Historical Semiotics of Literary Flower PDF

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Towards a Historical Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification

Author(s): Beverly Seaton
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 679-701
Published by: Duke University Press
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Towardsa HistoricalSemiotics
of LiteraryFlowerPersonification
Beverly Seaton
English, Ohio State at Newark
Give place you ancient powers,

That turned men to Flowers,
For newer Writerspen,
Yet tolde of Flowersreturn'dto Men.
The Masqueof Flowers 1967 [1613]
Throughout the history of Western literature, plants of all kinds have

been personified as men and women. Trees and flowers are the two
most common categories of such plants. This paper concerns flowers
only; trees would be another, quite different subject for semiotic analy-
sis. Flowers have their biological role in the lives of plants (as studied
by botanists), but their role in the cultures of the people who appreci-
ate them is an interesting and complex example of sign-function. The
codes of flower usage in cultures of both East and West have often
been studied by anthropologists and folklorists, especially popular
folklorists of the late nineteenth century (Cooke 1882; Folkard 1884;
Friend 1884; Gubernatis 1878; Thistelton-Dyer 1889). Most of us are
familiar with the particular flower customs of our own culture, typi-
cally relating to holidays or ceremonies such as weddings and funerals.
Such customs would be a fruitful subject for a semiotic investigation,
but this study does not concern them. Rather, my subject is the series
of transformations undergone by the concept of flower personification
from classical times to the end of the nineteenth century.
By flower personificationI mean any signification in any form that
brings together flowers and human beings. Included are figures such
as metaphor and simile, metonymy, symbol, and allegory, as well as
narrative elements and personification in its narrow sense. I do not
Poetics Today 10:4 (Winter 1989). Copyright ? 1989 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/89/$2.50.
680 Poetics Today 10:4
mean to include all poetic or literary uses of flowers; for example,

landscape description and conventional spring imagery do not de-
pend on personification. I do not consider the use of flower names
for literary characters (or for real persons), although it would be an
interesting subject. Usually, although not always, when an entire cast
of flowers is presented in a narrative, there is personification present.
While flowers have sometimes been personified as men, they are far
more frequently associated with women. This has been true through-
out the history of Western culture, in varying degrees. The myth of
the nymph Chloris (Xwp6og,"green") transformed into Flora, the god-
dess of flowers, after her rape by and marriage to Zephyrus, is one of
the controlling narrative forms of flower personification. This myth
not only personifies the great seasonal change into spring, as warm
breezes change the green landscape into one decorated with flowers of
all colors, but also clearly associates flowers with women. This "history"
of Flora, best expressed in book 5 (the month of May) of Ovid 1929
and pictured for us in Botticelli's Laprimavera(Wind 1967; Armstrong
1969), is not the only version of Flora's history, as we discuss later.
But it governs many of the literary appearances of flowers despite
other factors in their sign-function. The basis for the fact that flowers
usually signify women is reality (Norrman and Haarberg 1980). We
consider flowers beautiful to look at and enjoy the fragrance of most of
them, and we understand their role, more or less, in the reproductive
cycle of plants; most writers have been men who enjoyed the beauty
and fragrance of women, and likewise their role in reproduction. The
similarity between flowers and women is thus quite a dominant note in
our literature, based on such associations.' Another association is that
flowers so acutely illustrate the beauty of youth, the fading that comes
with middle age, and finally death, thus serving as a common, easily
grasped sign of mutability, which Western writers relate to women
in multitudinous ways. Thus, while in the analysis to follow I some-
times refer to flowers being personified as men, it is best to recognize
from the start that throughout Western literary history women are the
persons most often represented by flowers.
II
When I first began to study flower personification, I could see no
diachronic pattern to it; it all appeared to me as so many barnacles
attached to the literary vessel. But when I looked specifically at the
1. In this very brief form, I am obviously aligning myself with those who believe
that codes are not entirely arbitrary. I find the evidence of Norrman and Haarberg
(1980), for example, quite compelling.
Seaton * Semiotics of LiteraryFlower Personification 681
change between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and

English flower books, I began to see that there was a consensus in a
given literary era concerning the ways in which flowers are used in
personification and in the basis of the perception which ultimately be-
comes the expression (Eco 1979: 520ff.). At a given time, flowers (the
physical material, the natural fact) are charged with cultural significa-
tion well understood by writers, and not just the minor writers, whom
we expect to be more attuned to convention. In the nineteenth century,
the rise of a middle-class reading public coincided with a very great
interest in flowers, and thus the aspects of literary flower personifica-
tion shown in that century are best (but not exclusively) revealed in
the work of popular writers. But literary flower personification is not
especially linked to class. Both elite and mass audiences are involved
in the literary history of flower personification.
Thinking, then, of literary flower personification as an example of
sign-function liable to transformations based on shifts in perception
and the socio-ideological codes which motivate them (Corti 1978: 5),
I surveyed flower personification in Western literature. My first obser-
vation was that, throughout the centuries, two bases of such personi-
fication have alternated in dominance. I call the one biological (body;
heart), the other social (soul; head). The terms in parentheses identify
the concepts in terms frequently used for such dichotomies in tradi-
tional rhetoric, and of course they signify the two basic divisions of
human identity. By biologicalbasis I mean simply that flowers are seen
to represent persons in their relations to nature, in their sexual roles,
in the place of mankind in the cosmos. By social I mean that flowers
are seen to represent persons in their ranks in society, in their inter-
action with others, in their characters as different one from another,
in their religious orientations. Psychologically, the biologically based
perceptions tend towards emotion, the socially based towards ideas.
Figure 1 shows the shifting dominance of these bases throughout
our history. The rather amorphous periods I have chosen become
more narrowly delineated as I reach modern times because that is the
period of my specialized study. Despite the impossibility of precision
in such a study, I have found the categorization useful. Writers of
the classical period relate flowers to persons almost exclusively in the
biological mode; the extreme reaction of the emerging Christian cul-
ture to paganism can be seen in the almost exclusively social base of
medieval literary flower personification. Throughout the Renaissance
a balance of sorts was achieved between the two. Various factors in the
socio-ideological world of the eighteenth century moved its flower per-
sonification in the social direction, and nineteenth-century concerns
pulled it back towards the biological range.
Biological(body, heart) Social(soul, head)
Classical
Medieval
Renaissance
century
Eighteenth
Nineteenth
century
Figure 1. Periods of dominanceof biologicaland socialbases of flower per-

