Reading Flora: Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden, Henry Fuseli's illustrations, and various literary responses

Abstract

From William Hogarth's The Edwards Family (1733–34) to Mary Cassatt's Woman Reading in a Garden (1880), representations of the female reading in a garden setting are a familiar subject. Yet, within such recognizable scenes the signs that would separate woman from garden from text are ambiguous. In her study of women's involvement in botanical culture, Ann B. Shteir informs us that Flora is not simply the name of the Goddess of Botany, but also a type of text — a flora being an eighteenth-century genre in the natural history field tradition in which plants from a single area are classified. In the Classical period the flower provided a symbol for the text itself, the weaving of garlands being a long-established metaphor for the composing of poetry, thereby revealing Flora's duties to be metapoetic. Chapter 5 of Ovid's the Fasti forges a link between the creativity of Flora and that of the author. In this imaginary interview between the Goddess of Botany and the Roman poet, the specific species of flowers that Flora claims to have invented, such as the hyacinth, crocus and narcissus, are those that Ovid literally gave life to in his Metamorphoses.