ABSTRACT

William Blake's botany in the 1790s, two authors in Joseph Johnson's circle of radical intellectuals, Erasmus Darwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, portray gender from botanically informed perspectives that suggest the naturalness of transgender and homoerotic sexualities. Author examines, Wollstonecraft defines fruition as the cultivation of a rational, 'masculine' mind. Wollstonecraft's revision of floral discourse, which shifts emphasis from physical to intellectual development as Alan Bewell has argued, suggests that women should develop intellects like men, and even become 'more and more masculine', in order to pursue studies like botany. In Wollstonecraft's view, when women develop rational minds, they, as well as men, can study the hard science and sexual material of botany, despite assertions that these subjects lead to female immodesty. Women who lack education are made delicate by sensibility, like 'barren bloom', the petal-heavy 'hothouse plant' and floral 'heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, which consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre'.