SOURCE: Losano, Antonia. “A Preference for Vegetables: The Travel Writings and Botanical Art of Marianne North.” Women's Studies 26 (1997): 423-48.

[In the following essay, Losano discusses Marianne North's memoirs and examines her observations of flora during her travels, her stance against notions of women's role in botanical sciences, and her revision of the Romantic notions of nature. Losano also discusses North's paintings and their relation to her writing.]

1. IN WHICH AN EXPLODING MUSHROOM PROPELS THE YOUNG MARIANNE INTO A CAREER AS A BOTANICAL ARTIST

Marianne North (1830-1890), in her memoir Recollections of a Happy Life, describes her first encounter with plant life—the kingdom which will become the main interest of her adult life and the motivation behind her extensive travels¹—in rather suggestive terms:

Amongst others, Mrs. Hussey's two large volumes on British fungi were my great delight one summer, and started me collecting and painting all varieties I could find at Rougham, and for about a year they were my chief hobby. One, I remember, had a most terrible smell [North's footnote: Phallus impudicus]; it came up first like a large turkey's egg, and in that state was inoffensive; and as I was very anxious to see the change, I put it under a tumbler in my bedroom window one night, and the next morning was awakened by a great crash. Behold the tumbler broken into bits, and the fungus standing up about five inches with a honey-combed cap, having hatched itself free of its restraining shell, and smelling most vilely. Good and bad smells are merely a matter of taste, for it soon attracted crowds of a particular kind of fly, which seemed thoroughly to enjoy themselves on it.

(Recollections 12)

North's entry into botany is an explosive blend of budding girlish curiosity (she is 16 at the time) and botanical science. Botany was an approved study for girls and women in Victorian England; beginning with the Linnean-influenced surge of interest in plants in the 1760's, women had taken part in various botanical endeavors—collecting, cultivating, illustrating, classifying and writing manuals and textbooks. Various late eighteenth and nineteenth-century ‘conversations’ on botany were printed in women's magazines, blending “aesthetic commentary and scientific detail” (Shteir 1). By the mid-nineteenth century, women were being pushed out of the increasingly professionalized fields of science, but botany remained an acceptable hobby for women. The authors of the 1838 Young Lady's Book of Botany write:

That the mental constitution of the fair sex is such as to render them peculiarly susceptible of whatever is delicate, lovely, and beautiful in nature and art cannot, we think, be controverted; we are not, therefore, surprised that Botany receives more of their attention and study than any other science.

(Shteir 173)

Reasons for the popularity of botany with women and with Victorian social codes include the ease with which women could study botany conveniently in and around their homes; the glorification of English flora in an era of increasing nationalism; and the moral component linked to the study and appreciation of the natural world as divine revelation. All these are the ‘proper’ venues for Victorian middle and upper class women. Women remain during the nineteenth century most often mere dilettantes in the fields of botany and natural history: they produced watercolors or sketches of flowers, wax flowers, dried flower arrangements, etc. Shteir notes, “for the most part botany for girls and women was based at home in the parlor or breakfast room, or near home” (174)—the few female traveling amateur botanists were colonial wives or sisters, “enlisted in projects for imperial botany” (Shteir 192).

North, in her memoirs of her early years, strives to set herself apart from this tradition. Writing late in the nineteenth century about an early Victorian childhood, North is careful to separate herself from the feminine ‘accomplished’ amateur playing with flowers. Significantly, her first botanical encounter is with a fungus—not a flower. An odoriferous exploding mushroom whose Latinate taxonomic classification can be gleefully transcribed into ‘impudent phallus’ is almost too much fodder for a prurient-minded post-modern critic, but North's dead-pan style serves as a restraint. She engages in no interpretive reading of her own—she does not offer possible significance for this passage, she merely welcomes the flies to their feast, and continues:

At last some one told my mother that I was very uneducated (which was perfectly true), so I was sent to school at Norwich with Madame de Whal, one of the three sisters of Lady Eastlake … She was very handsome; it was impossible not to love her, but school life was hateful to me. The teaching was such purely mechanical routine, and the girls with one exception were uninteresting.

(Recollections 1:12)

Traditional schooling proves less exciting than experiments with fungi. North rejects the breakfast room accomplishments as suitable education for women and proceeds in her adult life to expand women's role in botanical science and artistic endeavor through her experience of travel.

