Abstract & Overview
This dissertation examines the rhetorical transformation of female bodies into plants and the gendering of plants in early modern English literature and science. Bringing gardening manuals and obstetrical treatises into conversation with a wide range of literary texts, such as Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Titus Andronicus, I argue that these horticultural metamorphoses occur when the generative potential of the female body threatens to elude patriarchal containment. Yet, I contend that the plant-women resist objectification by defying the conflation entirely, by wielding authority to metamorphose themselves into female-horticultural hybridity, or by discovering the surprising opportunity to embody new forms of discourse. Early modern ecocriticism and history of science typically detail the relationship between humans and nature, but my research reconceives that link by examining what happens when these two categories are rhetorically conflated. The resulting breakdown of boundaries reveals how early modern women and nature might evade patriarchal restrictions by becoming newly hybrid vegetal bodies capable of speaking from a dual subject position. The intermingling of horticulture and language in early modern England – where books could be gardens, forests, and posies, flowers could be powerful rhetoric, and grafting could be a graphic act of writing – creates room for this evasion to occur. I structure the project thematically, with an opening chapter on books as gardens, and subsequent chapters focusing on the female body as an enclosed garden, a flower, a fruit tree, and a forest tree. Metaphorical language creates these hybrid vegetal-female bodies, but this dissertation argues that the blurring of horticultural generation and literary or linguistic generation allows these feminized plant objects to regain authority over language and to remake themselves as subjects.