Entomology, Fiction, Intoxication: Annie Trumbull Slosson’s Narratives of Obsession

For Annie Trumbull Slosson, the study of insects was not merely an interest or a passion—it was an intoxicant whose addictive pleasures she likened to the euphoria of “cocaine and morphia.” A longtime amateur botanist and short-story writer, Slosson didn’t discover what would become the central intellectual pursuit of her life until 1886, when at the age of forty-seven she decided to read a textbook about insects written for children. Her goal was to “secure a superficial, cursory acquaintance with the more common ‘bugs,’ particularly those which infested my plants and flowers” (“A Few Memories” 85). But the overwhelming elation she felt upon seeing an insect that matched the image and description in her book for the first time was enough to keep her hooked for the rest of her life:

I sat near an open wood fire one day in my old Connecticut home reading the little book and as I reached for a stick of hickory to brighten the fire I saw something moving on the surface of the wood. It was a “bug” and alive, my very first entomological specimen. And it was pictured in my book! . . . I found that its high sounding name was Cyllene pictus. That was the very first scientific insect-name I ever learned. But the habit was formed. You know what an insidious, enthralling habit it is. Victims to cocaine and morphia have been known to break their fetters; even dipsomaniacs have escaped from slavery and rejoiced in glad and sober freedom. Did an entomologist ever burst his chains? What are drugs to bugs!

(“A Few Memories” 85–86)

Slosson describes her initial exposure to entomology as a point of no return. Entomology becomes so “enthralling” that she surrenders herself to it, becoming its willing prisoner and delighted “victim.” It is the language of ecstasy and subsequent addiction that Slosson uses to represent her love of insects and their classification and naming. It is not a pastime or a form of scholarly inquiry so much as it is “a habit.”

Slosson wrote fiction from her teenage years through her fifties, but in the later decades of her life she devoted most of her time to her entomological obsession. As her biographer Edward Ifkovic tells us, “her growing fascination with entomology rapidly began to overshadow her interest in literature” (10). Following the appearance of her first collection of fictional sketches, The China Hunter’s Club, in 1878, Slosson regularly published short stories in Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly in the 1880s and 1890s. Although she continued to publish fiction as late as 1912—with her final collection, A Local Colorist—she spent much more energy in the 1900s and 1910s studying and writing about insects, publishing essays and lists of findings in Entomological News, Entomologica Americana, the Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, and the Journal of the New York Entomological Society.¹ Her contemporaries considered her to be as central to the New England local color movement as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, yet she is virtually unknown today as a writer of short stories, and is much better known as a pioneering woman naturalist with more than a hundred insect species named for her.²

Intoxicating obsessions abound in Slosson’s stories, which feature unmarried or widowed middle-aged and elderly characters who discover interests in ornithology, entomology, botany, and ichthyology. I call these plotless sketches that capture the ruminations of amateur, self-taught naturalists narratives of obsession.³ In these stories, Slosson offers us obsession as a substitute for plot: the passions that these characters pursue are so intense that she does not need to craft a plot in order to make them compelling material for fiction. Rather, it is enough merely to describe these obsessions. In this essay I introduce Annie Trumbull Slosson and her narratives of obsession as a source that can enrich our account of the intersections between literature and science for women writers at the end of the nineteenth century. Slosson uses the conventions of naturalist science—description, collection, curiosity—as alternatives to the social...