Picking a flower (deflowering)
symbolises the notion of taking a woman’s virginity – it is an ancient metaphor
which appears so often that it can be classified as an archetype, i.e. as an
idea inherent in all people. This is apparent even from the etymology. Defloration is derived from flos, floris, the Latin word for “flower” or “blossom”, because its
original meaning was “to steal a flower or blossom from a girl”. The same
applies to the verb to deflower.
This
symbolism is also evoked in the dream of a young girl, mentioned by Freud in
his The Interpretation of Dreams. One
of his colleagues, Alfred Robitsek, had a patient whose native language was
English. While she was not neurotic, she was “rather prude” and “conservative”,
and was facing many obstacles in the lead-up to her imminent marriage. She
dreamt she was “arranging the centre of a table with flowers for a birthday“,
using “expensive flowers; one has to pay for them”. Robitsek interpreted the
birthday she was preparing for in the dream as the birth of a child which was
preoccupying her, and the picked or cut flowers as a symbol that she would have
to be deflowered in order for this to happen. The fact that the flowers were
“expensive” and “had to be paid for” meant she would be giving her virginity,
expecting in return “a rich love life”, and presumably also financial support
from her husband. When questioned as to the type of flowers, she responded “lilies
of the valley, violets and pinks or carnations”. Robitsek then asked her what she immediately associated with these
flowers – a method used in psychoanalytical dream interpretation. In doing so,
Freud’s colleague “carefully” avoided “suggesting the meaning of this symbolism
to her”. She associated the violets with
to violate, thus expressing “a
masochistic trait” and probably also the subliminal desire for her husband’s
forceful approach to help her overcome her insecurity and conservative
prudishness, enabling her to fulfil her yearning for motherhood. Her first
thought in relation to the carnations was
incarnation – she wanted to fall
pregnant. She associated the lilies of the valley with “purity”, which also
made sense to Robitsek, as the lily is a traditional symbol of the virginity
the bride is willing to sacrifice. We dare to take Robitsek’s interpretation
one step further by reiterating that incarnation is a religious term denoting
the Christ Child’s embodiment in flesh in Mary’s lap, and that the lily
particularly symbolises Mary’s virginity,
hence it also being known as the Madonna lily. It figures on almost all
paintings by the Old Masters portraying the Annunciation. The Archangel
Gabriel is holding a white Madonna lily when he announces to Mary that God
will impregnate her through the Holy Ghost; in some paintings, the lily
appears in a vase. This flower symbolises Mary’s virginal purity, which
remains intact thanks to the Immaculate Conception. Since a plucked flower is
an ancient symbol of deflowering, however, it can also be interpreted as
meaning that Mary becomes pregnant naturally; the Immaculate Conception is a
Christian invention which demonises sexuality as something dirty, animalistic
and sinful. This was a foreign concept to pre-Christian religions: Women in
ancient mythology, such as Europa and Leda, for example, were no longer virgins
after being impregnated by Zeus. Christianity reframed the picked flower as
being a symbol of asexual purity. The incarnation
which came to the patient’s mind to represent the pregnancy she was hoping
for, and which was to be of a biological and animalistic rather than a divine,
miraculous nature, fits with the original, uncorrupted meaning of the Madonna
lily which continues to live on in the human subconscious to which it has been
displaced.
The order in which the patient named the three flowers – “lilies of the valley,
violets and … carnations”, can similarly be no coincidence. She is initially a
virgin, represented by the lily as a Christian symbol (and also filled with the
desire to be deflowered and pregnant, symbolised by the lilies, as picked
flowers, she was using to decorate the table), then taken by force on her
wedding night, symbolised by the violets,
resulting in pregnancy, or incarnation.
The violence aspect also appears in Goethe’s poem Heathrose
about a rosebud which is picked by a young boy:
Once a boy a Rosebud spied,
Heathrose fair and tender,
All array'd in youthful pride,–
Quickly to the spot he hied,
Ravished by her splendour.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Heathrose fair and tender!
Said the boy, "I'll now pick thee,
Heathrose fair and tender!"