2. ‘DON'T BOTHER ME, I'M WORKING’: NORTH'S PROFESSIONALISM OF TRAVEL

North's travels as a botanical artist began in her fortieth year, after the death of her father, her sole companion for two and a half decades. His loss, and her life-long interest in plants—encouraged by a family friendship with Sir Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens—led her to begin a series of travels observing, collecting and painting the flora of more than a dozen countries, largely in the British Empire. The mere extensiveness of her travels serves to set North apart from her botanical foremothers—but what is of most interest in North's travel memoirs is the rhetoric of work and professionalism she employs, which writes against the nineteenth-century notions of women's role in botanical science. The rhetoric of work and the matter-of-factness about the turmoils of travel that this rhetoric encourages serve to ‘authorize’ North's endeavors and to question Victorian gender codes. It also allows present-day readers to examine an aspect of women's travel narratives which has been largely overlooked—that travel is, for many of these women, work. Too often critical writings on early women's travel collapse the term ‘travel’ itself, allowing it to become a monolithic, unquestioned category. But it is not enough to say that a woman simply traveled. What did she do when she got wherever she was going? Write, paint, botanize, dig up old monuments, visit political officials, teach, preach, trade, doctor, cook? A traveler's actions while abroad must have significant effects upon how she sees, and how she writes.

One striking aspect of North's rhetoric of work is its revision of the Romantic tropes of solitude and a transcendental appreciation of nature—under her pen the spiritual pensive traveler becomes the no-nonsense working woman. On first settling into her solitary home in the Jamaican wilderness on her first visit to the tropics, North writes:

Little Negro huts nestled among the bush everywhere … the mango trees were just then covered with pink and yellow flowers, and the daturas, with their long white bells, bordered every stream. I was in a state of ecstasy, and hardly knew what to paint first.

(Recollections 1:83)

North views the natives, the flora, and feels the ‘ecstasy’—then calmly settles down to work, rewriting the spiritual devotion to the natural into her own brand of Victorian work ethic. Sublime solitude, too, is put to the service of work: North glories in Australia, for instance, because of its lack of population—as well as its botanical richness, at the service of her work: “I much enjoyed my entire solitude through the grand forest alone, especially when I reached the magnificent old araucarias” (Recollections 2:114). The doubling of the solitariness—‘solitude’ and ‘alone’ in one sentence—magnifies her attraction to the single state; and her forest wanderings again end, as did her description of the Jamaican landscape, with her delight in the discovery of specimens. But the British are sociable people in the colonies: “After about a month of perfect quiet and incessant painting at the gardenhouse, people began to find me out” (Recollections 1:84). She is bothered with invitations, visits, formal dinners. When she does agree to visit one of the colonial English, she spends much of her time climbing out her bedroom windows in the early morning hours in order to be off into the woods painting before anyone can catch her (Recollections 1:85).

The landscapes of the countries she visits never impinge on North's consciousness; ‘work’ provides a barrier between herself and any possibility of the excess or the ecstasy of sublime nature. She looks, she examines, she momentarily delights—then she appropriates it all for her scientific art. The romance of solitude and the aesthetics of travel never become for North—unlike the majority of 19th century travel writers—moments for self-analysis, spiritual musings, or transcendental possibilities:

The whole country [Australia] was a natural flower garden, and one could wander for miles and miles among the bushes and never meet a soul. The difficulty was to choose the flowers. One was tempted to bring home so many, and as they were mostly very small and delicate, it was not possible to paint half of them.

(Recollections 2:149)

Susan Morgan, in her excellent discussion of North in Place Matters asks: “If not the 18th century masculine conquest language of guilt and desire, if not the 19th century masculine scientific language of discovery as rediscovery … what then is the gendered rhetoric which animates these memoirs?” (Morgan 119). In trying to ascertain a possibly proto-feminist agenda in North's work, Morgan seems finally to find any such agenda effectively overshadowed by imperialist privilege: “The very vision of personal female liberation her books present offers an argument for the Victorian imperial enterprise” (122). Morgan's reading of North's complicity with the imperial project is insightful and entirely accurate—perhaps even at times too polite, glossing over the multiple times when North calls the Chinese childish, the Indians devious, and the Africans bestial. North traveled and worked under the auspices of empire; in every country she visited English colonial administrators found her lodging, gave her servants, honored her bank notes, delivered her mail, and arranged for her safe access to less inhabited regions. She might have shunned their society as counterproductive to work, but she made full use of these imperial appendages. Her memoir is dotted with references to Mr. H. who met her at the station and carried her trunks in Singapore, or Mr. E. and his wife who gave her tea in Tasmania. Few have full names—instead a faceless parade of initials serves as North's only reference to her fellow Englishmen and women abroad. (One exception to this is Julia Margaret Cameron, whose meeting with North I will discuss below.)