sonification
III
In each period, in short, there is one form in which flower personifi-
cation is most often found and which can be said to characterize the
flower personification code of the era. Table 1 shows these forms as
well as indicates a more specific name for the basis of the era's flower
personification. Table 2 presents approximations of the tensions which
motivated the changes in the codes. The code in each era shows a
conscious self-identification partially defined by a reaction against the
flower personification code of the previous period. In the rest of the
paper, I will try to explain these tables in detail.
The most familiar and influential form of flower personification in
the classical period is the metamorphosis story, which can be found
in many places, most notably in Ovid's Metamorphoses.Many of the
transformation stories concern trees, of course, the most famous being
Daphne's changing into the laurel. While some of the metamorphoses
of women or men into trees and other plants are means of escaping
from a pursuer, flower shapes in Ovid's stories are taken on only in
death (sometimes caused by unrequited love). Only four flower meta-
morphoses are described in full by Ovid, and they are all popular
legends. The best known is the story of Narcissus, the youth who is
changed into a flower as he admires his reflection in a pool. Hyacinthus
is killed while playing games with his lover, Apollo, who then changes
him into the purple hyacinth, while Adonis, killed by a wild boar, is
changed into a crimson anemone by Venus. A more complex story is
Table 1 Aspects of flower personification, by period
18th 19th
Period Classical Medieval Renaissance Century Century
Basis Cosmic Abstracted Spiritualized Social Emotion

biology spiritual sexual connota-
qualities associations tions
Form Metamor- Symbol Metaphor Fable, Language
phosis personi- of flowers,
story fication lyric
in poetry,
botanical flower
science sermons
Table 2
Period change Tension
Classical to medieval Need to distance Christian ideas

from the pagan background
Medieval to Renaissance Decline of Mary, courtly love
traditions in a return to
sexuality in nature
Renaissance to 18th century Desire to generalize and use
the new knowledge of flowers
18th century to 19th century Desire to internalize flower "feelings"
the metamorphosis of Clytie, who loves the sun but is not loved in re-
turn. After she causes the death of Leucothoe, Clytie pines away much
as Narcissus does. Ovid describes the resulting flower as "a flower like
a violet" which "turns to the sun."2 Despite their differences, these
2. Scholars do not know what flower is so described. The heliotrope does not turn
to the sun; indeed, no flower does in the way told by the poets. The helianthus, or
sunflower, not only is not meant in the story but, in fact, does not turn to the sun,
either (see Heiser 1976).
stories have a common element: They are memorials to someone who

died for love or who was much beloved by a powerful god. The most
obvious characteristic of them is that we see the person dying (he is
buried or his blood is spilled on the ground) and then flowers grow
from that spot, representing the common motif of life springing from
death, the interconnection of all life forms. Thus we can call the basis
of classical flower personification a sort of cosmic biology, in which
flowers are associated with persons in their shared mortality (Wilhelm
1965: 38ff.).
The Greek poets used flowers often in their poetry, but mostly as
images only, without personification, or as part of the landscape. Me-
leager's (1975) poetry contains many flowers, but his most interesting
use of flowers occurs in the preface to the Garland, a collection of
epigrams by various poets, in which he describes the poetry of each
poet included in terms of a characteristic flower or plant. The col-
lection of poems is a wreath made from various flowers. This conceit
was continued in the names given collections of verse and is inter-
nalized today in our word anthology,from the Greek davog, "flower,"
and koyog, "word." A popular name for such collections up until the
late Renaissance was a latinized form,florilegium. This connection be-
tween poems and flowers is one of beauty and creation: Poems, like
flowers, are beautiful creations. And this concept has an interesting
history. At the same season of the year that the Romans celebrated
the floralia, or floral games, culminating on May 3, the Docteurs du
Gai-Scienceof fourteenth-century France initiated thejeuxfloraux, one
of the most celebrated of all poetry contests. The garland woven by
Meleager in his collection includes the roses of Sappho, the lilies of
Anyte, the narcissi of Melanippides, the myrtle of Kallimachos, and
the pomegranate flowers of Menekrates. Most of this poetry seems to
concern love affairs, which, together with the metamorphosis stories,
firmly links flowers to love, romance, and their major motivating force,
biology (ibid.).
IV
When we compare the most prominent form of flower personification
in the Middle Ages, the flower as Christian symbol, with the pagan
metamorphosis stories and other earthbound references, we see that a
rather violent cultural shift has occurred. The tensions which created
this change can be traced in the writings of the early Christian fathers.
In its first centuries, Christianity defined itself partially by its signifi-
cant opposite, the pagan world dominated by Roman civilization. In
order to isolate some of the causative factors in the Christian attitude
towards flowers, we need to consider the ceremonial uses of flowers in
pagan civilization. Pliny (1969: VI-VII, books 20-27) tells us that

