The Nature of Sensation Fiction: Botanical Textuality in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Rhoda Broughton’s Red as a Rose Is She (1870)

Hallum, Kirby-Jane

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_9

The Nature of Sensation Fiction: Botanical Textuality in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Rhoda Broughton’s Red as a Rose Is She (1870)

Kirby-Jane Hallum⁴

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First Online: 08 March 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

Abstract

Numerous publications documenting the meanings attributed to various blooms and plants entered the early-nineteenth-century book market, with Charlotte de Latour’s The Language of Flowers (1819) remaining relatively well known today. The Victorians, too, embraced the language of flowers as a means of codified and sentimental communication. While this fascination with the natural world is well established, insufficient attention has been given to Victorian writers’ productive engagement with floriography, a system of reference that accompanied a burgeoning interest in botany and classification. This chapter will explore how for women sensation writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Rhoda Broughton who were trying to highlight social issues, while still conforming to moral standards, the language of flowers provides a strategic yet restrained way to write about female desire.

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Notes

1.
George Gordon Byron, “Maid of Athens , Ere We Part,” in Selected Poetry of Lord Byron, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 194–95 (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 15–16.
2.
Originally published in French as Le Langage des Fleurs in 1819, de Latour’s handbook was translated into English, and adapted by Frederick Shorbel in 1834 so as to better reference English botany. In a nod to Bryon, Shorbel inconspicuously included the aforementioned lines as an epigraph in the frontispiece of the book. See, Charlotte de Latour, The Language of Flowers, trans. Frederick Shorbel (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835) and J. L. K., The Voice of Flowers (London: W.H. Broom, 1871). Later in the century, Greenaway’s beautifully illustrated Language of Flowers appeared and is still reprinted today: Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1884). De Latour’s text is the main source for my examination of floral imagery in this chapter.
3.
Notable examples are Michael Waters, The Garden in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), and Judith Page and Elise L. Smith, Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
4.
Simon Cooke , “Reading Landscape: Wilkie Collins, the Pathetic Fallacy, and the Semiotics of the Victorian Wasteland,” The Wilkie Collins Journal 2 (1999): 20. When we think of reading nature in sensation fiction, Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, notable for his eccentric penchant for roses, usually springs to mind. In The Moonstone, Cuff admits his preference for flowers over human relationships: “I haven’t much time to be fond of anything … but when I have a moment’s fondness to bestow, most times … the roses get it”: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, [1868] 1999), 157. Indeed, Collins “insists on combining emotions with topographies” across his fiction to give expression to a range of psychological conditions (Cooke, “Reading Landscape,” 18).
5.
Henry Mansel , “Sensation Novels, ” Quarterly Review 113 (1863): 482–83.
6.
John Ruskin, Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (New York: John Wiley and Sons, [1868] 1888), 64–65.
7.
Elaine Shefer, Birds, Cages and Women in Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Art (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 17.
8.
de Latour , The Language of Flowers, viii.
9.
Interestingly, Braddon chose to stay with the company that had so successfully published Aurora Floyd the year before and was beginning to have a reputation as a hub for sensation fiction. Joanne Shattock, “The Publishing Industry,” in The Nineteenth-Century Novel, 1820–1880, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, ed. John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor, 3–21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15.
10.
Pamela K. Gilbert has argued: “Braddon deliberately attempts to establish the novel, and herself as its author in the high-culture genre of realism by positioning the novel, through internal textual cues, against sensation fiction.” Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9. More recently, Madeleine Seys has contended that “Braddon’s positioning of The Doctor’s Wife within contemporary debates about realism and sensationalism, reality and fantasy, and women’s writing and reading is deliberately self-conscious.” “The Scenery and Dresses of Her Dreams: Reading and Reflecting (on) the Victorian Heroine in M. E. Braddon’s, The Doctor’s Wife,” in Changing the Victorian Subject, ed. Maggie Tonkin, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, 177–200 (Adelaide: Adelaide University Press, 2014), 182.
11.
Lyn Pykett , The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 55.
12.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1864] 2008), 72.
13.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 115.
14.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 112.
15.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 101.
16.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 113.
17.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 23.
18.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 114.
19.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 114.
20.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 116.
21.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 117.
22.
de Latour , Language of Flowers, 67.
23.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 280.
24.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 117.
25.
Amy Mae King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6.
26.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 139.
27.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 139.
28.
Laurie Garrison, Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2.
29.
Catherine J. Golden, “Censoring Her Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and The Doctor’s Wife,” in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina, 29–40 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 37.
30.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 202.
31.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 184.
32.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 214.
33.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 23.
34.
The French word for pear is “armonde” which rhymes with “omonde,” the French word for hope. De Latour suggests the scope for meaning of the language of flowers since “a flower or fruit expresses an idea suggested by a word with which its name happens to rhyme” (Language of Flowers, 15).
35.
Braddon, Doctor’s Wife, 68.
36.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 79.