Morgan's ultimate answer to the question of North's gendered rhetoric is that though neither a ‘proper lady’ or a ‘new woman’, and though complicit in empire, North's work exhibits a “rhetoric of emancipation”—a distaste for other people, social codes, formal society, and traditional women's roles. I'd like to add North's ‘rhetoric of professionalism’ as another component of her gendered rhetoric, closely aligned to Morgan's ‘rhetoric of emancipation.’ While ‘rhetoric of professionalism’ cannot excuse North's imperialism any more than ‘rhetoric of emancipation’ can, North's professionalism can more thoroughly explain exactly what that imperialism was supporting. North's particular brand of travel involved working the system for her productivity—English and native alike were placed in the service of her professional scientific art.² Again it is a strange rewriting of the romantic all-sacrificed-in-the-service-of-the-artist tradition; but here North rests on a bureaucratic and professional privilege rather than on spiritual or moral ascendancy. Her feminism is arrayed on the side of practical femininity: the few women (and men as well) whom she admires are those who work as hard as she does. North's description of her meeting with another great Victorian ‘lady traveler’, Miss Gordon Cumming, at a cocktail party in London, shows North's feminine values: “She is a thorough lady, genial and warm-hearted, and so strong and resolute that it might be quite possible she had walked certain limp Anglo-Indians to death before now” (2:212). She meets another famous traveler the same evening: Isabella Bird Bishop, whom North consistently calls “Miss Bird,” conveniently forgetting her married status. Miss Bird is “a solid and substantial little person, very decided and measured in her way of talking” (Recollections 2:212); and North reports Bird's refusal to travel to New Guinea because “she was married now, and it was not the sort of place one could take a man to!” (Recollections 2:212).³

Directly after this meeting of the ‘three globe trotteresses,’ as their hostess called them, North meets with the aged Charles Darwin. The male traveler and scientist is described as seeming “no older than his children,” and North also writes that “no man ever had a more perfect home, wife and children.” (Recollections 2:215). Her last word on Darwin is that “less than eight months after that [their meeting] he died, working till the last among his family, living always the same peaceful life in that quiet home.” (Recollections 2:215). It is plain that the mantle of exploration has been passed on to the more ‘solid and substantial’ female travelers.

A crucial component of North's rhetoric of professionalism is her emphasis on production. During her travels she is consistently occupied with painting faster, longer, more. “It was impossible to paint fast enough, but we can all work hard at what we like best” (Recollections 2:219) is a characteristic comment. She sees herself as a producer—not of art, but of scientific illustrations for the edification of viewers and the furtherance of scientific knowledge. Upon her return to London after the bulk of her travels, she donates her pictures to Kew and arranges and finances a gallery to house them, supervising the construction, framing and hanging the paintings herself, and decorating the doors and walls with stenciling.

My first thought after unpacking was the building at Kew, and I did not long delay going there. I found the building finished (as far as bare walls went) most satisfactorily … After than I spent a year in fitting and framing, patching and sorting my pictures, and finally got it finished and open to the public on the 7th of June 1882.

(Recollections 2:210)

She is now, herself, ‘open to the public’, as a cultural producer on a large scale. A review of the newly opened North Gallery by The Studio magazine called it “intelligent and useful applied art labour” (Ponsonby 76). The accretive buildup of adjectives in this praise at last dumps all its weight onto the crucial term here—labour. North would have been pleased.

She comments obliquely on the unusualness of this status as laborer for a woman in an anecdote she tells about an interaction in the Gallery just before its official opening. As she was alone putting the finishing touches on her work, an unwelcome ‘gentleman’ wanders in:

He turned rather rudely to me, after getting gradually interested in the paintings—“It isn't true what they say about all these being painted by one woman, is it?” I said simply that I had done them all; on which he seized me by both hands and said, “You! Then it is lucky for you that you did not live two hundred years ago, or you would have been burnt for a witch.”

(Recollections 2:212)⁴

The extensiveness and strangeness of her accomplishment is inassimilable to the Victorian gentleman, or to Victorian social codes. North's sister, the wife of John Addington Symonds, comments in her introduction to North's memoir: “My sister was no botanist in the technical sense of the term: her feeling for plants in their beautiful living personality was more like that which we all have for human friends” (Recollections 1:vi). Although this tries to re-write North's formidable achievement back under the rubric of acceptable female sensibility, read along with the witch quotation it seems to reinforce the perception of North's work as something not-quite-human. Mrs. Symonds hints at a certain psychic connection between North and plants, something on a different plane; the gentleman likens North to a ‘wise woman’ of old, with secret knowledge of the natural world. Neither commentator understands—or is willing to admit—North's professional endeavor, her commitment to scientific ‘fact’. Five species which she first ‘discovered’ were named for her; and she accompanied her paintings in the gallery with a thorough catalogue of botanical information:

I employed the last few weeks of my stay in England in making a catalogue as well as I could of the 500 studies I lent them, putting in as much information about the plants as I had time to collect, as I found people in general woefully ignorant of natural history, nine out of ten of the people to whom I showed my drawings thinking that cocoa was made from the cocoa-nut.

