Hyacinth
The flower that most of us think of as a hyacinth is Hyacinthus orentalis, a perennial bulb
also known as the Dutch Hyacinth which is a member of the lily family
(Liliacaea). Dutch hyacinths “pack their numerous flowerheads tightly around a
central stem forming a dense cylinder” or flower spike (Hogan 716). The flowers are mostly white to lavender,
pink, and dark purple, although intensive breeding has produced yellow, orange,
and red varieties; the trumpet-like flowerets have a recursive outward flare. Highly
fragrant, they can be grown in water and are easily “forced” to grow early in
the season. Pratt’s mid-nineteenth-century flower book describes the pleasure
to be had “in watching the progress of the beautiful white fibres which descend
from the bulbs into the water, tinged with the hue of purple or green” (125).
Originally from Iran and southern Turkey
(Pratt specifies Aleppo and Bagdad, 126) H.
orentalis was introduced to the Dutch
markets of Europe in the sixteenth century, along with tulips, lilies,
fritillaries, and a variety of exotic bulbs; Pratt claims that the Dutch had
bred over two thousand varieties by 1620, at a time when the flower was
“scarcely known in England” (126). The name comes from Greek hyakinthos, for the purple flower that
sprang from the blood of the handsome youth Apollo accidentally killed while
playing what turned out to be a dangerous game of discus tossing. In Ovid’s
version of the tale, Apollo inscribes the petals of the flower with the Greek cry
of mourning, “Ai, Ai.” This makes it difficult to confirm that what we now call
a hyacinth was the same flower. Giesecke suggests instead that it was Gladiolus illyricus, a wild purple
gladiolus from Turkey that has “distinctive marks on its lower lip” (49).
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There are, indeed, a confusing number of different flowers
which, over time and in various places, have been called hyacinths. For
example, the “wood hyacinth” -- definitely natural rather than a florist flower
-- is variously identified with BLUEBELLS, the English variety of which is
named Hyacinthoides
non-scripta,
as in hyacinths without the writing on them, or Harebells, the Scottish
bluebell, commonly known as Bell Flowers or Campanula (Rendall 352; Ward 212). Woolf does mention harebells twice in her letters, in January of 1928, in separate letters to Clive and Vanessa Bell, both times describing he childhood friend Margery Snowdon as a "withered" harebell (L3 447, 451).
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| Campanula in my garden |
The
“wild hyacinth” is designated by Rendall to be scilla, aka SQUILL, the name
given to Asparagaceae Scilloideae,
actually a relation of the Dutch hyacinth.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilla#/media/File:Blausternchen_2.jpg |
And
then there are “Grape hyacinths,” a name which usually refers to the much
smaller woodland lily, Muscari armeniacum.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscari_armeniacum |
One way to differentiate these different species is blooming
time: Dutch hyacinths bloom in mid-spring, generally at the same time as
daffodils in March, while wood hyacinths or bluebells bloom later in mid April
through early May.
Regardless of actual species, Hyacinths
are consistently associated with youthful beauty, usually male. Heilmeyer makes
the fascinating assertion that “eating the bulbs was said to retard sexual
maturity” (32), a practice that intensifies the flower’s association with
youth. Folkard, Heilmeyer, and Pratt all refer to the common practice of
comparing particularly “crisped and curled” hair to the blossoms of the hyacinth
(Folkard 201). Pratt explains this odd analogy by suggesting that it is based
on the way that “the petals of the hyacinth turn up at the points” (Pratt 126),
but I still have trouble picturing Adam’s “hyacinthine locks,” which “Round from
his parted forelock many hung/Clustering” in Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book IV, ll. 301-3; quoted by Folkard 201). A knowledgeable friend, a professor of
Classical Greek drama, tells me that “Hyacinth, as you no doubt know, is considered the most
beautiful flower by the Greeks and people who have lustrous curly hair have
‘hyacinth hair’ — the most beautiful kind. Athena gives Odysseus hyacinth hair
before he returns home as himself, in order to make him more beautiful, and
Helen is always referred to as having hyacinth hair.”
