality, lunacy; confirming the rumours, he labels her feral, rude outsider, a woman who should be cast out or purged.
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