11
Alison Matthews David
If you would take that hideous green flower out of your coat … I might answer your question differently. If you could forget what you call art, if you could see life at all with a simple, untrammelled vision, if you could be like a man, instead of like nothing at all in heaven or earth except that dyed flower, I might perhaps care for you in the right way. But your mind is artificially coloured: it comes from the dyers. It is a green carnation; and I want a natural blossom to wear in my heart.
Lady Locke refusing Lord Reggie’s offer of marriage in Robert Hichens’s
The Green Carnation ([1894] 1970: 109)
In Hichens’s fin-de-siècle novel satirizing Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and their decadent lifestyle and entourage, the titular green carnation plays a pivotal, if malevolent, role. Although at first Lady Locke is fascinated, even entranced by young Lord Reginald Hastings or “Reggie,” she comes to find him and his flower of choice repulsive. The artificially tinted flower he sports in his buttonhole symbolizes the tainted, artificial nature of his mind and heart. As Hichens writes of Reggie, “He chose his friends partly for their charm, and partly for their bad reputations; and the white flower of a blameless life was much too inartistic to have any attraction for him” ([1894] 1970: 3). Yet the dyed flower proves too much for Lady Locke. The book, which was a great commercial success, ends with Reggie making a somewhat desultory offer of marriage to Lady Locke, an offer that she refuses, claiming that she wants a more “natural blossom to wear in her heart” (Hichens: 109). Her rejection of Reggie is perhaps not surprising in light of the homoerotic meanings encoded in the green bloom. Although Hitchens, who was homosexual, could not make the green carnation’s sexual meanings explicit, the dyed buttonhole flowers visibly displayed “invert” sexuality on a man’s lapel. If a white carnation conveyed sentiments of “pure” love, green ones spoke the “love that dare not speak its name.”
Literary scholars, like Karl Beckson, have looked at the importance of the green carnation and its potential meanings in homosexual subcultures of the late nineteenth century, but this text seeks to situate it in broader debates and controversies over toxic arsenical greens in the nineteenth century (Gagnier 1986; Kaplan and Stowell 1994; Beckson 2000). Several decades before the distinctive dyed flower appeared on Wilde’s evening coat, there had been a moral and medical panic over artificial flowers that had been tinted green with arsenic, a deadly poison (Whorton 2010; David 2015: 72–101).1 The brilliant emerald green pigment that became a fashionable craze in the early nineteenth century was publicly feared and shunned by the mid-1860s. This text argues that Wilde’s green carnation, in the 1890s, should be seen against the backdrop of earlier, scientifically and medically justified fears over poisonous pigments. The link between literally toxic greens and invert sexualities are part of larger debates over sex and sexuality, artistic creativity, commerce, queerness, and color in late nineteenth-century Britain. David Batchelor, in his discussion of color in Western culture, gives this sort of “loathing of color, this fear of corruption through color” a name: “chromophobia.” He notes that color is alternately seen as the “property of some ‘foreign’ body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological,” or “relegated to the realm of the superficial.” He concludes that “Color is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both” (2000: 22–23). Using Batchelor’s view of color to explore the actual medical and perceived moral dangers of green, this essay examines the complex links between fashion, chromophobia, and homophobia played out in the substance and on the surface of natural and artificial green flowers and foliage.
At a time when Britain’s landscapes were mined for coal and ore and its cities blackened by chimneys and smokestacks, green recalled the healthy, verdant colors of unspoiled countryside and flourishing plant life. But as Michel Pastoureau, a French historian who has written on the history and symbolism of blue, black, and green has observed, green has always been ambiguous: it has long been a suspect color, considered “dangerous, corrosive, toxic,” a cause of disease and sometimes death (2014: 205). The complex technology and chemistry of green provides some of the explanation for this long-standing suspicion. Medieval guild regulations forbade dyers of blues and blacks from using reds and yellows. These tints were licensed to two different sets of professional dyers, and it was illegal to possess vats of both blue and yellow dye and to mix them in a combination every modern schoolchild takes for granted (Pastoureau 2014: 112–117). It was possible to produce greens with toxic and corrosive copper mixtures called verdets, but most greens looked “washed out” and assumed a greyish or blackish cast in light from oil lamps or candles (Pastoureau 2014: 116). Before the late eighteenth century, green was a difficult color to achieve and was rarely colorfast. A reliable, bright, vivid green simply did not exist.