plants and flowers are important and specifies which are mostly used
in chaplets, garlands, and crowns. Pliny also explains the proper uses
of such floral adornments. Flowers were chosen for both color and
scent to be worn by Romans when in a festive mood. Chaplets and
crowns were marks of honor and respect, and military heroes were
rewarded with them. Thus the rose, lily, and violet, the great trio
of popular flowers, were most often associated with garlands that
adorned either festive pagans or the images of their gods. Offering
flowers to the gods was a common custom, one which much troubled
early Christian writers.
Tertullian (1885), the Christian apologist of the third century, wrote
a specific work about the ceremonial use of flowers, "De corona." A
practical question for Christians of those times was, should Christian
soldiers refuse to wear their laurel wreaths? Tertullian takes that ques-
tion as the starting point for a disquisition which explains that the use
of flowers in crowns (or chaplets) is not a Christian tradition. While the
Scriptures do not forbid it, they do not encourage it, either. He allows
that God created the flowers for us to enjoy, and thus we are allowed
to carry them and strew our beds with them. But they do not belong
on the head (which Tertullian obviously associates with the soul and
ideas, as opposed to the body and senses). He opposes the ceremo-
nial use of flowers in any form by Christians, save only the wearing
of Christ's crown of thorns. But Tertullian, in this as in other things,
did not prevail. Other church fathers, such as Clement of Alexan-
dria, also attacked flowers, but it was not long before early Christians
were wearing floral chaplets at their weddings. By the fourth century,
flowers were being used in churches and on tombs. Some of the early
fathers had tried to reserve the use of flowers for the tombs of saints,
but their ideas were not followed (Cabral and Leclerq 1923: 1693-99;
1932: 1889-90).
So we can see what tensions existed, and we also see that flowers
regained their popularity in religious and ceremonial customs. By the
Middle Ages, flowers decorated the statues of saints, were worn in gar-
lands by priests, and appeared on altars. Statues of Mary and Christ
were often crowned with flowers. But the struggle over this left its
mark in the flower personification peculiar to the literature of the
Christian Middle Ages. Flowers had become matters of the head, as
Tertullian put it; later Christian writers made it so.
There is no sharper indication of the repudiation of the biological
basis of flower personification by the Middle Ages than the contrast
between the story of the origin of the floralia as told by Ovid and Boc-
caccio. Ovid (1929), summing up the myth of Flora in the Augustan
Age, told of the origin of the goddess and then explained that the
Roman senate established the floralia in her honor after she refused
to do her work unless so memorialized. Boccaccio (1963), a storyteller
and tale collector of a later age, told it differently. According to him,
Flora was a rich Roman prostitute who endowed the Romans with her
fortune to hold the games; the Flora myth as told by Ovid was invented
as a cover-up by the senators. Thus the link between paganism and
flowers was demythologized in the Middle Ages, just as other myths
were attacked.
In her study of medieval gardens, Teresa McLean (1980) explains
that the major garden image of the period was not the Garden of
Eden, although it was popular, but the garden in the Song of Songs.
Many medieval scholars wrote commentaries on it, including Hugh
and Richard of St. Victor. It provided the model of the enclosed gar-
den, and the interpretation of it as a theological treatise in the form
of a lovesong made it an ideal transition between the biological basis
of flower personification and the religious basis favored in the Middle
Ages. Church fathers like Rabanus Maurus (1864), in De universo, in-
terpreted the meanings of flowers in theological terms, thus making
flowers a matter of the head, in Tertullian's words. The three great
flowers of the classical period, the rose, lily, and violet, became the
three great floral symbols of the church. The conventional floral sym-
bolism of the period was largely in place by the first half of the ninth
century, for at the end of his Hortulus, an account of the herbs and
flowers growing in his "little garden," Walahfrid Strabo (1966: 63), a
student of Rabanus Maurus, tells of the lily and the rose:
These two flowers,so loved and widelyhonored,

