Crocus
 |
| Photo courtesy of Shilo R. McGiff |
Although it looks rather like a miniature lily, the crocus
is a member of the iris family, Iridaceae
and grows from corms or bulbous tubers: swollen, underground stems (Hogan 435).
Crocuses bloom in both spring and fall, but some fall-blooming crocuses are
actually Colchicum and belong to the lily family (See AUTUMN CROCUS). The most
common crocuses belong to one of three species: C sativus, the fall-blooming saffron crocus originating from Crete
and Greece, is the ancient source of the spice also used for dye and medicine; C. vernus is the spring-blooming Dutch
variety found in most gardens with colors for most varieties ranging from white to
lilac to a dark purple which is almost blue (Hogan 436; Ward 102). Yellow crocuses often belong to C. flavus.
Since saffron is one of the oldest recorded flowers, it has
a long history of cultural and literary associations. Crocuses were
particularly important to women in Bronze Age Minonan cluture as revealed by decorative
motifs on artifacts from Knossos and a series of frescos at Akrotiri. Rachel Dewan
points out the gynocologicial nature of many of saffron’s medicinal uses (48) and documents the
woman-centered religious iconography of both the flower and its yellow dye (50
passim). Crocuses are among the flowers mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as growing in the field from which Persephone is
kidnapped and thus are associated with particularly female modes of
resurrection and renewal.[1]
Classical Greek and Roman legends from Homer to Ovid make
the crocus more hetero-normative. Lehner and Lehner explain that that “The
ancients often used this flower to adorn their marriage beds because according
to Homer, the crocus plant was one of the flowers of which the couch of Zeus
and Hera was composed” (56). Ovid tells yet another story of ill-fated lovers
turned to flowers in the tale of Crocus and Smilax: separated by location --
Crocus lived on the plains and Smilax was a shepherdess living in the hills
-- either Crocus died from grief or the
two asked Flora to help them, and the gods or Flora turned them into flowers
(Folkard 161; Ward 104). In the Catholic church, the crocus is linked with St.
Valentine -- patron saint of heterosexuality-- who, just before his martyrdom, supposedly
sent a note to a little blind girl containing a crocus which restored her sight
(Ward 104).[2] Although
Shakespeare doesn’t mention the crocus by that name, he has four references to
saffron in his plays, including during the wedding masque in Act IV of The Tempest, where Ceres (a.k.a Demeter)
speaks of a fairy with saffron wings diffusing honey onto flowers (Quealy 165).
I have recorded fifty-six crocuses in Woolf’s published
writing, making it one of her most frequently mentioned flowers. The majority of the appearances, twenty-two,
are in her life writing. There are twenty-one references in non-fictional
prose, thirteen of which occur in a single piece, “The Patron and the Crocus”
(1924). The flowers appear least
frequently in her fiction, thirteen times, spread out over seven different novels
and short stories. While the crocus begins as a seasonal marker, once Woolf
begins to incorporate the flower into her fiction and essays, it begins to
accumulate an increasingly complex metaphorical load to include a more charged
role as an igniter of imaginative creativity generated by and producing a kind
of androgynously erotic excitement.
Woolf’s most common use of the crocus is in her annual observations
of spring flowers. From 1897, when she was fifteen until 1940, the year before
her death, crocuses were a constant harbinger of spring in many different
gardens-- at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in Kensington and Kew Gardens, and at Asheham
and Monk’s House in Sussex -- often coupled with other early spring blossoms
such as ALMOND TREES, HYACINTHS, SNOWDROPS, and SQUILL. Begun in January 1897, Woolf’s first journal marks
the seasons by clocking the bloom time of crocuses. In February 1897 she records that the
crocuses in Kensington Gardens are “coming out” (PA 39). Throughout March,
there are three more entries chronicling the floral progress of spring in Kensington
and Kew Gardens (PA 48, 52, 55). In time, she comes to associate crocuses with
rural rustication; Virginia writes her friend Violet Dickinson in April of
1903, asking if she has “settled down to pass [her] remaining days among cows
and crocuses” (L1 72-3).
