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| Fritillaries at Sissinghurst. Photo by Syd Cross |
Fritillaries
Fritillaries appear in Woolf’s writing in
both plant and animal versions. As a plant they take the form of Fritillaria meleagris, a member of the
lily family with “square-shouldered” bell flowers which bloom 8-12” high in
“grassy flood plains” in mid-spring ( Hogan 614). Recognizable for its
characteristic purple/ maroon pattern of checks (it also comes in a white
version with green checks), it was a favorite of Vita Sackville West who wrote
about it in her book, Some Flowers (1937).
Its species name fritilys is derived
from the Latin for dice box, appropriate for both its shape and its checked
patterning. Vita seems to sense
something sad or evil about the flower; she points out its rather “sinister” nicknames--
“Snakeshead, the Sullen Lady, and sometimes The Leper’s Bell” (Some Flowers 33) -- and comments
poetically on its effect when planted: “less spectacular than the foxglove, it
seems to put a damask shadow over the grass, as though dusk were falling under
a thunder-cloud that veiled the setting sun” (34).
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| Birds and flowers, or, Lays and lyrics of rural life (1873) |
Like a drooping thing of sorrow,
Sad to-day, more sad to-morrow;
Like a widow dark weeds wearing,
Anquish in her bosom bearing (qtd by Ward, 155).[1]
And Kate
Greenaway’s Language of Flowers
states that the meaning of the Checkered Fritillary is “Persecution” (12).
The checkered
lily appears five times in Woolf’s fiction, twice in her fantasy of female
friendship dedicated to Violet Dickinson, Friendship’s Gallery (1907), and
three times in in her fantasy of transsexual biography, Orlando (1928), dedicated to her lover, Vita Sackville-West. The two clusters of references are parallel
in several ways: aside from being pseudo-biographies conjured in the name of
intimate female friendship, they both have specific
poetic derivations with sinister or melancholy associations.
Chapter Two of Friendship’s Gallery takes us to “The
Magic Garden,” where there are “gigantic women lying like Greek marbles in easy
chairs” who rise and stride across the lawn, raining cherry blossoms like
crimson butterflies on the face of a child, and other women who stroll about
“like flowers strayed from the beds, anemones and strange fritillaries freaked
with jet” (282). The term “freaked”
means flecked or randomly streaked and seems to come from Milton’s pastoral
elegy, “Lycidas,” where the dead poet’s funeral bier is heaped with “every
flower that sad embroidery wears” including “the pansy freak’d with jet” (ll.
148, 144).[2]
Despite the change in flower, the “Lycidas” reference and the associated purple
and jet seem to indicate the possibility of a woman wearing mourning garb. A few pages later, the lady so arrayed is
identified as Violet’s friend Lady Robert Cecil, “the strange fritillary
freaked with jet of the Magic Garden” (285). As Ellen Hawkes explains in her
Introduction to Friendships Gallery, Violet and Nelly Cecil were close friends
who had travelled around the world together in 1905; their visit to Japan was
“undoubtedly” the source for Chapter Three of the work, in which “twin
goddesses appear in Tokyo” (Hawkes,
Friendships Gallery 271).
In her longer
essay which explores Woolf’s relationships with women in terms of the image of
a hortus conclusus or enclosed garden
of women, Hawkes describes Virginia Stephen’s infatuation with the older Violet
as part of a pattern including her feelings for her older sister Vanessa, Madge
Vaughn, and Vita Sackville-West and states explicitly that “Woolf fell in love
with the older woman” (Hawkes, “Magical Garden” 51, 36). Jane Lilienfeld’s
later and franker essay, ”The Gift of a China Inkpot” goes so far as to suggest
--with significant evidence-- that “Woolf’s relationship with Violet was a
consummated lesbian love” (41).
A number of
critics, including Hawkes, Lilienfeld and Karen Westman, have pointed out numerous
similarities between Friendships Gallery and Orlando, seeing the “mock biography” of the earlier piece as a
“direct antecedent” to the later novel (Westman 39). In Orlando,
vaguely sinister fritillaries are once again associated with a lesbian
relationship and a specific poem, in this case Vita Sackville-West and her
poem, The Land, published two years
earlier in 1926.
