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| Spring Verbena https://www.brc.ac.uk/plantatlas/plant/gentiana-verna |
Gentians
Gentians are
small wildflowers, usually a deep blue, which grow worldwide except in Africa. There are over 400 species, ranging in size
from tiny alpine varieties to large trumpets (Hogan 630). Most grow close to
the ground, and many prefer limestone grasslands such as those on the coast of
Ireland and the UK.[1]
While most bloom in the autumn, there is
a variety G. verna that blooms in
Ireland and the Alps in mid-spring (Ward 157). Vita Sackville-West was
particularly fond of a Chinese variety, Gentiana
sino-ornata, which she wrote about at least twice in her columns for The Observer (In Your Garden, 123-5; and Vita
Sackville-West’s Gardening Book 141-3); this is autumn-blooming and about
four inches tall.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentiana_sino-ornata |
Gentians have
many purported medicinal uses; the yellow gentian is the source for Bitters
used in making cocktails. Literarily, the most famous variety is the Fringed
Gentian, the subject of poems by American poets such as William Cullen Bryant,
John Greenleaf Whittier, and Emily Dickinson who wrote several poems about the
flower, emphasizing its late autumnal bloom.[2]
Woolf mentions
gentians ten times in her prose, the majority of references being observations
of the flower in the wild. The first three appearances are fairly local. In
September of 1917 she reports finding “Lady’s Tresses, & Field Gentian on
the Downs” (D1 49).[3]
Ten years later, in a short review of a
collection of nature photographs of the Outer Hebrides, the bluish purple
flower is paired with another of a similar, though lighter color, as Woolf
notes the author’s “charming veil of words . . . about the clouds and the
gentians and the scabious and the ghosts (E4 414). Since most SCABIOUS bloom
during the summer, it is difficult to guess what species of gentian this refers
to. The blue flowers again appear paired with a purple companion in a somewhat
haunting context in Orlando, this
time in a hybrid location as Orlando breaks her ankle on the South Downs and
experiences a “strange ecstasy” in which she imagines she is in Turkey and sees
“mountains, very high and full of clefts” in the folds of whose passes “were
fields of irises and gentian” (O 182). The floral vision immediately precedes
her rescue by the Rochester-like figure of her future husband, Marmaduke
Bonthrop Shelmerdine (O 183).
In
the early thirties a wider range of gentians begin to bloom in Woolf’s letters
and diaries as she encountered them on a series of travels. Clumps of “purple gentians” on a spring trip
to France in April of 1931 are mentioned both in her diary (D4 22) and in a
more dramatic letter to Ethel Smyth where she describes being caught in a
thunderstorm -- “when the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled” -- on the
banks of a river covered in flowers which are “blue, yellow, and suddenly
purple; with bluebells, cowslips and gentians” (L4 320). Two years later, she
reports that an acquaintance had been staying at a cottage in Zennor, not far
from St. Ives in Cornwall, with Will Arnold-Foster who “has a whole field of
gentians” (D4 182). In 1934 a spring trip to Ireland again produced both a
diary entry and a letter about picking “bright blue gentians on the cliff
looking towards the Aran Islands” (D4 214). Her letter to Elizabeth Bowen was a
bit more embellished: “And then we went to Galway and saw the Aran Islands and
picked the gentians and were almost blown off the cliff” (L5 304).
