I found Cooper’s tirade on the naming of flowers (82-87) wonderful, partially because I can’t help wanting to agree with her, in feeling if not in linguistic reason; partially because she works up some interesting ideas about the relationship between language, the world, and the experience of the world; partially just because it’s pretty hilarious when, in a moment of unusually fiery indignation, she starts re-writing Shakespeare and Chaucer with clunky scientific Latin to make her point.
This is a case where an excess of culture (or a certain kind of culture) has clearly had a negative impact, but not on nature qua nature so much as the natural world as humans are able to experience or describe it. It disturbs Cooper first that children who pick wildflowers can’t identify them, then that adults often can’t identify the plants around them either, and then that the plants are getting named all wrong anyway. She celebrates the “pretty, natural names” given to flowers in the nostalgic time when there was “some simplicity left in the world (84) and bemoans that “it is really a crying shame to misname them” (87) This “wrongness” suggests that there is some preferable “rightness” in the attaching of names to things; that things have “right names” which inherently belong to them. It’s a concern that dates from Adam (who, according to the Vulgate, named things nominibus suis, by their own names – but were those names their own even before Adam named them?), to Plato (In the Cratylus, the eponymous character remains convinced that the names for things are “natural” – they inhere in the nature of the thing itself – and not “conventional”), to present day prescriptivism in language(usually deeply occupied with the “problem” of language changing and words changing meaning).
Cooper certainly advocates a portion of this linguistic inherency, but not to the rigid degree of Cratylus; her concerns seem to be largely about transparency, aesthetics, and culture. The Latin names are “long [and] clumsy” where the common names are “homely and rustic” and show “quaint humor” or are “imaginative or fanciful” (84); names such as Schoberia and Brugmannsia are simply too ugly for flowers, better suited for “crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, and scorpions” (85); meanwhile, the daisy (or French marguerite) gets top honors as the flower (and flower-word) of romance, especially medieval. The “natural” names of flowers are parsable; they mean something to people who aren’t enrolled in botany classes and don’t know Latin. Cooper’s catalogue of flower-names with occasional explanations or [folk] etymologies reminds us that lady’s-smock is named for its color and bindweed for its habit of “winding about shrubs and bushes” (84). These names are relatively transparent, their meaning and relationship to the flower they denote evident to anyone who knows to connect word and object. Cooper’s concern is, at the last, that people simply won’t understand flowers if they’re named wrong. They’ll miss out on the “natural, unaffected pleasure” that the flowers, by their “right” names, offer (87).
(On the other hand, her note on gilliflowers, “a corruption of July-flowers, from the month in which they blossomed” (ibid) shows us two things: one, that even good “natural” English words change and become less-transparent; two, that since here Cooper’s etymological note is wrong (“July-flower” is actually a folk etymology of “gilliflower,” the “gilli” of which comes, via Latin, from a Greek compound meaning “nut-leaf,” according to the OED), meaning is only as transparent as we construct it to be.)
There is a struggle going on between registers at least, and languages at most, here. For Cooper, the Latin scientific terms are an “evil spreading over all the woods and meadows” which “perverts our common speech” (83); Latin will intimidate the timid and disgust the poets. And I think there’s also a struggle between disciplines, the humanities and the sciences. Cooper doesn’t exactly come at this issue as a wide-eyed ingénue; she’s full of cultural background, erudite quotations, and etymological speculation. However, all of Cooper’s encyclopaedic information seems to enhance her experience of the flowers, anyway – I think she genuinely likes the daisy better for knowing that Chaucer called it the “eye of the day” (which is, I can’t resist pointing out, in this case, its actual etymology), that the German word means “goose-blossom,” that French word is “marguerite,” and that French peasant girls are in the habit of pulling the petals off to figure out their love lives. The scientific name, on the other hand, compromises one’s ability to enjoy the phenomenon, and any amount of scientific knowledge about daisies would presumably only exaggerate that effect.
