Every year, on April 25th\u2014\u2018Anzac Day\u2019\u2014Australians and New Zealanders celebrate the moment in history when the Anzacs<\/i> (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) landed at Gallipoli in 1915 to help win the war in Europe.\u00a0 They were known, in Edwardian terms, as the \u2018flower of manhood\u2019. The Anzacs brought honour to Australia and New Zealand, two remote British colonies in the Antipodes, by proving that both countries had matured into free nations capable of sending fighting forces to help their allies abroad.\u00a0 Today the\u00a0 \u2018Anzac\u00a0 poppy\u2019\u00a0 is\u00a0 still\u00a0 worn\u00a0 proudly\u00a0 in\u00a0 both\u00a0 countries\u00a0 to\u00a0 remember\u00a0 those\u00a0 who fought and died in the First World War, and to mark a turning point in national consciousness.1<\/p>\n
For those of us who live in the Antipodes, the Anzac poppy is an emotive symbol and it is the catalyst for this study which looks at the significance and symbolism of floral imagery to the war imagination, and at the incongruity of flowers\u2014which popularly signify innocence and beauty\u2014within military contexts.\u00a0 My\u00a0 interest\u00a0 is\u00a0 in\u00a0 the\u00a0 imaginative\u00a0 and\u00a0 ritualistic\u00a0 figuring\u00a0 of\u00a0 flowers\u00a0 in\u00a0 war\u2019s remembrance and commemoration, as well as its protest.\u00a0 I integrate analysis of imagery from the fields of art, photography and popular culture, with commentary about the significances of the floral and the pastoral cited in literary theory.2\u00a0 Much of\u00a0 the\u00a0 visual\u00a0 material\u00a0 belongs\u00a0 to\u00a0 Australian\u00a0 and\u00a0 British\u00a0 war\u00a0 archives\u00a0 and\u00a0 war collections, but inclusion is also made of contemporary artists who utilize floral imagery in their protest of war.\u00a0 The First World War is treated as an historical touchstone as the war that brought the poppy, and battlefield wildflower, into proper focus as dramatic subjects for representation, and as vivid perceptual experiences\u00a0 for soldiers.\u00a0 Paul Fussell cautions us, however, not to explain our fascination with the poppy too simplistically by the fact that poppies were there on Flanders fields.3\u00a0 Its potential as a rhetorical device to reinforce the values of fraternity and sacrifice was obvious from the outset.\u00a0 The poppy belongs to a class of objects that has been described as \u2018a visual short-hand to represent shared ideals and to launch an immediate appeal to the audience\u2019s sense of a national community\u2019.4\u00a0 And its rhetoric extends beyond national bound aries.\u00a0 In its most abstract representation as an artificial flower the poppy is part of an expressive international syntax of war.\u00a0 It has been carved into and painted onto public sites across the world, from remote stone memorials in regional Australia, to the large murals on the walls of Memory Hall in the Liberty Memorial<\/i> in Kansas City.<\/p>\n
An effective example of the rhetorical power of this\u00a0 flower is an Australian photograph of a Lighthorseman collecting poppies on the battlefields of Palestine in 1918.\u00a0 It tells us that war is not for nothing and death will always be remembered through the loyalty of men.\u00a0 Frank Hurley was an official war artist, and this is one of the rare colour photographs to emerge from the First World War.5\u00a0 The image gains its emotional power from the way the soldier holds the flowers close to his body but also from their vivid redness which signals the heightened emotion of passion.\u00a0 When Charles A. Hill writes about \u2018the psychology of rhetorical images\u2019 he stresses the importance of vividness to their persuasiveness.<\/p>\n
\u2026 vivid language makes a persuasive message easier to comprehend and more likely to be remembered, but only if the vivid elements are clearly and explicitly relevant to the image itself.6<\/i><\/p>\n
The poppy\u2019s vivid saturated\u00a0 redness\u00a0 allows\u00a0 a\u00a0 direct\u00a0 relationship\u00a0 between\u00a0 its\u00a0 colour and the subject of war sacrifice.\u00a0 Without the redness signifying blood the photograph would not speak as clearly about the good of sacrifice or about ideals of manhood.\u00a0 It impresses upon us that comradeship, loyalty and solidarity are passionately felt.\u00a0 This is a display of the Australian ideology of \u2018mateship\u2019 which became central to the Australian masculine psyche following the War, and which is recorded in every influential account of Australian history since that time.<\/p>\n
In the narrower sense \u2018mates\u2019 are men who are thrown together by some emergency in an unfriendly environment and have become of one blood in facing it.\u00a0 In this sense its use is strongest in the unions and in the armed forces.\u00a0 Mates stick together in their adversity and their common interest.\u00a0 Mateship of this kind is not a theory of universal brotherhood but of the brotherhood of particular men.7 <\/i><\/p>\n