One green pigment invented during the Industrial Revolution embodies the contradictions between green as a symbol for both verdant plant life and deadly poison. In 1778 chemical experimentation produced an entirely new green pigment. In his laboratory, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish Pomeranian experimental chemist, mixed copper with arsenic trioxide to produce a gorgeous but toxic green. Arsenic trioxide, obtained increasingly cheaply as a by-product of smelting metals like tin, cobalt, and copper, was also used to formulate the color. Dubbed Scheele’s Green, among other names, the new tint was still fairly pallid, but a more intense shade of the color with a slightly different chemical composition, often called Schweinfurt or emerald green, was invented in 1814 and became commercially available in France and Britain by the late 1820s (Beaugrand 1859: 1).2 Despite its toxicity, the new pigment had many advantages over previous greens, and delighted consumers ensured that it enjoyed a widespread and fairly unchallenged vogue during the first half of the century, and through the 1860s. It was prolifically slathered over wallpaper, brushed onto artists’ canvases, and used to enliven everything from toys to textiles. It tinted fashion plates, gloves, ball gowns, and artificial flowers. To affix it to cloth, dyers mixed it with a binding agent like gelatin or albumen, but even more dangerously it was blended with adhesive starch and dusted over gauze flower leaves, making it liable to flake off and be inhaled as powder (Schutzenberger 1867: 292–296).3 As a pigment rather than a water-soluble dye, it was technically difficult to apply. Nonetheless, emerald green has left substantial traces in the material record. Scientific tests have revealed its presence in a wide range of consumer goods: it adorned and poisoned the shops, homes, and bodies of men, women, and children across the social spectrum.
Color presented one of the biggest sartorial challenges for middle-class Victorian women, who, as dress historian Charlotte Nicklas has demonstrated, took both an aesthetic and scientific interest in color (2014). How were they to dress both becomingly and appropriately for social events at different times of the day with a limited number of gowns? Lighting technologies, particularly gas lighting, changed the perception of the hues of women’s dress, sometimes quite radically. Advice manuals and newspaper columns warn women that the gown that looked one color in daylight could metamorphose, chameleon-like, into a completely different and perhaps unflattering shade at the ball that evening. One source complains that “colour in gas light is so deceiving” (Fitzmaurice 1896: 626) and an advertisement for a new form of “perfectly white” gaslight uses purity of color as its selling point: “During the dark months a great obstacle has hitherto existed for the selection of garments the colors of which are required to be adapted for daylight;—by ordinary gaslight it is well known that blue appears to be green, and other colours are much affected” (Advertisement 1861: 20). And thus an advantage of emerald green was that it maintained its luminous color in both natural and gas lighting (Draper 1872: 29–30). Period commentators described its almost eerie radiance, noting “brilliant ball-room wreaths” were “green with an unearthly verdure.” In artificial flower making, a craft that became a large-scale industry as well as a leisure pursuit for ladies in the nineteenth century, emerald green was the pigment of choice to color stems and leaves like the ones on these artificial hair wreaths (see Plate 11.1a). The “Dryad” model in the center, complete with blue butterfly, presumably transformed its fair wearer into a seductive woodland nymph. With an estimated 15,000 professional flower makers in Paris in 1858 (Beaugrand 1859), and 3,510 in Great Britain, mostly concentrated in London in 1851, this now-lost industry was an important urban trade but one plagued by health hazards (Guy 1863: 138). An amateur flower-making kit, sold by a London establishment in Regent Street, for example, was analyzed by the conservation laboratory of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where their scientists found it to contain arsenic in four of the five spots tested, including the lovely little round boxes holding the parts to fashion paper carnations, violets, and daisies.
By the late 1850s, doctors, forensic chemists, women’s societies, politicians, and the media began debating the hazards presented by the increasingly fashionable pigment, and artificial florists and their blooms were at the heart of the debates. In 1856, Parisian workers went to the Préfecture de Police to complain about the chronic poisoning they were suffering from their trade and doctors published horrifically illustrated scientific articles on its medical hazards (Vernois 1859: 319–349) (see Plate 11.1b). The historical link between literary and literal “Flowers of Evil” coalesced in France in the late 1850s, when a collection of poems—Charles Baudelaire’s poetry anthology Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)—was causing controversy on the literary stage. Because of the volume’s scandalous contents, it was called “an outrage to public morals.” Both author and publisher were prosecuted, and six of the poems were banned. Baudelaire’s flowers stemmed from a long tradition of writers and poets offering “bouquets” or “anthologies” of poems: each poem was a blossom. The term “anthology” comes from anthos, the word for flower in Ancient Greek. After each poem Baudelaire would say that he had “made a new flower” (Syme 2010: 2). Baudelaire’s self-described “unhealthy flowers,” poems on the subjects of prostitution, murder, and lesbianism, grew out of the cultural soil of artificial flowers fashioned in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, which sickened the men and women who made them.
