Biological Aesthetics: Thoreau, Gender, and Botany

Abstract

A leaf, for Thoreau, is a dynamic concept that allows him to take seemingly disparate entities and establish an underlying connection, a blurring of boundaries, whether that means mind and body, organic and inorganic, literature and science, or – as this study shows – female and male. In the 1850s when Henry David Thoreau was avidly reading both aesthetic and botanical texts, he playfully envisions leaves as having a male and female side. This imaginative intermingling of the male and female genders on a single leaf accompanies the commingling of two domains that, for Thoreau, are connected: aesthetics and the science of botany. This essay argues that aesthetics and botany occasion a gender inflection in which Thoreau simultaneously inscribes gender onto a single leaf and undermines that inscription. Botany – in part – enabled this gender inflection insofar as Thoreau engages with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of the ür-leaf, the major pre-Darwinian tool for conceptualizing metamorphosis. Thoreau uses the ür-leaf’s protean aspect to envision an underlying gender connection. The picturesque – in part – enabled this gender inflection insofar as this was a traditional method for undermining binaries, such as the art/nature binary. The concept of the beautiful – in part – enabled this gender inflection insofar as the material specificity of the leaf Thoreau engenders (Andromeda polifolia) physically resembles the line of beauty, an aesthetic term Thoreau associates with gender inflection. This study changes the way scholars envision Thoreau’s relation to science by revealing how gender conceptions facilitated his empiricism. Writing gender out of science, in this context, only results in a vitiated view of Thoreau’s relation to that discipline.