[In the following essay, Hoyer argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing is a good example of how women writers adapted male-dominated discussions about science and nature to their own purposes.]

In 1858 the preeminent American botanist Asa Gray opened his book Botany for Young People and Common Schools by quoting Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow” (1). Gray explains this verse as Christ's mandate to study the plants and, in so doing, to examine God's plan for humans. Later in the same volume, in describing flowers, Gray elucidates part of that plan: “The object of the flower is the production of seed. The flower consists of those parts, or organs, which are subservient to this end” (84). Those flowers that have “no proper covering or floral envelope” are “naked” (90).

Ten years later, in the first issue of the popular journal American Naturalist, another author began his article “The Fertilization of Flowering Plants” by declaring, “It is now universally accepted by botanists that there exist distinct sexes in the vegetable kingdom, and that nature's method of maintaining the existence of a specific form, is to bring the male and female elements in contact.” He went on to use the terms “nuptials” for fertilization, and “marriage priests” for the insects and winds that “carry the pollen from one flower to another” (Rothrock 64-65).

The year after Gray's Botany appeared, in 1859, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her third novel, The Minister's Wooing. In it, Miss Prissy, the spinster dressmaker who, according to one critic, is the novel's “moral center” (Shea 293), utilizes language and imagery in ways remarkably similar to those found in the pages of Gray's Botany and of the American Naturalist. As Miss Prissy is preparing to make a wedding dress, she muses aloud to the gathered women: “I was saying to Miss General Wilcox, the other day, I don't see how we [women] could ‘consider the lilies of the field,’ without seeing the importance of looking pretty. I've got a flower-de-luce in my garden now … which is just the most beautiful thing you ever did see; and I was thinking, as I looked at it to-day, that, if women's dresses only grew on 'em as handsome and well-fitting as that, why, there wouldn't be any need of me” (195).

Miss Prissy's likening of women's clothes to flowers echoes the narrator's language when Miss Prissy is introduced several pages earlier, where we read that the dressmaker engages “in that important art on which depends the right of presentation of the floral part of Nature's great horticultural show” (188). Stowe's equation of women with flowers highlights the novel's double-consciousness. When we consider that Miss Prissy is called on to sew a wedding dress, the wedding representing the ritualized public event that officially legitimates the woman's transformation from a pre-sexual into a post-sexual state, we see the novel's sexualized dimension. As we see in Gray's Botany, and as is common in much botanical literature of the day, however, the sexual dimension in the novel is pushed into shadow by the bright sun of divine intent, which in the story takes the form of an easily recognized theological debate between the systematists, or abstract theologians, on the one hand, and those of a more antinomian cast on the other.¹

Several critics have traced the ways in which Stowe manages in the novel “to package radical materials in a conservative frame” (Hedrick 287).² Susan K. Harris, in particular, has focused on the gendering of spaces and objects and the multiple ways in which such objects “open us to an arena of [sexual] pleasure which the text cannot openly admit” (185). Ironically, however, Harris misses the language of flowers, a characteristic she notes is common in other women's writing of the period (Susan Warner's Queechy, for example); thus, Harris emphasizes what she believes is a subconscious or unconscious autoerotic and, perhaps, homoerotic dimension to the novel. By paying attention, though, to the language of flowers, a language that would have been particularly accessible to Stowe's (primarily female) readership, and to the double-consciousness that such language carries with it, we can see a message that is radical for its time. The message is radical not because, as Harris proposes, it involves a rejection of men, marriage, and heterosexuality but rather because it advocates the notion that sexual passion is a legitimate and necessary criterion in a woman's choice of a mate and that, indeed, it was morally incumbent on young women to choose mates using the entirety of their beings—their physical as well as their spiritual beings—in gauging the rightness of their choices.³

To deliver this message in The Minister's Wooing, as we will shortly see, Stowe engages and intertwines the discourses of several debates going on during two historical periods: the eighteenth-century debates in botany over the nature of reproduction and in theology over the nature of faith with the nineteenth-century debates over slavery and over the rights of women. Examined in this light, Stowe's novel becomes a prime example of how women writers and artists have adapted male-dominated discourses of nature and of science to their own purposes and to the needs of their female audience.