Said the rosebud, "I'll prick thee,
So that thou'lt remember me,
Ne'er will I surrender!"
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,
Heathrose fair and tender!
Now the cruel boy must pick
Heathrose fair and tender;
Rosebud did her best to prick,–
Vain 'twas 'gainst her fate to kick–
She must needs surrender.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebudred,
Heathrose fair and tender!
The
rose, with its blossom and thorns, symbolises a young girl described by Goethe
as “morgenschön”, meaning “as beautiful as the morning”, in the original
German. The blossom plucked by the boy represents her virginity and beauty,
which is akin to a morning, because her youthful charm and grace will fade when
she becomes a woman and mother. She resists being deflowered by scratching and
pricking the violator with her thorns, but cannot escape her fate.
Even
in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, the flower symbolises what Goethe calls “morgenschön”, the graceful maiden’s charm, which fades after she
loses her virginity and falls pregnant. In Shakespeare’s work, a virgin refuses
to marry the man chosen for her by her father. She is faces the threat of being
sent to a nunnery as punishment, and is warned:
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
This
comparison is not romantic; nothing is euphemised. The nun, the asexual and
therefore barren bride of Christ, whose girlish beauty is not picked, but
rather remains on the bush and withers away without bearing fruit, is
contrasted against the “earthly”, i.e. natural, fate of the married girl, whose
flower is harvested and processed, distilled, to extract rose water, which is
used to flavour desserts. While the flower itself is consumed here, its
fragrance, its charm, its beauty is preserved and passed onto her child, who is
symbolised by the rose water.
Jorinde,
in Grimm’s fairytale Jorinde and Joringel,is also threatened with the fate of
withering away unpicked. When the virginal maiden goes into a dark forest with
her lover and fiancé Joringel “so that they can talk in private”, meaning get
intimate, her mood changes to one of despondent depression, which also rubs off
on Joringel. What is Jorinde afraid of? This is revealed to us by the song she
sings. She saw a turtle dove in the forest, i.e. a bird which symbolises the
lovers, but sings “miserably”, and she compares herself to this creature,
calling it “my little bird with ring so red”. In this situation, she obviously
appears as a turtle dove which feels uncomfortable in its own skin. What does
the red ring mean? Jorinde is referring to the typical red rings around turtle
doves’ pupils, but it also has another, subliminal meaning: A ring can have
things stuck through it; for Freudians, it is a symbol of the vagina. And the
red colour represents the blood which will flow when Jorinde is deflowered. In
other words, she is afraid of losing her virginity and becoming a woman and
mother, and is shying away from this step which will end her carefree
childhood. As such, the pair’s first act of sexual intercourse does not
eventuate, and they realise too late that they have come dangerously close to
the castle of the wicked witch, embodied by Jorinde’s mother. She transforms
Jorinde into a nightingale, which she keeps in captivity and feeds every day
like a mother does her child. In other words, Jorinde has fled back to her
childhood, back to her mother, with whom she is protected against deflowering,
but also has no freedom.
Joringel, however, picks a blood-red flower containing magic powers, and uses
it to free Jorinde from her witch-mother’s spell. The picking of the flower of
course means loss of virginity, and its red colour symbolises the blood that
will flow in the process: It makes Jorinde a woman, his woman, tearing her away
from her mother and out of her childhood.
Little Maria, in the 1931 horror film Frankenstein, is still much too young to
be torn out of her childhood. She finds herself unsupervised on the shores of a
lake when the monster appears in front of her. She does not get frightened, but
instead innocently invites it to play the “flower game” – probably the most
fatal children’s game in film history. She has a bunch of flowers and gives the
monster half. The two of them throw their flowers into the water to see how
they float. The monster is overjoyed to adopt the role of playmate, and when he
no longer has any flowers left, he comes up with the idea of continuing the
game by throwing Maria into the water, because in his childlike naivety, he
believes it will be fun for her to float like the flowers. But she sinks and
drowns, and he flees in horror. In treating the young girl like one of the plucked
flowers, he is not being driven by evil, but instead most likely the film’s
producer, because the “little Maria scene” has, like the human mind itself, a
subconscious, a subtext: It is the suppressed desire of adult men to sexually
abuse a young girl, to take her virginity, which is projected onto the monster.