The criminal and sexual associations of Baudelaire’s flowers were taken up by Wilde and others in the 1890s. Before turning to these fin-de-siècle flowers, the rapidly shifting material culture and science of color in the 1850s and 1860s should be mentioned. Wilde’s green carnation came in the wake not only of toxic greens but of a panoply of health scares caused by the brilliant rainbow of new aniline dyes tinting consumer goods. Mauve, the first aniline dye, was invented in 1856 and named after the purple mallow flower or mauve in French (Garfield 2000). It was followed by the almost electrically bright purples, magentas, oranges, and reds that flooded the market and went “viral” in a fashionable epidemic satirized as the “Mauve Measles.” Garments dyed with the new vivid aniline dyes were incredibly popular with the public, but in the late 1860s some new shades used for men’s hosiery had caused striped skin burns to their feet. Dyed shirts worn next to their skin in the late 1860s also raised alarms over the safety of these new colorants, compounding public fears over poisonous colors (David 2015: 102–125). The potential dangers presented by dyes were common knowledge by the 1880s, leading to a fad for supposedly healthy and sanitary undyed woolen underwear and socks, including garments promoted and sold by dress reform advocates like Gustav Jaeger, and advised by doctors like the dermatologist Dr. James Startin (Carr 1883; Startin 1884: 8).4 Colored clothing’s reputation had been compromised. By the late 1870s, as aniline became cheaper to produce and purchase, the Aesthetic Movement spurned “crude” primary colors, on the grounds of taste (and possibly health), in favor of more subtle “artistic” and indeterminate shades like the famous “greenery-yallery” of the Grosvenor Gallery (Matthews 1999: 172–191).5 By the late nineteenth century, intense, saturated colors were perceived by the artistic elite as repulsive and even terrifying. True Aesthetes preferred the subtle artistic shades painted by James McNeill Whistler and sold by Liberty’s of London. One late Victorian commentator bemoaned the stubborn persistence of public taste for bright hues, noting that “agonies in red, livid horrors in green, ghastly lilacs, and monstrous mauves” could still “be found among the repertory of the leaders of fashion” (Ware 1909: 3–4).
Exactly how dangerous was emerald green? While some period sources warned the public that these fashionable poisons presented a potentially deadly risk to home and health, different agendas informed debates at the highest levels of government. When newspapers printed atrocious accounts of the death of nineteen-year-old Matilda Scheurer, an artificial florist in London who died in 1861, the case spurred a Parliamentary Committee report on the “Alleged” (my quotation marks) Fatal Cases of Poisoning by Emerald Green; and on the Poisonous Effects of that Substance as Used in the Arts. Yet despite this governmental enquiry, the interests of industry won the day: Scheurer’s death was ruled “accidental” and the committee decided that proof of “one sole case of death” was not enough to spur regulation (Guy 1863: 125–162).
Since legal means were not enough to ameliorate the flower makers’ plight, female activists sought to call attention to it as a question of taste and what we would call ethical consumption. The Ladies’ Sanitary Association tried a double-pronged approach: they appealed to the emotions of female consumers by publishing a sickening and heart-wrenching firsthand account of the headaches, bleeding noses, and excoriated fingers of young girls and teenagers making flowers in the English Woman’s Journal (July 1, 1861: 308–314). They urged their readers to “forego their taste in the purchasing of artificial flower devices, declining the green, and discouraging its adoption in others” (314). Perhaps even more effectively, they turned to the facts and figures furnished by chemical science to scare consumers away from these lethally appealing fashions. They hired Dr. A.W. Hofmann, one of the most famous analytical chemists in the world, to test green hair wreaths and ball gowns for arsenic. He used the same tests developed to detect the presence of arsenic in bodies in criminal poisoning trials.6 Hofmann published his findings in “The Dance of Death,” a sensationally titled letter in the London Times (February 1, 1862: 12). The expert concluded that an average headdress alone contained enough arsenic to poison twenty people, and that the “green tarlatanes so much of late in vogue for ball dresses” contained as much as half their weight in arsenic. A ball gown fashioned from twenty yards of this fabric would have nine hundred grains of white arsenic.7 Four or five grains were lethal for an average adult. These scare tactics, along with Punch articles and caricatures like the terrifying “Arsenic Waltz” (Figure 11.1), published only a week after Hoffman’s letter, eventually succeeded in making the color feared and unfashionable. While arsenical greens should have been banished by the 1880s, a study by Wilhelm Grandhomme, one of the first on-site doctors in a dye factory, compiled a table of occupational poisonings in the 1880s and concluded that 15 percent of artificial flower workers still suffered from arsenical poisoning (Weyl 1892: 30).8
Figure 11.1 “The Arsenic Waltz” or The New Dance of Death (dedicated to the green wreath and dress-mongers), Punch (February 8, 1862). © Wellcome Library, London.
