Response: Arrested Motion

Among the many provocative works produced by Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) is Homage to Nature (1995). In this photograph, a tiny tree, complete with its root ball, sits isolated inside a glass dome. With unmissable irony, the elegant pedestal on which it rests is made of carved and polished wood. The dome is set, moreover, like a precious sculpture, against a deep moss-green velvet curtained backdrop. The implication is clear: nature is so rare, so precious, that a single specimen, isolated from the generative environment in which it plays a sustaining role, can be preserved as an object for our admiration and wonder. By doing so, of course, its naturalness is completely called into question.

But Charlesworth's image does not just speak to the precarity of today's environment: it also looks back to the mid-Victorian period. It is an example of the "Lilliputian landscape" that the Bristol glazier John Ivey described in 1852, addressing the proliferation of terraria that had started to appear in drawing rooms (165). As Lindsay Wells explains, these Wardian glass cases—named after their inventor, Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward—did more than provide a micro-climate hospitable in particular to ferns, subjects of the pteridomania that linked parlor to Empire. As she puts it, "these glazed containers delimited a space in which whimsy and invention could prompt deeper reflections on one's immediate surroundings" (165). The same may be said of the other two types of containers referenced in these pieces: Titian Ramsay Peale's butterfly boxes, and Victorian albums containing specimens of vegetation.

All three papers implicitly invite us to reflect not simply on containment, but on arrested patterns of mobility. Whether gathering ferns in tea plantations, butterflies in the Amazon basin, wildflowers in meadows and moors, or exploring rock pools and shorelines on a range of coasts, Victorian collectors of the natural world were themselves highly mobile. Their specimens had to be transported, sometimes in perilous circumstances (Alfred Wallace's 1852 loss, in a fire at sea, of the insects and birds that he gathered over the previous four years in South America is notorious). The more-or-less hermetically sealed Wardian cases were invented, and frequently used, for transporting plants, not just for growing them at home. The importance of recognizing the mobility of gathered specimens and the concomitant diversity of their origins could be conveyed through subsequent cataloging. Ellery Foutch shows how Peale's organization of his butterfly collection was "geographic"—something that would be meaningless without a grasp of lepidopteral range (177). The subjects of these pieces also reflect stilled motion in other ways. The paradox of butterfly collection lies in the fact that the quality of vibrant motion that helps to make the butterfly an object of particular attractiveness cannot be retained if one wishes to study it away from its native habitat. Instead, one finds oneself admiring in stasis the multi-colored scales on the wings that, in nature, open and shut, and flit around. What's more, the metamorphosis that fascinates as a principle is suspended at certain clearly defined stages—egg, caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly. Additionally, Peale's display cases bring order and control; specimens are protected from light, disturbance, the depredations of insects, and dust—that is, from responding to the flow of time in which they have their being.

Peale's specimen boxes were bound to resemble books: a very deliberate invocation of the metaphorical "Book of Nature" that was picked up on by his contemporaries, and that, through association, helped establish their connection to serious learning. The albums discussed by Maria Zytaruk contain "natural illustrations" of a different kind: specimens of grasses, wild flowers, and seaweeds that were gathered and preserved in portable herbaria. The rhetorical logic, here, is that the text to be read is the world itself, rather than the letter press of the printed page, a logic that Francis George Heath articulates in the preface to his encyclopedic The Fern World (1877), when he announces that it was written to "refer those who may follow him through its pages to the unfailing guidance of that beautiful and wonderful book—the...