Stephanie Sipp, illustrator
By Carol Howard
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was familiar with the Victorian “language of flowers.” In 1895, the twenty-year-old African American writer centered her story “Violets” on the popular pastime of making “tussie-mussies,” or floral bouquets with coded meanings. The tale opens with an artless young woman’s offer of a bouquet of violets and other flowers to her beau at Easter. She writes to him that “you may not be able to read their meaning, so I’ll tell you. Violets…signify that thought which passes always between you and me.” The beau soon marries someone else, and the heroine dies of a broken heart. Finding the faded bouquet among his papers a year later, the man lets out a “sigh…of remembrance.”
Dunbar-Nelson would have known that in Victorian floriography the common blue violet (Viola sororia) represented faithfulness and feminine modesty and that the violet’s close cousin, the pansy, also of the Violaceae family, represented reflective thought. (In French, thoughts are pensées, whence “pansies.”) These symbolic meanings are at play in the tale, as are 19th-century ideals of female piety and domesticity. Through the tale’s Easter setting, the author also gestures toward broader themes of love and sacrifice. These themes, though, like the tale itself, are sugar-coated in the melodrama that characterized popular literature of the period.
A generation later, in the 1920s, Dunbar-Nelson would again write of April flowers and women’s prescribed domesticity. In the post-war era, however, the author was a mature woman, and the culture had changed. She turned away from Victorian sentiment and became a progressive literary voice of the early 20th-century Harlem Renaissance. In the poem “Sonnet” (1922), she returned once again to violets, which had come to represent to the poem’s speaker a cheap, frivolous society. For a moment, though, the sanguine speaker remembers a time of youthful innocence, when violets were the “wild, shy” flowers “that spring beneath your feet /In wistful April days.”
In “April is on the Way” (1927), Dunbar-Nelson commemorated the 10-year anniversary of America’s entry into World War I on April 6, 1917. The poem is solemn with post-war memory, and the speaker gives voice to her added uneasiness over the struggle for civil rights. Still, nature’s signs of spring inspire the speaker’s quest for personal renewal: “from my brown limbs will bloom the golden buds with which we once spelled love.”
In another commemorative poem,“I Sit and Sew” (1927), Dunbar-Nelson turned from spring flowers to a different symbol of women’s domesticity. Set during the war era, the poem’s speaker regards sewing as a “useless task” that “stifles” her, but not because she opposes traditional domestic labor. Rather, she wants to do purposeful work to serve her country during a time of need. Earlier, in 1920, Dunbar-Nelson had published an essay on African American women’s important contributions to the war effort, but in that history she also records how segregation delayed their deployment into meaningful service.
By the 1920s, flower symbolism had changed in the culture at large. Bouquets that were once the province of romantic young ladies had come to honor fallen soldiers. In Britain and America, red poppies became the flowers of remembrance, while the French collected blue cornflowers. Southern Australia commemorated its heroes with “Violet Day.”
Carol Howard is dean of academics at Warren Wilson College.