Have throughoutthe ages stood as symbols
Of the church'sgreatesttreasures:for it plucksthe rose
In token of blood shed by the Blessed Martyrs;
The lily it wearsas a shining sign of its faith.
The rose, with its associations of love, joy, and beauty, came to repre-
sent all of the passionate, joyful aspects of medieval religious personi-
fication; the lily, its cooler aspects, purity and chastity; the violet, the
humility and patient virtues of the Christian life. The literature of the
Middle Ages offers many examples of literary flower personification
in which these three flowers, along with other popular flowers such as
the periwinkle, primrose, and marigold (calendula), represent Chris-
tian virtues and the abstract qualities of major saints. Those virtues
derive from the qualities of the flowers-color, odor, growth habits,
uses-making them strongly iconic.
In Latin devotional hymns, the Virgin Mary was frequently com-
pared to flowers, especially the rose, and this persisted in Middle En-
glish hymns (Freeman 1966: 181). In medieval lyrics, Mary is often
described in such floral terms as the "flur of alle," the "virgine fresch
as ros in may," and "of all maydens flourre." There is a considerable
tradition, in fact, of the flos florum (flur of alle) or "flower of flower"
topos in which hymns to the Virgin have their place (Giametti 1966:
47-48; Dronke 1968: 181-92). In some lyrics, the flowers are more
abstract; for instance, in one lyric of the thirteenth century, "The Lily
with Five Leaves," the lily's leaves are five virtues (Brown 1932: 29).
The flowers could also speak for themselves, as in Bosnevin da Riva's
(1941: 77-86) Disputatiorosa cum viola of the twelfth century, in which
the proud rose and the humble violet debate their merits and the lily
judges in the violet's favor. In the fourteenth-century elegy The Pearl,
flowers are made to symbolize mutability and then immortality (Kean
1967). Sometime during this period, that flower of troublesome iden-
tity, the fleur-de-lis, appeared. In it we have an abstract flower created,
it would seem, for the purpose of symbolism (Cabral and Leclerq
1923: 1699-1708).
The Song of Songs formed a bridge between flowers/love and
flowers/religion; we note that a bridge can usually be crossed from
either side. Thus when the beginnings of the Renaissance were felt in
Europe, the associations of flowers and love began to arise from poems
imitating the devotional hymns. This intertextuality is examined in
Wilhelm's (1965: 105-39) chapter on the poems of the twelfth-century
Carmina burana, in which typical Mary poems are parodied with the
mistress taking the Virgin's place. The lois d'amour,or rules of the
floral games established in fourteenth-century Toulouse, specify that
the poetry entered in the contest be religious, yet one historian char-
acterizes it as a mixture of passion and piety which reveals a longing
to shift the focus of the poems from the Virgin Mary to the mistress
(Gelis 1912: 49). Before the connection between flowers and the Vir-
gin Mary was codified, a writer like Venantius Fortunatus (1981) in the
late sixth century could personify the violet in his poems addressed
to the former queen Radegonde with no suggestion of disrespect for
religion. The qualities of the violet, perfume and color, represent the
qualities of Radegonde herself in the poem "Violets" ("Ad eandem de
violis"), while in "Flowers" ("Item ad eandem pro floribus transmis-
sis") the poet sends her purple violets and golden crocus, flowers in
the royal colors symbolizing what she has given up yet retained. But
one poet of the thirteenth century, when speaking of his mistress in
floral terms, invokes the many Mary poems of literary tradition:
hire rode is ase rose that red is on rys,
with lilye-whiteleres lossom he is;
the primerolehe passeth, the pervenkeof pris,

with alisaundrethereto ache & anys....
that syht upon that semelyto blis he is broht,
he is solsecle to sanne ys forsoht.
("Annotand Johon,"in Brown 1932)
[Her complexion is like the red rose on the branch;
she is lovely,with lily-whitecheeks;
she surpassesthe primrose,the preciousperiwinkle;
with alexanders(a potherb of the parsleyfamily),parsley,
and anise....
He who sees her is broughtto bliss;
she is the marigoldthat is sought after for healing.]
This is a clear signal that the flower code is undergoing a change. What
we find in the Renaissance is that the two rival traditions of flower
personification, the biological and the social, balanced out in a richly
intertextual melange.
V
If we characterize the Renaissance broadly as humanism fueled by
sympathy with the classical world, we are not surprised to see a re-
action against the strong religious associations of flowers appear in the
flower personification, and we may expect to find a return to the bio-
logical associations of flowers. We see also the beginnings of scientific
botany in the emphasis on observation. As Julius Held (1961: 206) ex-
plains in his study of the Flora iconography, in the sixteenth century
Flora began to be associated especially with plants and flower grow-
ing and often appeared as a statue overlooking the flower gardens
in baroque parks. One example in literature is the garden eclogues
of Italian neo-Latin writers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries (Grant 1965: 234-37).
Two magnificent flower books of the early seventeenth century re-
veal ways in which the authors worked out some new aspects of flower
personification within conventional limitations. One, the Partheneia
sacra of Henry Hawkins, an English Jesuit priest, appeared in 1633.
Written for the Parthenian Sodality of the Immaculate Conception,
it is part emblembook, part devotional prose and poetry, a series of
meditations on various components of the enclosed garden (Freeman
1966: 174-98). Its exposition of garden symbols includes the rose,
lily, violet, heliotropion (the illustration shows helianthus), and iris, as
well as several trees and other garden elements. In the section of each
chapter called "The Essay,"he writes about the flowers themselves, not
about their religious meanings or the legends associated with them.
In the essay on the rose, he describes the varieties of roses, bringing
direct observation of the flowers themselves into the work, heighten-

