2 results
11 - Botanomorphism and Temporality : Imagining Humans as Plants in Two Shakespeare Plays
- Edited by Susan C. Staub, Appalachian State University, North Carolina
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- Book:
- Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 17 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 07 March 2023, pp 267-284
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Summary
Abstract
This essay examines instances in two plays by Shakespeare, Richard II and The Winter’s Tale, in which characters are given the qualities of plants. This is not anthropomorphism, but what I call “botanomorphism.” Inspired by Michael Marder’s exposition of “plant-thinking,” I focus on how botanomorphism influences time in the plays. In Richard II, different characters are imbued with lives that are longer or shorter, depending on the plants with which they are associated. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione takes on the life cycle of a perennial plant that goes dormant and then returns to life, seemingly miraculously. In both, I argue that a limited human view is eschewed for the botanomorphic perspective of plants, lending a wider, more ecological vision of the events.
Keywords: plant-thinking, vegetal time, plant ontology, politics, critical plant studies
Plants, for early modern people, were a locus of meaning and knowledge production that provoked some of their most profound questions about embodiment, the ontological permeability and limits of human bodies, and the diffusion of sentience in the natural world. The many appearances plants make in the literature and science of the period often complicate the Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. In this essay I posit a practice in early modern literature, not of anthropomorphism (a charge that could be, and has been, levelled at Shakespeare, whose plays I consider) but of botanomorphism, according to which humans or human characters are endowed with the characteristics, physical and ontological, of plants, in a kind of extreme metaphor. I focus on Richard II but turn briefly to The Winter’s Tale, examining metaphors that suggest deep relations between human and vegetable. In both plays, the characters take on qualities of vegetable life, as imagined in a necessarily limited human way. Early moderns understood human ontology to be comprised of or to intersect at least partly with vegetable ontology, arguably making plants fundamental to human identity. I submit that these plays are partly about what it means to be a plant. Metaphor was understood not only as an artificial or discursive construct, but also, at times, as an indicator of material reality.
3 - Time, Gender, and Nonhuman Worlds
- Edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks
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- Book:
- Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 02 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 28 May 2018, pp 69-92
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Summary
Abstract
Early modern constructions of gender reach beyond the human in ways that complicate the male/female binary and efface the border between beings and environment. This essay examines three categories of gendered temporality in representations of nonhuman realms, revealing botanical, nautical, and disease-based perspectives on time that disrupt hierarchies of gender and redefine ontological boundaries. Drawing on a wide range of texts from early modern Spain and England, including works of natural history, poetry, and drama, we analyze manifestations of gendered temporality that frequently disrupt the authors’ attempts to stabilize binary constructs, thus revealing the interdependence between human and nonhuman worlds.
Keywords: nonhuman; temporality; ocean; plant; ecocriticism; new materialism
Some historians have located a shift in perceptions of chronology around the fourteenth century, when Europeans moved from a circular model of time that emphasized repetition and return toward a modern and more linear conception in which time moves from past to future, marked from the death of Christ. While the depiction of this shift may be useful in general, early modern temporality often defies attempts to conceive of time within a single framework. Instead, definitions of time overlap and compete, particularly when one looks outside the human world, as early moderns themselves did often. Recent work in animal studies, for instance, has moved beyond definitions of temporality that separate historical, or human, time from ahistorical, or natural, temporality, addressing, as Erica Fudge advocates, ‘the absence of the nonhuman from history’. Fudge's work foregrounds ‘significant shifts in human thinking and thus human history’ brought about by nonhuman agents. Likewise, the emerging field of critical plant studies has extended the definition of nonhuman actor to the plant world. Several scholars within plant studies have posited a phenomenological account of plant existence, including with regard to time. Michael Marder, in particular, proposes a vegetable temporality that involves ‘hetero-temporality’, a plant time that is dependent on outside factors like sunlight and mechanical interventions by humans; ‘the infinite temporality of growth’, that nevertheless includes interruptions in that growth; and ‘the cyclical temporality of iteration, repetition, and reproduction’. Further, Randy Laist asserts that ‘plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien [to humans] that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms’.