It\u00a0 would\u00a0 be\u00a0 wrong\u00a0 to\u00a0 imply\u00a0 that\u00a0 the\u00a0 depiction\u00a0 of\u00a0 soldiers\u00a0 among\u00a0 poppies\u00a0 is culturally-specific to Australian men, or to Australian military photography and the First World War.\u00a0 It is also part of British pictorial history and examples can be found in war archives of the Second World War, which suggests that a type of\u00a0 naturalization\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 relationship\u00a0 of\u00a0 uniformed\u00a0 soldiers\u00a0 and\u00a0 red\u00a0 poppies\u00a0 has taken place in western cultures.\u00a0 However, while the British example proves that the image of the blood-red poppy in close proximity to soldiers in uniform is not specifically Australian, there is a perception among Australians that it is unique to them which explains why tourist advertisers treat the image of poppies and soldiers as one of the country\u2019s most valuable commodities.\u00a0 It does not even matter if the flower that is shown is not the Flanders poppy, since any red poppy will trigger the right chain of signification to nationalistic history.\u00a0 Whether military or civilian, these\u00a0 images,\u00a0 which\u00a0 are\u00a0 designed\u00a0 to\u00a0 speak\u00a0 of\u00a0 male\u00a0 camaraderie\u00a0 and\u00a0 loyalty,\u00a0 are often so richly infused with desire through the touch and intimacy of men with flowers that they venture, perhaps inadvertently, into a sexualised domain.\u00a0 Paul Fussell was one of the first historians of war to discuss the often-taboo subject of homoeroticism in relation to the poppy.<\/p>\n
For half a century before the fortuitous publicity attained by the poppies of Flanders, this association with homoerotic love had been conventional, in the works by Wilde, Douglas, the Victorian painter Simeon Solomon, John Addington Symonds, and countless others.\u00a0 No \u201cpoppy\u201d poem or reference emerging from the Great War could wholly shake off that association.\u00a0 When Sassoon notes that \u201cthe usual symbolic scarlet poppies lolled over the sides of the communication trench\u201d he is aware, as we must be, that they symbolize something more than bloodshed and oblivion.8<\/i><\/p>\n
In his ethnographic study of the culture of flowers, Jack Goody describes the Flanders poppy as a \u2018strongly marked flower\u2019 for the impact it has made on the popular\u00a0 mind,\u00a0 within\u00a0 Western\u00a0 rituals\u00a0 of\u00a0 remembrance,\u00a0 for\u00a0 those\u00a0 who\u00a0 fought and\u00a0 died\u00a0 in\u00a0 wars\u00a0 after\u00a0 1915.9\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Goody\u00a0 does\u00a0 not \u00a0find\u00a0 it\u00a0 necessary\u00a0 to\u00a0 differentiate between the natural poppy and the artificial one, probably because the two are so successfully enmeshed as one symbolic entity in our imaginations.\u00a0 War rituals have co-opted the basic aesthetic of Papaver rhoeas<\/i> and turned it into a flattened schematic\u00a0 artificial\u00a0 form\u00a0 consisting\u00a0 of\u00a0 a\u00a0 black\u00a0 centre\u00a0 and\u00a0 red\u00a0 surround\u00a0 usually in\u00a0 the\u00a0 shape\u00a0 of\u00a0 a\u00a0 quatrefoil,\u00a0 sometimes\u00a0 with\u00a0 green\u00a0 stalk\u00a0 and\u00a0 leaf.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But\u00a0 peace ceremonies\u00a0 post-dating\u00a0 1933\u00a0 have\u00a0 appropriated\u00a0 the\u00a0 white\u00a0 poppy.10\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Such\u00a0 is\u00a0 the power of the aesthetics of colour and form that in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States the red poppy and the white poppy express two opposing views on the morality of war: the red poppy embodies the national soul, the celebration of history, and the commemoration of sacrifice through blood that was spilt for the freedom of the nation; the white poppy makes a judgment about the other commenting that it romanticises the ideology of nation-states and glosses over the actuality that their histories are soaked in blood.\u00a0 But so mutable is the flower as cultural sign, and so complex the realm of aesthetics, that the red poppy alone is able to configure the military body in contradictory ways as heroic, ruined, and also sexualised.<\/p>\n
The drama and symbolism of the poppy\u2019s sanguine flesh and black centre, a \u2018well\u2019 that seems to bear the gaze of the dead, has been remarked upon so often that there seems no possible way to speak about it outside clich\u00e9s.\u00a0 Yet the possibility that it can be expressed afresh never fails to allure.\u00a0 In 1992, Caron Schwartz Ellis was\u00a0 \u2018startled\u2019\u00a0 by\u00a0 the\u00a0 profusion\u00a0 of\u00a0 artificial\u00a0 poppies\u00a0 at\u00a0 The\u00a0 Vietnam\u00a0 Veterans Memorial<\/i> in Washington, and unable to ignore the impact of their \u2018blood red\u2019 colour she described the Memorial as<\/p>\n