Sexualizing plants had been standard practice in both scientific and popular accounts since the Swedish botanist Linnaeus had introduced his taxonomic system, also called the sexual system, over one hundred years previously. As François Delaporte points out in Nature's Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century, in sexualizing plant reproduction Linnaeus and his popularizers had identified the flower with woman, an equation that often moved Jean-Jacques Rousseau to states of near rapture: “The sweet fragrances, the lively colors, the most elegant shapes seem to vie with one another for our attention. One need only love pleasure to abandon oneself to such sweet sensations” (qtd. in Delaporte 139). According to some sexualists, such as Charles Bonnet, women were not excluded from such pleasures, and, by paying attention to the analogy of flower-as-woman, they could “find in plant love pure and delicious enjoyment.” Even when the botanist deflected the explicit identification between the woman's and the flower's sexual organs—by transforming the flower into mere clothing, or even the plant's wedding gown—the implication was clear: “woman is flower—that is, sex: she dresses and ornaments herself the better to unveil her essence” (Delaporte 139-40).

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a series of religious revivals swept western Europe and the United States, this kind of overt sexualization of plants did not long remain unchallenged. Among those who objected to the sexual system were the so-called agamists, those who believed that plants reproduced asexually and who therefore considered any analogy to human reproduction to be spurious. Among the agamists and those who disliked the sexual orientation of botany for other reasons, though, a desexualized taxonomy still met a fundamental need—in Delaporte's words, “the need for severe repression: name and classify rather than dream” (138).

However practiced, then, botany, according to Delaporte, becomes “an activity that is both innocent and guilty. It is guilty because the botanist rediscovers what he is pretending to flee. Nature must therefore reflect the image of a sublimated beauty.” Yet simultaneously, it is innocent “because it gives its sanction to imaginary gratifications.” By “contemplating the loves of plants,” one “bring[s] into being an economy of desire” (138-39).

The Linnaean system continued to provide rich verbal coin within that economy well into the nineteenth century. Despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the debate between sexualists and agamists continued to rage, botanical language never lost its sexualized connotation. This sexual dimension was reinforced in popular and scientific literature either by the ubiquity of Linnaean analogies or by their conspicuous absence, which made the language and imagery used in proxy seem sterile by contrast.

How, then, did botany, foremost among all the natural sciences, become such a popular pastime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And how did it become so popular among women in particular in an age when, as Nancy Cott points out, women's “passionlessness” was the “central tenet of Victorian sexual ideology” (220)?⁴ The explanation for the paradox lies in natural theology. As Gray's quoting of the biblical passage reminds us, it was not just Linnaeus's sexual system that people thought they were internalizing in studying botany but (they believed) God's system for ensuring that humans, no less so than plants, would reproduce. Thus, those who botanized and discoursed in the language of plants always carried a kind of double-consciousness: sex and piety were the two sides of the verbal coin circulating within the economy of desire.

Such coin circulated widely. Popular botany texts sold over a quarter of a million copies; botany was a standard part of the school curriculum; the top botanical writers were stars on the lyceum circuit; journals such as Godey's Lady's Book, Youth's Companion, North American Review, and Atlantic Monthly carried major articles on botany and offered reviews of the latest botanical literature; and literary and parlor clubs were as apt to discuss the latest botanies of Asa Gray and Almira H. Lincoln Phelps as the novels of Charles Dickens and Samuel Richardson. In short, botany and botanical discussion were so much a part of middle-class Protestant culture that it was impossible to avoid at least some familiarity with the subject.