ing the importance of observation and objectification. The Partheneia
sacra is a very significant work in flower personification, showing the
religious iconography of the medieval period in the power of a new
age.
For other writers of the period, however, the new age had advanced
much farther. TheJardin d'hiver,by Jean Franeau (1616), who seems
to have been an academic associated with the university at Douay, is
a collection of flower poems which describe the various flowers and
give botanical details. The illustrations in this book, in contrast to the
medieval-looking pictures in the Partheneia sacra, are large, detailed
drawings of individual flowers or plates showing several varieties of a
given flower. Franeau also writes about gardens, even explaining in a
footnote where one can see the best flower gardens of that time. The
conceit of the collection is, of course, that one can have a garden of
poetic flowers in the winter, when the real flowers are "asleep." In a
long poem at the end of the collection, "Les doctes lecons et beaux en-
seignements, que nous font les fleurs, et lesjardins," Franeau mentions
all the usual associations between religious lessons and flowers, begin-
ning with the Sermon on the Mount and including a long explanation
of the symbolism of the passion flower, an American plant introduced
to Europe in the early seventeenth century (Coats 1964: 238). While
the traditional medieval symbols are mentioned, they do not dominate
as in Hawkins's work; indeed, Franeau's spirit is quite advanced, for
we find him implying that in studying nature we are reading messages
from the author of our being, a most modern expression of sentiment
compared to the formalization such an idea commonly found in the
Middle Ages.
These two major seventeenth-century flower books suggest the
opening up of flower personification to observation and ultimately
botanical science. Together they show some interesting transitions.
The Partheneia sacra looks back at the medieval cult of Mary and the
love poetry/garden settings given her. TheJardin d'hiverlooks ahead to
the Enlightenment and its rapprochement between human beings and
science. They share a concentration on detail, a championing of the
real as against the abstract. The first step in the humanizing of flower
personification after the Middle Ages was concentration on the flowers
themselves, as physical objects. This of course brought forth many of
the best-known comparisons between flowers and women. The un-
known author of The Masque of Flowers, performed in January 1613 /
14 before James I at Whitehall and planned in part by Francis Bacon,
put it very plainly. The classical writers turned men into flowers; in
this work, flowers are turned into men. There is little plot to sustain
this notion, but the final scene shows dancers in flowerlike costumes
rising up and dancing. When the typical Renaissance writers looked at
flowers, they saw not symbols of various religious or moral virtues but
some very beautiful and suggestive physical objects. This is reflected
in much Renaissance love poetry, from Petrarch through Ronsard and
other poets of the Pleiade to the seventeenth-century English poets.
As the Silesian baroque poet Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein (1961:
10) wrote in his "Lobgesang der Blumengottin," "Ja, meiner Blumen
Purper gibt / Der Lieb ein Wohnhaus ab, der Wollust eine Wiege; /
Jedweder Stengel ist ein Merkmal ihrer Siege."
One well-known English love poem of the period is Thomas Cam-
pion's (1967: 174) "There Is a Garden in Her Face." This poem has an
underlayer of religious imagery, seen from the perspective of medieval
flower personification: "There is a Garden in her face, / Where Roses
and white Lillies grow; / A heav'nly paradice is that place." Later lines
mention "Pearle" (a prominent religious symbol, as common as the
rose or the lily) and "Angels." This combination of flower personifica-
tion with a religious association is most striking, however, in Thomas
Carew's (1949: 10-51) "The Rapture." This long poem-an attempt
to persuade Celia that the Goblin, Honour, is not to be heeded be-
cause it only fetters women with chastity-uses other imagery besides
the floral, but the floral is perhaps the most erotic in that it freely in-
corporates the material of the hortusconclususto describe a much more
worldly "garden of delights." While Carew mentions many lovers of
classical times and ends the list with Petrarch and Laura, the Vir-
gin Mary and her flower and garden symbolism dominate the flower
passage:
Then, as the empty Bee, that latelybore,
Into the common treasure,all her store,
Flyes'bout the painted field with nimblewing,
Deflowringthe fresh virginsof the Spring;
So will I rifle all the sweets,that dwell
In my delicious Paradise,and swell
My bagge with honey, drawneforth by the power
Of fervent kisses,from each spicie flower.
I'le seize the Rose-budsin their perfum'dbed,
The Violet knots, like curious Mazesspread
O'er all the Garden,taste the ripned Cherry,
The warme,firme Apple, tipt with corallberry:
Then will I visit, with a wandringkisse,
The vale of Lillies,and the Bowerof blisse.
Carew's placement of the lily, the flower emblem of purity and chastity,
in this context in a diatribe against chastity takes this floral revolution
about as far as it can go.
VI
From the very beginning of the jeux floraux of Toulouse in the early
fourteenth century until 1694, when the games were "reformed," the
most important prize was the golden violet-the image of a fragrant
flower suggestive of nature in all of its dewy loveliness. In 1694, how-
ever, the top prize was changed from the violet to the amaranth, which
an early historian of the jeux floraux calls "fleur banale et sans par-
fum" (Gelis 1912: 167). The amaranth-a flower of doubtful iden-
tity, probably some sort of everlasting, perhaps the globe amaranth
or gomphrena of today-was chosen as emblematic of eternity and
eternal values. For us, it serves as a significant emblem of the change
in flower personification from the biological basis so typical of the
Renaissance to other bases.
One rather obvious sign of the tension between the vital spirit of
the Renaissance and the era to come was the meticulous regularity
of some late Renaissance gardens in Europe. Nature needed to be
kept under control, perhaps not in enclosed spaces, as in the Middle
Ages, but under the control of human reason. Thus, in flower personi-
fication, the popularity of the amaranth. Thus, the very reasonable
conclusion to book 4 of Abraham Cowley's (1689) The Historyof Plants
(Sex libriplantarum), in which Flora, who has to decide upon a ruler of
the flowers, concludes that all deserve to rule, so the best solution is
to set up a form of representative government, with the rose and the
lily presiding over four seasonal praetors, the tulip, gillyflower, saf-
fron crocus, and hellebore. Cowley (ibid.: 62), makes it clear, however,
that his pageant of seasonal flowers who plead their cases in books 3
and 4 is a parade not of ordinary, real flowers but of "those that Plato
saw, Ideas nam'd, / Daughters of Jove, for heavenly extract fam'd. /
Aethereal plants!"
In eighteenth-century poetry, the personified flowers of love lyrics
were merely dry, conventional figures based on Renaissance meta-
phors, or else they were carefully organized, as in this verse by Mary
Leapor (1748: 148-49), from "On a Nosegay Made by Clemene":
To ev'ry Flowershe assignsa Place
Which gives to each a more than nativeGrace,
And all may now distinguish'dBeautiesboast,
Which lay before in wild Confusionlost.
More vital were the flowers found in popular English descriptive
poems, but they were not personified. These poems show flowers
being associated with man's appreciation of nature and his domes-
tic accomplishments (for example, James Thomson's "The Seasons,"
William Cowper's "The Task," John Scott of Amwell's "The Amo-
boean Eclogues" [1782], and Susanna Blamire's "A North Country
Village" [1873]). French descriptive poetry tends to be more general,

