American Idiom: Sarah Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter and the Figuration of National Identity

Abstract

The volume’s opening chapter recalls Sarah Josepha Hale’s efforts to encourage ‘the idioms of America’ in her popular Flora’s Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments. Although aimed at promoting American cultural heritage, this flower book (an ‘anthology’ in more than one sense) was also a collection of British poetry, and Jasper’s account illustrates the importance of English literature as an elegant medium of American expression. This chapter thus immediately sets forth key tensions at work in nineteenth-century literary culture, as Jasper shows Hale executing the complex task of rooting American literature in a British cultural past while simultaneously clearing sufficient ground for its independent growth. With careful attention to the publishing conventions of the flower book genre, this essay invites us to consider particular insights that book history offers into the processes that bring transnational circuits of culture into national service, and demonstrates how the idea of an American identity rooted in landscape and place continued to interact with more fluid cultural identities independent of place.

Many people helped make this chapter a reality. The Center for British and Irish Studies and the Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado provided crucial funding for research. For a fruitful month of research and scholarly fellowship I likewise thank the enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The staff at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library also provided valuable guidance through their rich archives. Kirstyn Leuner, Paul Westover, and Ann Rowland each had a hand in shaping the chapter’s final form, as did the Faculty Editing Service at Brigham Young University. For their influence on my thinking and writing I particularly thank Jordan Stein, who inspired the project in the first place and whose support and genius have guided it through the many years since, and Jill Heydt-Stevenson, whose judgment and mentorship have enhanced not only this chapter, but all of my work as a scholar.