Harriet Beecher Stowe had more than a passing acquaintance with these notions. Not only did she grow up in a family that encouraged intellectual pursuits through a wide range of reading, not only was she trained at female seminaries where natural history and natural theology were fundamental parts of the curriculum, not only was she a member of literary clubs that would have discussed the latest botanical literature, not only did she publish in magazines that regularly ran articles on botany, not only did she have friends and relatives who were knowledgeable about the subject, and not only was she an enthusiastic painter of flowers but more than all of these Stowe was an avid gardener who could at times, as the biographer Joan Hedrick puts it, garden with “manic fury” (125). Even Harriet's husband, Calvin, complained in letters of her devoted attention to raising flowers, sometimes to the neglect of her wifely and motherly duties. So passionate was she about her gardening that when she and Calvin were building a new home in 1838, Harriet “planned and executed grand gardens involving tons of manure and eight kinds of geraniums” (125). Her brother, George, was something of a plant expert, and Harriet was knowledgeable enough to have written for a local horticultural and agricultural newspaper while living in Walnut Hills, a suburb of Cincinnati.

The language of flowers in The Minister's Wooing is woven into a more conventional surface plot. The story, set in Newport, Rhode Island, in the late 1700s, involves two kinds of conflicts—one religious, the other romantic—that both require mediation in the person of Mary Scudder. The religious conflict centers on finding a middle ground between the abstract and depersonalized theological system of the minister, Dr. Samuel Hopkins, and a more personally experienced state of grace—a contrast between abstract intellect and intuitive emotion, between system and experience. The romantic conflict is presented through a love triangle. Mary's cousin James, with whom she has always shared an attraction, is (presumably) lost at sea—and no one can be certain about the state of his soul at the time of his death, leaving everyone wondering whether he is spiritually saved. Some time after James is reported lost, Dr. Hopkins, unaware of Mary's feelings toward James (and, indeed, Mary is loathe to admit her feelings, as James has not publicly declared his Christian faith), asks Katy Scudder, Mary's mother, for her daughter's hand in marriage. Mrs. Scudder joyfully accepts; and Mary assents but struggles with the fact that, although she admires the Doctor, she feels toward him only the love of Christian duty, a love of the head rather than of the heart. Practically on the eve of the Doctor and Mary's wedding day, James returns, but Mary refuses to break her bond to the Doctor. When Miss Prissy takes it upon herself to inform the Doctor of Mary's true feelings, which are obvious to most of the women, the Doctor subdues his feelings and bends his will to what he perceives as Divine Will, releasing Mary from her obligation and giving his blessing to the young couple.

Reader sympathies are with James and Mary all along, for the narrative has made it clear that Mary feels for him a passion that she lacks toward the Doctor. From the beginning of the novel, Stowe so consistently discourses on gender relations using the language of botany that readers of her day could not have missed its implications. People are said to be of a particular “genus” (3), the belles of Newport are labeled “specimens” (19), and several narrative reflections are prefaced with the words, “Naturalists say” (10, 45). Even more explicit, however, the women in the story are consistently likened to individual flowers, and almost every significant interaction between men and women occurs against a backdrop that includes flowers or other vegetation.

By using the language of flowers to develop gender relationships in general and the entanglements surrounding Mary's two romantic relationships in particular, Stowe's narrator guides readers toward an understanding that it is this quality of passion that Mary feels for James but not for the Doctor that validates their ultimate union. When we first see Mary, she is coaxing a dove out of the apple blossoms of the tree just outside her bedroom window; these are the same blossoms through which James makes his first appearance, stepping forward and warmly embracing Mary (19, 32). According to the language of flowers, apple blossoms are associated with preference and with a measure of fame that, in the words of one book of the time, “speaks him great and good” (Language of Flowers 1).⁵ Mary's later assessment of James, “I think him so noble and grand” (79), clearly reflects the association the flower imagery already established. Our introduction to the Doctor is likewise guided by flower imagery. Writing that he boards in a room in the Scudder household that is “dark and fragrant with the shade and perfume of blossoming lilacs” (59)—flowers that are associated with first emotions of love—Stowe, in describing the setting, forecasts the romantic attraction on the Doctor's part that will later become manifest.

