Fleurs du travail, fleurs sublimes: Anna Mendelssohn's Involute tulips

Situating Anna Mendelssohn within the nineteenth-century, highly feminised genre of floral poetry, anthologies, and dictionaries, this essay argues that flowers become a means by which Mendelssohn performs feminist oscillations between sentimentality and sublimity. Through genetic criticism and close reading, the essay attends particularly to Mendelssohn’s archived and published instantiations of tulips from 1974 to 1995, culminating in her great poem “Silk & Wild Tulips” (1995). By tracking floral motifs in Mendelssohn’s work, the essay unearths the thorough labour of her editorial processes, as well as some innately conservative strands of her artistry and ideology. At their most ideal, Mendelssohn’s flowers stand for an inarticulable, as-yet-unattainable, and distinctly feminised form of communication, and in this guise, they are a catalyst by which Mendelssohn strives to redefine her masculinist avant-garde inheritance. Numerous unpublished archival materials are referenced, among them, Mendelssohn’s prison diaries, marginalia, pamphlets, prose typescripts, and poem manuscripts.