less apt to describe flowers in such ways (e.g., Delille's "Les jardins"
[1824], Castel's Les plantes [1797], and Rapin's Of Gardens[1706]). The
eighteenth-century French poet most identified with flowers is Parny
(1826: 267), whose "Les fleurs" tells what flowers should be planted in
the parterre, and whose line from the same poem, "Flore est si belle,
et sur-tout au village!" so well represents the idealized French flower
imagery which began to appear around the end of the eighteenth
century.
But that is all merely background to flower personification. Along
with the descriptive poem, the verse fable was a popular eighteenth-
century form, and it is here that we find personified flowers. It is here,
too, that we find an intersection of the two general characterizations
of the eighteenth century: the age of reason or the Enlightenment,
and the age of sentiment. The sentiment of the eighteenth century
was very dry, at least by nineteenth-century standards, a business of
the head, a controlled emotionalism following rules of feeling. The
studied associations of Bernardin de St. Pierre's landscapes in Paul et
Virginie sum up this sort of sentiment, which can also be seen in some
of Rousseau's writings.
Early in the eighteenth century, fables were used for serious social
and political commentary, but later they began to serve as vehicles for
"the social amenities and sentimental personification" (Daniel 1982:
171). Throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries,
fables were favored for teaching moral lessons to children. Belong-
ing to this era of the English verse fables are some floral fables, in
which flowers, rather than animals, speak. The most famous of these
floral fables are those of John Langhorne (1794 [1771]), whose The
Fables of Flora went through numerous editions in both England and
America well into the nineteenth century. His flowers preach moral
lessons, such as the superiority of the retired life (exemplified by the
evening primrose) and the importance of gratitude (the sunflower).
Langhorne's imitator John Huddleston Wynne (1773), in his Fables of
Flowersfor the FemaleSex, uses a frame story in which the narrator falls
asleep in the vale of the Clyde, dreams of a visit to a magical garden
ruled by Zephyrus and Flora, and upon awakening can understand
the conversations of the plants. All of his fables have simple morals,
many of them dealing with pride. Wynne's flowers are a most conten-
tious lot; they will quarrel over any conceivable thing. Their favorite
arguments concern precedence or position, as when the climbing nas-
turtium tries to get the wallflower to let her have the wall to herself.
In such fables as these, the flowers represent persons in society, and
the lessons they teach are meant to socialize their readers. Naturally,
these stories were considered especially suitable for children, as the
Seaton * Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification 693
subsequent publishing history of both Langhorne's and Wynne's fables

show. Wynne's Fables, for instance, was reprinted in 1781 by Elizabeth
Newbery of the Newbery firm, famed specialists in books for chil-
dren. Then, many books of flower personification directly addressed
to children began to appear.
One of the most popular of these flower personification books for
children was a collection of fables entitled The Enchanted Plants, by
Maria Henrietta Montolieu (1800). Flora grants the narrator's wish to
understand the speech of the flowers, and the narrator proceeds to
teach a number of moral lessons using flowers. In Montolieu's poems,
the flowers are much more humanized than in the older fables. Other
writers of children's poetry followed Montolieu's lead. In Ann Taylor's
"The Wedding among the Flowers" (1905 [1808]), for example, the
flowers represent different human characters from a comical perspec-
tive. This was a commonplace use of flowers early in the nineteenth
century. It appears not only in children's work but also in lighter
poetry for adults, such as Alexander Balfour's "Garden Rhymes," in
the gift annual The Forget-Me-Notfor 1827, in which the sweet pea
climbing a stick represents a young girl marrying a rich old man.
Alongside the association of flowers with society, writers of the
eighteenth century began to reshape the associations of flowers and
romantic love. The forces behind the erotic flower personification of
the Renaissance had been scattered by the systematic botanists of the
eighteenth century, led by Carl Linnaeus, as they sought to classify the
flowers and understand them. But this effort brought forth its own
associations with love, for Linnaeus classified the plants by their meth-
ods of reproduction. He and his followers had an impact on literature
in a fairly direct way in the eighteenth century. This personification of
flowers in the interests of science-to explain their reproductive sys-
tems so that lay persons could understand-reached its apotheosis in
Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1824 [1789]), specifically in its
second part, "The Loves of the Plants." Darwin characterizes the mat-
ing of the plants in human terms. An earlier writer, Demetrius de la
Croix (1798), though considerably less popular, wrote a Latin poem
called "Connubia florum" (the marriage of the flowers), which was
first published in 1727 and later translated into French. This poem
is botanical but less explicit than Darwin's poem, and it is based on
the very rudimentary work of Sebastien Vaillant, a French physician
and botanist. The poet in this work praises Vaillant for teaching him
the elements of love through his floral studies, and he has his flowers,
when mourning the death of Vaillant, call him a man who knew who
they were.
Another factor in eighteenth-century flower personification has
been difficult to trace. It relates to the popularity of the Orient in
eighteenth-century tastes. Travelers to the Orient published their ob-

