Flowers Symbol Analysis

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft sometimes uses flowers, or plants, to symbolize the planting, nourishing, and blooming of human virtue—or the failure to achieve this. In the Introduction to the work, she compares women to “flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness…sacrificed to beauty…the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.” She uses this image to argue that when women’s minds are not properly nourished in the “soil” of education, with attention lavished on external beauty instead, they will begin to fade and languish long before their prime, never having reached their full intellectual and moral potential. Later, discussing liberty as the condition for virtue, she warns that if women are “not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics [flowers], and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.” In other words, if women are not afforded the freedom made possible by education, they will never flourish beyond a short season of giving pleasure to onlookers. Similarly, she argues that “modesty…will ever remain a sickly hothouse plant” unless both men and women seek to foster it—that is, when only women are encouraged to be “modest” (really a superficial kind of propriety), modesty will never ripen into a fruitful virtue to the benefit of broader humanity, but will wither and die like an artificially cultivated species.