It is not too long,
however, before we see Woolf assert a proprietorial pride in her own country crocuses. In early March 1913, writing to invite Ka Cox
to visit Asheham, she boasts, “I don’t believe you’ve seen this place, anyhow
not since it was lived in and had something like a garden-- 20 daffodils and ½
a dozen crocuses. Its far the loveliest
place in the world” (L2 20). In early March1920, she celebrates the much more
bounteous spring plantings at Monks House, listing everything that is in bloom:
“Daffodils all out; garden set with thick golden crocuses; snowdrops almost
over; pear trees budding” (D2 21). And
in September 1925 -- in the first of several explicit connections between crocuses
and Vita --she recounts how Leonard’s jealousy of Vita’s garden at Long Barn
has “complicated my relations for life” by intensifying distress over crocuses:
“The cook shouts ‘Oh ma'am, a crocus is coming up’. Then ‘A mouse has nibbled
the crocus, ma'am!’ I spring up, accuse Leonard; find its a false alarm” (D2
21).
The time being September, this reference of course refers to
AUTUMN CROCUS or Colchicum, but despite her apparent knowledge of the difference
between the two flowers, Woolf also associates spring crocuses with Vita. In January of 1926, anticipating her friend’s return, she
writes from London to Vita in Persia “when I saw
crocuses in the Sqre yesterday, I thought May: Vita” (L3 232). Writing to Vita in March of 1933, seven years
later, she once again invokes the spring blossoms: “How difficult it is to
write, with all the spring birds singing and the garden full of blue and white
crocuses”(L5 169).
In the mid-thirties, as Woolf turns her attention back to
the natural world as part of her preparations for working on the book which
eventually became The Years, she
again begins to record her annual spring observations. In March 1935 she announces,
“Spring triumphant. Crocuses going over, daffodils & hyacinths out” (D4
292). In March of 1936, she notes the
appearance of crocuses in both London (D5 17) and Monk’s House (D5 20). In February
1938, she describes a “perfect week end” at Monk’s House: “still, brisk spring;
crocuses in the garden; birds rapturous” (D5 128). And in March of 1940 she
registers a burst of optimism as she anticipates finally finishing her
biography of Roger Fry with a set of four happy accolades to spring crocuses. On March 7, after remarking, “Crocuses out
& snow drops,” she goes on to exclaim, “Oh it’s the spring that’s come
while I was ill -- birds chirping, P[ercy, the gardener]spraying apple trees; blue crocuses with snowdrops” (D5 271). Two weeks later she notes “All crocuses &
squills out” (D5 273), and in her Easter Sunday dairy on March 24, she exclaims
“it is refreshing & rejuvenating to see the thick gold clumps of crocuses
& the unopened green daffodils” (D5 274).
In Woolf’s fiction the spring rejuvenation of crocuses
serves as a metaphor for creativity often with a sexually charged sub-text. The
mention of crocuses in Woolf’s first novel, The
Voyage Out (1915), is, however, not very promising. Once the party has settled
in to Santa Marina, Mrs. Ambrose becomes so used to the mild tropical climate
that she becomes almost contemptuous of the March weather back home in England:
“She adopted, indeed, a
condescending tone towards that poor island, which was now advancing chilly
crocuses and nipped violets in nooks, in copses, in cosy corners, tended by
rosy old gardeners in mufflers” (VO 96). Forecasting the curtailed
blossoming of young Rachel Vinrace, the cramped spring in back in England signals
a failure to thrive rather than a new season of growth.