the burial place of Vietnam, a place infused with the blood of the Vietnam vet.\u00a0 Blood with its implicit taboo and power, symbol both of the potentiality of life and of the finality of death, is imagined in the stunning red of the poppy.11<\/i><\/p>\n
Underpinning the authority of the poppy is its clear and vivid form that allows our\u00a0 thoughts\u00a0 to\u00a0 concentrate\u00a0 on\u00a0 the\u00a0 simplicity\u00a0 of\u00a0 its\u00a0 language\u00a0 in\u00a0 an\u00a0 effort\u00a0 to comprehend the meaning of war.\u00a0 But the poppy is deceptively simple, and hidden behind its clarity and vivacity is an unfathomable reality.\u00a0 This is why the subject of the poppy is returned to repetitively: no representation of it is adequate just as no representation of war can express it sufficiently.\u00a0 The other reason for the poppy\u2019s allure is its contradictory nature or double language which comes as a revelation to many, despite nearly a century in which it has functioned as the official Western memorial flower, has elicited passionate responses from artists, and has been the subject of stimulating scrutiny in literary criticism.\u00a0 Whether in its natural form or its artificial form the poppy is fascinating because it has the ability to commemorate in an abstract way the \u2018glorious dead\u2019, but in a visceral way the damaged bodies of soldiers.<\/p>\n
Claudette Sartiliot has written one of the few philosophical texts devoted to the subject of flowers and she observes that it is in their nature to embody double meanings, since flowers are male and female in one, and when cut they become mobile metaphors that do not denote any fixed identity.12\u00a0 In war imagery they oscillate\u00a0 between\u00a0 the\u00a0 beautiful\u00a0 and\u00a0 the\u00a0 ugly,\u00a0 the\u00a0 masculine\u00a0 and\u00a0 the\u00a0 feminine, death and love, and the transcendent as well as the abject.\u00a0 They are simultaneously symbols of grief for the slain, and symbols of hope about life\u2019s renewal.\u00a0 Sartiliot describes the flower as a unique entity that<\/p>\n
seems to have no topos, no clear or real place, no role.\u00a0 If flowers are traditionally\u2014& as literary emblems, primordially\u2014associated with feminine beauty, life, & innocence, they shift in the same texts into their opposite.13<\/i><\/p>\n
Writers from Proust to Derrida have seized upon the flower\u2019s cultural mutability and\u00a0 abundant\u00a0 significations,\u00a0 including\u00a0 Jean\u00a0 Genet\u00a0 whose\u00a0 writing\u00a0 explores\u00a0 the poetic co-dependence of opposites embodied in blossoms.\u00a0 Genet speaks of flowers as \u2018gaiety and some are sadness become flowers\u2019.14\u00a0 Among the First World War poets who examined the lyrical potential in the paradoxes of the flower are McCrae (In Flanders Fields<\/i>), Sassoon (The Death-Bed<\/i>), and Read (A Short Poem for Armistice Day<\/i>).\u00a0 They have also shown us that war is one of the few realms where flowers break from convention and signify the bodies of men.<\/p>\n
While it is conventional to regard the flower as pure and innocent, in reality\u2014and the poppy proves this\u2014it is one of the most knowing and politically-overlaid objects in western history.15\u00a0 But because flowers are persistently connected with innocence, many commentators including Caron Ellis, cited above, claim to have been startled, frozen, and dazed by their unexpected appearance in war imagery.\u00a0 Some,\u00a0 including\u00a0 Jasleen\u00a0 Dhamija,\u00a0 have\u00a0 been\u00a0 jolted\u00a0 from\u00a0 their\u00a0 preconceptions about the gentleness of flowers through floral designs that look war-like, and war images that look flower-like.\u00a0 She describes the experience of sudden shock when the\u00a0 beautiful\u00a0 yellow\u00a0 blossoms\u00a0 decorating\u00a0 a\u00a0 contemporary\u00a0 Afghan\u00a0 rug\u00a0 revealed themselves on closer inspection as bursting gun shells: \u2018I shivered and something within me froze\u2019.16 Dhamija was psychologically immobilised by the transmutation of the image of the innocent flower into image of lethal weaponry, and while this felt like a violation, as if her own innocence had been corrupted, the experience was also cathartic.\u00a0 It shook her into sudden realisation about the anguish in the lives of Afghan women caught in war, including those who had woven these \u2018flowers of death\u2019 into their rugs.<\/p>\n
