Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education (original) (raw)

Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education

2014

This article will explore the intersection between 'literature' and 'science' in one key area, the botanical poem with scientific notes. It reveals significant aspects of the way knowledge was gendered in the Enlightenment, which is relevant to the present-day education of girls in science. It aims to illustrate how members of the Lichfield Botanical Society (headed by Erasmus Darwin) became implicated in debates around the education of women in Linnaean botany. The Society's translations from Linnaeus inspired a new genre of women's educational writing, the botanical poem with scientific notes, which emerged at this time. It focuses in particular on a poem by Anna Seward and argues that significant problems regarding the representation of the Linnaean sexual system of botany are found in such works and that women in the culture of botany struggled to give voice to a subject which was judged improper for female education. The story of this unique poem and the surrounding controversies can teach us much about how gender impacted upon women's scientific writing in eighteenth century Britain, and how it shaped the language and terminology of botany in works for female education. In particular, it demonstrates how the sexuality of plants uncovered by Linnaeus is a paradigmatic illustration of how societal forces can simultaneously both constrict and stimulate women's involvement in science. Despite the vast changes to women's access in scientific knowledge of the present day, this 'fair sexing' of botany illustrates the struggle that women have undergone to give voice to their botanical knowledge.

Botany, Sexuality and Women's Writing 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant

European Journal of English Studies, 2009

Sample. Have a separate maintenance! They must be your fashionable plants then. What and some have their misses, I reckon, as well as their wives? Anna. O yes! A great many: and some ladies have their gallants too. Sample. Upon my word, Miss, a very pretty study this seems to be that you've learnt: I can't say I should much like my wife to know anything about it. Anna. That you'll find a difficult matter to get one who's ignorant of it; for all ladies that know any thing study botamy [sic] now. (III. 1. 43-44) The Lakers and The Unsex'd Females show how fashionable women's botany had become. They demonstrate the spread of Linnaean ideas in England and the anxieties surrounding the figure of the female botanist in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

‘Emily Lawless and Botany as Foreign Science’

The Journal of Literature and Science, 2011

The primary goal of botanical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was to describe, categorise and define plants according to one of the many classification systems used. Despite its basis in subjectively selected criteria, system-building was perceived as an objective science and as soon as a classification method was adopted, it was considered universally applicable. Carl Linnaeus's Sexual System was structured and easy to understand and became one of the most widely used models. System-building and system-modification remained masculine enterprises, but collecting and classification were pursuits open to all, and botany was promoted as an edifying pastime for both men and women in the Enlightenment period. Linnaeus's System was disseminated throughout Europe in both the original Latin and in various translations, and circulated to a wider audience with the help of popular texts like botanical poems, dialogues and letters. The English versions that popularised the system, however, drew attention to the marriage metaphors Linnaeus used, and the sexual-political climate of the time required that women should be protected from sexualised language. Thus a need-or a market-arose for botanical texts addressed specifically to female users. Apart from being linguistically translated, the texts, or rather the knowledge they contained, needed to be put through a process of what Roman Jakobson terms "intralingual translation": a rewording where what might be construed as offensive language was removed (114). Alongside literal translations designed to be faithful to the original, a number of feminised adaptations of the Linnaean system therefore also appeared, initially written by men but increasingly produced by women writers (George 1-21). It could be said, then, that two types of translations were necessary to establish Linnaean taxonomy in Britain: linguistic translations from the original Latin to English and cultural translations from scientific botanical language to popular and what was regarded as feminised forms. The most common understanding of translation is the process of changing a text from one language to another, but it can also be defined as "the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form" ("Translation"). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the example of translating a painting into an engraving or etching, and in the case of written material, the other medium or form could be the translation of a scientific treatise into poetry or fiction. The process often involves transmitting metropolitan ideas to the conditions in the periphery, which draws attention to the cultural-political dimensions of the activity. Since no translation can be perfectly equivalent to the source text, the effort paradoxically accentuates the differences between the linguistic and cultural systems it is intended to erase. One effect of conveying information in a translated or alternative form may therefore be that the shortcomings of the original are uncovered. In the case of interlingual translations, the impossibility of exact equivalence is frequently noted as a problem. Intralingual translations, on the other hand, are not expected to be completely faithful to the original, and as a result they create spaces for variations, commentary and subversion. By remaining outside the norms of scientific writing, popular botanical works may expand the subject and include dimensions not normally found in a scientific text, such as subjective or emotional responses to the natural world.

Emily Lawless and Botany as a Foreign Science

Journal of Literature and Science, 2011

The primary goal of botanical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was to describe, categorise and define plants according to one of the many classification systems used. Despite its basis in subjectively selected criteria, system-building was perceived as an objective science and as soon as a classification method was adopted, it was considered universally applicable. Carl Linnaeus's Sexual System was structured and easy to understand and became one of the most widely used models. System-building and system-modification remained masculine enterprises, but collecting and classification were pursuits open to all, and botany was promoted as an edifying pastime for both men and women in the Enlightenment period. Linnaeus's System was disseminated throughout Europe in both the original Latin and in various translations, and circulated to a wider audience with the help of popular texts like botanical poems, dialogues and letters. The English versions that popularised the system, however, drew attention to the marriage metaphors Linnaeus used, and the sexual-political climate of the time required that women should be protected from sexualised language. Thus a need-or a market-arose for botanical texts addressed specifically to female users. Apart from being linguistically translated, the texts, or rather the knowledge they contained, needed to be put through a process of what Roman Jakobson terms "intralingual translation": a rewording where what might be construed as offensive language was removed (114). Alongside literal translations designed to be faithful to the original, a number of feminised adaptations of the Linnaean system therefore also appeared, initially written by men but increasingly produced by women writers (George 1-21). It could be said, then, that two types of translations were necessary to establish Linnaean taxonomy in Britain: linguistic translations from the original Latin to English and cultural translations from scientific botanical language to popular and what was regarded as feminised forms. The most common understanding of translation is the process of changing a text from one language to another, but it can also be defined as "the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form" ("Translation"). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the example of translating a painting into an engraving or etching, and in the case of written material, the other medium or form could be the translation of a scientific treatise into poetry or fiction. The process often involves transmitting metropolitan ideas to the conditions in the periphery, which draws attention to the cultural-political dimensions of the activity. Since no translation can be perfectly equivalent to the source text, the effort paradoxically accentuates the differences between the linguistic and cultural systems it is intended to erase. One effect of conveying information in a translated or alternative form may therefore be that the shortcomings of the original are uncovered. In the case of interlingual translations, the impossibility of exact equivalence is frequently noted as a problem. Intralingual translations, on the other hand, are not expected to be completely faithful to the original, and as a result they create spaces for variations, commentary and subversion. By remaining outside the norms of scientific writing, popular botanical works may expand the subject and include dimensions not normally found in a scientific text, such as subjective or emotional responses to the natural world.