Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England by Anna K. Sagal (review)

Abstract

The notion of entanglement brings forth images of inescapable enmeshment, jumbles of knots and webs from which no one can discern a beginning, an end, or any sense of how one individual strand figures into the whole. For Anna K. Sagal, this tangle is a site of subversion, a means through which women could participate in scientific discourse as they sought to reimagine the sociocultural constructions which intertwined their bodies with the natural world. In eighteenthcentury England, this association between women and plants entangled both figures in a “corporeal and psychological intimacy” that served to bolster constructions of women’s “natural” domestic femininity (1). This domestic femininity has often been read as an insurmountable obstacle to women’s rigorous scientific study. Botanical Entanglements, however, argues that women cleverly deployed these restraints to highlight a significant connection between “domesticity and scientific knowledge” (3). Implementing their own reinventions of these connections through literature and art, women forged new alliances with nature that produced significant intellectual development and scientific participation.