The Margins of Metamorphosis: Rethinking the Entomological Art of Maria Sibylla Merian Ariel Hoage

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 which 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 Dutchty in the schema of early modern science. As a seventeenth-century woman, she was situated within 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 very few European women who had independently travelled 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

based artist and naturalist, was herself a peculiariimperialism?

an’s work is also peculiar; it appears prominently on two plates, both standing out and settling below the surface in the lavish publication, which is otherwise dominated by colorful caterpillars and delicate butterflies. In early modern scientific and popular discourses, the ‘roach’ represented an element of darkness, filth, and primitivism; its occupation of the spatial and temporal margins symbolically allied it with other bodies marginalized by rationalist and imperial hierarchies. The cockroach refuses to be entirely consumed. Instead, it crosses boundaries and consumes all manners of human wastes (biological and symbolic). Thinking with Eduardo Kohn, we might consider Merian’s vision of nature as “a semiotic whole,” which emanates out of a particularly situated body politics; it is simultaneously an incomplete nature, an “open whole,” and, “as such, it can be a very rough approximation of the habits it represents” (Kohn 64-67). Thinking across space and time with a creature that has survived through 320-million years of migrations and mass extinctions, we might reimagine Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium as subsumed within an earthier ecology, soiled by cockroaches.

ECOLOGY OF THE EXOTIC

The distinctly “drawn from life” quality of Merian’s work distinguishes her from other seventeenth-century entomological illustrators (Merian). In her writings, Merian references her influential contemporaries—Jan Swammerdam, Jan Goedart, and Stephan Blankaart—who also studied insect life cycles (Royal Collection Trust). In contrast to Merian, however, their styles were two-dimensional and species-specific, and they separated their subjects with balanced amounts of white background space (Neri 157). In Goedart’s Metamorphosis Naturalis, for example, specimens are exclusively grouped with their same species and neatly contained, as if pinned within numbered boxes (see Fig. 1). While she was influenced by the ‘specimen logic’ of earlier entomologists, Merian’s insects are more dynamic, “illustrated and described from life, and placed on the plants, flowers, and fruit on which they were found” (Neri 157, Merian). Throughout the Metamorphosis, moths and butterflies are depicted in flight, holey leaves show evidence of herbivory, and chrysalises are precariously perched on branches and stems. As it became increasingly important for European painters to mimic nature in still-lives, landscapes, and other styles, Merian merged the artistic language of naturalism with the authority of empirical observation.

The written descriptions accompanying the engravings in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium also depart from earlier, purely morphological studies. Published in both Dutch and Latin, her field-style

Figure 1. Various species of butterfly in Johannes Goedart, Metamorphosis et Historia Naturalis Insectorum, 1669. From Linda Hall Library Online Archive, Kansas City, MO. Accessed lindahalllibrary.org.

notes are based on her experiences rearing insects from the eggs and larvae which she collected (Todd 5-7). She describes multispecies interactions, which sometimes precluded a complete study of a particular organism’s life cycle; she describes watching wasps emerge from butterfly eggs which they had parasitized; some of her caterpillar specimens starved to death, because she failed to identify their appropriate plant foods (Neri 160, 176). Merian’s work is not limited by the discrete borders of “specimen logic,” but simultaneously deals with multiple subjects within their shared environmental context (Neri 183).

Describing the interactions between insects, plants, and other organisms, enmeshed and in rich detail, Merian’s vision of insect-nature is arguably ‘ecological’ (Paravisini-Gebert 10-20). Each of the plates in Metamorphosis is concerned with multiple organisms, including different species and categories (plants, insects, and larger animals such as snakes are all featured), displayed together in the same visual space. Plate 2, for example, depicts the caterpillar, pupa, and butterfly stages of the extravagantly colored Philaethria dido, placed around the surface of a ripened pineapple (Ananas ananas; see Fig. 2) (Stearn). Merian paints the butterfly stage twice; one specimen is in flight, and the other is still, resting in profile on the fruit and flashing its bead-like eye at the viewer. On the crown of the plant, she shows a tiny unnamed worm climbing towards two cochineal beetles, explaining that the beetles are its food of choice (Merian). Although cochineal live on cacti (and presumably, so do their predators), and P. dido are also not specific to the pineapple, Merian uses the plant as a formal background to actively engage her specimen subjects in space (Krenn et al. 17-26, Bleichmar 67-77). Different species’ cohabitation in Merian’s ecological imaginary is a form of biological and aesthetic information, even when it seems biologically unlikely. The

