Plants in Science Fiction
Page 12
Plant scientists disagree about the appropriate terminology (and philosophy) that should be used to address such questions, but increasingly these kinds of conversation are taking place in botanical subfields with names such as ‘plant behaviour’; ‘plant sensing and communication’; and even ‘plant neurobiology’.4 Science fiction authors, of course, have been freer to ponder the implications of plant agency with the imaginative tools available to them in a transhistorical genre I call ‘botanical fiction’, which might be defined to span our oldest myths about vegetation deities to a text such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ or any of the much more recent entries into the pantheon of animate plants and hybrid plant–human beings.5 Even Lucian’s True History, that sometime-candidate for the first science fiction narrative, features an encounter with sexually alluring and entrapping vegetal hybrids, testifying to the antiquity of the human capacity to imagine plants desiring more visibly, even if the result is intended to be comedic. It may seem misguided to begin an inquiry into plant desiring in pre-modernity, as I have done here, when even in the present we experience so much difficulty acknowledging the mere possibility that plants may deserve ethical consideration as living and feeling beings, despite a dominant biological paradigm that insists plants share a common ancestor with ourselves.6 But perhaps this is part of the promise of pre-modern literature and thought: the sheer novelty of medieval images of plant–human hybridisations and the estrangements of alien intellectual paradigms might function in much the same way as a modern science fictional narrative that postulates a much more recognisably sentient plant being. What, after all, would it really mean for us to share a ‘vegetable soul’ with plant life, to share the capacity for growth and reproduction? Counterintuitively, would sharing such a soul suggest that humans are at our most vegetal when we desire? And particularly when we experience sexual desire? How might ‘desire’ differ from the modern concept of a ‘tropism’, that ostensibly automatic reaction to a stimulus argued to drive plant behaviour?
In order to begin answering such questions and as part of a larger effort to bridge the history of emotions and the emerging discipline of ‘critical plant studies’ pioneered by philosopher Michael Marder and others, this essay sets the history of botanical thinking about plant sexuality in dialogue with selected botanical fictions that contemplate that sexuality by means of imagined plant and human couplings. As we will see, some of these texts prove successful in imagining radical new configurations of plant and human being, while others remain limited either by a failure to escape anthropocentrism or simply regressive views on sexuality and sexual violence. The fictions to be considered here include, first, John Boyd’s 1969 science fiction novel The Pollinators of Eden, in which a character is quickly proved incorrect in his belief that ‘[t]here’s nothing sexual about a tree’; Pat Murphy’s 1986 short story ‘His Vegetable Wife’, the ecofeminism of which provides a corrective to the disordered vegetal-sexual politics of Pollinators; and, lastly, Ronald Fraser’s 1926 novel about a young woman’s sexual awakening among vegetal beings, Flower Phantoms, which alone of these texts locates the possibility of achieving a truly nonhuman perspective in meeting the bare life of plants.7 Marder encourages us to be mindful of – and indeed practice forms of – ‘plant-thinking’, but we would also benefit from striving for a greater awareness and understanding of ‘plant-feeling’ or plant-desiring, and its imbrications with our own forms of desiring.8 In The Great Derangement Amitav Ghosh writes of becoming ‘aware of the urgent proximity of nonhuman presences’, and his reflections on what we can gain from a recognition of such presences hint at what we might gain from deepening our understanding of what nonhumans, including plants, may desire: ‘The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.’9 To interrogate anew ‘the vegetable soul’ is to question what we may and may not share with plants as living and desiring beings.
The very different texts I wish to consider in this context each alternately deny and rely on the reality of ‘plant-feeling’: in all of these texts, also, the convergence of human sexuality and plant sexualities overturns the familiar and the comfortable in ways that can hold either promise or threat. To show plants in fiction alive to desire can challenge hidebound or limiting social and sexual norms, or simply reinforce them through the terror of a monster. As we will see, the strangeness – and even potential queerness – of plant sexuality as imagined in botanical fiction can usefully provoke readers to recognise a forgotten kinship with real plants, perhaps even reconsider the subjectivity of those plants.10 Even so, an undercurrent of repulsion and horror can also come to dominate the narrative, undercutting the radical potential of such texts for rethinking human–nonhuman relations; anthropocentric norms can also, self-limiting, reassert themselves under the guise of imagining a vegetal perspective.11 Indeed, despite their ubiquity on our planet and in the backgrounds of our fictions, plants themselves have proved mostly ‘unthinkable’ in the sense that Ghosh uses the word to speak of climate change and the problems it presents for humanity and our shared biosphere. It is no coincidence, then, that in Ghosh’s perspective the emergence of anthropogenic climate change coincided with a gradual forgetting of our ‘kinship with the nonhuman’.12 As for several other thinkers and writers concerned with climate change – including Richard Powers, author of the 2018 plant epic The Overstory – for Ghosh, overcoming the challenges presented by climate change thus goes hand in hand with becoming more intimately acquainted with nonhumans of all kinds.13 Botanical fiction does not, by definition, promote a better understanding of this kinship, but it can always stand as a place to begin thinking and rethinking.