(Vision 121)

3. “A PERFECTLY UNINTERESTING AND COMMONPLACE PERSON” WHO PREFERS REAL VEGETABLES

North's travels allowed her, literally, to make an exhibition of herself—but not the kind of exhibition of the self that women travel writers seem traditionally to make. The kind of soul searching and psychic growth that, as a component of travel literature, attracted women writers to the genre, is absent from North's memoirs. In this section I hope to convey the strange lack of affect in North's work, her erasure of female subjectivity and, indeed, human subjectivity in general.

North's prose style makes vivid her lack of interest in producing any coherent narrative of a self. One typical paragraph begins with a meeting with two daughters of a German in Rio, shifts to a description of the weather, then to a few sentences on how slaves are treated in Brazil, then a sentence on the Brazilian ladies' embroidery, finally finishing with a short description of the life cycle of a caterpillar. What does one do with such a narrative style? Besides red-pen it like a composition professor? I call North's style ‘stream-of-unconsciousness’: random unconnected elements flow together to create a sense of … nothing. No single consciousness is beneath or within the stream, forging symbolic connections. When North does plunge into what might promise to be a description of her psychic development, she immediately leaps out again, into the tangible world:

Governesses hardly interfered with me in those days. Walter Scott or Shakespeare gave me their versions of history, and Robinson Crusoe and some other old books my ideas of geography. The farm-house we lived in had been originally the laundry of the Hall, and consisted of one large center room on the ground floor …

(Recollections 1:8)

The reader must settle for a wildly unsymbolic series of interior rooms rather than any description of an interior individual. North's predilection for escaping other people, discussed in the previous section, extends to a desire to escape the self as well—significantly, what she learns from that epic of solipsism (Robinson Crusoe) isn't self-analysis, but geography.

The preference for vegetables noted in the title is North's favorite way of escaping self and other. North relates the following story about the bored Rani of Borneo:

Sometimes a troop of native women clad in all colors of the rainbow … would pay her a visit, but they were mere dolls, all alike, well-mannered but curious as monkeys … but her Highness thought she did good by being hospitable to them, and she liked their admiration of her nicknacks.

Vegetables suited me better. The bushes of the petrae were a perfect wonder of bloom …

(Recollections 2:99)

The grammar is uncertain as to what North finds distasteful, the nicknacks or the silly women—but it is certain that conventional femininity holds little charm for North. One critic of North actually misquotes this passage, citing it as “I prefer vegetables” rather than “Vegetables suited me better.”⁵ To a readership accustomed to Wollstonecraft, Mary Kingsley, Bird Bishop and other female travel writers who highly valued and carefully constructed their discursive subjectivity, North comes as a shock—and it seems almost fair to North to mis-quote her, since she refused to play the game properly. The mis-quotation gives North the subjective “I” so often absent in her memoirs. As Morgan writes, North had “nothing to do with those conventional female subjectivities in Victorian culture of heterosexual romance and motherhood” (Morgan 100)—but neither did North align herself with the subjectivity of traveling adventuress, artist, tourist, or pure scientist. North's love of the natural world makes people—herself included—seem small. (One reason for this is her intense but conflicted commitment to realism, which I will discuss in the next section.)

Her artwork (see Figure 2) illustrates this anti-humanist view of the world: enormous vivid flowers, itty bitty grey people. As an illustrator of plants, why need she include humans at all? Human figures are generally positioned in landscape or nature drawings to give scale to the representation, without which the viewer cannot position herself in space. Here, humans are added only to become paradoxically immediately smaller, as the flowers appear larger—thus throwing the entire composition off balance. Imagine the picture without the figures at bottom—cover them with your hand, and the flowers cease to loom as large. Something similar happens in North's prose—plants seem to literally grow over humans, choking them out of the verbal picture:

The black people too were very kind, and seemed in character with the scenery. They were always friendly, and ready for a chat with the ‘missus’. The population seemed enormous, though all scattered. There was a small valley at the back of the house which was a marvel of loveliness, bananas, daturas, and great Caladium esculentum bordering the stream, with the Ipomoea bona nox, passion-flower, and Tacsonia Thunbergii over all the trees …

(Recollections 1:83)

The people, who start out ‘in character with the scenery’, eventually are dissolved into it. ‘Population’ means, originally, black Jamaicans. But the passage is structured so that ‘population’ is transferred onto the bananas and daturas as the paragraph continues. By the end, plants have become ‘enormous’ and ‘scattered’ rather than the human population.

