Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais (review)

The victorian hothouse was a place of paradoxes. Jane Desmarais explores these paradoxes in Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, focusing on English Decadent writers, such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and French Realist artists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Claude Monet, and Émile Zola, at the fin de siècle. Monsters under Glass includes chapters on the history of the hothouse, hothouses in cities, flowers, scents, paradisiacal and torturous gardens, and other glass structures such as aquariums. Highlighting developments in hot-house technologies and historical perceptions of the hothouse, Desmarais positions this "alluring yet dangerous" (7) space as a literary metaphor that simultaneously calls to mind horticultural experimentation and invasion by foreign bodies, crowded urban settings and isolated life under glass, fruitful reproduction and illicit sex, death and decay and flourishing life. Desmarais weaves nineteenth-century anxieties about modernization, the role of women, colonial expansion, scientific hybridization, and fear of the other through her succinct analyses of late nineteenth-century prose, poetry, paintings, and illustrations.

Following existing scholarship on the place of gardens in nineteenth-century literature, Desmarais aligns the Victorian hothouse with other semi-private garden spaces, such as the conservatory and the shrubbery, as a site of sexual transgression, of "amatory and often clandestine encounters" (128). While Desmarais's premise that the hothouse is a transgressive space is not, on its own, a revolutionary idea, Monsters under Glass provides a much-needed complement to existing scholarship on Victorian greenhouses and glasshouses. Isabel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds (2008) offers an insightful history of the role of glass itself in the Victorian imagination and Victorian literature, and explores the role of the conservatory in literature, but does not go in depth into glass's specific use as a hothouse material. Amy King's Bloom (2003) proposes that metaphors of blooming flowers indicate a woman's marriageability in nineteenth-century novels, but she focuses on flowers generally and tends to emphasize the act and language of "blooming" more than the cultural histories and social implications of the flowers themselves within floral metaphors. Lindsay Wells's Victorian Studies article "Close Encounters of the Wardian Kind: Terrariums and Pollution in the Victorian Parlor" (2018) digs into the role that Wardian cases—small glass enclosures that create sustainable microclimates for growing plants, often foreign plants—play in nineteenth-century art history, but not that of larger glass structures.

In studying the hothouse as a unique metaphor or trope, Desmarais's book fills a gap in this scholarship and adds to the fertile fields of garden studies, glass studies, and space studies in Victorian literature and culture. Particularly important to the field are her argument that late nineteenth-century artists, especially Félicien Rops and Beardsley, completely overturned the cultural connotations of the so-called language of flowers in their depictions of floral women and women as flowers, depicting, instead, women who are "active and sexual" and, fittingly for hothouse flowers, "modern hybrids" (160); her demonstration that the hothouse metaphor shifts in meaning alongside developing hothouse technologies, a change that speaks to late-century anxieties about modernization; and her proposal that hot-house metaphors always have nineteenth-century connotations. This last point makes Desmarais's book of interest to scholars outside the field of Victorian studies as well.

Desmarais's prose is refreshingly accessible and engaging, she offers a succinct history of gardening, hothouses, and hothouse plants, and she is a strong close reader—highlights of her readings include her analyses of Manet's Music in the Tuileries, Arthur Symons's London Nights, and Octave Mirbeau's Le petit pavillon and Le jardin des supplices. While in a few places I would have liked to see more citations or more extended textual analysis (because these moments are some of the book's strongest), and some of the historical explanations focus more on...