servations, which were widely read. One such traveler was Aubrey de
la Mottraye, who visited the court of Charles XII of Sweden in his
Turkish exile. His well-known book, Voyagesdu Sr. A. De La Mottrayeen
Europe, en Asie et en Afrique (1727), explained that Turkish lovers often
communicated through the selam, a group of objects done up in a scarf.
The meaning of the objects was established by sound association, not
symbolism, and the objects themselves included all sorts of common,
unromantic items such as matches and soap, as well as flowers and
jewels. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1965 [1763]) reported the same
phenomenon in one of her pieces in TurkishEmbassayLetters, writ-
ten shortly after her return from Turkey in 1718. Somehow, by the
early nineteenth century this language of objects had been romanti-
cized into a language of flowers. Witness the essay on the selam by the
renowned Orientalist Joseph Hammer-Purgstall (1809), in which he
reminds his readers that the selam was a language of objects, not just
of flowers, and that it was only a game, not an actual language used by
harem girls and their lovers. Another rapprochement between flowers
and romantic love in the eighteenth century can be found in one of the
Oriental tales which met the prevailing taste for exotic romance, Mari-
anne de Fauques' (1774) The Vizirs; or, The EnchantedLabyrinth. This
narrative features the sage Locman, who analyzes a person's character
by his choice of flowers. In his experience, there is "a most surprising
analogy between the flowers and the passions of mankind" (ibid.: 268).
Locman lists flowers and their corresponding character types, such
as the violet (soft sensibility) and the amaranth (constancy). Based on
these observations, he constructs a labyrinth of flowers which serves as
an elaborate test of character. The details of the labyrinth, however,
are not given; they are "too minute and tedious to be mentioned"
(ibid.: 273).
From these examples, we can see a new grouping of associations
which realigned signs and signifiers in the nineteenth century. While
the highly social flower fables best represent eighteenth-century flower
personification, other elements within the century carried the seeds
of mature flower personification in the next century. The botanical
observations and popular Oriental associations tell us the direction of
popular thought. Meanwhile, writers like Novalis and Goethe were
putting it on a philosophical basis. In his botanical studies Goethe
sought the Urpflanze,the clue to all others; he looked for unifying prin-
ciples. His "Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen" locates an end to the
"confusion" which the many varieties of flowers cause in the student
of botany; it is found in the ultimate meaning of plant life, its unity:
Jede Pflanzeverkiindetdir nun die ewgen Gesetze,
Jede Blume, sie sprichtlauter und lauter mit dir.
Aber entzifferstdu hier der Gottinheilige Lettern,

Uberall siehst du sie dann, auch in verandertemZug.
(Goethe n.d.: 537)
These German writers used personified flowers to call attention to
man's union with all created life.
VII
The figure of Flora has appeared in this paper as a topos related to the
flower personification of each period; Flora presides over the kingdom
of flower personification in her various forms. We have seen Ovid's,
Boccaccio's, von Lohenstein's, and Cowley's Flora, each showing a dif-
ferent aspect of the goddess of flowers. From a spiritual presence to a
Roman prostitute, from a queen of love to a rational figure of justice,
she has kept up with the changes in flower personification. My favorite
mid-nineteenth-century Flora is found in an obscure American poem,
"Hymn to Flora," by Albert Pike (1872: 44). The poet pictures Flora
as a benign, married goddess presiding over a prosaic spring fete.
While the poet honors Flora and calls her by her ancient name, he
explains the difference between her former worshippers and those of
the modern day:
Come, gentle Queen! we spill to thee no blood;
Thine altar stands where the gray,ancient wood,
Now green with leaves, and fresh with April rains,
In stately circle sweeping round, contains,
Embowered like a hill-environed dell,
A quiet lawn, whose undulations swell
Green as the sea-waves ....
No priests are here prepared for sacrifice,
But fair young girls, with mischievous, bright eyes,
With white flowers garlanded,
And by their young, delighted lovers led,
With frequent kisses,
And fond and innocent caresses,
To honor thee, the victim and the priest instead.
This Flora very suitably presides over the typical flower personifica-
tion of the nineteenth century, which sought to put a natural base
under various phases of human experience by combining a renewed
sense of the power of cosmic biology (this was, after all, the century
of Darwin) with a tidy, fussy love of the specific detail fostered by the
spirit of objective science. It is the Victorian idealized landscape seen
from the window of a cluttered Victorian parlor.
The most interesting form of nineteenth-century flower personifi-
cation, American, English, and continental, is the language of flowers.
As I have tried elsewhere to demonstrate, this language, basically a list
of flower names attached to a list of meanings related to the love affair,