4. THE REAL THING

North's fear of the subjective arises in her memoirs as a tension between realism and imagination, or mimesis and representation. Recollections is filled with stories of the dangers of representation and the imaginary component of art, science, and travel (the radically contradictory stories her artwork tells will be discussed in Section Five.). North's meeting with Julia Margaret Cameron, the wonderful Victorian photographer, sets up the parameters of this tension, so allow me to quote extensively from this chapter of North's work. The meeting takes place in Ceylon, in 1877.

I had long known her glorious photographs, but had never met her. She had sent me many warm invitations to come when she heard I was in Ceylon. Her husband had filled a high office under Macaulay in India, but since then for ten years he had never moved from his room. At last she made up her mind to go and live near her sons in Ceylon. Everyone said it would be impossible; but when told of what she was going to do, he said that the one wish he had was to die in Ceylon! He got up and walked, and had been better ever since … His wife had a most fascinating and caressing manner, and was full of clever talk and originality. She took to me at once, and said it was delightful to meet anyone who found pearls in every ugly oyster … The walls of the rooms [in the Cameron home] were covered with magnificent photographs; others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors, with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most refreshing, after the ‘don't care’ people I usually meet in tropical countries. She made up her mind at once she would photograph me, and for three days she kept herself in a fever of excitement about it, but the results have not been approved of at home since. She dressed me in flowing draperies of cashmere wool, let down my hair, and made me stand with spiky cocoa-nut branches running into my head, the noonday sun's rays dodging my eyes between the leaves as the slight breeze moved them, and told me to look perfectly natural (with a thermometer standing at 96!). Then she tried me with a background of breadfruit leaves and fruit, nailed flat against a window shutter, and told them to look natural, but both failed; and though she wasted twelve plates, and an enormous amount of trouble, it was all in vain, she could only get a perfectly uninteresting and commonplace person on her glasses, which refused to flatter.

She also made some studies of natives while I was there, and took such a fancy to the back of one of them (which she said was absolutely superb) that she insisted on her son retaining him as her gardener, though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word.

(Recollections 1:315-6)

There's a wonderful paradox in this meeting: Cameron, the wildly imaginative artist in the new mode of photography which is touted as that which can capture the real without mediation of paint or brush or artist⁶; and North, the scientific illustrator who uses the traditional high art medium of oil paint to copy the real thing. North disapproves of Cameron's artifice—neither North nor the breadfruit can ‘look natural’ when nailed in a false position. English women can't be made into tropical princesses; North has a conception of identity based on what she ‘really is’ and what things ‘really look like.’ Realism is her obsession, and her aesthetics as described in her prose suggest a strategy for conferring absolute authority only via a mimetic copy of the visual truth. Her travels are emphatically not about taking on roles, playing the part of a foreign lady—she has no interest in ‘going native.’ One gets the impression that what ruins Cameron's 12 plates is North's scientific gaze ruthlessly looking out at them, threatening any aesthetic project which attempts to transfigure reality into something false. … The native's back, also, stands for North's indictment of Cameron's aesthetic mode; not only is the man's face never brought into focus, he is hired for his aesthetic potential rather than his natural use-value—which North finds absurd.

When North hears of Cameron's death, she writes that Cameron was “one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, and a beautiful face, like a beautiful flower, never fades from memory” (Recollections 1:321). A strange eulogy for a woman whose greatest artistic achievements were photographs of famous Victorians, to preserve them from fading from memory. But North has no admiration for photography's claim to realist immortality—instead it is a flower, that which fades quickly, to which North paradoxically likens an unfading face, thus naturalizing Cameron, as Cameron had attempted to naturalize North.

North's insistence on the real thing—or nothing at all—comes up again in her meeting with an Indian princess, who by traditional custom is secluded from the sight of all men except her husband, and must be carried everywhere in a curtained frame ‘like a shower-bath’:

I felt a real pity for the poor secluded woman. She showed me photographs of all our royal family, and a full-sized portrait in oils of herself, done by a native artist, not from herself, but from one of her little nieces who was supposed to be like her. The jewels and dress alone were taken from the real thing. I was asked the rather embarrassing question “was it not a good likeness?” She gave me a photograph of herself, with her autograph, and when I asked how it was that a photographer was allowed to look at her to do it, I was told he had his head in a bag, and was supposed not to be able to see her!

