Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  Boyd’s novel thus unknowingly anticipates the premise of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood novels, in which Butler asks whether humans can consent to sex with the alien species that has imprisoned them, the Oankali. For Butler, this is a central moral quandary driving the narratives; for Boyd, not even a consideration. Compare, for example, an infamous exchange in Dawn in which an Oankali appears to offer a human a choice before initiating a sexual encounter, but also implicitly reserves the right to interpret what ‘choice’ and consent mean:

  ‘Why didn’t you … just do it?’

  ‘I told you. This time you can choose.’

  ‘I’ve chosen! You ignored me.’

  ‘Your body said one thing. Your words said another.’ It moved a sensory arm to the back of his neck, looping one coil loosely around his neck.27

  Unsettlingly, for both Boyd and Butler, nonhuman life can desire, but only in a way fundamentally connected to a kind of violence – and, in the case of the former author, we have perhaps not moved so far from the old ‘Woman Eater’ tradition as may have at first appeared.28

  Pat Murphy’s short story ‘His Vegetable Wife’ uses a grimmer kind of humour than Boyd’s light satire to complicate the attitudes towards both sexual violence and the meaning of plant desiring that we see in The Pollinators of Eden, and importantly aligns vegetal being with the female subject position. The opening paragraph of the story at first appears thoroughly comic, playing as it does the absurdity of its premise with such straightforwardness:

  Fynn planted her with the tomatoes in the greenhouse on the first day of spring. The instructions on the package were similar to the instructions on any seed envelope. Vegetable Wife: prefers sandy soil, sunny conditions. Plant two inches deep after all danger of frost has passed. When seedling is two feet tall, transplant. Water frequently.29

  Suggestions of a darker tone quickly creep in, however, as we learn that this man farms a non-terrestrial ‘cash crop’ while living alone on a homestead that takes the form of a ‘living dome’ under a ‘green sky’ and regards the local plant life with a suspicion bordering on paranoia:

  Beyond the fields grew the tall grasses native to the planet, a vast expanse of swaying stalks. When the wind blew, the stalks shifted and moved and the grasses hissed. The soft sound of the wind in the grasses irritated Fynn; he thought it sounded like people whispering secrets. He had enjoyed hacking down the grass that had surrounded the living dome, churning its roots beneath the mechanical tiller, planting the straight rows of cimmeg.30

  As the plot of the story develops to encompass a violence far beyond this suggestion of pleasure in clear-cutting, it becomes even clearer that ‘His Vegetable Wife’ collapses violence done to plants with violence done to women’s bodies, to say nothing of the implied subtext of colonial violence; Diana Francis has incisively documented this latter dimension of the narrative, pointing out that Fynn’s attitude towards the plant-woman results from her status as both ‘a female and as a colonial subject’.31 Murphy’s story thus echoes the ecofeminist concerns of Le Guin’s 1972 novella The Word for World Is Forest, in which the women among the indigenous race of beings are subject to casual dehumanising sexual violence in parallel to the rampant economic exploitation and ecological devastation of their home.

  Francis traces the connection between the plant-woman’s oppression and her categorisation as ‘vegetable’ – ‘A vegetable is, by definition, a consumable’ – but I would like to further emphasise the vegetable wife’s vegetal nature in the context of the above discussions of plant-feeling.32 It is important to note, for example, that Murphy allows the plant-woman to perceive, and even shows Fynn nervously acknowledging that capacity to perceive, unsure finally what to make of it in a plant. We first apprehend this uneasy state of affairs when Fynn gropes the woman as soon as she displays secondary sex characteristics, as he equivocates once he perceives that she is watching him with unmoving eyes: ‘He backed away hastily, noticing only then that he had broken the stalks of several leaves when he stepped in to fondle the trunk. He touched the broken leaves guiltily, then reminded himself that she was only a plant, she felt no pain.’33 This initial hesitation does not, of course, prevent Fynn from continuing to sexually assault her; he continually pretends to be unable to understand what she is feeling because of her inability to speak and the flatness of her expression – ‘Her face was blank; her eyes, expressionless’ – while his actions, such as restraining her with a rope, demonstrate his full knowledge of her desire to flee from his touch and escape the dome.34 After the first scene of violent rape, she even cries tears in a way that troubles him momentarily, until he verifies that her expression remains the same. Fynn is ‘reassured by her expression’: ‘He knew she felt no pain; the instructions had said so.’35 We know that plants feel no pain: our inherited ontology has said so.