Figure 2. Pineapple (A. ananas), butterfly (P. dido), and Cochineal (D. coccus), Plate 2 from Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, 1705. From Royal Collection Trust, “Maria Merian’s Butterflies,” London: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2016 Exhibition Catalog.

depiction of insects in relation to their habitat and to each other—engaged in acts of consumption, reproduction, and metamorphosis—suggests the potential for violence, change, and unpredictability. By asserting the vibrancy of insects, Merian emphasizes the authority of her own role as an observer-illustrator, able to capture and record unpredictable ecological patterns.

While Merian places her specimens in a more complex visual order than other seventeenth-century studies of insects, her concern with ecology is fundamentally economic; she displays the plants and animals which she encountered in Suriname relative to their potential material usefulness. In Plate 2, she describes the Pineapple in terms of human tastes: “as though one had mixed grapes, apricots, red currants, apples, and pears and were able to taste them all at once” (Merian). The pineapple already signified “high status” for the European aristocracy; it was first grown in an English botanical garden in 1642 as a gift for King Charles I (Blumenthal 46). By comparing it to more familiar and common food plants, Merian makes the exotic fruit palatable for her audience’s consumption but also sets it apart as something ‘noble’ (Blumenthal 46). Her choice to introduce the collection with a pineapple was not arbitrary; it is centered in both Plates 1 and 2, and it is the only plant to appear twice in succession (see Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). The pineapple was an established symbol of the abundant riches to be found in the New World; Merian displays it prominently to set the tone of foreign luxury for her whole work (Blumenthal 46). This was common practice, and pineapThe small cochineal beetles (Chilocorus cacti), which she “added merely to decorate the plate,” were also wellknown commodities in colonial markets by the time she was alive (Merian). For nearly three-hundred years after their ‘discovery’ by the Spanish conquistadors, Coccinellids were the exclusive source of expensive red pigments in Europe; an estimated 5.6 billion dead beetles were imported from Latin America each year (Bleichmar 67-77). Coming from a painting background, Merian was surely aware of their value; although she does not mention this use, she makes the assurance that “there are enough cochineal insects in this country for anyone interested to prove this for themselves” (Merian). Despite the declared focus of the work—the metamorphosis of insects—the metamorphosing butterflies of Plate 2 seem to be a decorative afterthought, preceded by an extensive discussion of the pineapple’s virtues and the presence of valuable cochineal. More than simple nature studies, Merian’s subjects reflect her preoccupation with the luxury economy.

Travelling amongst colonial governors and merchants and living amidst sugar plantations, her orientation towards tropical fauna was unusual but nonetheless economically practical; in Metamorphosis, she openly criticized fellow colonialists for failing to be interested in “something other than sugar” and instead chose to promote the commodification of a more diverse array of ‘semi-wild’ plants (Neri 176-177). She visually represents pineapples as natural insect habitats, but she also describes them as potentially valuable foods for human consumption. In addition to the pineapple, she paints the pomegranate, cotton, banana, watermelon, cashew-fruit, various citrus fruits, vanilla, cocoa, and guava. These plants were ecologically relevant to Merian’s study because of their already-known and potentially marketable human uses, not because of their uniqueness to Suriname. In fact, she likely encountered representatives of many of these species before she ever left Europe, as specimens at the Amsterdam botanical garden and as paintings in curiosity cabinets (Neri 176). Many of these plant species were transplanted from other tropical regions into Suriname for commercial cultivation. While Merian’s visual frame is filled with lively and interactive creatures, it is nonetheless detached from any geographically-specific soil. The white background enables Merian’s representations of Surinamese nature to be translated into European idioms, obscuring the history of their biological referents; her ecological vision thus feeds the colonial desire “to lay claim to these foreign worlds in a literal and a figurative sense, through building colonies abroad and collections at home,” amassing a global archive of bio-information (Blumenthal 50).