I lack the space to enumerate the many revolutions in botanical thought and fiction between the Middle Ages and the present, but, before moving to the twentieth-century sf texts that will occupy me for the majority of this essay, I will linger on one particularly vital intermediary, a truly foundational text for any consideration of how humans have viewed plants and imagined plant desiring. Just as modern botany might be argued to begin a few centuries after Trevisa with the work of Linnaeus, modern botanical fiction may well commence with Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants, an idiosyncratic versification of the Linnaean taxonomic system often dismissed as merely ‘didactic or frivolous’, as Janet Browne has pointed out in a survey of its reception history.14 But this text is also delightfully bizarre in its depictions of animated stamen-brothers wooing pistil-sisters, and a great deal sexier than, for example, one’s typical high school lessons in botanical taxonomy. Indeed, as reading any given page or two of the Loves of the Plants will reveal, Linnaeus’ system of botanical classification is in fact all about sex, as indeed much of later Darwinian biology would remain preoccupied with sex. The classical definition of a species, of course, determines organisms to be of the same kind when they are able to reproduce sexually with one another. Naturally, in the ‘advertisement’ prefacing the text, Darwin insists that his purpose is not to titillate but to remain thoroughly pedagogical, aiming to ‘inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy’.15
Ultimately, Darwin’s desire to lead the readers of his poetry to a stricter understanding of botanical science may be frustrated and subverted by his strategy of personification, which invites readers to ponder quite viscerally what it might mean that, alongside humans, plants share sexual experience, the complexity of which in fact defies easy correspondence with human behaviour and mores. Consider the class of plants designated ‘Gynandria’ or the ‘Feminine Males’ by Linnaeus – and also the ‘masculine females’ by Darwin – because they possess ‘Many Stamens attached to the pistil’: the potential queerness of plant sex and sexuality would make matter for another essay entirely.16 I
t is true that the bulk of Darwin’s Loves of the Plants remains somewhat limited in its interest to explore these potentially intellectually fruitful and/or sexually revolutionary collisions of human and vegetal sexuality. But what I most wish to emphasise is that, just as there is promise opened here by imagining desiring plants in botanical fiction – suggesting radical possibilities for rethinking human–non-human relations as well as our own culturally and temporally specific understandings of ourselves and our sexualities – there is also risk. The complicated sexuality of plant life can be written in more reactionary fashion as sexually threatening, even as a threat to a specifically heterosexual social order.
The later 1920s, the dawn of the pulp era in science fiction, naturally saw a boom in the number of stories featuring monstrous plants; the deadly vegetable became a staple monster-of-the-month in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. I have written extensively on this tradition in botanical fiction and its connection to a Darwinian unease with the idea of universal common descent,17 but what I would like to emphasise here is the way in which these plants were so often figured as a specifically sexual threat. In the 1920s and long after, sf artists also eagerly took up the iconography of the sexually monstrous/monstrously sexual plant, decorating pulp covers and movie posters with images of vegetable horrors, by turns flytrap-yonic and tentacular-phallic and regularly ensnaring scantily clad women: representative examples include the posters for the 1962 film adaptation of The Day of the Triffids and 1958’s The Woman Eater, as well as the September 1928 cover of Weird Tales (illustrating John Murray Reynolds’s story ‘The Devil-Plant’) and the April 1940 cover of Famous Fantastic Mysteries (illustrating H. Thompson Rich’s story ‘The Beast Plants’), among many others. Not all of these narratives even feature scenes of plants abducting or otherwise assaulting women, so strong is the desire to depict them doing so.
Whence this sexual terror of the plant? As documented by Mark Chase et al., even before the still sexually suggestive name ‘Venus flytrap’ had been settled for Dionaea muscipula, eighteenth-century botanist John Bartram had understood this new wonder, a carnivorous plant, with the term ‘tipitiwitchet, a somewhat ribald Elizabethan term for vulva’; Chase et al. go on to add, ‘This connection between female sexuality and carnivorous plants continued into 19th century England and may have had something to do with their popularity and continued public fascination.’18 Fiction writers have thus simultaneously relished casting a plant-woman hybrid as femme fatale, from Lucian’s vegetable monsters to Beatrice Rappaccini and DC Comics’ Poison Ivy – and other kinds of desiring plants as a sexual threat to women, as we see more recently in stories such as Elizabeth Hand’s ‘Prince of Flowers’ (1988), or in the infamous rape scene by animate foliage in The Evil Dead and its remake (1981, 2013). For so many of these narratives, the very idea of plant sexuality seems to represent transgression, and a transgression often linked to ‘transgressive’ female desire.
