Bloom: The botanical vernacular in the English novel, 1770-1900 (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Fanny Burney, Henry James)

Starting with the 1753 publication of Linnaeus' Species Plantarun, modern systematic botany and its popularized taxonomies provided a representational model for the realist novel, particularly in the novel's depiction of sexual maturation and courtship. The girl "in bloom"--the representation of a girl at her social and sexual peak, around which the novel so frequently revolves--is a category in the novel informed by the popularization of eighteenth-century natural science, especially botany, and other related studies of nature, including natural history and landscape aesthetics. A "bloom" in botany is the corolla, the flower, or that which contains the entire reproductive system of the plant, and the "bloom" in the novel is the sign of the heroine approaching marriage. Botany during this period comes to be widely disseminated, and this broad dissemination of botanical knowledge created a "botanical vernacular", a term which designates a set of shared cultural assumptions about the meanings of botanical practice, a language taken from Linnaeus, that is also a novelistic language.; The blooming heroines of the courtship novel are defined by a presentation that elides a putatively bodily fact (the fact of being "in bloom") and a social position, the fact of the girl's insertion into a marriage plot. That elision is underwritten by the most significant fact about the Linnaean system: the way in which his system of classification calls the sexual reproduction of a flower "marriage," a terminology which makes a horticultural fact a human fact, and by extension a human act (marriage) a horticultural, "natual" act (blooming). The study is organized around Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James, and it works closely with the botanical texts of Linnaeus and his literary popularizers, including Erasmus Darwin and Gilbert White. Through a reading of key novels--including Fanny Burney's Evelina, Austen's Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, Eliot's Adam Bede, and James's Portrait of a Lady--the dissertation argues that the bloom narrative enables a physicalized mimesis in the novel of courtship.