The strategy of attracting viewers through the disarming spectacle of the flower in\u00a0 order\u00a0 to\u00a0 repel\u00a0 them\u00a0 about\u00a0 war\u00a0 is\u00a0 a\u00a0 calculated\u00a0 risk\u00a0 that\u00a0 contemporary\u00a0 artists are willing to take in the cause of peace.\u00a0 The risk they take is to inadvertently make\u00a0 war\u00a0 and\u00a0 its\u00a0 consequences\u00a0 beautiful,\u00a0 and\u00a0 it\u00a0 could\u00a0 be\u00a0 argued,\u00a0 that\u00a0 such\u00a0 is the binary relationship of beauty and ugliness that their objective is destined to fail and succeed equally, just as photographs of atomic explosions are destined to look beautiful and terrible simultaneously.\u00a0 For this reason Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarr\u00eda relies on the morality of the viewer to separate good from evil.17 For a series of black and white photographs titled \u2018The Flower Vase Cut\u2019 Echavarr\u00eda arranged human bones to resemble botanical specimens.\u00a0 The title of his work is taken from a practice in the Colombian civil war of the 1940\u2019s and 1950\u2019s when the \u2018Flower Vase Cut\u2019 was the name of a mutilation practice where amputated limbs were packed into the necks of decapitated corpses to resemble vases of flowers.\u00a0 His aim was to create<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2026 something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it.\u00a0 The spectator would come near it, look at it, and then when he or she realizes that it is not a flower as it seemed, but actually a flower made of human bones\u2014something must click in the head, or in the heart, I hope.18<\/i><\/p>\n
Echavarr\u00eda\u2019s photography is a protest against violence but while he hopes that this will be apparent to the audience, and that they will look beyond the beauty of the floral aesthetic and recognise that it is only a camouflage, he also fears that in coopting the beautiful to speak about the ugly the work risks misinterpretation.\u00a0 Given the clear definition of bones, the subject of the work is unlikely to be misread as a protest of the deadliness of war.\u00a0 However as a protest of war, the work lacks the unequivocal and unambiguous impact of other forms of public dissent in which the flower plays a vital role.\u00a0 The delicacy and liveliness of flowers have considerable ability to throw into relief the chill of war, and no example of the impact of this contrast can surpass the placing of pink carnations into the barrels of military guns by United States pacifists protesting the Vietnam War, and photographed on the steps of the Pentagon by Bernie Boston for Life <\/i>magazine in 1967.<\/i>19<\/p>\n
The effectiveness of the flower in the protest of war relies on its morphology: a fragile body with human-like head.\u00a0 It is easily broken, and in addition it is soft and yielding, qualities that place it in binary opposition to war machinery.\u00a0 This was remarked upon in a review of the 1956 film adaptation of Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace.\u00a0 <\/i>Frank R. Silbajoris criticised the film\u2019s director, King Vidor, for failing to represent the\u00a0 subtleties\u00a0 of\u00a0 Tolstoy\u2019s\u00a0 commentary\u00a0 on\u00a0 war,\u00a0 and\u00a0 in\u00a0 particular\u00a0 the\u00a0 author\u2019s intention to further the cause of peace.\u00a0 But there was one scene that Silbajoris found exceptional and satisfying, and which startled him.<\/p>\n
There is one shot in the film expressing the preposterous meaninglessness of war so well that it comes to the viewer as a surprise: Pierre\u2019s hand dropping the poppy flower just as the first canon of Borodino crashes through the quiet of the summer day.20<\/i><\/p>\n
The \u2018preposterous meaninglessness of war\u2019 was impressed upon Silbajoris by the startling juxtaposition of beauty and violence, and in particular of passivity in the dropping flower and aggression in the propelling weaponry.\u00a0 The conjunction of delicate nature and violent warfare is \u2018surreal\u2019 in effect because the unexpected are brought together in radical collision, like the strange and convulsive drawings, the exquisite corpse<\/i>, invented by the Surrealists following the First World War, and which, not coincidentally, are suggestive of dismemberment, just as cut flowers are.\u00a0 In certain contexts such as war\u2019s remembrance, and war\u2019s protest, flowers that have been severed from the ground have the ability to remind us that \u2018men like flowers are cut\u2019.21<\/p>\n
This is precisely why George Bataille, who was associated with the Surrealists, and\u00a0 who\u00a0 served\u00a0 briefly\u00a0 in\u00a0 the\u00a0 army\u00a0 during\u00a0 the\u00a0 First\u00a0 World\u00a0 War,\u00a0 wrote\u00a0 The Language of Flowers<\/i> (1929), a subversive essay using the anti-romantic image of a dismembered flower to shock the human world into facing rather than repressing the reality of death.\u00a0 Bataille\u2019s essay criticises the human custom of avoiding the subject of death by projecting its destiny with death onto the beauty of flowers, which are made symbols of the ephemerality of human life.22\u00a0 By exaggerating the hidden\u00a0 implication\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 flower\u2019s\u00a0 vitality\u00a0 which\u00a0 is\u00a0 its\u00a0 imminent\u00a0 decay\u00a0 Bataille employs the allegory of the flower to reveal how easily human ideals of everlasting beauty and purity are subverted by the actuality that this beautiful object \u2018is risen from the stench of the manure pile\u2014even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity\u2019.23\u00a0 The image of the rotting flower prevents it from conveying any of the conventional ideals of flowers as innocent, beautiful, and peaceful since they are \u2018doomed to die almost as soon as they bloom, they wither sadly on the stem in rank disorder, eventually falling to the ground from which they came\u2019.24<\/p>\n