Her choice to feature already-known commodities (and their potential predators) solely “for display” signals that her work would be of interest to a wide audience looking to profit off of newly discovered exotic nature. Her descriptions of plants (and their potential pests) would be valuable to horticulturalists because they ensured that plant specimens would arrive in Europe’s botanical gardens and private collections “with precise information about their cultivation, virtues, and uses.” Her life-like illustrations could serve as a field guide for naturalist-explorers in search of valuable collectables like cochineal (Reitsma 35). The Metamorphosis was also marketed as an art-object for display in kunstkammern and curiosity cabinets, where the audience could collect and consume the exotic symbolically. While some scholars have argued that her gender situated her at the “margins” of scientific knowledge production, Merian was an active participant in the colonial economy, selling preserved specimens as wares and representing them within a particular vision of nature (Davis 240-302). Without having access to the inherited capital of aristocratic hobbyists, Merian funded her travels and publications by selling her physical collections and field illustrations in luxury markets (Kinukawa 313-327). Akin to other ‘bioprospectors’—botanists and naturalists in search of tropical medicines, foods, and luxury items—Merian sailed to Suriname on a Dutch West India Company ship in search of insect and plant materials and the information needed to cultivate them (Kinukawa 91- 116, Reitsma 173, Bleichmar 115-120). In doing this, Merian also cultivated a distinctly exotic imaginary, legitimized as an ‘authentic’ representation of tropical life. As Tomomi Kinukawa writes, “the flora that Merian presented in her book was by no means an encyclopedic catalogue of native plants, but rather like a governor’s list of colonial agriculture. Consequently, Merian naturalized the commodifiable nature in Surinam as if real” (Kinukawa 101).

THE DARKER SIDE OF THE EXOTIC

Strangely, Merian chooses to begin Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium with cockroaches, which she describes as “the most infamous of all insects in America” (Merian). Like the beautiful butterflies and precious cochineal of Plate 2, the giant flying kakkerlakken of Plate 1 are neither central nor are they superfluous to the marketable quality of the image; they participate in the cultivation of an exotic whole, which is authenticated by Merian’s persona as a firsthand observer (see Fig. 4). Also like the pineapple they land on, cockroaches were already imbued with cultural significance for early modern Europeans; they were symbols of the dark, the disgusting, and the dangerous, in both scientific and popular cultures (Copeland 79-106). As decorative visual elements, they coexist in the “noble” fruit’s frame. Yet, she also describes them as threats, “on account of the great damage they cause to all the inhabitants by spoiling all their wool, linen, food, and drinks” (Merian). The cockroaches are peripheral to the pineapple at the center of the plate, but they also have the potential to corrupt it; Merian suggests that “sweet things are their usual nourishment” (Merian). From the first plate of Metamorphosis, she courts the paradoxes of the exotic—the contrasts between luxury and danger, abundance and violence—in order to shock and allure her European audience.

These elements of Merian’s visual vocabulary were inherited; she was raised and trained in a family of publishers and engravers famous for popularizing accounts of transatlantic voyages of discovery (Reitsma 21). Her maternal great-grandfather, Theodore de Bry, published widely-circulated images of strange (and often exaggerated) creatures and tales from the New World. His representations of giant armadillos and feather-wearing natives introduced the idea of an exotic (and dangerous) global periphery into the European imaginary, to be explored and colonized (Van Groesen 201). In this vein, Maria Sibylla Merian capitalized on representations of unusual fruits like the pineapple and threatening but marginal ‘others’ like the cockroach, claiming authority as a first-hand witness to a distant ecology. Although the cockroach was already a familiar pest in Europe, she prioritizes it as an insect ‘of Suriname,’ displacing it to the geographic margins of European naturalia.

