Nonfruiting Bodies: Biopolitics and Botanical Metaphor in Victorian Poetry

Abstract: This essay investigates botanical metaphors in poetic depictions of the nonreproductive female body. Though the nineteenth century dawned in the era of Malthusian angst about overpopulation, by midcentury the figure of the childless woman had become a source of anxiety, implicated in panic about “redundant” women and declining birth rates. In what ways does Victorian poetry register changing figurations of fruitlessness? I explore Victorian poems—especially poems by women—that resist the reproductive imperative even as they attend specifically to the sexual potential of the flower. I begin by surveying midcentury poems about “useless” flowers, focusing on poppies, before turning to queer botanical figures in the aestheticist poetry of A. Mary F. Robinson and Michael Field. In attending to the temporality of the flower itself—resisting the pull toward the future signaled by fruit and seed—these poets offer a queer, autoerotic repurposing of botanical imagery that decouples sexuality from reproductivity.