Textualities 2023 - Greenhouse Romanticism: A Potted History

Coined by Deidre Lynch, ‘Greenhouse Romanticism’ considers Jane Austen’s figurative use of the language of greenhouses, hothouses, and ‘forced’ nature, as an implicit commentary on the status and education of women.

While there are only five actual instances of a greenhouse, conservatory, summer house or pinery across all six of Jane Austen’s novels, she consistently aligns the language of plants, forced fruit, cultivation, and pruning with women, creating a dialogue between their moral versus formal education and the natural versus artificial world.

Austen clearly links an appreciation of nature to morality, while depicting those who prioritise a greenhouse over native trees, as false or unlikeable. Here we might think of Sense and Sensibility‘s Marianne Dashwood with her passion for dead leaves and old walnut trees, versus the snobbish Fanny Dashwood, who inherits the Norland estate, demolishes its old trees, and supplants them with a greenhouse – a clear symbol of conscious consumption and contrived nature over careful land stewardship.

Austen echoes Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, in which she called women’s miseducation a “barren blooming”, leaving them only an ephemeral moment of worth before their “short-lived bloom of beauty” was over and they were left “flaws in nature”.

Wollstonecraft criticised men as propagators of such “exotics” cultivated on too rich a soil; language we can see paralleled in Austen’s favourite poem - William Cowper’s The Task.

Here we can see that already in Austen’s day the greenhouse was a symbol of empire, characterised as a trophy case for those imported plants; the spoils of imperialism.

We can date this language of blooming exotics to Carl Linnaeus – a key figure in the relation between literature and the greenhouse. He invented the taxonomic system, or binomial nomenclature, which provided a socially sanctioned vernacular to speak of the unspeakable i.e. sexuality.

Essentially, plants were now understood as reproducing similarly to humans, and so the hothouse gained even more symbolism as a hotbed of sensuality. As Amy King has identified, the term ‘bloom’ came to imply women’s marriageability in socially friendly, or floral, terms, as evidenced in Austen’s abundant use of ‘blooming’ complexions.

As the Romantic era progresses into the Victorian, things heat up as the glasshouse becomes intensely popular, due to innovations in glass and iron technology.

The hothouse often functions now as a literary device foregrounding a character’s awakening or maturation – e.g. in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, young Molly Gibson has to leave the heated, almost soporific atmosphere of the Cumnor’s perfumed glasshouse with all its symbolic orchids, prefiguring her growth into adolescence and eventual marriage to Roger Hamley the naturalist.

Elsewhere, and mor disturbingly, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, we have the forced greenhouse strawberry which Alec force feeds Tess in the glasshouse/forcing house, which very obviously and symbolically, anticipates her later assault.

Around this time glasshouse pioneers like Joseph Paxton and John Claudius Loudon were creating the pinnacle glass structures from the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, to the famous Crystal Palace which housed the Great Exhibition in 1851. Simultaneously botany was becoming stratified from an egalitarian pursuit enjoyed by women and men into the professionalised male discipline of botanical science and the female domain of amateur botany.

Paxton said the conservatory had an umbilical relation to the house, being attached, and so it became associated with women and domesticity, whereas the greenhouse was an autonomous space designed by professional men like himself for the display of scientific specimens.

This ‘scientific specimen’ is the famous Chatsworth water lily, housed in the ¾ of an acre conservatory of the same house that figures as Pemberley in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. This “curious water-plant” measured 3 ½ feet wide, not quite supporting the child pictured here (Paxton’s daughter), who required an underwater support. But this image also highlights a growing concern of the age - fears of similarities between humans and plants, as native and exotic varieties were cross-fertilised, and even anxieties around hybridity and degeneration which were swimming around post-Darwin.

This liminality characterises the greenhouse itself of course, which is both an interior/exterior space, but also encompasses binaries as they were then understood, of home/empire, nature/nurture, nature/science, nature/culture. So it’s unsurprising that the fictional greenhouse often functions as a site of transgression or border crossing.

As the Victorian era gives way to the Edwardian, the literary greenhouse seems to deteriorate as exemplified in this Sherlock Holmes short story, The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton. The imperial language we saw earlier takes a physically violent turn conveying a real sense of colonial unease that often characterises the Holmes canon. But Holmes and Watson interestingly become perpetrators - one minute abiding by the law, the next Holmes removes a flimsy circle of glass to break and enter, and they “had become felons in the eyes of the law" (Doyle).

Crossing the literal and metaphorical border between legality and lawlessness, we see that the only protection between the two is the eminently breakable glass separating the safe British garden outside and the imperially-loaded crime scene within the conservatory.

The greenhouse’s popularity in literature does seem to map the trajectory of empire; rising in the Romantic era with figures like Jane Austen, ripening with the Victorians from Elizabeth Gaskell to Thomas Hardy, and regressing into the Edwardian era and beyond into the World Wars, when many were demolished or fell into decay. So perhaps it might be useful to think of greenhouse romanticism in terms of greenhouse imperialism. It did begin after all with Emperor Tiberius, who was prescribed a cucumber a day, so the tale goes.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880. Oxford UP, 2008.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Headline Review, 2006.

---. Sense and Sensibility. 1811. Collins Classics, 2010.

Bate, Jonathan. “Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3,

1999, pp. 541-560.

Bellamy, Liz. The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Bilston, Sarah. “Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice Text.”

Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-19.

Bowden, Mary. Review of Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, by Jane Desmarais. Victorian Studies, vol. 61 no. 3, 2019, p. 516-517. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/734988.

“Conservatory.” Grove Art Online. Oxford UP, 2003, doi-org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article

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Cowper, William. The Task: “The Garden”. J. Johnson, 1785, pp. 89-134.

Darby, Margaret Flanders. The Hothouse Flower: Nurturing Women in the Victorian Conservatory. Edward Everett

Root, 2020.

Desmarais, Jane. Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850

to the Present. Reaktion Books, 2018.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905. Project Gutenberg, 1994.

Eve, Jeanette. “The Floral and Horticultural in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels.” The Gaskell Society Journal, vol. 7, 1993, pp. 1-15. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45185554.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Wives and Daughters. 1866. Penguin Classics, 2003.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891. Everyman Classics, 1984.

King, Amy M. Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel. Oxford UP, 2003.

Lynch, Deidre. “‘Young Ladies are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism.” Elh, vol. 77, no. 3, 2010, pp. 689-729.

Shteir, A. B. “Gender and “Modern” Botany in Victorian England.” Osiris (Bruges), vol. 12, 1997, pp. 29-38.

“Thomas Hope & the Regency style.” Victoria and Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/thomas- hope/.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects.

1792. Floating Press, 2010. ProQuest, www.ebookcentral-proquest-com.ucc.idm.oclc.org/lib/uccie-ebooks/

/detail.action?docID=563875.