is a modern myth attempting to make natural the love affair as seen
in that period (Seaton 1985). The language of flowers, though of con-
fused ancestry in the late eighteenth century, seems to have originated
in complete form in the early nineteenth century in France (Seaton
1982), whence it spread into Germany, England, America, Spain, and
elsewhere (Seaton 1980). The three cultures whose versions of the lan-
guage of flowers I have studied, French, English, and American, all
had slightly different sets of flower names and meanings, and there
were differences in the meanings of the flowers within each culture
as well. The base on which the language of flowers rests is the notion
that flowers "speak the language of love" across centuries and cultures.
This is not exactly true, as any study of the different versions of the
language attests, but such was the usual justification made in the many
languages of flower books which appeared during the century.
The language of flowers was most often set forth in a book which
included a lot of poetry about flowers, whether quoted within the little
sections on each flower or simply attached to the "vocabulary."Indeed,
poetry about flowers was so common in the nineteenth century that
its sheer quantity is sometimes overwhelming. Collections of poems
about flowers also appeared separately from the language of flowers,
and almost all poets of the period wrote about them. Not all of these
poems can be considered examples of flower personification, but most
can. And most of the flower poetry was popular, or written for mass
consumption, and thus is commonplace and often inane. Most of this
poetry is grounded in the desire to make the reader at home in nature,
to make him the friend and companion of the flowers, those creatures
that he wanted to see as similar to himself. Flowers were considered
suitable to express the reader's most precious emotions, in an internal-
ized way. Josephine Miles (1965: 33) has pointed out that something
happened between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the way
people thought about flowers. While in the former century flowers
were only incidental items, in the latter they became capable of rep-
resenting the deepest feelings. The typical nineteenth-century poet is
often said to have sentimentalized nature, by which one usually means
that he has tried to fit it to man, rather than man to it. That assess-
ment is true of the flower poetry of the period; for Wordsworth and
his culture, "the meanest flower that blows" can represent "thoughts
that do often lie too deep for tears."
That flowers are God's messages to us is perhaps the most common
topos in popular flower writing in Victorian England and America;
there is token representation on the Continent. English and Ameri-
can writers produced many works of prose in which flowers were used
Seaton * Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification 697
to teach moral and religious lessons. Some of these books were writ-
ten for children, such as Louisa May Alcott's Flower Fables, but most
were aimed at adults. The flower sermons of Scottish clergyman Hugh
Macmillan (1889) are perhaps the epitome of such works, as Macmil-
lan, an accomplished botanist, combined botanical observation and
hermeneutical skills based on biblical topology to make God's word
clear to his listeners and readers. No matter what their audience and
form, however, in such works the basic motivation was to particularize
religious and moral feelings, to go beyond eighteenth-century pan-
theism and connect man with God through nature in a modern way,
reflecting the period's emphasis on the specific.
Thus, in the flower personification of the nineteenth century we see
that the culture is trying to bring man back into the realm of sentient
nature, to fit mankind into the cosmos by showing how nature rep-
resents human emotions and situations. The smallness of scale which
flowers introduce into this endeavor fits in well with the century's re-
spect for particularity. The basic dynamism of all this flower writing
energized a Western culture which was losing its spiritual security to
the findings of science and sought to halt scientific progress. Of course,
such attempts were not successful, and by the twentieth century Victo-
rian flower sentiment was no longer vital. In our century, flowers have
once again been trivialized.
VIII
The best Flora to rule over our twentieth-century gardens of flower
personification is perhaps the Flora of Taxile Delord's (1847) magnifi-
cent parody of nineteenth-century flower writing in Lesfleurs animees.
She is seen as a sensible, realistic queen whose subjects will not be-
have and so have to learn a lesson. While in the story the subjects are
the flowers, in the discourse the lesson is learned by human beings.
Flowers cannot and do not speak for us; we are foolish to idealize
and personify them. The same note is sounded in Flaubert's Bouvard
et Pecuchet, in the failure of their garden. The French, who were the
first to give flowers their nineteenth-century status, were, appropri-
ately, also the first to turn against the code. Both Robert Frost's "The
Rose Family" and Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose" serve
notice that our Western culture is demythologizing again, stripping
the flowers of their special association with a spiritualized universe
and "bringing them back into perspective," as we would put it today.
What this perspective is, I am not sure, as I have not studied twentieth-
century flower personification extensively. Flower personification of
the nineteenth-century sort appears now and then as a curious item of
nostalgia, and early in this century some very inflated and degenerate
versions of the spiritualization of flowers appeared in such works as

Maeterlinck's L'intelligencedesfleursand Henry Van Dyke's short stories
in The Blue Flower. Our century has produced some lovely picture-
books for children in which flowers are pictured as people in flower
costume.
In this analysis of literary flower personification from classical times
to the twentieth century, I have tried to show, first, that the personifi-
cation of flowers, which had seemed to be a literary constant, actually
changed with the changing cultural codes of the various historical
periods. These changes were not always complete or consistent, but
they are clearly demonstrable. Second, these codes changed partly in
reaction to the governing concepts of the code in the previous era.
In addition, I have tried briefly to suggest the rich intertextuality of
flower personification through the centuries, although it is beyond
the scope of this paper and requires far more exemplary readings.
Flower personification, although addressed by modern scholars only
in fragmentary ways (perhaps because in our century flowers have
been trivialized and, in America at least, extensively feminized), is a
major avenue along which writers have sought to find truth in nature.
Their endeavor, while culture-coded like all other things, does have
one absolute: It is constant, regardless of its form.
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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Towards a Historical Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification

Give place you ancient powers,

Throughout the history of Western literature, plants of all kinds have

mean to include all poetic or literary uses of flowers; for example,

change between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and

Biological(body, heart) Social(soul, head)

Figure 1. Periods of dominanceof biologicaland socialbases of flower per-

Table 1 Aspects of flower personification, by period

Basis Cosmic Abstracted Spiritualized Social Emotion

Period change Tension

Classical to medieval Need to distance Christian ideas

stories have a common element: They are memorials to someone who

pagan civilization. Pliny (1969: VI-VII, books 20-27) tells us that

These two flowers,so loved and widelyhonored,

the primerolehe passeth, the pervenkeof pris,

direct observation of the flowers themselves into the work, heighten-

Village" [1873]). French descriptive poetry tends to be more general,

subsequent publishing history of both Langhorne's and Wynne's fables

eighteenth-century tastes. Travelers to the Orient published their ob-

Aber entzifferstdu hier der Gottinheilige Lettern,

of flower names attached to a list of meanings related to the love affair,

versions of the spiritualization of flowers appeared in such works as

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