Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:44:09.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Cut it, woman”: Masculinity, Nectar, and the Orgasm in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2022

Christopher Harrington Open the ORCID record for Christopher Harrington [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper identifies the theme of honey gathering in Charlotte Brontë's fiction and places it within the context of Romantic and early Victorian representations of the nectarium's role in insect-flower relationships. Brontë's novels often invert the conventional use of botany to represent female sexuality by representing men as flowers and endowing her protagonists with an ulterior form of entomological agency. These insects work to express Brontë's desire for greater economic and erotic mobility, but it is argued that this mobility is problematized by the self-absorbed nature of the masculine nectarium, a dulcet gland in flowers originally believed by botanists to ooze sugar to serve a plant's own needs. This is particularly evident in Brontë's industrial romance Shirley (1849), as the theme of honey gathering is pathologized to visualize a crisis in the plotting of Victorian femininity. This paper may be helpful to scholars interested in Brontë's fiction, representations of sexuality, botany, entomology, ecology, and early Victorian pest discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 1 - 25
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Almeida, Hermione. Romantic Medicine and John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Barton, Benjamin Smith. Elements of Botany. Philadelphia: Robert Desilver, 1836.Google Scholar
Barton, Benjamin Smith. “Some Account of Poisonous and Injurious Honey of North America.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 5 (1802): 51–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blaisdell, Muriel. “Natural Theology and Nature's Disguises.” Journal of the History of Biology 15, no. 2 (1982): 163–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brontë, Anne. Agnes Grey. 1847. London: Vintage Classics, 2017.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. 1847. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2000.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Margaret Smith. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. The Professor. 1857. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. 1849. London: Penguin Classics, 2006.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. London: Penguin Classics, 1985.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte, Brontë, Anne, and Brontë, Emily. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. London: Aylott and Jones, 1846.Google Scholar
Brosnan, Leila. Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays and Criticism: Breaking the Surface of Silence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Clark, J. F. M. Bugs and the Victorians. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Coriale, Danielle. “Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and the Consolations of Natural History.” Victorian Review 36, no. 2 (2010): 118–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coriale, Danielle. “Gaskell's Naturalist.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63, no. 3 (2008): 346–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtis, John Farm Insects: Being a Natural History and Economy of the Insects Injurious to the Field Crops of Great Britain. Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1860.Google Scholar
Darby, Robert. A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles. “Humble Bees.” The Gardener's Chronicle no. 34 (1841): 550.Google Scholar
Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden; A Poem in Two Parts. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson, 1791.Google Scholar
Darwin, Erasmus. Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life. 3 vols. Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1801.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Endersby, Jim. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Amanda Jo. Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Devin. “Flattening the World: Natural Theology and the Ecology of Darwin's Orchids.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37, no. 5 (2015): 431–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gubar, Susan. “The Genesis of Hunger, According to Shirley.” Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3/4 (1976): 5–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harman, Claire. Charlotte Brontë: A Life. Stirlingshire: Viking, 2015.Google Scholar
Hooker, Joseph. The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya. London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849.Google Scholar
Huber, François. Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles. 2 vols. Paris: J. J. Paschoud, 1814.Google Scholar
Hustak, Carla, and Myers, Natasha. “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies in the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23, no. 3 (2012): 74–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacson, Maria. Botanical Dialogues, Between Hortensia and Her Four Children. London: J. Johnson, 1797.Google Scholar
Johnson, Heather. “Dangerous Skin: Bees and Female Figuration in Mahler and Plath.” In Insect Poetics, edited by Brown, E., 129–53. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Kelly, Theresa. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
King, Amy. Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, 1770–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirby, William, and Spence, William. An Introduction to Entomology. 4 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822–26.Google Scholar
Kreisel, Deanna K., and Griffiths, Devin. “Introduction: Open Ecologies.” Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no. 1 (2020): 1–28.Google Scholar
Lindley, John. The Elements of Botany, Structural, Physiological, and Medical. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1849.Google Scholar
Lindley, John. An Introduction to Botany. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Longman, 1832.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindley, John. Ladies’ Botany; or, A Familiar Introduction to the Study of the Natural System of Botany. 2 vols. London: James Ridgway and Sons, 1848.Google Scholar
Linnaei, Caroli. Dissertatio botanica sistens nectaria florum. Upsalia, 1762.Google Scholar
Lorch, Jacob. “The Discovery of Nectar and Nectaries and Its Relation to Views on Flowers and Insects.” Isis 69, no. 4 (1978): 514–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacLachlan, Bonnie. “What's Crawling in Sappho Fr. 130.” Classical Association of Canada 42, no. 2 (1989): 95–99.Google Scholar
Martineau, Harriet. Illustrations of Political Economy. Philadelphia: E. Littell, 1832.Google Scholar
Miller, Lucasta. “Introduction.” In Shirley, by Brontë, Charlotte. London: Penguin Classics, 2006.Google Scholar
Plath, Otto. Bumblebees and Their Ways. New York: Macmillan, 1934.Google Scholar
Réaumur, R. A. F. Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insects. 5 vols. Paris: L'imprimerie Royal, 1734–42.Google Scholar
Rees, Emma. “Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman.” In The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, edited by Mangham, A. and Depledge, G., 119–34. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Ruricola. “Humble Bees.” The Gardener's Chronicle 30 (1841): 485.Google Scholar
Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de. Études de la Nature. Paris: Aime Andre, 1825.Google Scholar
Samyn, Jeanette. “Intimate Ecologies: Symbioses in the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no. 1 (2020): 243–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sappho, . Greek Lyric. Translated by Campbell, David A.. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Minor Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Edward Moxon, 1868.Google Scholar
Shteir, Ann B. “Gender and ‘Modern’ Botany in Victorian England.” Osiris 12 (1997): 29–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Charlotte. Beachy Head: With Other Poems. London: n.p., 1807.Google Scholar
Smith, Jonathan. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Sprengel, Christian. “Discovery of the Secret of Nature in the Structure and Fertilisation of Flowers.” In Floral Biology, edited by Lloyd, D. and Barrett, S., 3–44. New York: Chapman and Hall, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprengel, Christian. Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen. Berlin: F. Vieweg, 1793.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Robert. A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus: Comprehending an Elucidation of the Several Parts of the Fructification; a Prize Dissertation on the Sexes of the Plants; a Full Explanation of the Classes and Orders; of the Sexual System; and the Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature, Being Picturesque, Botanical, Colored Plates, of Select Plants, Illustrative of the Same, with Descriptions. 3 vols. London: T. Bensley, 1799–1807.Google Scholar
Virgil, . The Georgics: A Poem of the Land. Translated by Johnson, Kimberly. London: Penguin, 2009.Google Scholar
Vogel, Stefan. “Christian Conrad Sprengel's Theory of the Flower: The Cradle of Floral Ecology.” In Floral Biology, edited by Lloyd, D. and Barrett, S., 44–65. New York: Chapman and Hall, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Jane. “Barrett Browning's Enduring Bees.” Essays in Criticism 70, no. 2 (2020): 178–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. “Honey-Mad Women: Charlotte Brontë's Bilingual Heroines.” Browning Institute Studies 14 (1986): 11–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar