Butterflies, Bugs, and Maria Sibylla Merian
Once you start looking, it seems like you find examples of women who did important things in the past everywhere. Women you’ve never heard of unless you happen to be in their field of expertise—and maybe not even then.
Take, for instance, naturalist and illustrator Maria Sibyella Merian (1647-1717). She was trained as a painter by her stepfather, who was a still-life painter. She married one of her stepfather’s apprentices. Unlike many women, she continued to paint after her marriage, producing a popular series of watercolor engravings of flowers. Her career would have been interesting enough if she had simply been a forgotten woman who made a career as an artist in the seventeenth century.
Flowers were a way to pay the bills. Her passion was insects. She was one of the first naturalists to observe live insects directly and the first to document the metamorphosis of the butterfly. (1) While still in her teens, she captured insects, raised them, dissected them, and drew them at various stages of their development. In 1679, she published the first volume of a ground-breaking work that depicted the transformation of caterpillars into moths and butterflies. Each plate showed an insect next to the type of plant it ate. Accompanying text described the stage of metamorphosis the drawing illustrated.
In 1692, after fourteen years of marriage, Merian left her husband. She spent a several years with her daughters and mother in a strict religious sect called the Labadists that practiced “primitive Christianity.” (2) When her religious fervor cooled, she moved the family to Amsterdam, where she and her daughters supported themselves as artists, giving art lessons to the daughters of wealthy merchants and selling watercolors of plants and butterflies.
In 1699, at the age of 52, Merian set off with her younger daughter, Dorothea Maria, on a scientific expedition to Surinam, then a possession of the Dutch West India Company. (3) For two years, the women collected and studied plants and insects in the South American jungle.
Merian had hoped to stay in Surinam for five years, but a tropical fever cut the trip short. Back in the Netherlands, Merian published the most important work of her career. The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, which included sixty plates illustrating the different stages of development of Surinam’s insects. The book brought her scientific recognition by her contemporaries. Sort of. Members of the scientific societies of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe bought her books and discussed them, but did not invited her to join the all-male institutions that praised her work.
Today, Merian is once again recognized as a founder of the modern field of entomology.
(1) At the time, insects were popularly believed to spontaneously generate from the mud.
(2) Plain clothing, simple food in limited quantities, cold houses, communal property and a culture of reporting each other’s failings to the group.
(3) One of the first purely scientific expeditions to set out from Europe. Just to put this in context: Captain Cook led his first expedition to the Pacific in 1768 and the first French circumnavigation of the globe took place from 1766 to 1769, which also included a woman, albeit one disguised as a man, French botanist Jeanne Baret.
Heading Back to the Great River Road
In November, 2015, My Own True Love and I set out on an adventure. We headed south for a three-week trip along the Great River Road, a conglomeration of 3000 miles of local and state roads that follow the length of the Mississippi River. We started in Memphis, went south until we reached the end of the road in Louisiana, then headed back toward Chicago, stopping at whatever took our fancy. We made it as far as north as Vicksburg,(1) where we ran out of steam and the weather turned nasty. I blogged about it as we went. (If you’re interested, you can find those posts in the category Road Trip Through History.)
In a few weeks we’re setting out again. This time we’re starting at the headwaters of the river at Lake Itasca State Park, and traveling south through Minnesota and Iowa toward Chicago. Once again, we’ll stop at anyplace that catches our eye. We only have a week, so we may not even make it across the Minnesota border before we have to head home. More blog posts will ensure.
Once again, I’m asking the Marginalia for suggestions about places we should stop at, historical or simply hysterical, famous and obscure. Are there regional specialties we need to try? What little town has a great restaurant, bakery, farmer’s market, or music venue? Traveling history nerds want to know.
(1) I apparently never wrote a blog post on Vicksburg National Military Park, which is a shame because it was fascinating. I knew I left some posts unwritten, but sheesh! It may be time to dip back into those notes.
Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy–and Anne Boyd Rioux
It’s the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and the legions of Alcott fans have plenty of ways to celebrate. PBS released an adaptation in May and at lease one new feature film adaptation is in the works.(1) A graphic novel that re-envisions the March sisters as a blended family leaving in modern New York City will be released in hardcopy in February. (The hard core have been able to watch it on-line in serial form beginning in March.) As the anniversary grew closer, articles about Alcott, Little Women, and related topics have appeared in all the major publications that consider things pop-cultural, literary, and historical.
Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth , Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters is an important contribution to the conversation, and one that will last long after the current flutter of interest subsides. (2) Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is not a biography of Alcott, though Rioux certainly tells Alcott’s story. It is instead a biography of Little Women itself. Rioux considers the changing audience for Little Women(3). She examines its many adaptations into other art forms. She describes the book’s cultural influence–including an amazing array of women who claim it as an influence. And, perhaps most importantly, she takes on the question of Little Women’s relevance today.
Discussing Mark Adamo’s opera based on Little Women, Rioux says “The story Adamo tells does exactly what an adaptation should do: it opens up the original text and makes you feel like you understand it even more deeply.” The same could be said of Rioux’s study. Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy is an engaging and enlightening piece of scholarship that led me straight to my copy of Little Women, eager to read it one more time.
(1) Maybe two. I’m seeing two different directors and two different time lines. The one with Meryl Streep as Aunt March looks interesting enough that I may break my long-standing ban on watching adaptations of Little Women.
(2) Rioux also edited a new annotated edition of Little Women for Penguin Classics. It’s a thing of beauty: a good choice if you’ve read your childhood copy to flinders, or want to introduce someone to the book.
(3) Boys read it, too, when it first came out. And their lives were richer for it in my opinion.