(Recollections 1:328-9)

Again we have a strange nexus of conflicting ideologies of the visual here: a princess who can't be looked at except obliquely, a native artist who must create his representation from a representation, and a blind photographer taking a copy of the real. North's opinion of all this is obvious from her caustic wit—she demands the real, and a one-on-one relation between it and its copyist. Not to be directly seen is, in North's terms, pitiable; in a society based on the seclusion of women, there is little space for female self-representation.⁷ North tries to be a good Platonist, acknowledging that all copies are inferior and that second-hand representation, especially if poisoned by cultural or artistic ideologies, desecrates the original. She also tries to be a good Kantian. Francis Ferguson describes Kant's treatment of the sublime as “locating aesthetic pleasure in nature—outside, that is, of the question of design of intention” (Ferguson 130). North isn't much interested in labeling anything she sees ‘sublime’, but her interactions with nature do show a philosophy which believes that design or intention contributed by humans causes representation to fail in its ‘truth.’ Any attempt at the expression of one's own consciousness in art compromises the artist and the product by calling attention to the inherent duplicity in that attempted expression.

North's fear of the theatricality involved in artistic expression⁸—as exemplified in her sitting for Cameron—is in keeping with her drive-to-the-real. “To be conscious of being seen is always to be in the position of mugging, putting on one's expressions for the sake of one's audience” (Ferguson 130). North can only authorize herself and her productions if she can convince us of their mimetic exactness, and her lack of artistic intervention in their production.

Karen Lawrence, in Penelope Voyages, writes that travel literature “explores a tension between the thrilling possibilities of the unknown and the weight of the familiar, between the desire for escape and a sense that one can never be outside a binding cultural network” (19). I'd like to align Lawrence's notions of the expansion and containment of travel to the tension in North between mimesis and representation. In some sense North is a repressed traveler, and a repressive writer, one who gathers up her spoils of travel and hauls them home to England and nails them into place in a perfectly designed domestic interior (the North Gallery). ‘Realism’ in North's terms is a form of containment—it is the science of getting as close a copy as possible of something onto canvas and fixing it there for British posterity—rather than for personal expansion. Her line of sight is like an entomologist's—it fixes:

While I was sketching outside it [an Indian temple] a very sacred man came out, all painted and whitened, and produced a pot of red paint, which he daubed over several of the carvings, with a defiant look at me; I believe as a sort of precaution against the effects of my evil eye. I took his portrait, and as he did not take mine I think I had the best of it.

(Recollections 1:339)

Her paint wins out over the native's paint, for the very sacred man's aesthetic is based on what North sees as superstition, while hers is based on ‘reality’; the daubs he affixes are ineffective against her imperial eye that can aggressively ‘take’ his portrait. But for all its aggression, North is attempting to write against a tradition of artistic travel which perhaps further undermines a native culture, by turning it into pure aesthetic representation. Observe the Wildean life-imitates-art appropriation of the East in the following extract from the journal of Elizabeth Thompson Butler, a successful Victorian artist and avid traveler:

One knows the gorgeous East at first only in pictures; one takes it on trust from Delacroix, Dechamps, Muller, Gerome and a host of others. You arrive, and their pictures suddenly become breathing realities, and in time you learn, with exquisite pleasure, that their most brilliant effects and groups are no flights of fancy but faithful transcripts of every-day reality. At first you ask, ‘Can those figures in robes and turbans be really going about on ordinary business? … That water-seller by Gerome has moved; he is selling a cup of water to that gigantic Negro … and is pocketing the money quite in an ordinary way. And there is a praying man by Muller …

(Nunn 99-100)

Here we have the imaginative way to erase a native culture; North shows us the ‘realist’ way to do it.

North's imperial eye has two uneasy moments when the possible artistic ‘mood’ of what she sees threatens to overwhelm her. Instead of giving in to the imaginative experience of an encounter with a foreign culture as did Butler, North flees:

Hardwar is a most enjoyable place for an artist, full of picturesque bits of street views. I went one morning into a room overhanging the river … a tomb was in the centre of the room, covered with green satin drapery, and a real live Fakir, entirely naked, was there too, with a long white beard and some daubs of yellow paint on him, who stared like a wild beast (as he was). I longed to stay and paint the scene, but it would have taken long, and the holy man might possibly have got hungry and eaten me up.

(Recollections 1:350)

Here the danger of being looked at and consumed by what you are supposed to be looking at and consuming overpowers North. She can't get this sacred man's portrait as she did the other one—perhaps because this one is naked, perhaps because of his dual nature—part human, part beast—or perhaps because he is staring, presumably at her, and thus disrupting her authoritative unidirectional line of sight. Not an artist given to symbolic representation, North is unable to represent this scene, to incorporate it back into her realist project. This ‘savage's’ use of paint, too, on his body as sacred space, succeeds as protection—she cannot paint him, for he is already painted. As a living work of art he is unapproachable by North's mimetic mode.