The contrast between the flower imagery Stowe uses to introduce the two characters might be sharpened even further by noting that apple blossoms represent an earlier stage of the fruit of sexual knowledge that is bound to fall. Stowe soon makes clear that sexuality is a subtext by presenting a subplot that engages the issue both explicitly, at the level of plot, and implicitly, through imagery that reinforces the association between women and flowers. The subplot involves Madame Frontignac, a married French woman who is visiting Providence with her soldier husband, an older man whom she sees as more of a father than a lover; Colonel Burr, who is attempting to seduce Madame Frontignac; and Mary, whom Burr also wishes to seduce. When Colonel Burr first sights Mary, he sees her framed against the backdrop of a garden, and later he introduces her to Madame Frontignac as “a charming specimen of our New England flowers” (210, 221). In contrast to Mary, whose beauty is characterized by freshness and youth, Madame Frontignac possesses a beauty of refinement, or mature elegance, a quality that the narrator both overtly evokes by comparison of her to a Rembrandt painting and tacitly announces by the language of flowers employed to describe Madame's “pomegranate cheeks” (297).⁶

Through Burr's response to women's beauty as well as through his lascivious designs, Stowe presents him as a counterpoint to the Doctor. Whereas Burr is the serpent of Christian allegory (304), the Doctor, as the narrative repeatedly indicates, is a rock, seemingly (although not actually) so unmoved and stunned into silence by Mary's beauty that all he can manage to mutter at times are the biblical quotations he knows so well. Burr is one who practices the deceptive art of eliciting and then preying on passion; the Doctor, one who cannot give it voice in anything but religious language, thus translates passion out of conscious existence.

This contrast, too, is developed partially through references to botanical science. Burr is implicitly likened to the kind of scientist who has no social conscience and analyzes situations and people only for what he can gain from them. He studies Mary and Madame Frontignac with cold calculation; in both cases, Burr is compelled “to experiment” on them—in Mary's case because her “calm dignity … piqued and stimulated his curiosity” and in Madame Frontignac's case “because he felt an artistic pleasure in the beautiful light and heat” that he enkindled in her (264, 230). The Doctor, by comparison, is one whose conscience and self-analyzing tendencies are so overdeveloped that he demonstrates no awareness of his needs as a human and little awareness of others' perceptions and needs (as he repeatedly demonstrates in his sermons). “The Doctor had practised his subtile mental analysis till his instruments were so fine-pointed and keen-edged that he scarce ever allowed a flower of sacred emotion to spring in his soul without picking it to pieces to see if its genera and species were correct” (289).⁷

While the two men differ in their motivations, they share in common a view that places them, as men, in a “natural” position of superiority over women—just as, in the Doctor's view, God holds ascendancy over Man. Burr, for instance, is described as being motivated by his desire to “subdue” women, or to “gain and hold ascendancy” over them, and he dreams of an Arcadian existence where the “animal wants” of men are attended to not by the labors of servants but rather “by the ministrations of the most delicate and exalted portion of the creation” (264, 219, 267)—that is, by women. The Doctor, for his part, first recognizes his attraction to Mary in terms that highlight his assumed air of “natural” superiority. With “unconscious majesty,” the “strong, heroic man” sees, in the person of Mary, an “answer to his higher soul in the sweet, tremulous mirror of womanhood” (148-49). Furthermore, the narrator goes to some lengths to point out that the Doctor, like all men, remains blissfully unaware of the labor (performed by women) that purchases his leisure time; it is a situation for which, as the narrator puts it, “most of our magnanimous masters” would express gratitude if only they were aware of it (168-69).

As with the novel's botanical discourse, its treatment of the relative power between the sexes points simultaneously in another direction. The passage just cited, for example, appears during a scene in which a group is debating the issue of slavery, the issue over which the Doctor, in the preceding chapter, has confronted one of the most influential members of his congregation. When the Marvyns' African American servant, Candace, is asked for her opinion on the slavery issue, she declares that it is not right, and she cites the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights as proof. “It stands to reason,” she posits, because “I a'n't a critter. … I's a reasonable bein',—a woman,—as much a woman as anybody” (176). Thus, she claims her equality and freedom on the basis of her status not merely as a human being, the contrasting category she logically suggests by “critter,” but specifically as a woman. The implication of this move is reinforced two pages later when, in describing Candace's relationship with her husband, the narrator tells of a time that a deacon admonished her, “You ought to give honor to your husband; the wife is the weaker vessel.” To this, Candace, who was physically far larger and more imposing than her husband, could only reply, “I de weaker vessel. Umph!” The narrator then editorializes: “A whole woman's-rights' convention could not have expressed more in a day than was given in that single look and word” (178-79). This entire passage, in the context of the narrator's earlier comment on the “magnanimous masters,” shows the issues of slavery and of gender inequality to be mirrors of each other.