The literary provenance of hyacinth
is largely in the area of the pastoral elegy, as a mourning emblem for the
early death of a beautiful boy. For example, Milton’s poem On a Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough compares the child’s
demise to that of the “dearly-loved” Hyacinth. Ward declares that the “sanquine
flower inscribed with woe” in Lycidas
is a hyacinth (210), pointing out that in Greek mythology Hyacinth is linked
with Adonis as a symbol “of rebirth and the renewed plant growth of Spring” and
of “youthful beauty” (209). The two youths transformed into flowers by deities
as a sign of their grief are connected in Milton’s Comus where “young Adonis oft reposes” on “Beds of Hyacinth and
roses” (ll. 998-9; qtd by Ward 211), and the two are again linked in Shelley’s
pastoral elegy on the early death of Keats, Adonias,
when the narrator compares his grief to that of the sun god: “To
Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear” (st 16; qtd by Ward 211). A more parodic use
of the flower appears in Jane Austen’s Northanger
Abbey, where the heroine, Catherine Morland, declares that she has “learnt
to love a hyacinth,” which is taken by her love-interest, Henry Tileny, as a
sign that she has begun a somewhat parodic neo-platonic progress of moving in
stages to learn to love ever higher things, including, one presumes, himself (beginning
of Chapter 22; mentioned by Rendall 357).
In the Victorian language of
flowers, the various meanings of hyacinth appear to be differentiated by color.
The entire genus is associated by Greenaway with “Sport. Game. Play” --
presumably because of the unfortunate discus incident (Greenaway 22). She adds that the White Hyacinth also denotes
“Unobtrusive loveliness” (op cit). Ward additionally asserts that “the blue
hyacinth was the symbol for constancy and fidelity” while “the purple hyacinth
meant sorrow” (208), linking back to the pastoral tradition.
As usual, Virginia Woolf does not
pay much attention to fine distinctions among species, though the narrator of Orlando does mention seeing a “grape
hyacinth” among the crocuses in Kew in early March (215). Woolf can be fascinatingly
non-compliant with the pastoral tradition on hyacinths. Her early work consistently
aligns them with the coming of age of young women, with a certain
corollary evanescence and delicacy that suggests wood hyacinths or bluebells
rather than the larger and studier Dutch version. One of her most notable and
sustained evocations of hyacinths occurs in an 1903 practice essay entitled
“Thoughts upon Social Success,” in which she muses on the round of parties she
and Vanessa were being dragged to by George Duckworth during what she elsewhere
referred to as “the Greek slave years” (MOB 106). Noting that she and Vanessa
often felt like “outsiders” at these parties, where they typically knew no one,
she speculates on the other young ladies for whom these social gatherings seem
to constitute an entire life. Wondering whether they even exist in the morning,
she embarks on a lengthy fantasy:
My private belief is that the dinner bell calls them into
existence — they spring up all over the drawing room like hyacinths in June. By
daybreak they are faded — a little crumpled perhaps — never mind — they fold
themselves in sleep — to wake once more when the sun is set. Now I find this
very beautiful & attractive but always a little puzzling. Has she a stalk
or a body — is she clothed in silk or gauze or are they flower petals that
shine on her? Above all, what does she talk about? (PA 167-8)
The fact that these flowers bloom in June as well as the
vision of their stalks clothed in silk suggest a variety of wood hyacinth,
although I cannot help but think there is a bit of a reference to the Victorian
pastime of forcing hyacinth bulbs as these blossoms seem to exist entirely in
drawing rooms.
Although the reference is to an
older woman rather than a younger one, the hyacinths which appear in Night and Day resonate with a similar
feminine delicacy. Impatient with her
mother’s wayward tendency to distraction, Katherine reads “her mother's musical sentences
about the silver gulls, and the roots of little pink flowers washed by pellucid
streams, and the blue mists of hyacinths” before momentarily becoming enraged
at the way her own time is wasted on the endless task of memorializing her poet
grandfather (ND 115). Once again, the
reference seems to be to wood hyacinths; this time it is Katherine who is
enslaved and without a voice, the image of the flower roots washed by streams possibly
recalling hyacinth roots in glass vases of water.
