“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Anaïs Nin, Risk
“In the rain, in the evening, in the garden, I will come again.”
PJ Harvey, Black Hearted Love
A garden of delights may begin here. Perhaps not with a rose or violet but a gypsophila paniculata. Baby’s breath. A flower commonly found in roadside ditches growing out of the mud: an invasive species. A flower so delicate, so soft, so thornless that even Kurt Cobain cuts himself on it. And it’s accomplice? Angel hair. The cuscuta campestris, a parasitic vine weed dissecting the host from inside out, hollowing out the body to plant down its own roots in entrails and crumbs of organ tissue. Angelic, perhaps not by name, nor by nature. For what is in a name? That which we call a titan arum by any other word would smell as strange—of decay, of rot, of the corpse.
That name is amorphophallus titanum, or, titan arum, or, in the choppy seas of representation: the corpse flower, ‘deformed penis’ (amorphous as ‘misshapen’ and phallus as ‘penis’) or, more recently Putricia, in lieu of the putrid scent it produces upon the crux of blooming. I was fascinated with the story. Hundreds, thousands of people lining up to see the flower in her exclusive becoming; a spadix extended from a gathered skirt of oxblood spathe like the agile legs of a burlesque dancer upturned and planted into soil. An image only cheapened by the name Putricia. It sounded familiar. It felt deep-rooted, chauvinistic. As if putridity was both innately feminine and a harmless in-joke, because surely only a woman could smell so unbecoming and preternatural? Where had I heard this before?
High School. PDHPE classes in which, upon the periphery of sweet sixteen, our co-ed classes were split down the middle. Maybe not because of the incessant “…can anyone smell fish?” or “…close your legs” or “… I can smell you from here,” but because it was that time for the girls to learn about their capital ‘R’ Responsibilities and the boys to Play Footy. There was a word on the tip of my tongue, one that sounded a lot like self-hatred but felt like rage, one that could only be documented in a teenage tumblr blog:
I’m not one to admire the art of getting into trouble. Sitting atop the library table and being told to get myself off of it. Would you have asked a boy to do the same? Only if they had a whole hygiene section dedicated to their own genitals in every chemist too.
An acceptance of the feminine body by compromise of deodorising.
“I would argue,” says the nondescript aisle in Chemist Warehouse, “that odor is intangible against visual representation and therefore incompatible with beauty.”
Feminine body odor is a problem that can and must be solved through means of floral semiotics, lexicology and plain old maintenance. “Here,” says Western culture, “is a bottle of bright pink, undisclosed and probably animal-tested goop to wash your lady-bits with!” Beautiful women don’t smell, and if they do it’s of Peach-Blossom Ultra-Fresh pH-Sensitive, Odor-Controlling Coconut-Hibiscus Lavender Intimate-Wash. And roses. Perfumes of “rotting corpse” would simply be too hard to market.
This is not new phenomena. Charles Courtney Curran in the 19th century described the women in his paintings as “…[forever] condemned as a punishment to…subsist on the perfume of flowers.” Women and flowers coexist in a cross-sensorial representation: the floral body as a decorative object of discrete fertility, fusing domesticity with the function of the feminine mystique in innocence: an Iron Maiden entrapping the female body in wrought iron petals. Women are to not just smell floral: but be floral. The flower, as a living entity, is subverted when it is perceived merely as a horticultural body: the spectator-spectacle relationship established through visual beauty. And the most desired phase in the cycle? The bloom. The opening, becoming, a seasonal and sensual appearance that manifests an illusion of theatricality in reproduction – a fertile pantomime.
And yet, here is a flower that exists in spite of the idea. Here is an inherent abjection of the feminine floral form, beauty suspended in utter absentia. When the amorphophallus titanum compromises beauty for odor, it occupies the space between the ideal floral feminine and abject body. An unmarketable scent, a confused consumer.
Applying gender binary to botany in order to classify it as feminine is but a basic usage of gendered semiotics – the fusing of Putrid and Patricia making an undeniable stab at an age-old open wound of social disgust of the female body. In fact, the corpse flower is monoecious, both male and female sexual organs coexisting in the same plant for potential self-pollination. Then, I figured, if the name wasn’t a case of tangible anatomy, perhaps then, one could tie the words botanical and sexism together in order to make it make sense.
Botanical sexism is defined via Wikipedia as a preferential planting of (male) pollen producing plants in urban areas rather than (female) fruit-bearing plants. The reasoning, being that a small plague of colloquial allergies is easily anesthetized by domestic antihistamines, but fruit? Fruit that falls: litters, rots, spoils – lubricates up the roads and sidewalks with its bruised flesh is but a public nuisance. Somehow, this question of excess also struck me as familiar, the idea of reproduction being an asset until it isn’t. Until there is too much, until the question is what do we do with it? Where do we put all the excess? How do we deodorise, tuck, silence and denigrate? The rose bush is always pruned.
And yet, a deflowering of the greatest kind: strangely, there is something else. Something more important than beauty and scent that is maybe overlooked: growth. There exists an alternate dialogue of the double-edged metaphor in which floral femininity is both a gendered pitfall and a reclamation of the body. Flowers can be invasive, wild, dominant. They can smell sweet. Tarty. Like the earth. Wet Earth. Musk. Dead flesh. A flower is not a ‘deformed penis’, but rather a flower – in the same way that women are not deformed men: they are women. As Hayley Williams serenades in Petals for Armor:
And I will not compare other beauty to mine, and I will not become a thorn in my own side. I will not return to where I once was. Well I can break through the earth, come out soft and wild.
Or, perhaps, a flower is just a flower.