Her second uneasy visual moment comes again in an encounter with the aesthetics of the Other. While visiting a Buddhist shrine in Ceylon, she writes:

I spent one day making a painting in the semi-darkness of the holy place, trying to give some idea of the yellow flowers, yellow gold, yellow priest, and yellow light of the thing, which in the hands of a great artist might have made a rich picture; but the want of air, the smell of burning tallow, of flowers, and of general Buddhism, was almost too much for even my endurance, and after an hour or so I was glad to get back to my happy garden home and to quiet.

(Recollections 2:307)

North is driven out of the holy place by the excess mood of the subject she attempts to capture; a second sense, smell, invades the territory of the visual artist and renders her art ineffectual. Here is a sight—and a smell—that needs a different kind of artist than North professes, in her memoir, to be. One who can capture smoke and light and mood, rather than the empirical formal realities of vegetables. Yet we shall see in the next section how often her verbal aesthetic is at odds with her visual productions.

5. SUITABLE FOR FRAMING: THE BOTANICAL ART OF MARIANNE NORTH

As the last quote demonstrates, North has none of the ‘reciprocity’ in her encounters with native people which Mary Louise Pratt elaborates in her discussion of the travel writings of Mungo Park, in which the traveler “appropriates and is simultaneously appropriated by” native culture in the service of a capitalist ideology whose main impetus is trade (Pratt 90). This fantasy of reciprocity is one way Pratt sees early European travelers, adventurers, and explorers endeavoring to maintain a certain image of ‘innocence’ about their colonizing or imperial projects. Another ‘innocent’ tradition is that of the traveling naturalist, who, since the boom in natural history sparked by the work of Linnaeus, traveled the globe “armed with nothing more than a collector's bag, a notebook, some specimen bottles, desiring nothing more than a few peaceful hours alone with the bugs and flowers” (Pratt 27). A perfect description of North—except that her baggage always included an easel, brushes, and paints as well. North combines the innocence of the botanist with the innocence of the mimetic artist—viewing, not taking; recording, but not altering. She collected visual representations only, and brought them home and planted them in England. The seeming ‘innocence’ of the cultural productions of a traveling artist calls into question the status of representation as imperial project—do her paintings participate in the appropriation of foreign resources and peoples? How might the countless sketches of other female travelers fit into the overall ideology of Empire? If North is ostensibly drawing from the real thing, how far can she, too, be accused of artistic ‘Orientalism?’

North donated all her paintings to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and funded the building of a ‘domestic interior’ to house them, complete with desks, a studio, comfy chairs—North even wanted refreshments provided for the weary walkers in the gardens. A first glance into the North Gallery is overwhelming …—the mass of pictures swim before your eyes like wild wallpaper. If you step up close, however, and look at the individual paintings, a new light on North's work appears—one that radically disrupts the image of the stolidly realist prose persona I have been trying to elucidate. Recollections is not illustrated, so until you see the pictures, this side of North remains hidden—and vice versa, I'm sure. (I came to the pictures second, after reading the memoir—and was pleasantly shocked.) Certainly her memoir gives no sense of North as witch—but the impact of the Gallery makes that old gentleman's comment suddenly comprehensible.

North's paintings are lush and sensuous; the oil is thick, the color vivid. A reviewer of the North Gallery in 1992 writes that North's work in its “strong female imagery, suggests a 19th century Georgia O'Keeffe” (Quoted in Morgan 101) … and the comparison is entirely justified—although often North's ‘female imagery’ is a bit more coy than O'Keeffe's … and frequently North's imagery seems to me to fluctuate between male and female, at one moment portraying a pitcher plant as undeniably phallic …, the next positioning the same plant to resemble nothing so much as a gaping uterus and vagina (Figure 7).⁹

Whatever the gendered imagery, North's paintings are a far cry from the standard botanical illustrations of her time—pen and ink sketches, line drawings, watercolors, or colored pencil sketches¹⁰ which are precise, highlighting one plant or plant part on a white ground. North, on the other hand, paints vegetable chaos. Flowers tumble over the canvas, one scientifically interesting part of one flower hidden by another. She regularly uses the formal arrangement of foreground and background as well, so that the flowers are always in some context—against a mountain, next to a temple, beside a lake. But this formal pattern only heightens the startling effect of the paintings. … [The] plants loom large in the foreground, disrupting the viewer's sense of the proportion of the world. One always has the sense of something—animal, mineral, vegetable, spiritual—lurking in the shadows at the boundaries of the vividly cheerful flowers. The flowers have their own shadows, however—as in O'Keeffe's work, North's flowers have hidden depths which entice the viewer—but unlike O'Keeffe, North's flowers have dangerous depths as well. … [The] looming quality of the flowers or plants in the foreground of almost all North's work also contributes to a sense of the plants as specimens: the spectator sees each pistil and stamen as through a magnifying glass, theoretically removing all possible mystery. But North's obsession with things that hang … means that the visible source and support of these specimens is invisible, off-stage. And hence the strangeness returns.¹¹

