John Shaw Neilson and The Floral Metaphor

Abstract

The femme fatale was a fascinating figure of art in Victorian times. Mario Praz, in his well-known book, The Romantic Agony, has described her manifestations in several European literatures, including English. In Australia too, "Ia belle dame sans merci," the beautiful woman, imperious, fascinating and cruel, appears in various forms in the poetry of Christopher Brennan, Kenneth Slessor, A.D. Hope and others. Norman Lindsay has painted her image. The femme fatale is a striking creation, threatening pain, castration, delusion and death, but also suggesting the possibility of ecstatic union. She is of both heaven and hell, is sought among the stars and in the underworld, is Lilith, Persephone, Circe, a Siren or heartless cocette; she promises immortality or obsession and ruin.

Nevertheless, the femme fatale is not the only distinctive projection of femininity to be found in Australian poetry. Inherently less striking, but complementary in its displacement from everyday reality is the figure of the fragile girl, the delicate child-woman, a tender and transient flower, a beautiful ideal doomed to wither before the crude demands of life. John Shaw Neilson is the supreme representative of this figure in Australian poetry. In Neilson, the femme fragile, as she will be called here, rather than the femme enfant, is typically presented as a girl, who "innocent/in the whistling Spring," will not survive into Summer. She is "the tenderest of pale girls."¹ She grows ill and must die. The theme was popular in Neilson's time. Edgar Allen Poe wrote that "The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."² If, for "beautiful woman," we substitute "young girl" or occasionally "young boy," this statement becomes quite applicable to Neilson also. A complex network of cross-reference and influence could be shown for European writers and artists on this theme, around the turn of the century. The present writer has pursued this aspect of Neilson elsewhere, in its relation to the Victorian cult of the child.³ Here, it is intended to concentrate on an accompanying aspect of the femme fragile in Neilson, namely the poet's use of flower metaphors, as a way of showing that this apparently simple poet has suprisingly more in common with the international European culture of this time than is generally supposed.