As if the
experience of seeing and picking gentians had triggered a new interest, the
bright blue flowers make their most significant appearance in her published
prose in her 1937 novel, The Years
where they become a subtle emblem of female repression and persistence. After a
visit to the lively, spontaneous working class Robson family, Kitty Malone
returns to her conventional upper middle class Oxford home feeling her familiar
life to be somehow lacking, artificial, “For a moment all seemed to her
obsolete, frivolous, inane”; she goes upstairs to her room “Slowly, as if a
weight had got into her feet too” (TY 70). As she sits on her bed, she has a
memory of sitting on the terrace of an Italian inn, watching her father “pressing
gentians onto a rough sheet of blotting paper “ (TY71) She tries to tell her
father what she wants, while he pinches “the little blue flower between his
thumb and forefinger” (TY 71). But the expression of her need is never
articulated. A bell rings and Kitty goes down to dinner, after which news
arrives of the death of Rose Pargiter, her mother’s cousin (TY 75). A
discussion follows about what Kitty wants to do, but her options are blotted
out like the small blue flower. Her mother suggests that Kitty return to
helping her father write his history of his Oxford College. However, Kitty had
inadvertently knocked a bottle of ink over her father’s work, causing him to
remark, “Nature did not intend you to be a scholar my dear” as he applies the
blotting paper (TY 76).
This scene is
reminiscent of a comment by Peter Walsh in Mrs.
Dalloway where he describes the women of Kitty’s generation as being repressed
like dried flowers by “the whole
pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable” (MD 158).This
tower of privilege had “pressed; weighed them down, the women
especially, like those flowers Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between
sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré‘s dictionary on top, sitting under
the lamp after dinner” (MD 158).
The motif of the repressed blue
flower reappears later in The Years
in connection with a painting of Rose Pargiter. Twenty-two years after the
blotting of Kitty’s hopes for any kind of independent future, in the 1908
section, Martin and Eleanor Pargiter are discussing the portrait of their
mother Rose, Kitty’s mother’s cousin who died the night Kitty remembers the
gentian, the spilled ink, and the blotting paper. Martin notes that the
painting needs cleaning because “a little blue flower” in the grass has disappeared
clouded by the accumulated dust and grime of time. Significantly, the
conversation takes place in the context of remembering the intensity of their
sister Rose’s childhood anger, which led to her attempt at suicide by slashing
her wrist (TY 151). The scene ends with the sound of glass crashing, perhaps
from a conservatory (TY 152). The next time we see the blue flower is in the
Present Day section, when it has been liberated from its effacement. Eleanor has had the painting cleaned and now her sister Peggy can see “a flower -- a little
sprig of blue -- lying in the grass” (TY 308).
It is if the breaking glass has allowed the flower to reappear.
In The Pargiters, the novel-essay portion of
the earlier draft of what became The
Years, Edward Pargiter writes a poem about his cousin Kitty; the poem is
named “Persephone” which is, we learn, Katherine Malone’s middle name (P 69).
This mythological reference links Kitty’s identification with the gentian
preserved in blotting paper, and her feeling of being blotted out by her
father’s intellectual disdain for her with the disappearing and reappearing
blue flower in Rose’s portrait.[4] Although Persephone can be kidnapped,
eventually, she returns.
Interestingly,
the last gentian to appear in Woolf’s prose is also pressed and preserved. In
her biography of her friend Roger Fry, she recounts how Roger’s father,
although he sometimes moralized, showed his affection for his son, by sending
him gifts such as “the picture of a lion” and also a bright blue flower: “and
he picked a gentian and sent it him” (RF 27).
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| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gentiana-verna-specimen-from-the-National-Herbarium-Glasnevin-Ireland_fig4_267541671/download |
[2] (See the fascinating article by
Elizabeth Patrino "Late Bloomer: The Gentian as
Sign or Symbol in the Work of Dickinson and Her Contemporaries." The Emily Dickinson Journal 14.1 (2005):
104-125 https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-facultypubs/72 )
[3]
Wikipedia identifies Gentianella campestris as the Field Gentian. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentianella_campestris
Lady’s Tresses are a wild
white orchid. See https://www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/discover-wild-plants-nature/plant-fungi-species/autumn-ladys-tresses
[4] My
paper on sunflowers discusses the importance of blots in The Years. Unlike Kitty, who is imprisoned / flattened by the
blotting paper, Eleanor makes blots on paper; they are expressive, like the angry doodles in
Chapter 2 of A Room of One’s Own that
spread into cartwheels and circles (ROO 32).
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