37.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 269.
38.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 67.
39.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 195.
40.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 197.
41.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 201.
42.
Narin Hassan, “‘Hothouse Flowers and Despair’: Reading the Garden in M. E. Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife,” special issue, “The Garden,” Mosaic 38, no. 4 (2005): 76.
43.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 201.
44.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 186.
45.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 334.
46.
See, for example, Richard Collins, “Marian’s Moustache: Bearded Ladies, Hermaphrodites, and Intersexual Collage in The Woman in White,” in Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins , ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox, 131–72 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 152; Rachel Ablow, “Good Vibrations: The Sensationalization of Masculinity in The Woman in White,” Novel 37, no. 1–2 (2003): 163; and D. A. Miller, “Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” in The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, 107–36 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 107, 110.
47.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 94.
48.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 234.
49.
Hassan , “‘Hothouse Flowers,’” 73.
50.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 353.
51.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 401.
52.
Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife, 403.
53.
de Latour , Language of Flowers, 255.
54.
Margaret Oliphant , “Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 102 (1867): 265.
55.
“Red as a Rose Is She,” Times (London), 7 March 1870: 4.
56.
Rachel Anderson, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-Literature of Love (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 62.
57.
“Miss Rhoda Broughton: A Novelist of English Character,” Times (London), 7 June 1920: 17.
58.
Rhoda Broughton, Red as a Rose Is She (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), 3.
59.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 3.
60.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 70.
61.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 26–27.
62.
O’Farrell records how the blush as a “somatic display” has been traditionally employed by writers to reveal concealed emotions and character. Mary Ann O’Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Blush (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 2. In this way, it has served as a useful tool in the hands or sensation writers to evoke imagination and affect.
63.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 32.
64.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 5.
65.
Page and Smith, Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape, 173.
66.
King , Bloom, 3–4.
67.
King , Bloom, 4.
68.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 84.
69.
Talairach-Vielmas has already established a relationship between the representation of the female body and nature in Broughton’s fiction, although her discussion of Not Wisely But Too Well (1867) is confined to thinking only about exotic flowers and their implications for orientalism and consumerism. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 103.
70.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 18.
71.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 125.
72.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 165–66.
73.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 51.
74.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 79.
75.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 78. The French term, literally meaning “devil’s beauty,” was used somewhat disapprovingly in the Victorian period to denote a mixture of youth and captivating beauty.
76.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 40 (emphasis in original).
77.
Pamela K. Gilbert, “Introduction,” in Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, 9–30 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010), 24. Meyer has noticed that central characters in Broughton’s fiction succumb to consumption “as a result of romantic developments.” Basil Meyer, “Till Death Do Us Part: The Consumptive Victorian Heroine in Popular Romantic Fiction,” The Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 2 (2003): 287. He argues that Broughton’s artistic use of the disease is grounded in the “more clinical aspects of the consumptive mythology” in terms of her depiction of Nell’s rosy cheeks in Cometh Up as a Flower (“Till Death Do Us Part,” 294).
78.
Wilson Flagg, Analysis of Female Beauty (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), 29.
79.
Valerie Steele , Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 119.
80.
Broughton, Red as a Rose Is She, 386.
81.
Lori Hope Lefkovitz, The Character of Beauty in the Victorian Novel (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 169.
82.
Flagg , Analysis of Female Beauty, 28.
83.
Broughton, Red as a Rose Is She, 438. The Angel Gabriel was often painted presenting Mary with a white lily when he announced to her that she would give birth to the Son of God.
84.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 337.
85.
The term “anorexia nervosa” was coined by William Withey Gull in 1873. He proposed that a refusal to eat stemmed from a form of nervous disease that was particularly associated with young women. Erin O’Connor, “Pictures of Health: Medical Photography and the Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 4 (1995): 535.
86.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 234.
87.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 346.
88.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 358.
89.
de Latour, Language of Flowers, 71.
90.
Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, xi.
91.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 445.
92.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 443.
93.
Broughton , Red as a Rose Is She, 445.
94.
Marilyn Wood, Rhoda Broughton: Profile of a Novelist (Stanford, CA: Paul Watkins, 1993), 27.

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Research and Enterprise, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Kirby-Jane Hallum

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Kirby-Jane Hallum
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University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grace Moore
Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Michelle J. Smith

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Hallum, KJ. (2018). The Nature of Sensation Fiction: Botanical Textuality in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Rhoda Broughton’s Red as a Rose Is She (1870). In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_9

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_9
Published: 08 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57336-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57337-7
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