Recent scientific tests performed by molecular biologist Andrew Meharg have confirmed that some historical wallpapers contained arsenic (2005: 66; 2010). Historian Andrew Whorton devotes a chapter of his book on arsenic in Victorian Britain to arsenical dress, but actual historical dress and artificial flowers had not been tested to verify or refute the findings of Victorian chemists and doctors. The Physics Department at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, tested a range of shoes, shoeboxes, textiles, and fashion plates for arsenic using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry.9 Although arsenic has long been used in museum collections as a pesticide, scientific testing of a range of suspiciously green nineteenth-century museum artifacts in Canada and Britain has demonstrated the presence of both copper and arsenic. This combination suggests emerald green pigments, and appeared in a substantial number of green objects dating from about 1815–186510 (Plate 11.2). Scientific analysis had confirmed that toxic greens were used to fashion flowers, but why were flowers important to the Victorians and what symbolic meanings did they carry?
As Art Historian Alison Syme argues in her book A Touch of Blossom, flower buds and blooms were erotically charged in Western art and literature. By the mid-nineteenth century, these sometimes graphically sexualized fruits, flowers, and their insect pollinators appear in popular prints, greeting cards, and picture postcards in a range of amusing and suggestive poses. Syme writes that “vegetal arousal came to be associated with Decadents and Aesthetes” and a range of non-reproductive “vices” and pleasures. What was then called “invert” sexuality appeared in descriptions of a boy or man as a “Hyacinth,” or “Narcissus.” From the 1880s, gay men were called “buttercups,” “pansies,” and even “horticultural lads” (44, 46). Flowers and fruits were used as slang terms in English and French for male and female body parts, as well as sexual acts and practices, including masturbation and same-sex love. For example, engaging in intercourse with a woman “entailed picking or gathering strawberries, nuts, flowers, and so on” (Syme 2010: 31). These appetizing fruits adorned women’s hair in botanical creations like a French hair-wreath festooned with juicy grapes, some of them already plucked and presumably eaten, and equally delicious-looking strawberries (Plate 11.3). Although the wreath has not been tested, the fact that it was produced in the 1850s in Paris suggests that despite the tantalizing fruit and the sexual invitation it broadcast, its gauze leaves were likely toxic, and doctors noted cases where women wearing green wreaths developed skin rashes and “painful eruptions” around the shoulders where the powder flaked off onto their décolletage (Draper 1872: 31).
While artificial florists cultivated entire cloth gardens to deck women’s hats and decorate their hair and dresses, men were strictly forbidden from wearing artificial blooms (Angeloni 2000: 63).11 One popular newspaper story from the 1890s entitled “A Mad Englishman” revolves around a stylish young English couple in Paris whose money has run out. They devise a scheme to win money. Simply by trimming his masculine top hat with his wife’s fashionable red and violet artificial flowers and daring to stroll along the boulevards, Mr. Cecil Berkely De La Hoope wins a thousand louis bet with the men from his private club (Pick-Me-Up, March 23, 1895: 394). As this mainstream story suggests, men wearing “feminine” artificial flowers were diagnosed as perverse or insane. Doctors, sexologists, and even François Carlier, the head of the Parisian vice squad, made supposedly “scientific” associations between “invert” sexuality and a preference for artificial flowers. Carlier claimed that “pederasts” were “drawn to trades like floristry, and they liked to dress as women and deck themselves with ‘artificial flowers, chaplets, and garlands’ on special occasions” (Carlier in Syme 2010: 243 n.4). In 1884, Rachilde, the pen name of writer Margeurite Vallette-Eymery, makes Jacques Silvert, a “sexually ambiguous” male artificial flower maker, the object of her aggressive female heroine’s lust in the novel Monsieur Venus (Rachilde [1884] 2004; Syme 2010: 243). Her contemporary, the author Joris-Karl Huysmans’ famous decadent dandy Des Esseintes, prefers artificial blooms that look real and real hothouse flowers that look fake. He revels in his new tropical plants created by the gardener’s skill and exclaims “without a shadow of a doubt, the horticulturists are the only true artists left to us nowadays” (Huysmans [1884] 2003: 88).