This pattern of
associating hyacinths with women moving into adulthood but constrained by
silencing and/or an unnatural forcing of growth reaches its apogee in Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa’s daughter
Elizabeth is several times compared to the graceful flower. The first time, waiting for her tutor Miss
Kilman, she is presented as “a
hyacinth sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has
had no sun” (120), a description which emphasizes her pre-adult status and
reiterates early associations of hyacinth with shade. The second time, waiting for an omnibus in
Victoria Street, she begins to resist the effeminate characterization: “People
were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns,
running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her”
(130). Like Virginia herself, she
resents the artificial social demands of parties “for she so much preferred
being left alone to do what she liked in the country” (130). Later at her mother’s actual party, her sense
of being misrepresented is confirmed; although she seems to Sally Seaton to be
“very handsome, very self-possessed,” the young man Willy Titcomb (what a
name!) is thinking “She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a
hyacinth” (184).
The
intentionality of Woolf’s concentration on “hyacinth girls” and rejections of
allusions to the fallen male figure of Greek mythology is given further
credibility by a perusal of the flower’s absence in Woolf’s previous novel, Jacob’s Room, her pastoral lament for
the death of her brother Thoby and the waste of lives in World War I, which is
full of spiky composite purple flowers such as ASTERS, SEA HOLLY, LILACS,
and TEASLE (see Sparks, “Literary and Quotidian” 48-9). A diary entry of April
10, 1920, directly juxtaposes the genesis of the novel with the blooming of
hyacinths at Monk’s House (D2 28), and the visual appearance of the flower as
well as its traditional association with the death of a beautiful boy engaged
in a dangerous game seem tailor-made for Woolf’s purposes.
In fact, a perusal of the holograph manuscript of Jacob’s Room reveals that the flower
originally was mentioned no less than nine times, but it was revised completely
out of the published version (JRHD 194, 196, 198, 199, 209). The flowers are
inserted as Jacob is walking around the gardens at Versailles with his friend
Cruttendon, a painter living in Paris, and Cruttendon’s friend, Jinny Carslake,
also knowledgeable about art (the revised scene appears in JR 135-7). The three
repeatedly march by a “lozenge shaped bed packed with stiff pink
hyacinths” while having “the great argument” about “Do we exist? Does anything else
exist?”(JRHD 194). Woolf seems to have interestingly ambivalent feelings about
the gender identification of the flower, shown by the line drawn through “pink,”
a color that suggest a somewhat feminized version of the traditionally purple floral
symbol for sorrow. Both Cruttendon and
Jinny, with their keen, painterly sense of color, notice that in shadow the
flowers appear bright violet (194 and 199), and this foreshadowing of mourning
is intensified by the addition of a yew hedge (196, 199), yew often being
planted in the cemeteries of English country churchyards and, according to
Greenaway, representing “Sorrow” (46). As if to compensate for the feminine and
childish pinkness, the initial stiffness of the flowers is amplified by the
addition of a nearby statue of Priapus “or some other tapering White God” (196;
also on 199). The scene, with its juxtaposition of innocence, masculinity, and
sorrow, gets lodged in everyone’s mind as an important moment in time. Jacob
feels like “a new kind of person” (196); the “hyacinths appear momentous”
(199), and Jacob remembers them on the train to Italy (209). The elegiac function of the flowers is further
emphasized when we learn that seeing hyacinths in Devonshire ten years later makes
Jinny cry “as she hung her little boys shirt over the hissing fender” (198).
