The Margins of Metamorphosis: Re-Thinking the Entomological Art of Maria Sibylla AUTHOR: Ariel Hoage ABSTRACT: This eco-critical art history paper discusses the work of the seventeenth-century artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. While her illustrations of South American insects and plants contributed significantly to the emerging science of field ecology, I argue that they also reflect a gendered and racialized understanding of the natural world, situated in the colonial imaginary of imperial Europe. I also explore the invisible violence imbedded in colonial science and art — economic activities that depended on the commodification and exploitation of non-white, non-male, and non-human bodies. Looking at the representation of nature in Merian’s major work, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, I consider the ways that science contributes to the construction of “exotic others” and the justification of colonial violence. Within this context, I focus on the cockroach as a subject and agent in Merian’s ecology, looking beyond its representation in the European imaginary and considering the complexity of its entangled natural/cultural histories. INTRODUCTION In Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Londa Schiebinger argues that, “in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans created for themselves peculiar visions of nature” (Schiebinger 201). Artists and scientists at the centers of European empire became an archival force, tasked with representing the sudden wealth of biological information made available through global trade and commerce. Legitimized by a rationalist imperative to observe and order life, they organized biological encounters within newly developed systems of categorization, and they consolidated knowledge about the natural world into encyclopedic formats (Neri; Richards). Scientist-illustrators also looked for and re-invented racialized and gendered hierarchies within the non-human world (Schiebinger). ‘Nature’ studies were the frames through which non-white, non-male, and non-human bodies became subjects for control and consumption by the scientific-imperial eye. Justifying the colonial economy on which they depended, collectors of bio-information both consumed organic material and contributed to a growing archive of naturalia, traded by the European elite. Looking at classifications and representations of ‘natural’ bodies—animal, vegetal, topographic, feminine, black, and brown—in early modern scientific illustration and literature, we might draw from Walter Mignolo’s philological approach to “colonial semiosis” and ask not just what, but also where, when, and for whom naturalistic descriptions were made (Mignolo 9). Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born and Dutchbased artist and naturalist, was herself a peculiarity in the schema of early modern science. As a seventeenth-century woman, she was situated within
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the ‘craft’ tradition, trained in floral watercolors and botanical embroidery (Davis 143). Yet, she also pushed the representational boundaries of the domestic sphere of production and contributed to a broader scientific understanding of insect biology and classification (Reitsma). For her scientific contemporaries—wealthy male taxonomists and collectors—as well as modern scholars, she is considered a “remarkable woman” with an “utterly extraordinary life” (Neri 139, Schmidt-Loske 7). At the turn of the 18th-century, she was one of the very few European women who had independently traveled to the New World and perhaps the only one to make a transatlantic journey explicitly in pursuit of science (Schiebinger 30). She self-published her major work, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, after a two-year voyage to Dutch Suriname (1699-1701), compiling a 60-plate collection of entomological and botanical illustrations. In Metamorphosis, she presents extravagantly detailed and vibrant watercolor prints of exotic nature ‘drawn from life,’ preoccupied with insects’ reproductive patterns, food choices, and changing forms. Yet, this peculiar vision both reveals and obscures other bodies and other forms of violence which existed within the ecological matrix of colonialism. Considering what bodies are represented, misrepresented, and not-represented in the frame of Merian’s work, how might we reconsider life at the margins and peripheries of European science? I first attempt to unsettle the geography of Merian’s study, showing how life processes extended beyond colonial scientific discourse and into the semiotic interstices of colonial encounter—the edges and spaces which Schiebinger calls “biocontact zones” (Mignolo 7-8, Schiebinger 116). What signs of life existed outside European naturalists’ systems of representation and proliferated despite the violence of imperialism? The cockroach is a curious creature to think with, both through and beyond Metamorphosis. Its presence in Meri-
