A Bath Butterfly Botany and
Jennifer Lovell discloses some saucy connections between science and Enlightenment society In 1795 Joseph Banks was made a Knight of the Order of the Bath, the first civilian to be awarded this order of chivalry. In reference to his own accomplishments, Banks wrote: ‘I may flatter myself that being the first man of scientific education who undertook a voyage of discovery and that voyage of discovery being the first which turned out satisfactorily in this enlightened age, I was in some measure the first who gave that turn to such voyages’. However, it was principally due to his achievements as President of the Royal Society, rather than his earlier exploits on the Endeavour journey, that Banks became Sir Joseph. Despite this fact, the hand-coloured etching by James Gillray that was inspired by the occasion, The Great South Sea Caterpillar, Transform’d into a Bath Butterfly (1795), returns Banks to the shores of Tahiti, providing a testament to the theme’s ongoing ability to titillate the public. The satirical image Gillray produced is a rich resource for the study of late eighteenth century sexual politics in Europe.
James Gillray studied at the Royal Academy under Francesco Bartolozzi in what art historian Draper Hill has characterised as a ‘prevailing academic milieu of saccharine grace and moral uplift’, but it was Gillray’s devastating caricatures which earned him fame. Gillray’s etchings were hung in the windows of the print shop where he lived and worked, and they attracted excited crowds. One eyewitness said, ‘The enthusiasm is indescribable when the next drawing appears, it is a veritable madness. You have to make your way in through the crowd with your fists’. Gillray’s many admirers suggested subject matter to the caricaturist, and politicians who wished to raise their public profile would sometimes attempt to attract his attention. After September 1796, Gillray made a habit of inscribing those prints whose theme was his own invention ‘inv: et fect [made]’ and those that were suggested by others ‘des & fect.’. The Great South Sea Caterpillar is signed ‘Js. Gy. desn. & fect.’, signifying that Gillray created the design and etched the plate, but the idea for the work may have been provided by someone else. In the etching, Gillray has depicted Banks as a butterfly, the last stage in that insect’s metamorphosis. Banks is touched by rays from a sun located in the upper left of the image. At the centre of the sun lies a crown, indicating that it is the royal patronage of George III that shines on Banks and has sparked his transformation. Banks’ body rises upwards and towards the left of the image, as does his gaze. Both are met by rays from the sun moving downwards along the same course to form an invisible line between the sun/king and the Banks butterfly, highlighting the real-life connection between the two men. At the bottom of the print is a written description in which the artist parodies the language of the Royal Society. Gillray claims that the image illustrates a ‘Description of the New Bath Butterfly’ taken from the Royal Society’s publication entitled the Philosophical Transactions. Gillray’s manufactured description reads:
The beautiful red to which Gillray refers is the red ribbon or sash of the Order of the Bath, and the shining spot its insignia. The edges of Banks’ wings are decorated with images of a bee, a scallop, a flower, a crab, a scorpion and a starfish, all symbols of natural history which allude to Banks’ own accomplishments in the field as well as to the success of his presidency of the Royal Society. Also on his wings, but located closer to his body, are two symbols whose meanings are not so obvious. According to a study of the print by Alan Bewell they are little hats, and, more specifically, representations of the bonnets rouges of the French Revolutionaries. Such a suggestion may seem surprising in light of the strong connections that have been drawn between Banks and royalty within the same caricature. To understand the presence of these revolutionary hats, the contemporary state of Banks’ speciality, botany, must be considered. At the end of the eighteenth century, botany was associated with sex—and through sex, with revolution. Within The Great South Sea Caterpillar, Gillray introduces the sexual nature of Banks by depicting his body rising phallically skyward in contrast to the other flaccid caterpillars that surround him. Gillray was surely alluding to Banks’ sexual escapades in the South Seas, which had long been the object of satire. A well-known example, James Perry’s Mimosa, or The Sensitive Plant [1779], poetically described the qualities of the penis and was dedicated to ‘Mr Banks’.As the basis for his satire, Perry played upon a relationship between plants and sexual organs, a relationship which had long been established metaphorically, but was made explicit in the eighteenth century by Linnaeus’ system of plant classification. Linnaeus believed that the habit of a plant–characteristics like colour, size or taste–was too variable to be a reliable guide to classification. Consequently, his system of classification, first outlined in Fundamenta Botanica (1735), relied upon the number, form, proportion and location of the sexual parts of the plant. Linnaeus used social analogies in his descriptions of plants. For example, he referred to stamens both as ‘male’ and as ‘husbands’, pistils as ‘females’ and as ‘wives’, and fertilisation as ‘marriage’. His system contained 24 classes, the first 23 of which were initially referred to as Nuptiae Publicae (Public Marriages), meaning that they were seed-bearing plants with visible flowers. The twenty-fourth class was Nuptiae Clandestinae (Concealed Marriages), consisting of plants, such as the ferns, whose flowers were not visible. The class names employed the suffixes andria and gynia, the Greek for ‘male’ and ‘female’ respectively. In Botanophilia in Eighteenth-century France: The Spirit of the Enlightenment, Roger Williams states that it was not difficult for contemporary readers to infer that Hexandria monogynia, for instance, meant not only six stamens and one pistil, but implied ‘six husbands in marriage to one wife’. Linnaeus’ simple, rational system was partially responsible for a massive increase in botanical classification by men of science as well as by hobbyists, but the system also affected the negotiation for power between the human sexes. Conservative moralists were alarmed as the analogies of Linnaean botany provided women with a language for understanding and talking about their own sexuality. Through works such as Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, which was published in 1762, the idea had emerged that the expression of human traits, including sexuality, was influenced by social and historical causes instead of being determined solely by nature. Existing societal norms for sexual behaviour and relationships might not be preordained or immutable. Linnaean botany, with its celebration of sexual variety, might give women ideas. There was a great deal of discussion about the morality of botany and whether women should be allowed to study it. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her influential A Vindication of the Rights of Women, illustrated the very cause for concern when she used the language of botany to criticise the societal norms for relationships between men and women.
Sexual knowledge, and the desire for sexual freedom that might result, were seen to go hand in hand with ideas concerning the freedom of women in general. French philosophy that discussed the rights of all men was applied by some women to their own condition. Attacks by counter-revolutionary conservatives upon women like Wollstonecraft discussed the corrupting forces of both French philosophy and the study of botany. Within Gillray’s The Great South Sea Caterpillar, it is Banks as a representative of the science of botany that is associated with revolution by the bonnets rouges, not Banks the man. Despite the popularity of his system of classification, Linnaeus recognised the artificiality of its simplicity, which grouped together plants that were, apart from their sexual system, quite diverse. He viewed the system as a temporary expedient to provide order to a botanical world that was ever expanding through journeys of scientific exploration such as those of Joseph Banks. While Linnaeus failed in his attempts to create a second system of classification which retained the rationality of the sexual system, but also accounted for other elements of a plant’s physical form, others followed in his wake who were more successful. As new systems of classification replaced that of Linnaeus, botany became less sexy, opening the way for the Victorians’ genteel fascination for flowers. In addition to Gillray’s The Great South Sea Caterpillar, the National Library’s collections contain a number of other satires, both written and visual, of Sir Joseph Banks. These satires are, as Gillray’s etching demonstrates, rich time-capsules for the study of late eighteenth century attitudes. JENNIFER LOVELL completed an internship at the National Library in 2004. She is currently in Mexico, conducting independent research into indigenous art traditions |
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