The gender inflections of this discourse highlight the reason James is the only suitable mate for one such as Mary. Both the Doctor and Burr are guided almost wholly by what many considered to be the preeminent male (and deific) characteristic—Reason—although their reason is directed toward achieving different ends. James is guided by emotion and intuition as well as reason, and he approaches life as a series of experiences from which one must learn and to which one must accommodate oneself rather than as a system to be mastered and then systematically applied to reach a predetermined end. Like Stowe's women in general, and Mary in particular, James displays “a subtile keenness of perception outrunning slow-footed reason” (131). In contrast to the Doctor's “subtile mental analysis,” which impels him to dissect and classify the “flower[s] of sacred emotion” rather than to act on them, and also in contrast to Burr, who performs and acts on his mental calculations but only in the service of preying on others' emotions, James exhibits qualities akin to Mary's “blessed gift of womanhood,—that vivid life in the soul and sentiment which resists the chills of analysis, as a healthful human heart resists cold” (289). James's balanced embodiment of emotive-intuitive and logical temperaments suits him, since he, like Mary, had “always craved … outward demonstrations” of sincere affection (427).

Because James possesses both feminine and masculine qualities, it is no surprise to find descriptions of him such as the following: “He was tender as a woman to his mother, and followed her with his eyes, like a lover, wherever she went; he made due and manly acknowledgments to his father, but declared his fixed and settled intention to abide by the profession he had chosen; and he brought home all sorts of strange foreign gifts for every member of the household” (116). James's habit of generosity to all within the household shows him to be a mediating figure, as well, in terms of race. He and Candace evidence a special relationship with and understanding of each other, and, like her, he stands in the place of one who is, according to his society, both “savage” and “civilized.” The narrative makes this point clear in at least two ways: first, by having Katy Scudder, here voicing the estimation of polite society, call him “an infidel,” in reference to the fact that he has not publicly declared his conversion to Christianity (81); and second, by visually casting him as a savage when describing him, as a child, emerging from his mother's cosmetic bag “showing a face ghastly with blue streaks”—clearly a heathen in sheep's clothing (106). James's position as mediator between genders, between races, and between theological temperaments, makes him the ideal companion for Mary.

What the narrative traces, however, is not the logical reasoning behind Mary's preference for James—indeed, in the reasoning of her society, all logic points to the Doctor—but rather a feeling toward him that is palpable yet for which she has no name. That this indefinable feeling is attributable to passion is most clearly revealed in the narrative's reliance on the language of botany.

After James's apparent death, Mary rationalizes giving herself to the Doctor to be his wife with the observation that “the flower must fall before fruit can perfect itself” (411). In Nature's Second Kingdom, Delaporte makes clear that this “floral chronology,” paralleled in the minds of the sexualists by a “sexual topography,” was a truism of botanical study even for those who wished to desexualize reproduction (both plant and human) by focusing on the outcome rather than the process, on plant design rather than anatomy (95). Mary's response to the Doctor partakes of this kind of thinking. Clearly devoid of any anticipation of the process—sex—that would be an inevitable part of her union with the Doctor, Mary instead concentrates on the grand design, the end for which (according to the Doctor's system of belief) she was created: physically, to bear children; and spiritually, if we repress the physical dimension entirely, to bear fruit in the dissemination of the gospel message.