Once flowers start to rot they become inappropriate to the conventional rituals of public commemorations of war and sacrifice because they undermine idealisations of nature and human life.\u00a0 They look out of place on war memorials where the careful control of symbolism is designed to take the mind into an abstract realm and\u00a0 where,\u00a0 it\u00a0 has\u00a0 been\u00a0 argued,\u00a0 even\u00a0 \u2018fixating\u00a0 on\u00a0 the\u00a0 marble\u00a0 effigy\u00a0 [is]\u00a0 a\u00a0 way\u00a0 of blocking\u00a0 the\u00a0 memory\u00a0 of\u00a0 torn\u00a0 human\u00a0 bodies\u2019.25\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Memorials\u00a0 are\u00a0 best\u00a0 decorated with wreaths woven with fresh or artificial flowers to signify victory in death and eternal life.\u00a0 Although fresh flowers on wreaths will die the wreath continues to retain its form and therefore its symbolism.\u00a0 When informal bunches of flowers decay they become literal signs of death, and take the imagination into the realm of melancholy.\u00a0 They work against the symbolism of everlasting memory and even conspire to turn the dead into victims, which is the role of anti-memorials.<\/p>\n
Contemporary protests of war use the floral in ways that are likely to undermine the institutions of war.\u00a0 \u2018Pale Armistice\u2019 (1991), a sculpture by British artist Rozanne Hawksley, takes the form of a wreath, but the foliage and flowers, usually symbols of everlasting memory, are simulated by empty gloves and divert the mind to the macabre by signifying the missing bodies of men and women killed in wartime.\u00a0 The gloves, which are interspersed with bones and artificial flowers, form a ghostly circle, alternately amiable in the way they seem to greet each other, and desperate in the way they clutch each other.\u00a0 The work returns a gaze that scrutinizes us, asking us to fathom the sense of war.<\/p>\n
The return of the gaze is a powerful strategy in war art where the intention is to arrest our attention, as if we are being spoken to.\u00a0 The most logical transmission of the gaze is through the representation of a human eye, but the centres of flowers are equally as effective.<\/p>\n
Genet talks of the \u2018deep gaze\u2019 at the centre of the rose, but he is just one of many writers who have remarked upon the active power that emanates from the recess of every flower, as it fixes us in its gaze and makes us the object of its stare.26\u00a0 When John Ruskin wrote \u2018The Flower\u2019 in Proserpina (1875) he described looking deeply into the cup of the poppy and being drawn into its heart.\u00a0 He described the poppy as \u2018a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven\u2019s altars\u2019.27\u00a0 He deified flowers, and thought of the poppy as the most \u2018complete\u2019 of all due to the symbolic connection, as he saw it, between its red cup and the blood of Christ.\u00a0 Ruskin regarded the cup of the flower as an encoded deified entity but others regard the cup, or face, of the flower as analogous to a human head with an eye that stares back like the poppies in John McCrae\u2019s In Flanders Fields.28\u00a0 The head of the flower resembles a human head, and this is why the earliest western still life paintings of flowers were painted on the backs of portraits.29<\/p>\n
George\u00a0 Lambert\u00a0 who\u00a0 sketched\u00a0 Gal ipoli\u00a0 Wildflowers<\/i>\u00a0 on\u00a0 the\u00a0 battlefields\u00a0 at Gallipoli in 1919 was a portrait painter as well as an official war artist for Australia.\u00a0 In this flower painting he has accentuated the cups of the flowers and positioned them so that we look into their centres.\u00a0 Because Gal ipoli Wildflowers<\/i> was painted on\u00a0 the\u00a0 battlefields\u00a0 where\u00a0 thousands\u00a0 of\u00a0 Australians\u00a0 died\u00a0 and\u00a0 were\u00a0 symbolically returned to the earth, the flowers seem animated with the spirits of the dead and the painting supports Elaine Scarry\u2019s view that the flower\u2019s face is more perfect for imagining than the faces of people.30\u00a0 But there are at least two competing readings here: one hopeful about regeneration because the dead are like flowers, part of the cycle of life and death; the other pessimistic about the violence and finality of death since soldiers are like flowers: they can be cut down, and when this happens they decay.