The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century by Liz Bellamy

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century by Liz Bellamy Laura J. Rosenthal Liz Bellamy, The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 248 pp. In The Language of Fruit, Liz Bellamy explores intriguing tensions between the allegorical uses of fruit in literature, of which there are many, and the practice of horticulture. While she surveys a range of fruits with attention to their economic status, their use in recipes, their cultivation, and their social meanings, she focuses on three: the apple, the orange, and the pineapple. Bellamy positions this project at the intersection of historicism and ecocriticism. She approaches literature as an influence as well as a representation. She insists that the traditional, symbolic meanings of fruit not only change over time in response to the material availability of fruit but that these literary meanings have shaped horticulture itself. Thus the book explores literary texts, horticultural writing, and historical practices of cultivation. Bellamy opens by addressing the gendering of fruit, starting with both the Judeo-Christian story of the fall by way of a piece of fruit and the Roman tale of Proserperine, who brings the desolation of winter by eating a pomegranate seed. In Ovid, "she is simultaneously identified with fruit that is consumed and with her own consumption of fruit" (33). Ovid's Metamorphoses has other scenarios in which female vulnerability is expressed through fruit, including the Pomona, the goddess of orchards, seduced by Vertumnus, the god of seasons. Bellamy threads the gendering of fruit throughout the project, demonstrating its significance as well as its instability. While apples represent female frailty, they also symbolize the purity and even masculinity of a native English fruit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Authors of agricultural pamphlets, Bellamy notes, encouraged the planting of fruit trees as a patriotic duty. The iconographic resonances of particular fruits were embedded in their language even as they responded to changes in fruit production technology. This encouragement to grow fruit was in part an expression of xenophobia, warning the public against imported luxury goods and embracing native fruits as natural, wholesome, and healthy. Horticultural literature draws on a range of literary sources to characterize the virtue of certain fruits, connecting agriculture to both literary and spiritual tropes. [End Page 109] This period also saw the emergence of the leisure gardener, who becomes an object of attention in this study. Central to leisure gardening was the hot bed, a frame containing manure that gave out a steady heat in the process of decomposition. (Bellamy later returns to the "hot bed" as a metaphor, as we will see.) The hot bed allowed the elite leisure gardener to cultivate more delicate fruits, such as cherries, strawberries, and later oranges. The first orangeries sprang up in the late seventeenth century, but the fruits themselves were more often imported from Spain or Portugal than grown in England, making the journey intact thanks to their protective rind. While the apple was hailed as healthy native fruit and the orange became a special, usually imported treat, the pineapple remained an embodiment of exotic curiosity throughout the eighteenth century. This tropical fruit blended colonial exoticism with a royal flavor associated with its rarity. The pineapple was further linked to the king because of the way its leaves resemble a crown. This opening investigation of both myth and horticultural practice offers new insight into literary texts. In a chapter on the use of fruit in seventeenth-century poetry, Bellamy complicates recent ecocritical claims by showing that mythic associations with various fruits persist through transformations in horticultural technique. The apple is, of course, foremost in this discussion, as both a native fruit appropriate, according to the poetry, for all classes of eaters, but also particularly fraught with symbolic meaning. In the Restoration, Bellamy argues, the apple is exchanged for the orange. Oranges became the snack of choice in the Restoration theaters, and the license to sell them was quite lucrative. Oranges were relatively expensive luxury commodities, associated with their origins in Spain and Portugal. Portugal was an ally and the home of the queen, Catherine of Braganza, but both...