In contrast is the obvious passion Mary feels toward James (before he goes to sea) and toward his memory (after he is presumed dead). In their last visit together before James heads off to sea, a scene that, significantly, takes place in the apple orchard, Mary is shown “shiver[ing] and trembl[ing], as she heard his retreating footsteps, and saw the orchard-grass fly back from under his feet. It was as if each step trod on a nerve,—as if the very sound of the rustling grass was stirring something living and sensitive in her soul. And, strangest of all, a vague impression of guilt hovered over her.” Within the apple orchard, Mary, as a kind of Eve figure, experiences guilt, as if she has had a foretaste of that sexual union with James that she, an unmarried woman, could not yet either experience or even, in light of the uncertain state of his faith, anticipate. Upon Mary's return from the orchard, her guilt is so apparent that her mother is shocked at her appearance, and she comments, “your cheeks are as red as peonies” (41-42). Regardless of the extent to which Mary is conscious of her budding sexuality, however, Stowe's reliance on the language of flowers and of botany brings it before the reader's consciousness and makes clear that one purpose of the rest of the story must be to transform the guilt of passion into the pleasure of passion, to bring it into the economy of desire, by proving its legitimacy through the office of marriage.

Later in the story—immediately after Mary offers her rationalization (“the flower must fall before fruit can perfect itself”) for marrying the Doctor—we again see her passionate, clearly physical feelings of longing for James:

[S]he had a kind of shadowy sense of a throbbing and yearning nature that seemed to call on her,—that seemed surging towards her with an imperative, protesting force that shook her heart to its depths.

Perhaps it is so, that souls, once intimately related, have ever after this a strange power of affecting each other,—a power that neither absence nor death can annul. How else can we interpret those mysterious hours in which the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal bond?

(411)

Not only do the “throbbings” and “yearnings” and “surgings” articulate Mary's far more active feeling of passion toward James but, likewise, her soul being made “vital with such longings” and the near “bursting” of the “mortal bond” evoke the essential processes of reproduction, the sexual act itself. And Mary reveals her feelings in language that parallels discourse used in botany—words to describe, for instance, on the one hand, pollen rising to the tip of the anther, ready to fertilize the ovules, and, on the other, the bud bursting into full flower.

Lest this example suggest that I go too far in ascribing such bald physicality to words that instead concern metaphysical longings, let me emphasize again the reciprocity, in Stowe's world and in the language of natural theology that helped make sense of that world, between sex and piety. Mary must come to realize within her person the same kind of double-consciousness that already exists within the novel's botanical language, with its sense that God has given us sexual passion as a gift that helps guide our selection of a mate. Ironically, Mary gives voice to this idea when she wonders aloud to her mother about what role she might play in bringing James to declare his Christian faith: “[D]oes not God use the love we have to each other as a means of doing us good?” (82). The discourse on Christian belief as a species of passion that partakes of both earthly and heavenly pleasures takes on an added dimension when Stowe, in explaining the tribulations Mary undergoes on hearing of James's death, likens God to a gardener and Mary to a flower that needs tending:

It is said that gardeners, sometimes, when they would bring a rose to richer flowering, deprive it for a season, of light and moisture. Silent and dark it stands, dropping one fading leaf after another, and seeming to go down patiently to death. But when every leaf is dropped, and the plant stands stripped to the uttermost, a new life is even then working in the buds, from which shall spring a tender foliage and a brighter wealth of flowers. So, often in celestial gardening, every leaf of earthly joy must drop, before a new and divine bloom visits the soul.

(361-62)

While this passage on one level allows the narrator and thus the reader to see Mary through her grief, on another it serves to document a season of dryness, winter, and dormancy in her passionate life, and thereby it helps us anticipate the rebirth that will soon be accomplished through James's timely reappearance. That Mary, after James's return, makes a conscious decision to give up passion for duty is Stowe's representation of how thoroughly conventional mores—a collective consciousness—tended to govern individual behavior and thwart individuality, especially for women. Mary's decision signals her obedience to the system, one which, as pointed out earlier, is in Stowe's view patriarchal, sustained by male privilege and power. Mary must (she believes) subordinate her will to God's will, and her feelings to the Doctor's feelings. That other women such as Miss Prissy are the ones who are truly in touch with God's will, with a higher wisdom that impels them to acquaint the Doctor with Mary's true feelings and thereby set in motion the chain of events that frees Mary to act on her passionate feelings for James, signals Stowe's validation of an alternate (female) sensibility.