Jacob’s Room offers
the first sign of a more positive inflorescence for the crocus. After a description of winds rolling the
darkness through the webbed streets of London, Woolf depicts the dawn light
rising, irradiating flowers like the rebirth of light after an eclipse: “But
colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into tulips and
crocuses;” (JR 172). Here the crocus begins
to signal growth and vitality in the first of several associations between the
blooming of the crocus and the return of color after an eclipse.[3]
A more developed articulation of the possible generative significance
of the crocus takes place in Woolf’s essay on the author’s relation to their readers,
“The Patron and the Crocus,” first published in April of 1924 and subsequently collected
in the Common Reader. Woolf begins by
identifying the writer’s initial motivation to create as having been being “moved
by the sight of the first crocus in Kensington Gardens” (E4 213). Very quickly,
however, the flower evolves from being a mere sample inspiration into being a
kind of meme for all creative activity. It is not enough, she maintains, to
“think only of your crocus,” you must find a way to communicate your feelings
about it: “The crocus is an imperfect crocus until is has been shared” (E4
213). Talking about writers such as Henry James who remain aloof from their
public, she begins to use the crocus as a metaphor for the author’s creative
product: “Their crocuses, in consequence, are tortured
plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked about them” (213).
When she introduces the demands that the Press makes on the fledgling
author, the crocus becomes a mere commodity: “Twenty pounds down for your
crocus in precisely fifteen hundred words” (213). Instead she recommends that
the writer try to find a patron who can “make us feel that a single crocus, if
it be a real crocus, is enough for him” (E4 215). [4]
Around the same time that Woolf was writing “The Patron and
the Crocus” she was also drafting the dramatic appearance of the single most
memorable crocus in her oeuvre: the “match burning in a crocus” scene of Sapphic
longing in Mrs. Dalloway. Upstairs in her attic retreat, Clarissa
meditates on her heterosexual failures and contemplates her occasional flashes of
attraction to women, described in terms of an orgasmic kindling:
It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a
blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its
expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the
world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of
rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary
alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an
illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.
(MD 31)
Although the connection is not made explicit, many critics
link this description to Clarissa’s memory a few pages later of “the most
exquisite moment of her whole life” when Sally “stopped, picked a flower; kissed
her on the lips” (MD 35). Totally disoriented, Clarissa feels she has been given
a gift: “ A present, wrapped up . . . a diamond, something infinitely precious”
whose radiance burns through to provide “the revelation, the religious feeling" (MD 35).
The image of
the burning flower is a particularly vivid and androgynous evocation of a
simultaneously erotic and spiritual moment of being, much discussed in psychoanalytic
and lesbian approaches to the novel. Elizabeth Able analyzes it as “an image of
active female desire that conflates Freud’s sexual dichotomies. The power of the passage derives in part from
the intermeshed male and female imagery, and the interwoven languages of sex
and mysticism” (174). Judith Roof
comments on the “double masquerade” of the crocus: “The phallic match. . . is
cloaked again by the petals of the crocus, a flower with a phallic shape" (102),
but she concludes that “A crocus is finally not a phallus-- its petals peel
back to reveal something other, a flame rather than a stick, a radiance rather
than solid unity” (109).
In her Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway, Anne Fernald suggests that Woolf’s “image of a flame
echoes the conclusion of Walter Pater’s The
Renaissance (1873): ‘ To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to
maintain this ecstasy, is success in life’”(226). Although this reference reverberates to the diamond and
dead star of Woolf’s kisses, another possible literary analogue, more closely
aligned with flowers, appears in Tennyson’s “Oenone,” (1829), the story
of the wife Paris left behind for Helen of Troy. In the tenth stanza of the dramatic
monologue, Oenone describes the arrival of Athena and Aphrodite for the
judgment of Paris: “And at their feet the crocus
brake like fire.”