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (Bauer 1997: 75)
Like Des Esseintes, who admires the art of cultivated flowers, Wilde describes an artful floral accessory that he cultivated daily as part of his dandified dress. The boutonnière or its English translation buttonhole was, and still is, a fashionable and often expensive flower or bouquet inserted through a hole in jacket lapels (Chenoune 1993: 102–112). Even bare of floral adornment, buttons and the holes cut for them had suggestive potential, and displaying and unbuttoning these little objects was often erotic and eroticized in an age before zippers. In the exhibition Déboutonner la mode (from February 10 to July 19, 2015), the Musée des Arts Décoratifs displayed flirtatious “rebus” buttons of the late eighteenth century. These large mother-of-pearl buttons were carved with word puzzles to decipher; for example, one is inscribed “GCD à son amour” (J’ai cédé à son amour) or “I yielded to his/her love” (Belloir 2015).12 The French makes the gender of the lover indeterminate. In addition to the multitude of buttons that fastened waistcoats, suit jackets, and breeches, flower motifs were popular for men’s formal dress in the Ancien Régime.
During the nineteenth century, male flowers were banished to the buttonhole. The thick reinforced woolen broadcloth of suits allowed tailors to deliberately cut and hand-stitch this design feature into the lapels of most fine men’s suits. The male chest became a surface to publicly display awards and honors, but it also sprouted specially prepared flowers, sometimes with their own little silver vase. In principle a man bought his own buttonhole, but it could also be romantic gift from his ladylove. Yet the type of blooms inserted into this empty sartorial “slash,” as George Bauer, a scholar of homosexuality in French literature, calls it, and the gesture of penetrating it with a floral decoration could be blatantly homoerotic (1997: 64–82). In Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), one character “seductively slips his posy into his future lover’s hole,” and “… taking the flowers from his buttonhole, he put them into mine with one hand, whilst he slipped his left arm round my waist and clasped me tightly, pressing me against his whole body for a few seconds” (Proust 1913 in Syme 2010: 50–51).
As gay figures begin to emerge in nineteenth-century French literature, they are nosegays whose bouquets are perfumed and dandy floral offerings that flirt with a certain language of criminality and real and artificial flowers.
George Bauer, “Gay Incipit: Botanical Connections, Nosegays, and Bouquets,” p.65
In light of these invert floral associations, we may interpret Wilde’s green carnation as an intentionally provocative sexual in-joke and a deliberate, artificially dyed “perversion” of the natural blooms worn by heterosexual men. The fragrant carnation had one set of meanings in mainstream Victorian society and radically different connotations in nineteenth-century gay subcultures. White carnations expressed pure love, and are still the buttonhole of choice for weddings (Foulkes in Angeloni 2000: 35). By contrast, in French culture, Wilde’s carnation, or oeillet (“little eye”) in French, was slang for anus. Its suggestively wrinkled folds, fragrant perfume, and jagged petals inspired several homoerotic poems. Henri Cantel, a now little-known admirer of Baudelaire, concluded his 1860 poem Éphèbe with these lines:
My bottom can without shame or jealous remorse,
Open itself to your phallus, like a carnation that opens …
–Beautiful marble, adieu! Return to your cushion in the Louvre!