When the desperate father appears in the village carrying his dead child in his
arms, a lynch mob forms to hunt down the presumed rapist and murder. This
hunting scene plays out in Bavaria, but is fatally reminiscent of hunting
scenes in the country in which the film was shot: A black man is accused of
sexually assaulting a white girl, a lynching party results, they hunt down the
alleged “black rapist” with dogs and torches and eventually burn him alive.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the monster victim bears the name of the
Christian Mother of God, Maria (Mary). After all, the Madonna embodies purity
unsoiled by base animalistic sexuality, and this ideal also applies to
children, whom we imagine to be asexual, innocent, pure beings. This childlike
purity is defiled by the Frankenstein monster, which treats the little girl
like the other plucked flowers, i.e. deflowers her – as such, the monster
embodies suppressed dirty desires which adults have for children.
And it is not just evil intentions towards young girls, but also towards women
in general, which are projected on him, resulting in him being hunted and
lynched: His victim, Maria, simultaneously symbolises a dishonoured white woman
whose purity was considered a social ideal at the time of the film’s
production. This is reflected in his next victim, whom he approaches in the
role of “black rapist”. She is Elizabeth, the fiancée of his creator, Henry
Frankenstein. The pair want to marry, and the Frankenstein home is decorated
for the wedding reception; every room contains vases of flowers, including
white flowers which are most likely Madonna lilies (1). Elizabeth is wearing a
wedding dress whose white colour, like the white flowers which are or are
reminiscent of Madonna lilies, represents the purity of the bride who is
bringing her virginity to the marriage (2). She is anxious and nervous, because
she senses an evil threat, and even Henry has trouble calming her down. When
the monster enters her chamber through a window without her realising it, she
takes a bunch of flowers out of a vase (it may be her bridal bouquet, ready for
the wedding ceremony) as a way of having something to hold onto in her nervous
state. Like in the little Maria scene, the monster thus encounters a female
holding flowers, though Elizabeth does not give him any: She doesn’t want to
play any flower game with him, instead screaming for help when she sees him and
running away; she doesn’t want him to snatch the flowers she is holding onto
for grim death. In this scene, too, they symbolise the act of deflowering,
which the monster is threatening to do to her (3). After all, Henry
Frankenstein is the one who should be deflowering her on their wedding night –
but the monster wants to get in before his creator, and reaches for this
forbidden fruit. It is a case of oedipal rebellion, because Frankenstein is the
father of the monster; he is its maker, and his creation is now turning against
him and wants to take his place. Once again, we see the white man’s fear of
rebellion by the black man, for whom he claims the paternalistic position of
father, whose underage children are and remain the blacks.
Maria and Elizabeth are both
victims of the monster, which, in its role of “black rapist”, zeroed in on
their virginal purity, symbolised by flowers. At the time the film was made,
any girl who lost her virginity before marriage had much less chance of finding
a husband, and particularly so if she had been “dishonoured” by a black man.
Her only option then is to take her own life, like Flora did in the 1915 racist
silent film The Birth of a Nation.
Chased by a black man, the young white girl prefers to jump to her death off a
cliff than be raped, because she has internalised the notion of what
constituted an “ideal woman” at the time: A dishonoured woman is worthless and
should be dead. This still applies today in patriarchal Islamic societies, and
girls are constantly the victims of honour killings. Flora (4) jumping to her
death could be seen as an honour suicide; an American Lucretia is pitched to
white women as a role model. And Maria, who had been deflowered by a black man,
may perhaps have been killed by her father if the monster, which serves as the
scapegoat for the evil desires of white men, had not got in before him (5).
