Flower girls and garbage women: Misogyny and cliché in ronsard and herrick

This article takes as its point of departure what Bataille calls the “nauseating banality” that flowers are both symbolic of everlasting love and comically short-lived. The comparison of women to flowers in early modern lyric, already by the sixteenth century veering into the territory of cliché, often explicitly thematized—rather than trying to gloss over—the proximity of flowering to withering, a proximity highlighted by the French equivalents of those words, fleuri and flétri. In both Petrarchan and carpe diem traditions, female figures were both essential and essentially expendable. Even the most conventional love poems failed to stay on this side of garbage, as wispy images of women became disfigured into decaying organic material in the space of a single sonnet. Focusing on poems by Pierre de Ronsard and Robert Herrick, I show how these very different poets were engaged in the same misogynist cultural project, a project that takes as a premise that the smooth transition of women from vibrant matter to rotting trash is remarkable in its unremarkableness. These poets, I argue, approached the woman-flower trope with a desire and disdain comparable to their sentiments for the women their poems represented. Viewing women as neither invitingly immediate nor ethereally inaccessible, treating their bodies as dead weight or garbage rather than as property of any value, these poets used the timeless ephemerality of both women and cliché to negotiate their own ambivalence to poetry and immortality.