The author spurns the cold, carved marble hermaphrodite in the Louvre museum, longing instead for a young man whose floral “buttocks smell like the lily, and the bashfulness of the morning rose.” The poet longs to penetrate his lover and caress the ephebe’s “nubile garden” and the ephebe is invited to open the poet’s own “carnation” in return as the culmination of these floral pleasures (Cantel 1860).13
More famously, only two years later, lovers Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud co-wrote a Sonnet au trou de cul or Asshole Sonnet.14 It was written as a parody of a collection of sonnets written by poet Albert Mérat about the beauties of his mistress’ individual body parts but Verlaine and Rimbaud wanted to “remedy” Mérat’s one omission—the anus. The first verse reads:
Crumpled like a carnation, mauve and dim
It breathes, cowering humbly in the moss
Still wet with love which trickles down across
The soft slope of white buttocks to its rim.15
The fashion historian cannot help but read oeillet as a sartorial double-entendre. In English an oeillet can also be another small eye or “eyelet,” a tiny hole made in linen underclothes, shirts, and garments, reinforced by a thread.16 The poets’ word for “rim” is another technical sewing term: the ourlet is a garment’s stitched hem.
Like the colored bandannas that can communicate sexual preferences in LGBTQ culture today, specific colors of accessories in the male wardrobe seem to have been used for over a century as visual codes for “invert” sexuality. These supposedly included the green cravats “worn by a band of pederasts at Paris” according to sexologist Havelock Ellis (1942: 299–300).17 Ellis stressed that “inverts exhibit a preference for green garments.” What follows will discuss how the combination of the color green and carnations as potent signifiers in their own right was received in the popular press.
too often, it is… that part of the garment which first gives signs of mortality.
“Button-hole Devotion,” Leeds Mercury, April 19, 1890
Although two years after its debut in 1892, Oscar Wilde takes sole credit for inventing “that magnificent flower”, the green carnation had been on display in florists’ windows in Paris for at least a month before its opening night in Wilde’s lapel. It seems to have made its first appearance on the playwright’s person at the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde, October 2, 1894: 3). The Glasgow Herald’s “Notes on Dress in France” announced a month before the play that the “blue carnation,” from Paris, “has been dubbed chic … [and] looks blue in some lights, green in others; so persons buying the novel blossom can, according to taste, call it blue or green” (January 20, 1892: 9).18 Wilde accessorized it with a scandalously lit cigarette at curtain call on February 22, 1892. It reappeared on Wilde, who was accompanied by “a suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower” (Beckson 1987: 83–84). The novel artificially tinted flower began to attract a range of mostly negative and sometimes disproportionately vitriolic commentary. The Pall Mall Gazette denounced it as a “freak,” a “hybrid produced by over-culture out of the creamy white carnation that was indeed one of the loveliest of midsummer garden flowers” (Pall Mall Gazette February 25, 1892: 1). Perhaps this was even more of a travesty because the carnation is also a luxurious and elegant bloom: carnations, which survive well without water, were at the top of the boutonnière hierarchy, and cost the same as rare orchids.19
Other journalists added their thoughts to the debate: The County Gentleman calls the green carnation “inartistic,” “ghastly,” an “atrocity,” and warns that “it is crude enough to set one’s teeth on edge and affect the observer, let alone the wearer, with cholera morbus at the very least.” It then recommends two West-End florists’ shops where the blooms can be seen and, tongue-in-cheek, advises its readers that if they are “taken seriously ill after having seen this poor, degraded flower, that there are several restaurants handy wherein you can purchase restoratives” (The County Gentleman March 5, 1892: 298). Scents and scented flowers were historically believed to ward and fend off illness, not to spread it. Wilde’s choice of lapel ornament challenged sentimental and nostalgic fantasies about England’s rural beauties as appropriate for the buttonhole. One poet waxed romantic about green hillsides and birdsong evoked by the “faint and fleeting” perfume of a spray of lilies of the valley that he has pinned to his coat. The smell of his “dear heart’s” gift takes him from the “city gutters, gusts, and grimes/to lowland fields and fences” and functions much like the prophylactic scent of a Medieval or Renaissance pomander (Luders 1889: 9).
Other articles indignantly call it an “ill-used and utterly destroyed specimen,” a “spoiled white carnation,” a “green and sickly flower,” an “abomination,” a “villainous vogue spread from Paris salon to London drawing-room,” and a “hideous button-hole anomaly” (The Preston Guardian March 5, 1892: 7; The Hampshire Advertiser March 9, 1892: 3; County Gentleman March 12, 1892: 334). Less judgmental gardening and natural history magazines tried to explain the mystery of the green flower’s origins and the science behind its color: several claimed that the green carnation was discovered by an anonymous Parisian artificial flower worker, who dipped a real bloom into her coloring solution, observing that the green dye spread up the stem and into the flower. The result was a white flower veined and spotted with green from “tetrae” or “malachite green” dye, or violet produced with methyl-violet, aniline dyes that “last a very long time, and are not injurious to the health of any person using it” (The Gardener’s Chronicle March 5, 1892: 302).20 Nevertheless, many still saw the ghost of arsenic in its vivid green hue.