\u00a0 It is impossible to ignore that the flowers that we look into in Lambert\u2019s painting, which are anemones and poppies, were once rooted in the ground at Gallipoli and shared that place with thousands of dead bodies.\u00a0 The flowers seized his attention just as a field of wildflowers seized the attention of two Australian soldiers in France a year before.\u00a0 The two men seem to be communing through the cups of the flowers with\u00a0 the \u00a0dead\u00a0 who\u00a0 lie\u00a0 under\u00a0 the\u00a0 earth,\u00a0 an\u00a0 interpretation\u00a0 that\u00a0 is\u00a0 framed\u00a0 by\u00a0 the history of literature where the cups of flowers are passages to the underworld and the unconscious.\u00a0 Elaine Scarry writes about the cup of the anemone facilitating a passage from the living to the dead when discussing D.H. Lawrence\u2019s version of the mythological story of Persephone:<\/p>\n
The concave blossom also reappears in D.H. Lawrence\u2019s account of the rape of Persephone, pursued by the underworld in the flowers that suddenly emerge on the surface of the ground and seize our attention as they seize Persephone herself: \u2018purple anemones \/ Caverns \/ Little hells of colour \/ caves of darkness\u2019.\u00a0 The ungraspable expanse of the underworld can suddenly (as Addison promised) be taken-in in a single glance in the shape of the anemone.31<\/i><\/p>\n
The men are immersed in a field of living flowers, and the image is romantic because the\u00a0 mood\u00a0 is\u00a0 both\u00a0 melancholic\u00a0 and\u00a0 contemplative.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u00a0 communicates\u00a0 about\u00a0 an eternal cycle of death and rebirth, the unity between man and the universe, and the idea that war is a natural part of this relationship.\u00a0 But it overstates the pastoral, which lends support to George Mosse\u2019s argument that exaggerated appropriations of\u00a0 nature\u00a0 during\u00a0 war\u00a0 were\u00a0 a\u00a0 reassuring\u00a0 means\u00a0 of\u00a0 pointing\u00a0 \u2018homeward,\u00a0 to\u00a0 a\u00a0 life of innocence and peace\u2019.32\u00a0 And it also lends support to Paul Fussell\u2019s argument that\u00a0 \u2018if\u00a0 the\u00a0 opposite\u00a0 of\u00a0 war\u00a0 is\u00a0 peace,\u00a0 the\u00a0 opposite\u00a0 of\u00a0 experiencing\u00a0 moments\u00a0 of war is proposing moments of pastoral\u2019.33\u00a0 Pastoral moments are distractions from the\u00a0 claustrophobia\u00a0 of\u00a0 warfare\u00a0 and\u00a0 allow\u00a0 temporary\u00a0 transcendence\u00a0 through\u00a0 the innocence and purity of nature.\u00a0 But by immersing themselves in the particularities of\u00a0 beauty,\u00a0 the\u00a0 soldiers\u00a0 invoke\u00a0 the \u00a0opposite,\u00a0 the\u00a0 horror\u00a0 or\u00a0 war,\u00a0 since\u00a0 Fussell also\u00a0 reminds\u00a0 us\u00a0 that\u00a0 the\u00a0 pastoral\u00a0 is\u00a0 merely\u00a0 \u2018a\u00a0 code\u00a0 to\u00a0 hint\u00a0 by\u00a0 antithesis\u00a0 at\u00a0 the indescribable\u2019.34<\/p>\n
Because the Western philosophical tradition genders flowers as feminine, the depiction\u00a0 of\u00a0 men\u00a0 immersed\u00a0 in\u00a0 a\u00a0 floral,\u00a0 pastoral\u00a0 and\u00a0 organic\u00a0 world\u00a0 invokes\u00a0 the feminine.\u00a0 And because flowers readily signify sexuality, being the sexual organs of plants, the image of two men touching flowers is erotically charged and this in turn eroticises their friendship.\u00a0 Santanu Das has written extensively on the subject of touch and intimacy in First World War literature to argue that in times of crisis, touch\u00a0 becomes\u00a0 central\u00a0 to\u00a0 war\u00a0 experience.35\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In\u00a0 addition\u00a0 the\u00a0 image\u00a0 emphasises Michael Roper\u2019s argument that manliness was \u2018reformulated\u2019 in the First World War.36 And it supports John Ibson\u2019s research into relationships between United States soldiers where he argues that the Great War fostered more intimacy than civilian life, and that photographs taken in France in particular speak \u2018powerfully about closeness engendered by the war\u2019.37<\/p>\n
I\u00a0 have\u00a0 tried\u00a0 to\u00a0 show\u00a0 that\u00a0 war\u00a0 is\u00a0 one\u00a0 context\u00a0 where\u00a0 men\u00a0 and\u00a0 flowers\u00a0 have\u00a0 an intimate relationship, and that this is not simply because flowers commemorate the war dead, but also because they mediate the complexity of human emotions and relationships.\u00a0 The red Flanders poppy is the most prevalent war flower in modern western history.\u00a0 Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmer argue that objects such as the poppy, which have exceptional exposure as symbols, \u2018resist individualistic interpretation because they are over-determined by customary usage\u2019.38\u00a0 But while the symbolism of the poppy is widely known, this has not prevented artists and keen observers from repeatedly trying to individualise their responses to it.