Maria, the deflowered girl whose life ends in the water just like the flowers
she has picked, is reminiscent of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. She and Prince Hamlet love each
other. But as the Reason of State forbids him from marrying her, she is warned
by her father and brother not to allow him to get so close to her, so as to
prevent her from being seduced by him and “opening” her “chaste treasure”, i.e.
her virginity, “to his unmastered importunity” (I,3,31f.). But there is much to
suggest that this has already happened, for when Hamlet pretends to be insane,
rejects her and kills her father, she really does go insane, sings ambiguous
folksongs about a deflowered girl who is left abandoned (IV,5), and distributes
flowers she has picked to her brother, the king and the queen. The deflowered
abandoned girl is her referring to herself, and the picked flowers she gives
out symbolise the fact that she has frivolously given away “her treasure”, i.e.
her virginity. She thus uses innuendo and gestures to confess that which has
been weighing heavily on her heart, but which she is not allowed to admit
openly in the patriarchal society. She eventually dies while collecting flowers
for wreaths on the shores of a stream. When the willow branch she is holding
onto breaks off, she falls into the water, taking the flowers with her:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. (IV,7,171-174)
The flowers she has picked are
referred to as “trophies”, which
fits, because Ophelia is just like them. She has become the prize, the victim,
of Hamlet, the man who robbed her of her “treasure” or virginity, forcing her
to wither away as a nun in a convent because no one else will marry her.
The flowers Ophelia picks and gives away symbolise the fact that she surrendered
herself to Hamlet, that she gave herself to him, in other words, that she had
sex with him – and this is also demonstrated by a salacious allusion relating to
the long purples (Orchis mascula) found among Ophelia’s
flowers:
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our could maids do dead men’s finger call them. (IV, 7,167-170)
This common, lewd name could
be fool’s stones or dog stones, whereby stones mean “testicles”. Or priest
pintell, a.k.a. “priest’s penis” – the orchis mascula was called this
because its two tubers are reminiscent of testicles, making the entire plant
look like a penis, and because it has been attributed with aphrodisiac properties
(6). This sees us faced with a contradiction, because the name alluded to gives
the long purples a phallic character and makes them male symbols. But plucked
flowers – the topic of our text – stand for deflowered girls, and are thus
female symbols. So do Ophelia’s long
purples represent a man or a woman? The answer is both. They are an
androgynous symbol of the union between man and woman, Hamlet and Ophelia, in a
sexual act.
1) I’m not totally sure, however, whether these flowers,
which are difficult to see, are Madonna lilies. If so, they would fit well with
the lilies featuring in the dream of Robitsek’s patient.
2) As the lilies are in a vase, i.e. picked, they not
only symbolise her virginity, but also her deflowering, which is planned for
her wedding night.
3) In Black
Frankenstein. The Making of an American Metaphor (p. 183), Elizabeth Young
also demonstrates that the attacks on Maria and Elizabeth are thematically
linked:
“In one sequence in Frankenstein, the
monster enters Elizabeth’s room on her wedding night and corners her behind the
locked door; the camera cuts to others hearing her screams, and when they break
into her room, her white dress is disheveled, and she lies across one corner of
the rumpled bed moaning desperately “Don’t let it come here.” Although the
monster’s crime is officially the penetration of the room, his actions are
framed precisely according to the imagery of interracial rape. The next scene
metaphorically realizes the disastrous consequences of such a rape, when an
angry young father displays to the crowd the body of his little girl, whom the
monster has accidentally drowned.”
4) Her name is symbolic: “Flora” comes from the Latin flos, floris for “flower, blossom”. The
young girl has become sexually mature; metaphorically, we can also say she has
blossomed, and her blooms attract men wanting to deflower her, meaning the
white men have to watch out for her. Her name is also reminiscent of the Roman
goddess Flora, who was the symbol of
flowers and general springtime blossoming in nature.
5) Elizabeth Young, loc. cit., makes the following apt
comments about Maria and Elizabeth: “By the end of this sequence, the black man
has become the archetypical rapist, and the white woman, if not actually dead,
has assumed the role, as Jaqueline Dowd Hall puts it, of ‘the quintessential
Woman as Victim, polluted, >ruined for life<., the object of fantasy and
secret contempt.”
6)
Charlotte F. Otten: Ophelia’s “Long
Purples” or “Dead Men’s Fingers”. In: Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 3
(1979).
