UC Berkeley

Strange Blooms shows how nineteenth-century American writers and artists used plants as a device for thinking about the personhood of others. In the nineteenth century, botany functioned as a social discourse, permeating American culture as a popular science, a poetics, and a visual language. In tracking literary and visual engagements with plants across the century, I investigate how this discourse was used to both reify and reimagine marginalized bodies. I focus particularly on moments that overlap representations of plants with portrayals of race and gender. These moments, I argue, reveal surprising, historically specific ways of thinking about plants: as beings with interiority, agency, and alternative modes of communication. By subverting prevailing notions of plants as inert, hyper-visible, and silent, writers and artists reclaimed personhood for bodies that the dominant culture had also reduced to the same qualities. In thinking about the relation between literary and visual texts, I also emphasize imperceptibility—that which the visual surface of a plant or a body gestures toward but also hides—as an important category for engaging with human and non-human otherness. The images this project engages with thus illuminate the imaginative challenges required not only to think about other species, but also about other people beyond the sphere of sympathetic identification.

Throughout Strange Blooms, I argue that thinking about plants exposed a range of creative possibilities for writers and artists of the period. Beginning with a collection of friendship albums owned by free African American women in antebellum Philadelphia, I argue that the women authors of these albums assert their agency through their revisionary use of botanical poetry and painting—using figures of flowers, rather than their own bodies, to represent resistance to the white gaze. I continue explore the intersections of race and botany by demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe deploys botanical figuration in her anti-slavery novels to lend further dimensionality to her representations of African American characters. In his novel Pierre, Herman Melville representationally intertwines female persons and plants to subvert traditional plots of gendered character development. I argue that these subversions allow for the existence of forms of femininity are spiritual and abstract. In my last chapter, I turn to Charles Chesnutt and late nineteenth-century visual culture to highlight the both violent and empowering possibilities undergirding plant-person amalgamations, particularly in relation to African American bodies. With this final turn, I argue for a broadening of the category of the “human” to allow for more radical and ecological senses of personhood.