Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The Language of Fruit caught my attention right from the title, and this book has remained with me in profound ways since I finished reading it. Liz Bellamy incorporates an ambitious array of horticultural texts, agricultural treatises, poems, plays, and novels into a nuanced discussion of the significance of fruit throughout English literary history. The title claims the monograph is limited to the long eighteenth century, but with chapters that centralize Greco-Roman mythology, biblical tradition, medieval poetry, and early modern horticultural texts, the title is somewhat misleading. Throughout, Bellamy demonstrates her facility with close reading and analysis across genres, producing a volume that is enjoyable and insightful in equal measure.

Bellamy begins with a goal that appeals to any scholar of ecocriticism or critical plant studies: “to discourse with fruit trees, understand their language, and recognize how they communicate with our inward sense” (1). What unfolds in the following chapters manages to deftly “discourse” with the history of fruit representation throughout literature while retaining [End Page 311] this original sense of wonder. In lively prose, Bellamy escorts her readers through the complex and often contradictory legacy of fruit in literature. Encompassing everything from class and socio-economic status to gender and sexuality, fruit can be deployed to represent any number of critical anxieties, political interests, or economic designs.

Bellamy’s interdisciplinary project reminds us that, “as a natural product of human intervention that is freighted with symbolic associations, fruit subverts unproblematic binary oppositions of nature and art, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture that have been articulated in some ecocritical theory” (8). In many ways, The Language of Fruit challenges certain assumptions of ecocritical theory as it productively expands the limits of how we can look to nature and individual biota like apples, oranges, and pineapples to inform our understanding of literature and society in the past. Bellamy rightly notes that most research and criticism on plants in the eighteenth century and prior have centralized flowers, whereas her innovative investment in fruit showcases the unique ways in which these particular plants—as intrinsically consumable—makes more apparent the linkages between plants and sexuality. Given the popularity of fruit references in literature (the ubiquity of which I had never realized until reading Bellamy’s careful study), we have much to learn about both the socio-cultural significance of these plants and the extent to which their agricultural development influenced society over time.

Chapter 1’s focus on fruit in biblical and classical tradition grounds the dazzling analysis of subsequent chapters. This section discusses the Tree of Knowledge, but also encompasses a broader selection of texts inspired by Genesis, as well as the Song of Solomon, and the Old and New Testaments more extensively. In fact, Bellamy touches on everything from Egyptian wall painting to the Eclogues of Virgil to provide a thorough survey of the complex ways in which fruit came to signify a seemingly contradictory range of ideas and concepts that allowed various biota to be used representationally for multiple critical purposes in English literature.

The second chapter combines these classical and biblical fruit associations with horticultural manuals to highlight the ongoing influence of cultural tropes on agricultural descriptions. Referring to early modern sources including Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman (1613) and William Lawson’s A New Orchard and Garden (1618), Bellamy guides readers through a survey of horticultural texts both recognizable and relatively obscure to a non-specialist. Her analysis is especially successful with reference to the ambiguous overlaps between orchards and gardens in the early modern period, and how such seemingly similar horticultural spaces often conveyed distinct cultural and literary associations.

The third chapter brings a fresh perspective to the diversity of approaches to understanding the role of nature in seventeenth-century pastoral poetry. Beginning with a meticulous reading of Ben Jonson’s [End Page 312] Penshurst (1616), Bellamy proceeds to pull ideas from garden history, ecocritical readings...