Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann's The Female Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenge of Queer Historiography

In 1800, printers in both New York and London released a "republished" edition of The Unsex'd Females, a political tract by Richard Polwhele, a London curate. Published anonymously in 1798, Polwhele's extremely popular poem was a vitriolic attack on Jacobin gender politics, reserving the largest part of its ire for one of the most notable "unsex'd females" of the decade, Mary Wollstonecraft. Historians and literary critics of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin politics alike have explored at great length the relationship between The Unsex'd Females and the essay to which it, in large part, responds: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Often overlooked, however, is that both the form and the content of Polwhele's poetic diatribe also parodically address another controversial and quite popular piece of literature from the 1790s: Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants (1789), an epic poem based on Linnaean taxonomy that described the sex lives of plants in pornographic detail.

To Polwhele, Wollstonecraft's radical feminist politics and Darwin's lavishly copulating flora both reflected the same social ill: the violation of "NATURE'S law" (7) of feminine modesty. Though Wollstonecraft's work became culturally associated with sexual lasciviousness due to popular knowledge of her many romantic affairs, Polwhele's anxiety about the sexual implications of the rise of popular interest in botany was derived from the science itself. Because of the 1735 publication of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, which introduced a "sexual system" of taxonomy that identified plants by the presence or absence of their reproductive organs, botany emerged as a sexual science, and cultural practices of plant exchange, dissection, and illustration exploded among the middle class and the wealthy.¹ If we keep this in mind, Polwhele's critique of radical feminism takes new shape when we consider his complaint that female modesty was imperiled by Wollstonecraft's call for women's education. The American edition of The Unsex'd Females is permeated with assertions of his haughty disapproval of women practicing botanical science in the name of education. Describing a botany class, he writes that young female students

With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave,Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve,For puberty in sighing florets pant,Or point the prostitution of a plant;Dissect its organ of unhallow'd lust,And fondly gaze the titillating dust.

(10-11)

This series of lusty images—heaving bosoms, "forbidden fruit," "pant[ing]," "prostitution," and the plant's "organ of unhallow'd lust"—render Polwhele's tract perhaps more pornographic than even Loves of the Plants, the poem it satirizes. In the American edition, Polwhele footnotes this passage, explaining that "botany has lately become a fashionable amusement with the ladies. But how the study of the sexual system of plants can accord with female modesty, I am not able to comprehend." In a somewhat voyeuristic validation of this claim, he also notes that, "I have, several times, seen boys and girls botanizing together" (n10). Polwhele's disgust at coeducational "botanizing" clearly demonstrates that the implicit sexuality of botanical taxonomy also spurred an explicit cultural awareness of botany as not only a science of sex but also an outlet for human sexual practice.²

This essay takes the transatlantic interest in popular botany as a point of departure in its examination of alternative sites for the study of American sexuality before the rise of formal sexology.³ Focusing on the American interest in the "sexual system" of popular botany in the wake of the Revolutionary War, I turn to a lesser known "unsex'd female" of the 1790s, considering the historical problem posed by Deborah Sampson, the real-life, cross-dressing, "lesbian-like" protagonist of Herman Mann's The Female Review; or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (1797). Mann's relatively obscure novel describes both the military and the romantic exploits of his unconventional hero(ine), at times going into explicit yet extremely confusing detail concerning the nature of Sampson's relationships to her "sister sex."⁴ The Female Review...