The cockroach appears again in Plate 18, although less conspicuously; it is a passive participant in a scene of remarkable ecological violence (Fig. 3). It is pinned to the branch of a guava tree, with the large pincers of leaf-cutter ants (Atta cephalotes) bearing down upon it. The ants seem to act as a mass; they form a bridge of their own bodies between their victims (also including a large cane spider and its offspring) and carry remnants of the defoliated tree in their jaws. On a lower branch, a pink-toed tarantula has immobilized a hummingbird, with one foot on its golden neck and another on its nest. The largerthan-life scene, teeming with bodies in concert and conflict, would have been sure to shock European viewers with its ‘savagery.’ The violence bleeds out of the image and into her commentary; she describes the ants carrying out various other acts of horror. She says, “they come into houses and run from one room to the next, sucking the blood out of all animals, both large and small… they run from one room to the next, so that even human beings have to withdraw” (Merian). Plate 18 feeds into a pre-existing European imaginary of the New World as chaotic and violent, where non-human forces corrupt the borders of civilization. Merian translated her grandfather’s motif of the ‘savage Indian’ into a fascination with preda-

tion and herbivory in the insect world. Representing gruesome scenes never-before-seen, Merian also asserts the uniqueness of her own travel account.

The ‘nature’ which Merian represents as scientific truth is also artfully imagined, diverging from its material referents and imposing an imagined sense of order. It is unlikely that Merian would have traveled far enough into the jungle to observe such a ‘wild’ scene. When a specimen was located beyond the borders of her garden and the cleared plantation landscape, she would send her enslaved assistants to fetch things for her (Reitsma 183). In several cases, she notes that she made illustrations solely based on the ‘testimony’ of her ‘informants’ (Merian). The information for Plate 18 was likely gathered in this manner. Whether based on her first-hand experience or enslaved women’s translations, there is evidence of fabrication; hummingbirds rarely lay more than two eggs, but Merian has placed four in the delicate nest (Davis 198).

Similarly, modern naturalists have not observed pink-toed tarantulas eating hummingbirds in the wild, and Merian’s vibrantly-colored bird does not correspond to any identifiable species (Davis 198). The ordering of space itself reveals aesthetic intervention; although there is an element of chaos, Merian uses the tree’s branches to frame specimens and separate their movements into distinct areas. The smaller cane spiders link the tips of the branches and occupy the empty spaces between them; their webs are far too neat and circular to have been drawn from life (Etheridge). The precarious placement of the hummingbird’s nest, centered directly above a guava fruit, seems unlikely, if not unnatural; again, Merian highlights symbols of exotic fertility as delicate and vulnerable. Janice Neri points out how Merian’s visual style was influenced by the botanical “scrolling stem” designs of women’s embroidery (Neri 146). Her arrangement of the vegetation provides both a physical support and a pictorial frame for the animals, translating patterns from textile crafts into a scientific mode. Merian’s aesthetic interventions order and rearrange specimens into a cohesive (and sometimes contradictory) ecological vision, emphasizing the beauty and violence of Suriname.

Thus, the marketable nature of Metamorphosis legitimized colonial assumptions and contributed to the construction of a geographical and ecological New World which was foreign but able to be understood and controlled by the rationalist eye. Merian’s individual insect-subjects are drawn alive but arranged carefully as decorations; their bodies subsumed within her production of a holistic vision of tropical nature. Merian depicts the insects of Suriname engaged in acts of violence as they consume each other and

Figure 3. Guava, Pink-toed Tarantula (A. avicularia), Cane Spider, Leaf-Cutter Ants, Cockroach, and Hummingbird, Plate 18 from Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, 1705. From Royal Collection Trust, “Maria Merian’s Butterflies,” London: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2016 Exhibition Catalog.

reproduce themselves; her description of certain insects (including cockroaches) as pests also threatens the potential for inhuman violence against humans and their property—corruptions from the margins of nature. The credibility of her account hinged on her position as a first-hand witness to something rare, distant, and dangerous. Merian’s Metamorphosis tempers naturalistic observation with aesthetic interventions, situated within her own political and economic status as a European woman, relying on the sale of naturalia for personal legitimacy.

