Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, by Jane Desmarais

Abstract

Reviewed by: Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais Mary Bowden (bio) Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, by Jane Desmarais; pp. 248. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, £25.00, $40.00. In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin noted "the increased size and beauty which we now see in the varieties of the heartsease, rose, pelargonium, dahlia, and other plants, when compared with the older varieties or with their parent-stocks" ([Penguin, 2009], 42). Darwin uses these transformed flowers as evidence for his analogy between artificial and natural selection: their enhanced size and altered appearance indicate the Victorians' ability to modify nature according to human desires. This Victorian emphasis on floral manipulation extended to the cultivation of exotic species in British glasshouses. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class consumers had benefited from new methods of manufacturing glass and cast iron, which made the materials for constructing conservatories more affordable, and from improved technologies for transporting plants, which made plants from distant reaches of Britain's Empire newly accessible. Exotic flora filled British glasshouses. These exotic plants—or "monsters under glass"—were natural objects that were artificially modified and maintained. Jane Desmarais argues in Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present that in the late nineteenth century, these hothouse flowers "enter literary language in a highly charged way" (7), offering an important challenge to traditional symbolic associations that "equated flowers with beauty and femininity" (8). Instead, the artificiality of hothouse flowers, and the precarity of their existence, evoked darker associations with exotic invasions, sickness, and rot. Desmarais argues that by the twentieth century, these metaphoric meanings offered an idiom for "comment[ing] on the contradictions and complexities of modern existence" (12). While Desmarais's work offers a brief history of plant cultivation in artificially heated and humidified spaces before 1850—in the first chapter, she tracks the development of hothouse technology from ancient Rome through the "Dark Ages," Renaissance, and eighteenth century—her primary focus in the remainder of the book is the decadent literary and artistic culture of fin-de-siècle Britain and France (17). Desmarais convincingly argues that during this period, the hothouse and the hothouse flower "became key metaphors to describe the experience of living in a rapidly modernizing city-world," as the artificial construction of a cosmopolitan vegetal space paralleled late-nineteenth-century urbanization (7). Desmarais's chapters range broadly across various cultural associations with hothouses and hothouse flowers in this period: she examines the city as hothouse; dandies' flower fetishes; "florientalism," or exoticizing associations with hothouse flowers, particularly through perfume (99); the garden as a paradise or torture site; the "fleur fatale," or the renovation of older associations between women and flowers to encompass dangerous or seemingly degenerate New Women (13); the use of glass, including aquaria and bell jars, "as a metaphor of mental space" (14); and weeds, which she suggests represent fears of primitive invasion. Desmarais's archive of sources is similarly impressive in scope, including the works of writers such as Oscar Wilde and J. K. Huysmans; works of art by artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Tissot, and Édouard Manet; and cultural texts such as perfume advertisements and illustrations from horticultural magazines. While the book's title and introduction suggest a kind of genealogical examination of the ways in which late-Victorian interactions with hothouse flowers continue to inform our cultural understandings of them today, I found the more contemporary interludes in Desmarais's work—such as a brief reading of Raymond Chandler's 1939 [End Page 516] novel The Big Sleep and its 1946 film adaptation—comparatively underdeveloped, and not wholly integrated into a work mainly concerned with the cultural resonances of these flowers in decadent Britain and France. Desmarais's methodology is panoramic. In the introduction, she likens this book to a "cabinet of curiosities" rather than "an exhaustive study of the metaphors of the hothouse and the hothouse flower" (14). Indeed, I found her work most successful when approached as an assemblage of insights rather...