  Unlike Boyd’s plants – which, as I have argued, turn out to be far less alien, far less nonhuman than they first appear – Murphy’s plant-woman remains thoroughly vegetal in some respects, unable to communicate in a way Fynn is willing to recognise as communication because she does not speak human language: ‘She did not understand language. She did not speak language. She paid little attention to him unless he forced her to look at him, to see him.’36 Indeed, Fynn chooses not to respond to her attempts to communicate her wishes precisely because they are ‘wordless’, denying plants any agency by dismissing outright any possible alternative methods they might use to express interior states, sensations, desires: ‘She seemed to react only to violence, to immediate threats. When he made love to her, she struggled to escape, and sometimes she cried, a wordless sound like the babble of the irrigation water flowing in a ditch.’37 The Pygmalionesque narrative ultimately bends toward a plot structure we might describe as ‘Daphne’s revenge’, in which the plant-woman kills her rapist in imitation of his own violence, resolving also to bury him to ‘see what grew’.38 Murphy’s ‘vegetable wife’ thus represents not merely a metaphor for a woman under patriarchy, rape culture, capitalism and/or colonialism, but also a plant under the hierarchies of being that have historically subordinated them as insensate, disposable, beneath ethical consideration of any kind. Fynn finds his ‘wife’ exceedingly beautiful, of course, but this in no way blunts his epistemic and very physical violence. As if to underscore the reality and poignancy of plant-feeling, Murphy also ingeniously maps phototropism onto the plant-woman’s desire for liberation: ‘If he dragged her to bed, she would struggle free in the night, and when he woke she was always at the window, gazing out at the world.’39 Plants, this image suggests, do have desires if we are willing to expand our categories of understanding to encompass their expressions of desiring as such.

  Murphy’s story signals that a teeming site of resistance to the subordination of plants lies in recent feminist discourses: witness not only Elaine P. Miller’s The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine, published a decade before Marder began to lay the foundations for the critical plant studies now coalescing around his work,40 but also any number of botanical fictions by women sf authors, including Joan Slonczewski’s 2011 novel The Highest Frontier and Theodora Goss’s 2017 story ‘Come and See the Living Dryad’. Yet I would like to conclude this exploratory study of plant-feeling and plant sexuality in botanical fiction by pointing to another possible origin for a counter-tradition to regressive botanical fictions in which plants remain bound to old epistemological and ontological paradigms – or, when violating them, become objects of horror alone. Surprisingly contemporaneous with the forging of the modern genre of sf in the early pulp magazines and the devil-plants and man-eaters that populate their pages, Ronald Fraser’s little-read 1926 novel Flower Phantoms remains one of the most sophisticated attempts I have encountered to articulate a plant-thinking or a plant-feeling in narrative. Drenched in mysticism, Fraser’s novel tells the story of a young woman who communes with plant consciousnesses, sometimes during dreamlike encounte
rs with anthropomorphised plants, yet Flower Phantoms also probes the possible metaphysical and conceptual limits of any such communion with the vegetable world.

  Early in the novel, the protagonist Judy, a botanist at Kew Gardens who desires to ‘know the life of plants’, to ‘see into the consciousness of plants’, finds herself frustrated by her fiancé, Roland, a littérateur who understands plants only as a piece of the grammar of poetic metaphor: ‘Flowers were all very well. He knew about them, of course, through the images in literature. Without doubt he was aware that they existed, as the occasion of numerous fancies and thoughts to do with grace, purity, transience and the like’.41 Roland cannot help himself from endlessly comparing his fiancée’s beauty to a flower – ‘You are a yellow daffodil blooming in the snow’ – in a way that disappoints her on a metaphysical level:

  ‘But you must understand, my Roland, it is no good using that language about flowers with me. I live with them. I know them. I know the world of the plants, their thoughts, their feelings, and I have intimations of strange experiences among them. No image, therefore, that you could fetch from the furthest of your literary excursions would ever cope with the real flower, or with the experience, or with any experience …’ she began to expand her thesis.42

  Flower Phantoms, then, does not simply critique the utilitarian or instrumentalist attitude towards plants that has dominated Western attitudes towards them – an attitude represented by Judy’s fiscally fastidious brother Hubert, who has particular ideas about what gardens are ‘for’43 – but also their fundamental misapprehension in human language and particularly their impressment as symbols: Fraser, in other words, daringly censures a Monsanto and a Wordsworth alike.