A nearly contemporaneous possible source for the image of
the flaming flower is provided by Woolf herself in her revision of “How Should
One Read a Book?” (originally published in 1924) for the Second Common Reader (1932). In fleshing out her discussion of the
intensity of reading poetry with some exemplary touchstones, she quotes a
stanza of “splendid fantasy” from Ebenezer Jones’s “When the World is Burning”:
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
When, far down some glade,
Of the great world's burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems, to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade. (CR2 266)
The remarkable conflation of the glowing crocus as an object
of beauty, a sign of new beginnings, a metaphor for artistic creation, a
revelation of hidden meaning, and a code for lesbian desire stands behind a
number of references to crocuses in the later 1920’s. “Moments of Being:
Slater’s Pins Have No Points,” a 1927/8 piece which Woolf labeled “a nice
little story about Sapphism,” (L3 397) extends the lesbian context of the
spring flower. Julia Craye is a single,
independent woman, a dressmaker unencumbered by the masculine orge of a husband
who would interfere with her daily routines and moments of pleasure. One of her
great joys is managing to visit Hampton Court when the crocuses “(those glossy
bright flowers were her favorites)” are at their peak (CSF 219). Soon after this memory, Fanny Wilmont who
has something of a crush on Miss Craye, surprises her in a “moment of ecstasy”
as she holds a carnation in her fingers. This carnation seem to kindle a
reaction very similar to the crocus in Mrs.
Dalloway, as Fanny Wilmont has her own moment of being, seeing through Miss
Craye to discern “the very fountain of her being spurt up in pure, silver
drops.” At the moment Julia kisses her,
Fanny sees her “blaze” and “kindle” and in an image very similar to the kiss in
Mrs Dalloway: “out of the night she
burnt like a dead white star” (CSF 220).
Orlando
(1929) which Woolf began writing a few months after finishing “Slater’s Pins”
maintains the androgynous, if not explicitly lesbian aura of the crocus.
Although the novel is a “love letter” to Vita Sackville-West, a noted Sapphist,
with whom Woolf was quite deliriously in love, common garden crocuses make an
appearance primarily as floral accessories at Orlando’s ancestral country home.[5] When
Orlando finishes refurbishing his home near the end of the 17th
century, crocuses are part of the necessary inventory of seasonally
conglomerated plants: “snowdrops, crocuses, hyacinths, magnolias, roses,
lilies, asters, the dahlia in all its varieties” (O 81). When she returns to her estate as a woman in
the 19th century, it is December and she has to imagine the flowers, “the
sleeping crocuses, the dormant dahlias,” which fill her heart “with such a lust
and balm of joy” (O 127). A subsequent
trip to Kew in March sometime in the next century produces a typical
list of spring flowers -- “A grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on
the almond tree” but the vernal vitality of the crocus flower now seems
transferred to the more masculinized virility of the plant’s root: “bulbs,
hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October, flowering now” (O 215). Aside
from this rather phallic image, the erotic charge of crocuses in Orlando is carried by the autumn crocus,
associated with Orlando’s husband Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine and with
Virginia’s husband Leonard (See AUTUMN CROCUS).
After Orlando,
the crocus seems largely to revert its role as a sign of spring or new
beginnings but continues to carry the added energy of a fiery kindling. A Room of One’s Own is transitional in
this respect. Crocuses appear in a list
of spring flowers, which do not appear
in the October gardens of Fernham: “I dare
not forfeit your respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the
season and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls, crocuses, tulips and
other flowers of spring”(16).
Of course this act of literal denial itself incites a moment of imaginative
creation as the narrator opens the gate to the gardens of Fernham in full
bloom: “wild and open” with daffodils and bluebells sprinkled in the long
grass, “wind-blown and waving” (AROOO 17).
This moment of imaginative transformation climaxes with a glimpse of the
great classic scholar J____ H____ and “the flash of some terrible reality
leaping. . .out of the heart of spring,” another sudden flash or kindling of
light associated with the appearance of a beloved female figure (AROOO 17).
In her 1930 essay “On Being Ill” Woolf again presents an
image of the crocus flaming out as a kind of signal of life’s resilience. In an
interesting reversal of the “great burning” apocalypse of the poem by Edward
Jones, she describes something that sounds very much like the heat death of the
universe, a time when “ice will lie thick on factory and engine. The sun will go out . . . the whole earth
[will be] sheeted and slippery”; nevertheless, she rejoices in the continued
existence of an ancient garden in which “thrusting its head up undaunted in the
starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn” (E5 200).