\u00a0 The red\u00a0 poppy\u00a0 is\u00a0 a\u00a0 powerful\u00a0 vehicle\u00a0 for\u00a0 communicating\u00a0 about\u00a0 life\u00a0 and\u00a0 death,\u00a0 and while poets and philosophers have pondered existential questions through many species of flowers and plants, it is difficult to imagine the blood-red poppy losing its authority, despite the challenge that the white poppy of peace tries to bring to it.\u00a0 Nationalism depends on the symbolism and aesthetic of red which enfolds not only visceral references to the dead but also historical references to Flanders fields.\u00a0 However, the red poppy that increasingly emerges today as symbol of contemporary war, and its aftermath, is the cultivated narcotic poppy from Afghanistan.\u00a0 The Flanders poppy and the Afghanistan poppy symbolise two different eras of warfare, but in both cases, their image embodies the melancholy of the human condition which is the struggle between war and peace.<\/p>\n
NOTES:<\/b><\/p>\n
1. Unlike\u00a0 the\u00a0 United\u00a0 States\u00a0 where\u00a0 poppies\u00a0 are\u00a0 worn\u00a0 on\u00a0 Memorial\u00a0 Day<\/i>,\u00a0 in\u00a0 New\u00a0 Zealand\u00a0 they are worn on April 25, Anzac Day<\/i>, while in Australia, like Britain and Canada, they are worn on November 11, Remembrance Day<\/i> (or Armistice Day<\/i>).\u00a0 Anzac Day<\/i> is commemorated in Australia by the wearing of sprigs of rosemary to symbolise everlasting memory.<\/p>\n
2. Three images from the col ection of the Australian War Memorial were also published in Ann Elias, \u2018War Flowers and Visual Culture: the First World War Col ection of the Australian War Memorial\u2019, Journal of the Australian War Memorial<\/i>, 40 (2007), http:\/\/www.awm.gov.au\/journal\/j40\/elias.htm, 1-12.3. Paul Fussel , The Great War and Modern Memory<\/i> (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: first published 1975), 247.<\/p>\n
4. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (eds.), Defining Visual Rhetorics <\/i>(Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 4.<\/p>\n
5. See Captured in Colour: rare photographs from the First World War<\/i>, (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2003).<\/p>\n
6. Charles A. Hil , \u2018The psychology of rhetorical images\u2019, in Charles A.\u00a0 Hill and Marguerite Helmers (eds.), Defining Visual Rhetorics<\/i> (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 32.<\/p>\n
7. Donald Horne, The Lucky Country<\/i> (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1988: first published 1964), 32.<\/p>\n
8. Paul Fussel , The Great War and Modern Memory<\/i> (2000), 248.<\/p>\n
9. Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers<\/i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 298.<\/p>\n
10.\u00a0 \u2018Remembrance: why the poppy?\u2019, BBC: Religion and Ethics<\/i>, <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/religion\/
\nremembrance\/history\/poppy.shtml> (accessed 17 April 2007).<\/p>\n
11.\u00a0 Caron Schwrartz El is, \u2018So Old Soldiers Don\u2019t Fade Away: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial\u2019, Journal of American Culture<\/i>, 1\/5 (1992), 27.<\/p>\n
12.\u00a0 Claudette\u00a0 Sartiliot,\u00a0 Herbarium\u00a0 Verbarium:\u00a0 the\u00a0 discourse of\u00a0 flowers<\/i>\u00a0 (Lincoln,\u00a0 London:\u00a0 The University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 17.<\/p>\n
13.\u00a0 Ibid. 248 War, Literature & the Arts<\/i><\/p>\n
14.\u00a0 Jean\u00a0 Genet,\u00a0 Miracle\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 Rose<\/i>,\u00a0 trans.\u00a0 Bernard Frechtman\u00a0 (Ringwood,\u00a0 Victoria:\u00a0 Penguin, 1971), 226.<\/p>\n
15.\u00a0 The\u00a0 social\u00a0 significances\u00a0 of\u00a0 flowers\u00a0 is\u00a0 the\u00a0 subject\u00a0 of Jack\u00a0 Goody\u2019s,\u00a0 The\u00a0 Culture\u00a0 of\u00a0 Flowers<\/i> (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1993).<\/p>\n
16.\u00a0 Jasleen Dhamija, \u2018This Space is Mine\u2019, in The Rugs of War <\/i>(Canberra: The Australian National University,\u00a0 2003)\u00a0 6\u00a0 . <http:\/\/www.anu.edu.au\/ITA\/CSA\/publications\/Whole_TROW.rtf> (Accessed 03\/23\/2007).<\/p>\n
17.\u00a0 Echavarr\u00eda\u00a0 is\u00a0 discussed,\u00a0 and\u00a0 his\u00a0 work\u00a0 reproduced,\u00a0 in Michael\u00a0 Taussig,\u00a0 \u2018The\u00a0 language\u00a0 of flowers\u2019, Critical Inquiry, 30<\/i> (Autumn 2003)<\/p>\n
18.\u00a0 Michael Taussig, \u2018The language of flowers\u2019, Critical Inquiry, 30 <\/i>(Autumn 2003), 99.<\/p>\n
19.\u00a0 Reproduced in David E. Scherman, The Best of Life <\/i>(New York: Avon Books, 1973), 257.<\/p>\n
20.\u00a0 Frank R. Silbajoris, \u2018War and Peace on the Screen\u2019, Col ege English, <\/i>18\/1 (1956), 45.<\/p>\n
21.\u00a0 Herbert Read, \u2018A Short Poem for Armistice Day\u2019, in Jon Silk (ed.), The Penguin Book of First<\/i><\/p>\n
World War Poetry<\/i> (London: Penguin Books, 1996: revised edition), 176.