  Because the novel at times waxes into the mode of full-blown philosophical dialogue, it will be useful to excerpt at length from one further conversation between the two lovers:

  ‘It is necessary that I should know the life of plants.’ Perhaps she still had some hope that he would understand her.

  ‘Oh, life!’ he interjected. ‘Nasty raw stuff!’

  …

  ‘You are not, of course, to think that I am trying to isolate the life of plants as if it were a juice. It has now been positively shown by physicists and chemists that there is really no such thing as life. What I seek is to know their desires …’

  ‘Desires? How can plants have desires?’

  ‘They have needs,’ she pointed out; ‘therefore probably desires.’

  ‘But they have no consciousness to be aware of themselves as possessing desires.’

  ‘How do you know? What is consciousness? Anyway, that is what I am after, to know their queer civilization, what they have built up from their raw life; and, as fundamental, what it is in them that is in us too. I mean, what there is of common origin and, if you understand me, common experience.’44

  A deeper apprehension of the ‘life’ of plants, for Fraser, represents one way to transcend a merely verbal reality, an apprehension that eludes Roland: ‘he did not feel the teeming of an unperceived order of existence, an inexpressible reality’; ‘for him there was no voice in the silence; there were no eyes among the plants.’45 For Judy, it is always a ‘teeming plant silence’ that she perceives.46

  The plot of the novel thickens as it turns out that Judy has been having a sort of emotional affair with a particular orchid, so that her brother becomes convinced she has taken a (human) lover: ‘The flower she spoke of was the subject of certain intimate thoughts. The beauty and the strength of that orchid were mysteriously more efficient with her senses than the beauty and strength of Roland.’47 This is not some mere floral paraphilia – ‘Are you plant-mad, Judy?’ – as what Judy truly longs for is communion with ‘the living silence, the secret activity and thinking of plants’.48 She eventually proves able to achieve an ambiguous kind of communication with the world of plants during trance-like states of reverie in the greenhouses. During these dreamlike interludes, she encounters a cast of personified flowers as she herself takes the shape of a hybrid being, fulfilling her earlier hope that humans and plants might communicate by meeting one another halfway:

  If they could only come part of the way to meet her, as she had gone to meet them. If they would appear to her in a shape somewhat resembling the shape of men, so that one could speak of face, or eyes. She pretended, like a child, that they could. If they would dress their plant-thoughts in a kind of human speech, so that one could have a sort of conversation.49

  Fraser does not anthropomorphise his plants for the pedagogical reasons that Darwin does: I would argue that this narrative strategy (for Fraser) and meditative technique (for Judy herself) resemble the ‘strategic anthropomorphism’ promoted as a conceptual tool by theorists such as Jane Bennett and others.50 Later, a climactic reincarnation scene describes Judy’s most complete entrance into the vegetal sensorium, as her visionary consciousness is reborn as a germinating seed perceiving and desiring as a plant might be understood to perceive and desire: ‘Great spaces of delicious and untranslatable sense-dreaming, while the sweetness of light and dark alternately provoked and assuaged desires.’51 On one level, however, Judy understands all of her dream-experiences to be authored by her own mind rather than somehow supernatural or truly originating in the plants themselves, and she regularly reproaches herself for deluding herself into thinking she has truly met the vegetable world: ‘“You have learned nothing of the life of plants!” she told herself, shaking her golden head. All those thoughts she herself must have invented – but out of what unknown part of her did these imaginations proceed?’; ‘How mad to dream within herself of the kisses of an Orchid – how unbotanical! how anthropomorphic!’52 To Judy as to many scholars investigating the nonhuman, ‘anthropomorphic’ is a dirty word, but it may finally represent the best strategy she has.