Crocuses bloom once again in an icy setting in The Waves (1931), in the last section
when Bernard is describing the period when the six characters emerged out of
the protective coating of childhood with another, more muted scene of a crocus
coming to color from frozen whiteness: “through
this transparency became visible those wondrous pastures, at first so
moon-white, radiant, where no foot has been; meadows of the rose, the crocus,
of the rock and the snake too” (TW 182). Recalling the Homeric Hymn to Demeter where Persephone wanders
the meadows of roses, crocuses and violets before the earth opens up and Hades
emerges to abduct her, this passage presages the longer, fuller account of an
eclipse later in Bernard’s description of “the world seen without a self” (TW211-3).
One of the only humorous uses of the crocus
(aside from being mouse-bitten) arises in a 1934 lecture on the futility of
lectures, “Why?” when Woolf complains that “Never does the crocus flower or the
beech tree redden but there issues simultaneously/from all the universities of
England, Scotland and Ireland a shower of notes from desperate secretaries
entreating So-and-so and So-and-so to come down and address them upon art or
literature or politics or morality” (E5 33). Here the crocus call to
intellectual activity is unenthusiastically curbed.
The crocus flame almost disappears in The Years (1937), when despite all the observational flower notes
in her diaries, Woolf presents the little tubers as nothing but generic window
dressing establishing continuity; in 1880 Eleanor notices that “The crocuses
were yellow and purple in the front gardens” (TY 18); in 1913, she remembers “the
little garden where they used to plant crocuses” (TY 206).
The very last crocus in Woolf’s writing is, however, once
again associated with the image of fire, though in this case one that is lowering
rather than kindling. In her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf quotes a passage
from a letter sent from Rome where Fry’s reference to crocuses combines their
emergence from a kind of detritus of the unconscious with a reference to the
setting sun: “Every now and then we came
on beds of purple crocus bursting up through last years dead leaves…. We sat
and drank wine and watched the sun go down like a red hot ball into the blue
sea of the Campagna” (RF 67; Woolf’s elipses). The counterpoint between the
rising crocus and the setting sun is a last match lit between the flower and the
light.
[1] A
good deal has been written about Woolf’s use and revision of the Persephone
story. See
Amy Smith and
Lisa Tyler, in particular, both of whom interpret the Persephone/ Demeter
relationship in lesbian terms, the mother/daughter bonding being represented in
the connections between maternal women and artist figures in several of Woolf’s
novels.
[2] A
charming, extended version of the story is told on an Irish website called The
Wild Geese
[3]
Jane Goldman has done the most thorough analysis of Woolf’s use of the eclipse;
the entire first half of her The Feminist
Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf is devoted to the subject. As Goldman reminds us, Woolf saw the full eclipse
of June 1927 with Vita Sackville-West, another metonymic link between Vita and
crocuses.
[4] In
her essay on “Roots, Woolf and the Ethics of Desire,” Lisa Coleman expands upon
the significance of the crocus; it “is
the flower of a thwarted but unending desire that transgresses boundaries of
plant and animal, sex and longing, life and death. For Woolf, the crocus leads. Not a bulb.
Not a bulb but a root, the crocus lives underground, hidden,
unconscious, but nonetheless alive” (111).
[5] As
I have been suggesting throughout, Vita is an absent presence in many of
Woolf’s crocus references. Vita and
Virginia first met in 1922; their friendship kindled in 1923-4 as Vita
published her novella Seducers in Ecuador
with the Hogarth Press. Although the relationship was not consummated until
December 1925, Karyn Sproles point out that Mrs. Dalloway was written during a period of “growing intimacy”
with Vita (6). She claims that although it is generally agreed that Madge
Vaughn was the original for Sally Seaton,
Vita was “likely influential in stimulating the homoeroticism of Mrs. Dalloway "(52).
No comments:
Post a Comment