The Botanical Imagination of Naturalist Literature in the Americas

This project analyses the relationship between the language of botany and settler identity in trans-American naturalist fiction written between 1880 and 1915. This includes works by eight novelists from Latin America: Eugenio Cambaceres, Federico Gamboa, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Manuel Zeno Gandia, and the U.S.: Jack London, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin and Frank Norris. Since the earliest days of European exploration in the New World natural scientists have surveyed American flora and produced botanical illustrations. These illustrations were part of an emerging scientific empiricism which sought to classify the natural world, the roots of which recent scholarship has located in Spanish America (Safier, Canizares-Esguerra). This project goes a step further by demonstrating that colonial visualisations of flora had an afterlife in literary works of naturalism in the Americas around the turn of the century. I argue that the botanical metaphors found in these novels are a significant form of imagery for Euro-Americans and the creole elite, and that literary identification with plant life entails a psychological form of sowing oneself into the land, and of having one's anxieties alleviated and belonging validated by association with the processes of the natural world.

In retracing the origins of botanical imagery, this project realigns the dominant understanding of literary naturalism as a movement. Naturalism of the Americas is widely understood as directly modelled on the works of French novelist Émile Zola. However, the era of scientific development (driven by such travellers to the Americas as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin) which shaped Zola's ideas were themselves the products of colonial encounters in the New World. Therefore, whilst American forms of literary naturalism may have their immediate origins in Zola, tracing Zola's origins inevitably leads us back to the Americas. By reading the botanical metaphors present in naturalist fiction alongside earlier colonial uses of botanical imagery, this research rejects the implication that such imagery was part of a linear transmission of European ideas, suggesting instead that the botanical imagination of American literary naturalism is part of a much longer history of transcontinental exchanges.