In The Minister's Wooing, then, Stowe's intertwining of the discourses of eighteenth-century debates in botany over the nature of reproduction and in theology over the nature of faith with the nineteenth-century debates over slavery and over the rights of women reveals a pattern of rich complexity that blurs the boundaries between nature and culture. Her layering of histories in language brings to mind a point that Gary Snyder makes in The Practice of the Wild, in a section called “Nature's Writing”: “The layers of history in language become a text of language itself” (66). In this light, even if we never choose to call Stowe a nature writer, we can credit her as being one of those writers whose experiments record nature's writing. By attending to such a distinction, we gain an image of Harriet Beecher Stowe that highlights both similarities and differences to heralded nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau. Specifically, we attain an image of a woman of genteel culture rather than of the adventuring class, one who could garden—and write—with manic fury. But this is also a woman who, rather than wandering far afield from where most of her contemporaries lived in order to glean the wild, took them into their own backyards, choosing to plant herself squarely within the garden of her culture and time and, from there, gently broadcasting the seeds and nurturing the seedlings of a more humane society.

Notes

1. In discussing the intermingling between earthly and heavenly realms, the narrator raises the issue of double-consciousness when, addressing the reader, she writes that, as long as we have both body and soul, “Two worlds must mingle … wreathing in and out” (205).

2. See also Romines.

3. For insightful analyses of women's interest in botany and their use of the language of flowers, see Keeney; Seaton; Shteir; and Bewell.

4. Between 1850 and 1890, botany became so associated with women that some writers felt the need to advocate why it made a “proper” study for males.

5. Numerous books of the period, published in both the United States and England, contain poems about and provide the vocabulary for the language of flowers. One of the most widely reprinted, The Language and Poetry of Flowers, compiled by S. C. (Sarah Carter) Edgarton, was first published in London in 1849. Derby and Jackson, the publisher of Stowe's novel, brought out a reprint from an 1853 volume entitled The Language and Poetry of Flowers, by H. G. Adams, in 1858, the year before The Minister's Wooing was published. While the associations I reference appear in an undated and anonymous book, The Language of Flowers, published in London by Frederick Warne, they accord with those I have found in other books with similar titles.

   Further examples of Stowe's use of botanical imagery in the novel are too numerous to list, but two more should suffice to show the pattern. The Doctor is elsewhere likened to a great elm, a tree that, according to the language of flowers, connotes dignity, the quality that Mary and others recognize in him. Later in the story, as Mary struggles emotionally to deal with the news that James is lost at sea, she is likened to “a bruised flax-flower,” flax being associated with fate (320).

6. The pomegranate flower is also associated with foolishness, a characteristic that, in light of Madame's infatuation with Burr, is in implicit accord with the narrator's estimation of her.

7. The contrast between the two men is also dramatized in a theological debate that centers on the question of whether one should focus, as the Doctor does, on the Christian millennium, or, as Burr does, on the present moment (261).

Works Cited

Bewell, Alan. “‘Jacobin Plants’: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s.” Wordsworth Circle 20.3 (1989): 132-39.

Cott, Nancy F. “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4.2 (1978): 219-36.

Delaporte, François. Nature's Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: MIT P, 1982.

Edgarton, S. C. (Sarah Carter). Language and Poetry of Flowers. London: Thomas Nelson, 1849.

Gray, Asa. Botany for Young People and Common Schools. New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co., 1858.

Harris, Susan K. “The Female Imaginary in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing.” New England Quarterly 66.2 (1993): 179-97.

Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Keeney, Elizabeth. The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.

———. The Language and Poetry of Flowers. London: Milner and Sowerby, 1867.

———. The Language of Flowers: Including Floral Poetry. London: Frederick Warne, n.d.

Romines, Ann. The Home Plot: Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992.

Rothrock, J. T. “The Fertilization of Flowering Plants.” American Naturalist 1 (1868): 64-72.

Seaton, Beverly. The Language of Flowers: A History. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995.

Shea, Maura E. “Spinning toward Salvation: The Ministry of Spinsters in Harriet Beecher Stowe.” ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly 10.4 (1996): 293-310.

Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Minister's Wooing. 1859. New York: Derby and Jackson; Hartford: The Stowe-Day Foundation, 1978.