In feminist author Violet Hunt’s “Green Carnation,” a short story published soon after Wilde’s premiere, the perplexed heroine Isabel asks her young male friend at a dance, “What’s that green thing in your button-hole?” Billy nonchalantly replies: “Oh, haven’t you seen them? A green carnation. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.” Isabel wants it but Billy refuses to part with his “gage d’amour” or “pledge of love” from an older gentleman called Dacre (Black and White March 12, 1892: 350–351; Beckson 2000: 389).21 Even though Dacre turns his attentions to Isabel, this love story is ambiguous at best. Two years later, Hichens’ Wilde figure, Mr. Esmé Amarinth, is reputed to have come up with the idea for the green carnation, calling it “… the arsenic flower of an exquisite life. He wore it, in the first instance, because it blended so well with the color of absinthe. Lord Reggie and he are great friends. They are quite inseparable” (Hichens [1894] 1970: 11; Beckson 2000: 392).22 These references to arsenic, which was never used to tint natural flowers, in the same paragraph as allusions to Esmé and Reggie’s inseparability conflate toxicity, queerness, and “tainted” love.23 The paragraph also mentions another toxic green associated with literary and artistic creativity in Baudelairean and Wildean circles. Bitter wormwood root was used to make absinthe, the pale green alcohol known as “La Fée Verte” (Delahaye 2000; Adams 2004).
By the time Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for sodomy in 1895, fashion and taste had condemned green as both a literally and sexually tainted color. Chromophobia reared its fearful head and incriminated both arsenical hair wreaths tinted to resemble real plants and the artificially dyed natural flower that Wilde wore in his lapel. Yet the outcomes of these medical and moral panics illustrate larger structural inequalities. The famous writer was brought to trial and put under lock and key for his sexual preferences, based in part on evidence supposedly supplied by his sartorial eccentricities, including his carnation’s “villainous vogue.” His imprisonment led to a decline in his health and contributed to his death. By contrast, industrialists like Monsieur Bergeron, who owned the London workshop where Matilda Scheurer toiled with toxic emerald green until her early death at the age of nineteen, were never condemned, much less imprisoned for forcing their workers to use a deadly poison. As these two different moments in the history of fashionable green flowers suggest, criminal negligence causing death and the criminalization of same-sex love were not given equal social or legal importance. While it was acceptable to taint artificial flowers adorning the bodies of women in the name of fashion, Wilde’s love for his own sex, a love he communicated through flowers, was a seemingly unforgivable crime.
Notes
1 Whorton’s excellent book gives a full account of the history and importance of arsenic in Victorian Britain, see also chapter 3 of my book Fashion Victims: 72–101 and chapter 4 “Dangerous Dyes: A pretty, deadly rainbow” on aniline dyes: 102–125.
2 Copper acetoarsenite was discovered in Schweinfurt, Germany by Rulz and Sattler, a paint manufacturer.
3 It was almost certainly applied differently to silk than to cotton, almost as a “tint” bound to the cloth with gelatin or albumen, but an 1867 manual suggests the use of some of the elements found in samples in the dyeing process, including potassium and sulfur.
4 Carr’s text was popular text and published in three editions. See also the Healthy Dress Exhibition of 1884.
5 In an earlier article I discuss color and “physiological aesthetics” in more detail (Matthews, 1999).
6 The Marsh test was developed by James Marsh in 1836. Technical treatises suggest that the textile industry had access to sophisticated chemical testing as early as the 1840s in the form of Strasbourg chemistry professor Persoz, and were not concerned when burning fabrics with copper and arsenic revealed the presence of a telltale black spot on a mirror (1846: 152–154, 537).
7 A grain, based on the weight of a wheat grain, is equivalent to 64.8 milligrams or 1/7,000th of a pound. Hofmann’s letter reprinted a week later as “Arsenical Pigments in Common Life,” (1862) Chemical News 8 February: 75).