FORMS OF VIOLENCE LEFT UNNAMED

While Merian presents a curated view of carefully selected biological subjects and their interactions, her representation of Surinamese nature belies colonial histories and the human-enacted violence of transatlantic ecologies. Returning to the cockroaches of Plates 1 and 18, we might consider how the science of naming and describing practiced by Merian and other European naturalists—as a product and process of colonial discourse—denies the possibility of alternate histories and representations of life as much as it fails to completely obscure them. As Mignolo says of symbols/ words, both saying “more than intended” and “less

than expected,” Merian’s Metamorphosis naturalizes a colonial landscape mostly devoid of humans and human forms of violence (Mignolo 8). Her ‘nature’ also reveals itself to be an emergent form of semiotic encounter, taking place beyond-the-artist, beyond-theWest, and beyond-the-human.

The ‘infamous’ cockroaches which Merian depicted carry much more complex species histories than she could observe, both inside and outside of their entanglements with humans. Placed around the pineapple in Plate 1, Merian depicts the life cycles of two different cockroach species (see Fig. 3). Information about the reproductive patterns of insect pests was critical for their control by interested human horticulturalists, as it continues to be for the pesticide and insecticide industry today (Stockland). Merian depicts the cockroach egg case and describes how the baby cockroaches emerge “as small as ants” so they can “get into chests and boxes through slits and keyholes, where they can then destroy everything” (Merian). Yet, the egg case she depicts on the pineapple leaf belongs to a spider, rather than a cockroach (Schmidt-Loske 70). Biological mis-representations such as this one were common in the visual and verbal sciences of description. Carl Linnaeus referenced Merian’s work in his epic of classification, Systema Naturae, and used Metamorphosis to name several species in 1767 (Schmidt-Loske 12). Some of these names were accurate descriptions of Merian’s accounts but inaccurate representations of their living referents. For example, after seeing Plate 18, he named the pink-toed tarantula Avicularia avicularia, or “bird-eater”; it has persisted as the official scientific name, despite the fact that Merian’s A. avicularia specimens were not strictly ‘from life’ and bird-eaters do not commonly eat birds in the wild (Schmidt-Loske 12). Linnaeus also named the smaller species of cockroach from Plate 1 Blattella germanica (Cochran 7). The specific epithet, germanica, seems to contradict the creature’s presence in Merian’s “Insects of Suriname.” Yet, the species which Linneaus named the German cockroach originated neither in Germany nor Suriname; it was originally endemic to Northeast Africa, but it was transported around the globe through the slave trade, along with billions of other human and non-human organisms (Mechling 123). Merian’s encounter with the cockroach was only possible because of her situation in a colonial economy; although in less visible ways, the encounter was also contingent on the cockroach’s entanglement with transatlantic histories.

The Latin name given to the larger cockroach species, Periplaneta australasiae, similarly neglects its vast geographic history. The Australian cockroach is considered ‘cosmopolitan,’ meaning it currently occupies all biologically possible habitats around the globe (Co

Figure 4. Pineapple (A. ananas) and Cockroaches (B. germanica and P. australasiae). Plate 1 from Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, 1705. From Royal Collection Trust, “Maria Merian’s Butterflies,” London: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2016 Exhibition Catalog.

chran 12). It made its way to Australia (and Suriname) after it was transported from tropical Africa through early modern trade and commerce. Returning to Merian’s descriptions in Plate 1, it is easy to re-imagine these cockroaches as trans-oceanic travellers and stowaways, able to consume a variety of foods and occupy liminal spaces (between the planks of a ship, for instance). Although she did not name or assign them geographical descriptors herself, Merian’s depiction of the cockroach as the scourge of Suriname unknowingly silenced any histories of the species existing outside of the her ‘exotic’ reference frame. Moreover, the naturalization of transplanted species within biocontact zones fails to situate them within the context of a globalized colonial ecology. The insect-bodies and human-insect entanglements misrepresented by the language of classification and by Merian’s visual vocabulary speak for the possibility of other bodies and histories otherwise left unnamed.

