Elisa's General Point of View

     Because I am in the middle of an ongoing project to write a book on Woolf and flowers, my free writes are going to tend to look at her works through a floral lens. While this may at first seem to be a rather limited, even constraining, focus, I have been astonished to discover how much pulling this thread unravels about both Woolf's major themes and her imaginative method. Not exactly "solid objects," flowers are at least rooted in natural reality: they have shapes, and colors, and habitats, and they often conjure specific locations in Woolf's life.  In addition, however, flowers come freighted with a huge range of historical, literary and symbolic associations and meanings.  They appear in Greek myths and legends, in Shakespeare and other classics of British literature; there is even an entire symbolic "Language of Flowers" developed in the nineteenth century as a romantic code. While Woolf herself was more a a weeder and an admirer of flowers than an actual gardener, throughout her life, many of her closest friends were avid and knowledgeable flower growers including the friend of her youth, Violet Dickinson, her husband Leonard Woolf, and her her muse and lover Vita-Sackville West.

     The main thing I have discovered from all these years of counting flowers is the strikingly political way that Woolf uses flowers to critique her culture’s repressive gender arrangements. Although they are almost all structurally hermaphroditic, flowers have a very long history of female attributions, which stretches from myth of Demeter and Persephone which makes the floral renewal of spring part of cycle of rape and rebirth to Georgia O’Keeffe’s visual renditions of flowers as revelations of the female body. As Amy King has pointed out in her brilliant exegesis of the flower story in Victorian literature, Bloom, the narrative of the marriage plot which underlies so many novels is often metaphorically presented as a vegetative process of budding and coming to fruition. Woolf’s complication, undercutting, and reversal of the traditional treatment of flowers is a subtle but consistent element of her continuing critique of the stories society tells about women.