\n22.\u00a0 Claudette\u00a0 Sartiliot,\u00a0 Herbarium\u00a0 Verbarium:\u00a0 the\u00a0 discourse\u00a0 of\u00a0 flowers\u00a0 <\/i>(Lincoln,\u00a0 London:\u00a0 The<\/p>\n
University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 81.<\/p>\n
23.\u00a0 Batail e quoted in Jonathan P. Eburne, \u2018That Obscure Object of Revolt: Heraclitus, Surrealism\u2019s Lightning-Conductor\u2019, Symploke <\/i>8\/1-2 (2000), 189-190.<\/p>\n
24.\u00a0 Michael Taussig, \u2018The language of flowers\u2019, Critical Inquiry, 30 <\/i>(Autumn 2003), 118.<\/p>\n
25.\u00a0 Katie\u00a0 Trumpener,\u00a0 \u2018Memories\u00a0 Carved\u00a0 in\u00a0 Granite:\u00a0 Great War\u00a0 Memorials\u00a0 and\u00a0 Everyday\u00a0 Life\u2019, PMLA, <\/i>115\/5 (2000), 1101.<\/p>\n
26.\u00a0 Jean\u00a0 Genet,\u00a0 Miracle\u00a0 of\u00a0 the\u00a0 Rose<\/i>,\u00a0 trans.\u00a0 Bernard Frechtman\u00a0 (Ringwood,\u00a0 Victoria:\u00a0 Penguin, 1971), 274.<\/p>\n
27.\u00a0 John Ruskin, \u2018The Flower\u2019 from Proserpina<\/i>, in Dinah Birch (ed.), John Ruskin Selected Writings <\/i>(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), 251-263.<\/p>\n
28.\u00a0 McCrae, John, \u2018In Flanders Fields\u2019 in Jon Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poet<\/i>r, (London: Penguin, 1996: revised edition, first published 1979), 85.<\/p>\n
29.\u00a0 Norbert Schneider, \u2018The Early Floral Still Life\u2019, in Hans-Michael Herzog (ed.) The Art of the Flower,\u00a0 the\u00a0 floral\u00a0 still\u00a0 life from\u00a0 the\u00a0 17th\u00a0 to\u00a0 the\u00a0 20th\u00a0 century<\/i>\u00a0 (Germany:\u00a0 Edition Stemmlein\\association with Kunsthal e Bielefeld, 1996), 16.<\/p>\n
30.\u00a0 Elaine\u00a0 Scaarry,\u00a0 \u2018Imagining\u00a0 Flowers:\u00a0 Perceptual\u00a0 Mimesis (Particularly\u00a0 Delphinium), Representations<\/i>, 57 (Winter 1977), 105.<\/p>\n
31.\u00a0 Ibid., 97.<\/p>\n
32.\u00a0 George Mosse, Fal en Soldiers: reshaping the memory of the World Wars <\/i>(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 107.<\/p>\n
33.\u00a0 Paul Fussel , The Great War and Modern Memory<\/i> (2000), 231.<\/p>\n
34.\u00a0 Ibid.\u00a0 235.<\/p>\n
35.\u00a0 Santanus\u00a0 Das,\u00a0 Touch\u00a0 and\u00a0 Intimacy\u00a0 in\u00a0 First\u00a0 World\u00a0 War Literature\u00a0 <\/i>(Cambridge,\u00a0 New\u00a0 York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).<\/p>\n
36.\u00a0 Michael\u00a0 Roper,\u00a0 \u2018Between\u00a0 Manliness\u00a0 and\u00a0 Masculinity:\u00a0 the \u201cWar\u00a0 Generation\u201d\u00a0 and\u00a0 the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914-1950\u2019, Journal of British Studies, <\/i>44\/2 (2005), 357.<\/p>\n
37.\u00a0 John Ibson, A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photograph<\/i>, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 94.<\/p>\n
38.\u00a0 Charles A.\u00a0 Hil , \u2018The psychology of rhetorical images\u2019, (2004), 4.<\/p>\n
______________________________<\/p>\n
Ann Elias is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, Australia.\u00a0 Her discipline is art history, with specialisations in still life and flower painting, camouflage, and aesthetics and war.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For those of us who live in the Antipodes, the Anzac poppy is an emotive symbol and it is the catalyst for this study which looks at the significance and symbolism of floral imagery to the war imagination, and at the incongruity of flowers\u2014which popularly signify innocence and beauty\u2014within military contexts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}