  For Fraser, desiring remains the fundamental link between the vegetal and the human. A reader will be struck by how superficially similar the premises of Pollinators and Flower Phantoms appear to be: in both novels, a young scientifically minded woman seems unable to find sexual gratification until a sentient plant teaches her the true meaning of desire. Whereas Boyd, however, rather clumsily inscribes human desires onto plant bodies, thinking it a radical and liberatory manoeuvre, the mystic in Fraser remains unsatisfied even with meeting plants halfway. Even if Judy has succeeded in expressing ‘plant realities in human language’, she seeks after higher truths, and by the novel’s conclusion the flower phantoms of its title remain evanescent, elusive, lingering on the fringes of the world she has rejoined and acknowledged as ‘real’, exorcised but not resolved.53 Indeed, this discussion has only scratched the surface of this fascinating and multifaceted text, with its hints of sadomasochism and apocalypticism. Fraser is finally interested in larger riddles than ‘what a plant feels’, but plant life nevertheless remains a key to these larger mysteries. The novel maps Fraser’s lifelong interests in mysticism and Buddhism onto the almost inaccessible plant world, where in the end he finds no escape from sensation, pain and desire. Plants are desiring things, and human desiring links us to them even when other communication or communion remains impossible – and for good or bad.

  Judy’s self-doubt about whether she has truly bridged the divide between plant and human persists for reasons that we scholars of literature, Rolands all, must confront: ‘The way into the plant-world was lost, and perhaps it had never existed, save in illusion.’54 What, finally, does it mean to move from fictions of imaginary, ostentatiously desiring and feeling plants to revisit the ‘Planet of the Plants’ that our own planet very much already is, with the vast bulk of the biomass on Earth being contained in non-animal organic matter? Why is it that, even in the realm of science fiction unreality, it is easier to imagine plants as the agents of arousing desire rather than themselves experiencing and expressing desire? Why, when plants in botanical fiction are shown to speak, to communicate, to desire, to feel, is this behaviour so often rendered as a violation, as monstrous? Wit
h its efforts to imagine and inhabit a shared space of plant and human desiring, Flower Phantoms represents a rare flower in the history of botanical fiction. Even the medieval mandrake, for example, that threateningly feeling plant, becomes a symbol for Antichrist in certain patristic commentaries – and, later, strongly associated with witchcraft. In my view, whether under an Aristotelian or Darwinian paradigm, the challenge presented by the lives of plants to our sense of human exceptionalism is not one that our scientific and ethical systems have fully resolved – or even fully acknowledged.

  As Marder has recently written, ‘In our approach to the world and in our thinking, we remain vegetal without knowing it, whereas every reminder of this belonging is met with suspicion, incredulity, and ridicule.’55 Behind our laughter at the pseudoscientific claims of The Secret Life of Plants or the latest B-movie monster plant lies a real disquiet: we remain uneasy with the idea that plants might perceive and feel, and particularly uneasy with plant sexualities in all their complexity, and what they might mean for us, for our supposed uniqueness, for our own forms of desiring. If, for example, we find John Boyd’s promise of a serpent-less Eden ultimately bankrupt, the fault does not lie with the plants, but with Boyd’s ultimate failure to imagine vegetal consciousness and think beyond the familiar and indeed regressive shape of his own human desiring. We as readers of the novel are obviously intended to take the side of the supposedly sexually – and therefore also politically – subversive orchids, but we can never fully do so today because of the extent to which Boyd’s ostensibly radically different alien plants are not in fact plants, but merely humans disguised by a veneer of cellulose, and moreover humans who do not understand concepts of consent and sexual violence any better than Boyd himself does. Indeed, in order to recognise and better apprehend the nature of our kinship with plants, we will need to do more than merely see ourselves in plants. Perhaps a way forward would be to begin acknowledging what Marder calls ‘the repressed vegetal facets of our lives’: that is, to see plants in ourselves rather than see ourselves in plants.56 We might also do well to attribute to plants in our fictions and our imaginations a greater possible range of feelings than mere voracious appetites, sexual and otherwise.