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

Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann's The Female Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the... GRetA L. LAFLeUR University of Hawai`i at Manoa Precipitous Sensations Herman Mann’s e F Th emale Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenge of Queer Historiography In 1800, printers in both New York and London released a “re- published” edition ofe Th Unsex’d Females , a political tract by Richard Pol- whele, a London curate. Published anonymously in 1798, Polwhele’s ex- tremely 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 crit- ics 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 con- troversial and quite popular piece of literature from the 1790s: Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789), an epic poem based on Linnaean tax- onomy that described the sex lives of plants in pornographic detail. To Polwhele, Wollstonecraft’s radical feminist politics and Darwin’s lavishly http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Early American Literature University of North Carolina Press

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

LaFleur, Greta L.
Early American Literature , Volume 48 (1) – Mar 6, 2013
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 The University of North Carolina Press.
ISSN
1534-147X

Abstract

GRetA L. LAFLeUR University of Hawai`i at Manoa Precipitous Sensations Herman Mann’s e F Th emale Review (1797), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenge of Queer Historiography In 1800, printers in both New York and London released a “re- published” edition ofe Th Unsex’d Females , a political tract by Richard Pol- whele, a London curate. Published anonymously in 1798, Polwhele’s ex- tremely 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 crit- ics 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 con- troversial and quite popular piece of literature from the 1790s: Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789), an epic poem based on Linnaean tax- onomy that described the sex lives of plants in pornographic detail. To Polwhele, Wollstonecraft’s radical feminist politics and Darwin’s lavishly

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Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Mar 6, 2013

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