The Metamorphosis becomes an ecology emergent and contingent with the slave trade and colonization of the Americas, before and beyond its encounter with transplanted African cockroaches (B. germanica and P. australasiae). Merian’s voyage and publications were fund

ed with European capital from plantation economies, generated by slave labor (Kinukawa). While Merian benefitted from the activities of the Dutch West India Company, her scientific naturalism itself was a violent form of extraction. The animal and plant specimens which she drew ‘from life’ were collected and translated by her enslaved assistants — likely indigenous Carib or Arawak women and others of African descent (Davis 240-302). In her written notes for Metamorphosis, Merian describes several plants “brought home by [her] Indian,” and others which her slaves were sent into the jungle with machetes to procure (Kinukawa 100). These women also cultivated the garden which served as her field laboratory and provided food for her and her daughter (Kinukawa 101). She brought one captured native woman back to Amsterdam with her to help identify and cultivate the specimens she collected (Davis). The ethnobotanical and ecological knowledge of indigenous and African women was critical for European naturalists who were attempting to study (and survive within) an unfamiliar landscape (Kinukawa 102). It was also critical that their voices be silenced, translated into pieces of bio-information. While Merian mentions her slaves as references and qualifiers for her scientific observations, they are left unnamed and their bodies are invisible in her work.

Yet, it is surprising that she mentions these women at all in Metamorphosis, and some of her descriptions are more ethnographic than one might expect in a work purportedly about insects. In Plate 45, Merian depicts the Peacock Flower, which has long feathery stamens and bright orange and red petals (see refers to it as Flos Pavonis; see Fig. 5). A plump green caterpillar (Manduca sexta) balances on the stem, but the plant seems untouched by any herbivory; she only observes that the insects “live on the plant” (Merian). Instead, she includes an unusually lengthy discussion of the way it is consumed by humans:

“Indians, who are not treated well while in service to the Dutch, use it to abort their children so that their children should not become slaves as they are. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola must be treated benignly, otherwise they produce no children in their state of slavery; nor do they have any; indeed they even kill themselves… for they consider that they will be born again with their friends in a free state in their own country, so they told me themselves” (Merian).

Merian’s almost sympathetic account suggests that slaves should be treated more humanely, but it does not defend their human-ness. She speaks of them as she does her insect-subjects, objectively and economically. Moreover, Kinukawa and Schiebinger point out that this was another moment of bio-prospecting, although abortifacients and midwifery were strictly

Figure 5. Flos Pavonis and Carolina Hawkmoth (Manduca Sexta). Plate 45 from Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, 1705. From Royal Collection Trust, “Maria Merian’s Butterflies,” London: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2016 Exhibition Catalog.

suppressed by male-dominated medical science (Kinukawa 104, Schiebinger 371). Selling anecdotes about enslaved women’s reproductive agency to the Dutch elite would have nonetheless supplemented her firsthand account of the exotic and increased the amount of valuable economic information it contained.

Merian’s peacock flower (flos pavonis) offers another example of socio-ecological stories implicit or otherwise within the colonial processes of naming and describing. She does not explain how or why the enslaved women told her about the plant, nor does she include the name(s) they may have used for it. Instead, she chooses to reference a well-known symbol of the exotic—the peacock—an animal originating from Dutch colonies in an entirely different hemisphere. She likely first saw flos pavonis in the Amsterdam Hortus Medicus, where it was cultivated as an ornamental shrub (Jones and Gallison 125-145). Incidentally, the peacock flower also originated in South Asia, like the peacock. Although the plant was likely transported more intentionally than the cockroaches were, it also travelled to the West Indies via oceanic trade. As a product of many translations across time and space, the plant has been given upwards of forty common names. The official Latin name which Linnaeus immortalized—Poinciana pulcherrima, to honor the governor of the French Antilles, Phillippe de Poincy—celebrates the colonial history

of the West Indies and obscures other ethnobotanical memories tied to the species (Jones and Gallison 125-145).