At the beginning
of Chapter Six of Orlando, when Orlando recovers their ability to write at the
start of the modern age, the
first thing they (s/he) pen is a few lines about fritillaries from the Spring section
of Vita Sackville-West’s pastoral tribute to the Kentish Weald:
And then I came
to a field where the springing grass
Was dulled by
the hanging cups of fritillaries
Sullen and
foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull
purple, like Egyptian girls (O 195)
Upon writing
these lines, however, Orlando comes to a sudden stop, checked apparently by
some fear of a lesbian reference. While they deem grass and fritillaries “all
right” to write about, they worry that talk of “the snaky flower” may be “a
thought strong from a lady’s pen” even though “no doubt” sanctioned by
Wordsworth.[3] But their inner governess draws the line at
“--girls” and asks “Are girls necessary?” considering that Orlando has “a
husband at the Cape” (O 196). So Orlando
stops writing, feeling like a traveller who has escaped paying a fine for
trying to get something “something highly contraband” past “the spirit of the
age” (O 196).
with an ancient
snaring spell,
Throwing a net, soft round the limbs and heart,
Captivity soft and abhorrent, a close-meshed net,
—See the square web on the murrey flesh of the flower—
Holding her captive close with her bare brown arms.
Close to her little breast beneath the silk,
A gipsy Judith, witch of a ragged tent (The Land 49).
Throwing a net, soft round the limbs and heart,
Captivity soft and abhorrent, a close-meshed net,
—See the square web on the murrey flesh of the flower—
Holding her captive close with her bare brown arms.
Close to her little breast beneath the silk,
A gipsy Judith, witch of a ragged tent (The Land 49).
The prospect of
such enthrallment is so frightening that the poet of The Land shrinks “from the field of English fritillaries/ Before it
should be too late” (The Land 50). Here
the checkered purple pattern of the flower becomes a net cast by a witch to
trap the poet. So, even Vita’s conjuring of the fritillary retains the
traditional negative association with shadows, snakes, and sinister loss, and
its coded reference to sapphism seems overwritten by fear of persecution. Considering
that Woolf’s Orlando came out the
same year that Radclyffe Hall’s novel about lesbian love, The Well of Loneliness, was published and prosecuted for obscenity,
the fritillary becomes an apt symbol for a love that dare not speak its name.
The last mention
of fritillaries in Orlando is at the
end of the novel in a passage which, according to Jane DeGay, offers “a final
oblique echo of Woolf’s intimate response to the work of Vita Sackville-West”
(65). Pondering whether writing poetry is “a secret transaction, a voice answering
a voice,” the narrator compares her answer to the “old crooning song of the
woods. . . and the gardens blowing irises and fritillaries” to the “intercourse
of lovers” (O 238), gently confirming the lesbian undertones of her
intertextual reference.
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| Fritillaries from Coleman's British Butterflies (pl X) |
Causing a bit of
superficial confusion, the other fritillary which flits through Woolf’s prose
is a butterfly, a member of the Nymphalidae family with black
checkered markings on a golden-brown ground.
According to Coleman’s British
Butterflies (which Virginia consulted as a child, a copy of which was in the Woolfs’ library), the butterfly
received its common name from its resemblance to the flower (128). These fritillaries appear three times in
Woolf’s fiction, twice up on the moors and hedgerows in Jacob’s Room (20, 22) and again in a list of summer butterflies
fluttering in in the dip beyond the lily pool in Between the Acts (39)
See Works Cited Page for full documentation
[1]
Mary Howitt is famous for writing the children’s poem “The Spider and the Fly”
as well as translating a number of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales. She and
her husband William, whose book on Visits
to Remarkable Places Leonard Woolf had received as a presentation copy,
mixed in literary circles including Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning.
[2]
The fact that Lycidas is mentioned in the first page of the mock biography
lends credence to this allusion. Expressing her delight in her friend Violet’s name,
Virginia Stephen suggests an equivalence between her choice of name and the
existence of Milton’s pastoral lament, suggesting that just as she is hurt by
the thought that Violet Dickinson might have been plain Mary Jones, her reader
would be hurt “to think that Lycidas was once a matter of conjecture” (275), a
speculation similar to that which leads to her search for Milton’s manuscript
in A Room of One’s Own (AROO 7).
[3] In her essay on one sentence from Orlando, .ane DeGay locates Wordsworth’s use of “snaky” to suggest homoeroticism in Book III of The Prelude and connects it to an episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene which connects the “snake in the grass” motif to the legend of Persephone (60-1).
[3] In her essay on one sentence from Orlando, .ane DeGay locates Wordsworth’s use of “snaky” to suggest homoeroticism in Book III of The Prelude and connects it to an episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene which connects the “snake in the grass” motif to the legend of Persephone (60-1).
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