The
re-gendering of the hyacinth appears once more in To the Lighthouse where the flower is reconnected to its Greek
elegiac origins in order to honor an older woman, the goddess-like Mrs. Ramsay.[1] When Lily Briscoe comes back to the Ramsay’s
house after a ten-year absence during which Mrs. Ramsay has died, she decides
to try to finish the painting she had started. Returning to the canvas, she
experiences a moment of consolation as she has a vision of Mrs. Ramsay “raising
to the forehead a wreath of white flowers” and then “stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose
folds, purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinths or lilies, she
vanished” (184). The evocation of the
“fields of death”(185) anticipates Mr. Carmichael’s final classical valediction
at the end of the book when he greets the arrival at the lighthouse with a
gesture as if he had “let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and
asphodels” (211). Although H. orientalis
is now classified with asparagus amongst the order Asparagales, previously, as Pratt reminds us, it belonged to the Asphodeleae or ASPHODELS, which
grew by the river Styxx in Hades (Pratt 129), reinforcing hyacinth’s status as
a funereal flower.
With the
farewell to Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf also leaves behind the association of hyacinths
with women coming of age. A change of venue for hyacinths was first signaled in
Mrs. Dalloway, where the young,
inexperienced Masie Johnson stands in Regent’s Park, by the “prim flowers” of
the hyacinth beds (26, 27). In Orlando
the flowers begin to move out of the shaded woods and into the brightly colored
arrangements of metropolitan bedding schemes. Hyacinth are among the
asynchronous catalogue of flowers listed as growing in Orlando’s resplendent
seventeenth century garden -- “snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias,
roses, lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties” (81)--, and they also
appear in their native landscape during Orlando’s stay with the Turkish gypsies
when Orlando’s characteristically English love of nature causes her to cry out
in ecstasy at “the red hyacinth” and “the purple iris” (106). Back in London, another moment of ecstasy is
accompanied by the vivid flowers as, walking through Hyde Park, she passes “a
fine bed” of red, blue, and purple hyacinths whose violent” spirt” or “splash”
of color reminds her of her husband: “my hyacinth, husband I mean” (211). The masculinization of hyacinths is confirmed
when, now visiting Kew, the sight of a grape hyacinth brings to mind “bulbs,
hairy and red, thrust in the earth in October” (215).
Woolf’s only other fictional evocation of hyacinths appears in
The Years, where they are municipal,
located, as in Orlando, in Hyde Park.
Each section of the novel opens with a kind of climatological survey of
contemporary conditions, and in the years she was writing it, Woolf paid
special attention to the annual progression of flowers, making observational
flower notes usually at Monk’s House.
She mentions hyacinths repeatedly in her dairies. In February 1934 “the
bees [are] buzzing in the hyacinths” (D4 201). In March, the crocuses are
“going over, daffodils & hyacinths out” (D4 292), and March of 1936, she
records “Trees coming out, hyacinths, crocuses” (D5 20). The fictional weather
report for 1910 concerns the opening of London’s social Season in Hyde Park, where
“the green chairs were ranged among the plump brown flower beds with their
curled hyacinths, as if waiting for something to happen,” perhaps a procession for
Queen Alexandra, with her face “like a flower petal,” wearing her “pink
carnation”(152). The hyacinths have reverted and once more are linked with a female
figure and the color pink, albeit only metonymically. Presumably the green chairs were arranged
along Rotten Row, just south of the Serpentine, exactly where Orlando spotted
her hyacinths.
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In the 1914 section, the green chairs are once more “drawn
up at the edge of the Row” as Martin and Sara stroll towards Hyde Park Corner,
passing “a bed in which
the many coloured hyacinths were curled and glossy” (224, 225). In real life,
the month after The Years was
published, in April of 1937, Woolf was observing the “patriotic beds of
red, white & blue hyacinths” in Tavistock Square (D5 79). A year later,
she makes her last mention of the flower: “The hyacinths over” (D5 134).
See Works Cited for full documentation
[1]
The shift of hyacinths to represent females rather than males seems to echo the
treatment of Adonis in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Judith P. Saunders
points out that in the earlier short story, Clarissa Dalloway focuses on a
repeated line from Shelley’s Adonais, “From
the contagion of the world’s slow stain,” associating it with menstruation and
with women’s “natural” isolation from social and political activities (Saunders
140 and passim; CSF 154, 155, 158).
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