The peacock flower is known to be used as an abortifacient in East India, where it originated; it was recorded by Merian’s Dutch contemporaries in the botanical treatise, Hortus Malabaricus, under the Malayalam name, tsjetti mandaru (Jones and Gallison 137). How and when information about the plant’s medicinal properties travelled between women and across the colonies is unknown, and these stories are not contained within the taxonomizing authority of botanical science. It is possible that African women carried the seeds and herbal knowledge with them via the Middle Passage, as they did with other plants (Schiebinger 316-343). It is also possible that they were introduced to it—growing wild or cultivated—as they learned to survive within the unfamiliar landscape of the West Indies. Ethnobotanical knowledge might have been shared between enslaved women of different races, speaking different languages. Merian’s flos pavonis presents a glimpse of how human-nonhuman relations were engaged in resistance to colonial control, but her account does not fully inscribe the history of the women nor the plant. She translates and extracts information within a colonial archive, to be understood by Europeans far away from the sites of exchange. As bodies were moved and represented across space and time, thinking of Merian’s work as a product of colonial semiosis “implies the coexistence of interactions among and cultural production by members of radically different cultural traditions” (Mignolo 9). Tracing names and biogeographies outside the frame of European scientific narratives decenters Europe in these plant, insect, and human histories and places the “understanding subject” of Merian’s artwork “in the colonial peripheries” (Mignolo 9).

THINKING WITH COCKROACHES

Within Merian’s epistemology, cockroaches (along with other living bodies) were mapped onto ‘natural’ hierarchies and binaries, where they were presented as evolutionarily primitive, dark, dirty, and marginal. In 2007, naturalist and popular environmental writer E.O. Wilson described an “aesthetic” encounter with a cockroach—a startling, if coincidental, echo of Merian:

“I came to realize that the house pests and feces-consuming sewer dwellers are only the least pleasant tip of a great [cockroach] biodiversity. My aesthetic appreciation of these insects began during one of my first excursions to the Suriname rainforest, where I encountered a delicate cockroach perched on the leaf of a shrub in the sunshine, gazing at me with large uncockroach-like eyes. When I came too close, it fluttered away on gaily colored wings like a butterfly” (Wilson).

For the cockroach to be at all redeemed in the eyes of the naturalist, it must be “delicate” and “like a butterfly.” What happens when it becomes “uncockroach-like?” When we are startled by uncanny “aesthetic” encounters such as Wilson’s? As Derrida and Kohn deal with the “act of looking back at each other” across the interspecies divide, when might we consider the cockroach a thinking and representing self (Derrida 93)? In these moments, the animal (or plant or otherwise) cannot be subsumed by human classification; the uncockroach-like cockroach resists our schemes and hierarchies of understanding, and it proves that it cannot be so easily pinned down. Returning to the cockroach as a symbol and an embodiment of marginality, we might unsettle the frame of colonial ‘nature’ and reground it within the biological life-worlds of Kohn’s “emergent real” (Derrida 66).

Cockroaches’ evolutionary histories are tied to human histories, as they have travelled with humans, taken advantage of their unprotected food sources, lost natural habitats to urban development, colonized built environments, and adapted to survive poisons and traps. After 320 million years on Earth, cockroaches have drifted with continents, but their genetic structures remain relatively unchanged (Copeland 17-25). They have survived with and despite humans for 200,000 years, and it is probable that some species of cockroach will outlive us and most remnants of our languages and cultures (Copeland 17-25). Merian’s Metamorphosis was situated within histories of European colonialism and commercial science; yet, her representation of the lowly cockroach was itself an ecological process, emerging out of millennia of migrations and interspecies encounters.

