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Margaret Fuller’s and Elizabeth Stoddard’s innovative use of the language of flowers in “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” and The Morgesons explore multilevel feminine discourse in ways later described by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigary. Fuller uses flowers symbolically in her text, not mimicking conventional sentimental motifs, but inspiring women’s independence and self-development. Fuller’s flower images become anthropomorphic possibilities for female empowerment which re-envision American women’s social roles and express Fuller’s developing feminism. Stoddard’s use of flowers reflects her realist writing and captures many of the contemporary social applications of flowers. Stoddard, like Alice Walker, sees some artistic agency for women through gardening, but ultimately finds the comparison of women to flowers an antiquated system which holds women back in search of social progress.

Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) has been overlooked by most modern literary critics and scholars. She needs to be incorporated into the canon of the American novel in order to establish a deserved critical visibility and to retain it for many years to come. Her groundbreaking fiction, unconventional by any nineteenth-century standard, especially as evidenced by The Morsesons and by some of her short stories, is characterized by penetrating psychology, individuality, and enduring literary qualities.

The language of flowers was a popular phenomenon in the United States in the nineteenth century. This dissertation on American literature looks at several American women authors’ use of the language of flowers in their novels. I examine the use of the language of flowers in Margaret Fuller’s “Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” “Yuca Filamentosa,” and poetry such as “To Sarah,” Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, Edith Wharton’s Summer, Mary Austin’s Santa Lucia: A Common Story and Cactus Thorn, and Susan Glaspell’s The Verge. Through analysis of language of flowers dictionaries, historical studies of the language of flowers, feminist history and theory, and close readings of the sketches, poems, novels, and plays themselves, I will show that American women continued to use and be influenced by the language of f lowers for close to a decade. I will also show that these women writers’ use of the language of flowers shows evolving social attitudes toward women and standards of femininity in American society during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century.