Floriography, Sexuality and the Horticulture of Hair in Jorge Isaacs’ María

• Lesley L. Wylie ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Leicester

     University of Leicester

     GB.ENG.H4.31UC, Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Bulletin of Spanish Studies, ISSN-e 1478-3428, ISSN 1475-3820, Vol. 95, Nº 9-10, 2018 (Ejemplar dedicado a: ‘The Lyf So Short, the Craft So Long to Lerne’. Studies in Modern Hispanic Literature, History and Culture in Memory of James Whiston), págs. 147-158
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2018.1547000
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Tapping into the Romantic predilection for nature, flower symbolism is widespread in Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867), set amid the lush Cauca Valley in a period before the abolition of slavery in Colombia. Flowers have been identified as encoding female eroticism in the novel, propelling the tragic love affair between the narrator and the eponymous heroine, who, as well as frequently being compared to flora, spends much of her time in her garden, collecting and arranging flowers as love-tokens for Efraín. At the end of María, after the heroine’s death, the flowers picked in the throes of young love are described as ‘marchitas y carcomidas’, encoding María’s untimely demise as well as intimating, as I will suggest in the conclusion, the waning of plantation culture in South America. This article will explore horticulture motifs in the novel, including the multiple references to human hair, which was once thought to share the same physiology as plants.