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Arwen--excellent beginning of what could be a great essay on transparency and naming in Cooper. There's a number of ways that could be extended--by relating her hope for linguistic transparency to the obfuscation of her authorship in Rural Hours, for example. The names she prefers have less of a human component in them--the presence of the namer or the honoree (Schober, Brugmann) is less palpable, which would make good ecocritical sense, so to speak.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, a focus on naming could also help us understand Rural Hours as an early attempt to establish some kind of "middlebrow" science, one that bridges the emerging gap between professional, academic science (as represented, for example, by the Philadelphia Academy of the Natural Sciences) and folk science. (There's something similar going on the culture at large-see Lawrence Levine's remarkable book "Highbrow/Lowbrow" or Joan Rubin's later "Middlebrow."
Last but not least, you draw attention to one aspect of Cooper's book that we barely talked about--her humor (self-irony, sarcasm, playfulness etc.). There's not too much in the book, but the subtlety works. By contrast, there's more in Thoreau, but his irony has a certain archness to it. Sometimes, though, it even seems plain silly or post-adolescent. We'll talk about that this week.
As a fellow medievalist, I was struck by the way Cooper's spirituality comes out in her book: it seems to me a deeply religious text, though the focus has shifted somewhat from heaven to earth. The book itself is organized (roughly) around the natural cycle of seasons, but it could also be read as a book of hours which also followed the course of the year. I have been meaning to check the journal entry dates to see if they correspond to saint's days.
ReplyDeleteBut more to the point of why I am responding to your post, could we also read her insistence on using "vernacular" names instead of Latin as an echo of protestant reformations? The argument seems to be that the dead language is removed from the common folk, and her concern is that not just children, but adults as well, can't name the flowers they pick: in other words, they can't read from the liber mundi. Her goal then seems to be to translate this text into something understandable by the laity, opening up the landscape as holy book to everyone.
This was one of my favorite passages in Cooper, so I guess it makes sense that this is one of my favorite threads. I agree with Christoph; both Arwen's and Ben's posts sound like the beginnings of excellent papers.
ReplyDeleteI meant to bring up my take on Cooper's frustrations with the Latin scientific names in class, but I didn't get to it. What I think Cooper overlooks is the intent of these Latin names. Rather than being erudite and exclusive, in choosing a "dead" language early scientists meant to establish a transnational conversation, so that no country or culture's language was privileged over another's. The danger in favoring poetic names is the claim that a word sounds better in, say, English or French. For example, I find that many contemporary Americans believe the German language doesn't sound as "nice" as French or Italian. But these biases are based upon culturally-grounded associations: when Americans think of German, they're probably imagining a film reel of Hitler that they saw on the History Channel rather than a recital of Rilke poetry.
So I guess my question is: does Cooper dislike the names for the sounds they make or their function as descriptive agents? I can see how a rural person may not "understand" what a Latin name means, but without the etymology lesson Cooper gives who really knows what "daisy" means? I doubt many people are thinking "day's eye" when they pick it. What it comes down to, I think, is that we call plants what we were taught to call them and this naming is inherent to local communities. A Latin scientific name just facilitates easier conversation on a broader scale.
(What perhaps complicates my idea, though, is the Latinization of non-Latin words for scientific names. I'm thinking specifically of the insect named after Gary Larsen and the genus Vormela, derived from German Würmlein. I'm not sure if this practice was as common in Cooper's day, however.)
On the other hand, Cooper seems more interested in the hyper-local, perhaps intending to highlight the new American country's uniqueness. Using Ben's religious language, this political allegory may work: in the same way that Protestants refer to their break with the Church as "Reformation" while Catholics refer to it as "Rebellion," what we call "The Revolutionary War" Brits call the "War of American Independence." Could the break with Latin refer to a break from old Europe?
About the Latin names--the desired break with European tradition (or the European presumption that they can dominate the colonies scientifically, too) was also what induced the colonists to rebel against the Latin names. John Bartram, the father of William Bartram, is a case in point. Latin also implied educational privilege. You find Bartram preferring native names--such as "tipitiwitchet"--to their Latin equivalents (Dionaea muscipula--now known as the Venus flytrap).
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