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Abstract
Tapping into the Romantic predilection for nature, flower symbolism is widespread in Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867), set amid the lush Cauca Valley in a period before the abolition of slavery in Colombia. Flowers have been identified as encoding female eroticism in the novel, propelling the tragic love affair between the narrator and the eponymous heroine, who, as well as frequently being compared to flora, spends much of her time in her garden, collecting and arranging flowers as love-tokens for Efraín. At the end of María, after the heroine’s death, the flowers picked in the throes of young love are described as ‘marchitas y carcomidas’, encoding María’s untimely demise as well as intimating, as I will suggest in the conclusion, the waning of plantation culture in South America. This article will explore horticulture motifs in the novel, including the multiple references to human hair, which was once thought to share the same physiology as plants.
Notes
* This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number RF-2016-064).
1 Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla (1907–1917), ed., con intro., de Geoffrey Ribbans, 2ª ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991), 185.
2 James Whiston, Antonio Machado’s Writings and the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996), 186.
3 See Valerie Masson de Gómez, ‘Las flores como símbolos eróticos en la obra de Jorge Isaacs’, Thesaurus, XXVIII:1 (1973), 117–27. Flower symbolism is also briefly mentioned by Donald McGrady, Jorge Isaacs (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), 151, notes 25 & 26. Stephen Hart regards flowers and the bird of ill omen as the two most significant symbols in the novel (Stephen M. Hart, A Companion to Spanish-American Literature [London: Tamesis, 1999], 65).
4 Jorge Isaacs, María, ed., intro. & notas de Donald McGrady (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 326. All further page references to María will be given in parenthesis in the main text.
5 Beverly Seaton, ‘Considering the Lilies: Ruskin’s “Proserpina” and Other Victorian Flower Books’, Victorian Studies, 28:2 (1985), 255–82 (p. 255).
6 See Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 235–37.
7 See Beverly Seaton, ‘The Language of Flowers’, Semiotica, 57:1–2 (1985), 73–86 (p. 83).
8 Jennifer Bennett, Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship between Women and Plants (Camden East, Ont.: Camden House Publishing, 1991), 74. She notes that these two flowers are the only ones mentioned in the Song of Solomon.
9 See Bennett, Lilies of the Hearth, 74. The Rose of Sharon is further discussed in Bobby J. Ward, A Contemplation upon Flowers: Garden Plants in Myth and Literature (Portland: Timber Press, 1999), 313.
10 For example, ‘la base de su garganta de tez de azucena’ (132).
11 Elizabeth A. Augspach, The Garden As Woman’s Space in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Literature (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 14.
12 Examples of Efraín climbing the garden walls are on pp. 124 and 139.
13 For instance, McGrady, Jorge Isaacs, 14.
14 Augspach, The Garden As Woman’s Space, 7.
15 Margo Glantz, ‘Húmeda identidad: María de Jorge Isaacs’, in her La lengua en la mano (Puebla: Premià, 1983), 84–90, discusses moisture in the novel.
16 This quotation is included in the first three editions of the novel but excised in the fourth (the 1922 edition by Camacho Roldán & Tamayo), on which McGrady’s edition is based. It is included in the notes on p. 351.
17 See, for instance, Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 2005), 18. Of course, María’s Jewish heritage makes the analogy with oriental baths more significant. As Doris Sommer argues, for nineteenth-century readers of the novel, Jewishness ‘signals, among other things, an irrepressible sexuality’ (Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991], 191).
18 John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond & David Hopkins, 5 vols (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), V, 1697–1700, 659. Later in the novel the lovers engage in a similar act by both kissing Juan on the lips (McGrady notes this in Isaacs, María, ed. McGrady, 151, note 1).
19 See Goody, The Culture of Flowers, 296–97.
20 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed., with an intro., by René Weis (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012), 213.
21 Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2011), 67.
22 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. & trans. James Strachey, rev. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 495–96.
23 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Strachey, 496.
24 Joan Corominas & José A. Pascual, Diccionario crítico-etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1980), II (CE–F), 98.
25 Note also the double suggestion of the carnation in the words ‘encarnado’ and ‘clavados’ in a description of María blushing: ‘Las mejillas de María se tiñeron [ … ] del más suave encarnado. Sus ojos estaban clavados en el suelo’ (144).
26 McGrady notes that the colour of María’s hair varies in the novel; see Isaacs, María, ed. McGrady, 197, note 1. María’s plaits are mentioned, for example, on pp. 59, 64, 77 and 132. Her ringlets are described on p. 240.
27 Carol de Dobay Rifelj, Coiffures: Hair in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2010), 199.
28 Cited in Edward J. Geisweidt, ‘Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in Early Modern English Thought’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 19:6 (2009), 1–24 (p. 10).
29 Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 2003), 136.
30 From Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck, Anatomy of Human Bodies (1689); cited in Geisweidt, ‘Horticulture of the Head’, 14.
31 Geisweidt, ‘Horticulture of the Head’, 15.
32 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4:3 (1998), 469–88 (p. 479).
33 Galia Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2016), 14. Margo Glantz argues that María’s Jewish heritage makes the cutting off of a lock of her hair for Efraín doubly scandalous: ‘para los judíos religiosos el cabello debe ocultarse al mundo y solo su marido puede verlo, y aún más, tocarlo’ (Margo Glantz, ‘De la erótica inclinación de enredarse en cabellos’, in her Obras reunidas, 4 vols (México D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006–2013), II (2008), Narrativa, 291–432 (p. 319).
34 Glantz has discussed the connection between María’s hair and the bird of ill omen in ‘De la erótica inclinación’, 321–22.
35 See Jeannette Stirling, Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 2010), 56.
36 Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology, 2nd rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1971), 22.
37 Stirling, Representing Epilepsy, 58.
38 Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 197, discusses how María’s epilepsy is presented as a form of hysteria in the novel which, according to the conventions of the time, was thought to be treatable both by the restriction and by the supplementation of female sexuality.
39 Ileana Rodríguez, House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women, trans. Robert Carr & Ileana Rodríguez (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1994), 128.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.