8 Grandhomme in Weyl (1892): 30.
9 Professor Ana Pejović-Milić and Eric Da Silva, Assistant Professor of Physics and an expert, kindly opened their state of the art analytical facilities to me and scientifically tested a wide range of objects. The science of detecting arsenic is complicated by an overlap between arsenic and lead in XRF (X-ray fluorescence) spectra, and sophisticated numerical and statistical analyses are required to distinguish arsenic from lead, another common toxin and contaminator of pigments. Further and ongoing research suggests the possibility that arsenic may become removed over time, diminishing the quantity of arsenic we can detect in Victorian artifacts today. This can happen even at room temperature, and may enter the air we breathe. At Ryerson the artifacts were analyzed using an S2 PicoFox (Bruker-AXS, Madison, WI, USA) with monochromatic Mo K radiation and SDD detection. The analysis was performed by Eric Da Silva, who also helped me detect lead in Victorian face powder and contemporary lipsticks, mercury in fur felt hats, and even to check whether a ‘Radium’ hospital blanket from the 1920s might still be radioactive. See Da Silva, E., Matthews David, A. and Pejović-Milić, A. “The quantification of total lead in lipstick specimens by total reflection X-ray fluorescence spectrometry,” X-ray Spectrometry 44 (2015), pp. 451–457. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues at Ryerson for these detailed analyses that were invaluable for the Bata Shoe Museum Exhibition and my Fashion Victims book.
10 Not every green object was arsenical, but the poison showed up in much more minute quantities in green-tinted Victorian fashion plates I purchased on e-Bay, several shoes and shoe boxes from the Bata Shoe Museum, the artificial flower kit in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a child’s cotton dress at the Museum of London, a printed cotton dress at the Royal Ontario Museum, and two 1860s silk gowns, one from a private collector in Australia and the second from the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection. I wish to thank these Museums and their conservators for testing their objects to assist with this research.
11 A contemporary book states that “there is one major caveat that bears mentioning: artificial flowers, no matter how realistic, should never be worn in place of a living bloom” (Angeloni 2000: 63).
12 This 1780s button is but one of the many sexualized rebus buttons in the collection, see: http://www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr/IMG/pdf/depliant_boutons_1201.pdf (accessed November 10, 2015).
13
Ma fesse peut sans honte et sans remords jaloux
S’ouvrir à ton phallus, comme un oeillet qui s’ouvre … –
Beau marbre, adieu! retourne a ton cousin du Louvre!
From “Éphebe,” in Amours et Priapées, (1860).
14
Obscur et froncé comme un œillet violet
Il respire, humblement tapi parmi la mousse
Humide encor d’amour qui suit la fuite douce
Des Fesses blanches jusqu’au cœur de son ourlet.
15 Verlaine, ed. Eliot, pp.128–129, cited in Bauer, p.75.
16 OEILLET. s. m. Petit trou entouré de fil, de soie, etc., qu’on fait à du linge, à des habits, pour passer un lacet, une aiguillette, un cordon, etc. Faire un oeillet. Faire des oeillets à un corset, à des brodequins. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 6th Edition (1835) consulted on Artfl Dictionnaires d’autrefois, https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois, (accessed November 8, 2015). See also Bauer, p. 75.
17 Ellis’s volume Sexual Inversion was first published in 1897, and these quotes are taken from the 3rd edition (1924).
18 In 1880, a Paris Fashions column in a Scottish journal advertised the debut of a “peculiar” new green dress fabric for blondes in “carnation stalk” green but the actual green-dyed carnation did not appear on the scene until over a decade later. “Paris Fashions,” Aberdeen Weekly Journal 7911, 24 June 24: 2.
19 Several articles discuss the carnation’s cost, and the Pall Mall Gazette notes that a simple buttonhole cost sixpence, while a small orchid or carnation was thrice the price at eighteen-pence. “The Shops and the Fashions,” (1892), 25 February 25: 1.
20 This article also remarks that “The Parisian press hints that the traditional bridal orange-flowers can now be obtained of a delicate violet, suitable for ladies entering for a second time into the holy estate of matrimony.” If white signaled the bride’s virginity, dyed flowers broadcast sexual knowledge.
21 Hunt knew and admired Wilde.
22 Amarinth is a play on the legendary unfading or unwilting flower called the Amaranth (Beckson 2000: 392). Victorians believed that in small quantities, arsenic could impart physical vigour, like the legendary Arsenic-eaters of Styria. It also preserves dead flesh and was extensively used in Victorian taxidermy.
23 For contemporary debates over queerness and toxicity, see Mel Chen’s excellent book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
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