John Boyd’s novel The Pollinators of Eden thus belongs to a large and varied tradition of botanical fiction engaging with sex and sexuality, but also appeared during a particular cultural moment for the vegetal-sexual, a time when people began to think a great deal about having sex with plants. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we can find a resurgence of images in sf melding human and plant forms in sexual embraces, as in the particularly striking cover by Bruce Pennington for the Damon Knight-edited volume Nebula Award Stories 1 (April 1969) – in which callipygian humanoid forms merge with a trunk of a tree with human lips for leaves – or the cover featuring a nude woman posed with enormous flowers for Rena Vale’s Taurus Four (January 1970). Despite this rather more overt sexuality, we can turn to the figure of the man-drake as an unlikely link between medieval epistemology and certain of the sexual obsessions of 1960s counter-culture; The Pollinators of Eden begins with an allusion to the legend, as Boyd chooses as his epigraph the famous lines from John Donne: ‘Go, and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake root.’19 The poem consists of a series of further impossibilia that culminate in the misogynistic accusation that ‘nowhere’ lives a woman both true and fair, but Boyd omits these lines from the poem, including only the first stanza. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine a more fitting epigraph, as this novel slips into casual misogyny time and time again under the guise of contributing to ‘women’s lib’.
Indeed, I see The Pollinators of Eden poised between two phases in twentieth-century botanical fiction, perhaps not coincidentally also poised on the cusp of the second-wave feminist revolution in the science fiction genre at large. On the one hand, its murderous tulips and sexually aggressive orchids represent a culmination of the long literary and filmic tradition in which the ‘deviant’ sexualities of the plant world become conscripted as agents of horror. On the other hand, Pollinators also anticipates by only a few years several fictions more interested in taking the plant’s point of view, including Ursula Le Guin’s much better-known story of vegetal sentience ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ (1971), as well as a number of fictions published in the wake of 1973’s pseudoscientific opus The Secret Life of Plants, perhaps the most successful work of ‘pop botany’ ever published. By contrast, The Pollinators of Eden has been all but forgotten, and admittedly received a decidedly mixed early reception. For one, feminist critic and fellow sf author Joanna Russ parodied the novel mercilessly in her short story ‘The Clichés from Outer Space’, and she had also reviewed Boyd’s previous novel so infamously unfavourably that an excerpt from the review was quoted in her own New York Times obituary: ‘I forgive Mr. Boyd the anguish his novel caused me and hope he will eventually forgive me the anguish this review may cause him, but for Berkley [Books] there is no forgiveness. Only reform. Don’t do it again.’20
For better or worse, they did do it again, and gave us The Pollinators of Eden. The premise of the novel – the discovery of a mysterious planet with sentient plant life that brings its repressed protagonist Freda Caron to a sexual awakening – amounts to something that is not exactly Paradise Lost ‘in space’, although Boyd’s literary-classical ambitions should not go unremarked. In his preface to the book’s 1978 reprinting, Boyd explains that ‘[t]he following novel is one of a trilogy based on classic myths’, and the narrative is peppered with classical allusions and narrative structures.21 For instance, while everyone knows that hell is a nine-circled pit, we hear less often about Dante’s Mount Purgatory, that seven-corniced cake with the Garden of Eden on top – and a major influence, I would argue, for the design of the seven-tiered mountain atop which Boyd’s own ‘Earthly Paradise’ is perched.22 Only Freda’s fiancé, Paul, has unlocked the mysteries of Flora and resides on the mountain in a sexual relationship with the orchids, while the other scientists flounder in a kind of equatorial purgatory down below. Not so coincidentally, Dante, touring Eden at the conclusion of his Purgatorio, compares himself to a tree reborn with new growth, as he prepares to make his way from the Earthly Paradise to the heavenly one. But it is to Ovid and his Metamorphoses rather than Dante that Boyd’s novel owes most. Intriguingly, Boyd – as Darwin boasts of doing in The Love of the Plants – reverses the famous Apollo and Daphne narrative: plants no longer represent the virginal and sexless, and transforming into one as Daphne does in order to escape her pursuer would certainly not, in this world, imply an escape from desire. During the Middle Ages – and despite the eroticism of later Renaissance depictions of the story – Daphne was always understood as a figure for the Virgin Mary, a plant-woman standing in as the ideal representation of a virgin’s isolation from sexuality: ‘there’s nothing sexual about a tree’ all over again.23 For Boyd, greater communion and communication with plants results in a literal consummation of human desire for plants and plant desire for humans: becoming closer to plants or indeed more plant-like awakens rather than evades human sexuality. To put it more plainly, if you are seeking graphic sex scenes between humans and alien orchids, this is the novel for you.