Seeing North's pictures liberates a reader of the memoirs to let loose the speculations—to make the most of deadpan accounts of exploding mushrooms—to question the verbal insistence on mimetic realism and scientific calm. … Realism and symbolism vie for control in North's work; in her prose, we saw her refusal to break the mimetic contract—in her interactions with Cameron, various foreign peoples, and local flora. But in her art we see images struggling toward an uncomfortable but lovely strangeness. She stands at the crossroads of the “contested territory signified by Ruskin's ‘natural ideal’, Arnold's ‘imaginative reason’ and Pater's ‘cognitive skepticism’” (Macleod 334) and exemplifies the debates over the difference between the real and the ideal, categories which were continually contested during the Victorian period—in part because of that new representational mode, photography. In their introduction to the volume Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, Carol Christ and John Jordan write:

Two very different accounts have been given of the history of the visual imagination in the century. One has stressed the predominance of realist modes of representation, culminating in photography … The other emphasized a break with realism, an increasingly subjective organization of vision leading to modernism.

(xxi)

That these two accounts are not separate but interconnected and contested is exemplified in North's work. Her writing is aligned to one mode, her painting another, but the dialogue between them must infect both axes with elements of the other.

In her later years, North suffered from mental illness—hallucinations, paranoia, voices in the head. Only brief references to these events remain in the published version of her memoirs and are therein, or by Mrs. Symonds, attributed to bad food, or North's increasing deafness. Certainly North seems a monument of sanity, and I don't mean to suggest that she's some seething cauldron of Victorian repression. But I do wish to let the artistic productions stand beside the written memoirs and bounce uncomfortably off one another. In a letter to Barbara Bodichon near the end of North's life, she writes of her decision to embark upon her memoirs: “I am a damp unwholesome body, disagreeable to myself and friends, but I mean to crush the demon and meanwhile sit by the fire and scribble about warmer places” (Ponsonby 121). All good witches must have their demons—perhaps amongst them, in the hidden spaces of North's visual and discursive productions, might lie the more radical possibilities of North's career.

Notes

1. In about 20 years North visited Canada, the U. S., Jamaica, Brazil, Chili, Japan, Singapore, Borneo, Java, Ceylon, India, New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, South Africa, Portugal and Italy.

2. This aligns North's travels with that of other earlier women travelers who also ‘went to work’: Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Short Residence in Sweden was generated out of a trip as emissary for Gilbert Imlay's business problems; or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who saw herself as a professional ambassadress in Turkey.

3. For an excellent introduction to the wonderfully stroppy travel writings of Isabella Bird Bishop, see This Grand Beyond selected by Cicely Palser Havely (London: Century Publishing, 1984).

4. See Figure 1 for the full force of the North Gallery.

5. See Morgan, 100.

6. Most critics of Cameron see her as dedicated to liberating her art from its service to realism. See especially Victoria Olsen and Carol Mavor.

7. And yet notice that the princess shows North photos of British royalty. Who's collecting whom here?

8. See Michael Fried's Absorbtion and Theatricality for a discussion of the 18th century fear of theatricality which is continued in North.

9. North actually had a strange fondness for pitcher plants … one of the species she ‘discovered’ was a species of pitcher plant, which now bears her name: Nepenthes Northiana.

10. See Shteir for several illustrations of 18th and 19th-century botanical illustrations.

11. North's technique is also very similar to Oriental woodcuts, which North would have been familiar with.

Works Cited

Christ, Carol T., and John O. Jordan, eds. “Introduction.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Ferguson, Francis. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Fried, Michael. Absorbtion and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Macleod, Dianne Sachko. “Intertextuality in Word and Image.” Victorian Poetry 33(1995): 334-350.

Mavor, Carol. Pleasures Taken. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Morgan, Susan. Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Books about Southeast Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996.

North, Marianne. A Vision of Eden. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980.

———. Recollections of a Happy Life. Ed. Mrs. John Addington Symonds. New York & London: Macmillan, 1894.

Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, ed. Canvassing: Recollections by Six Victorian Women Artists. London: Camden Press, 1986.

Olsen, Victoria. “Idylls of Real Life.” Victorian Poetry 33(1995): 371-390.

Ponsonby, Laura. Marianne North at Kew Gardens. Exeter: Webb and Bower in assoc. with the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, 1990.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

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