Before Merian and beyond Kafka’s twentieth-century Metamorphosis, cockroaches and their allies occupied the darkest corners of the European entomological imaginary. The cockroach appeared as a domestic pest in Greek and Roman herbals, but it was also thought to have medicinal value as a cure for earaches (Copeland 17-25). The Romans named it blatta—“he who shuns the light”—in reference to its observed habits and an already-acquired cultural taboo (Copeland 17- 25, Mechling 125). Linnaeus would later officialize this Latin name as a genus in the eighteenth-century. Other names for the insect reflect its association with the social and economic margins. In Sweden, cockroaches were “bread-eaters” (brotaetare); in the UK they were called “steambugs,” “steamflies,” “shiners,” and “black beetles.” The German cockroach has been known as

the “French cockroach” or the “Russian cockroach” in different parts of Germany; in Russia, they have been called “Prussian cockroaches.” Regional names for the American cockroach, including “Yankee settlers” and “Bombay canaries,” also connote social and geographic displacement (Copeland 47-48).

Some of this interspecies history is contained and much is lost in Merian’s depiction of the cockroach; however ‘naturalistic,’ her cockroach is not ‘natural.’ Rather, her study of the insect is an emergent part of a living and semiotic whole of relations. From the same period as Metamorphosis, another cockroach story emerged out of Suriname, from an alternate insect-oriented episteme. In the oral folklore of enslaved and marooned Africans, Cockroach has a history with Anansi, the trickster spider (Mechling 132-133). In one version of the story traced to Suriname-specifically, Cockroach and Anansi challenge each other to a climbing competition. Anansi, knowing that the winged cockroach will win by flying, sends Rooster to judge from the top of the tree. When Cockroach reaches the top, he is immediately eaten. This understanding of cockroach ecology merging with morality is incommensurable within the rationalism of Merian’s Western science. It nonetheless reflects histories of cohabitation and representation shared between humans and insects. We cannot know if this was the same species of cockroach which Merian drew, nor can we know if it was one of the cockroaches which made the journey across the Middle Passage, travelling with other iterations of the transatlantic Anansi.

As much as they were engaged as active cultural agents, insects’ bodies were suspended in Merian’s work and fixed inside of collector’s cases with needles; how might other cockroaches represent themselves ecologically? In contrast to the cockroach of Plate 18, pinned beneath a swarm of A. cepalotes, one species of cockroach (Attaphilla fungicola) has developed a complex symbiotic relationship with leaf-cutter ants, where the tiny cockroaches live quietly in the ants’ nests and eat the fungus which the ants farm (Phillips et al. 277- 284). The ants also aid them in dispersal; the wingless roaches latch onto the ants as they travel beyond the nest in order to establish new colonies. This is an example of obligate symbiosis, where one species relies on close cohabitation with another to survive.

As cockroaches have benefitted (and sometimes suffered) from their associations with other insects (including leaf-cutter ants and the spider-like Anansi), so have they with humans. Although fewer than 1% of cockroach species live in or near human dwellings, the species which have associated with us have followed wherever we go (Mechling 122). “Colonizing” species like B. germanica are also “cosmopolitan,” inhabiting vast areas of the terrestrial Earth surface (Bell et al.). This radical change to cockroach biogeography and the dramatic expansion of a few species’ range was dependent on human commerce and globalization (as was Merian’s scientific practice), but it was also a product of the cockroach’s own nature. Willing to eat all manners of human waste and able to inhabit disturbed spaces, they were adaptable and resilient travel companions and colonizers.

Maria Sibylla Merian did not depict the Suriname cockroach, P. surinamensis; she may have never encountered one. If she did, it likely would have been burrowed in loose soil or hiding beneath rocks, rather than flying through her house like the German and Australian cockroaches of Plate 1 (Bell et al. 46). Although it does not inhabit human-built structures, the Suriname cockroach is another ‘colonial’ species, both inside and outside of the Metamorphosis eco-world. It was named by Linnaeus in 1758, when a specimen was shipped to him from Suriname; however, P. surinamensis is also a New World transplant—it was endemic to South Asia and Malaysia. Incidentally, some of its territory may have coincided with that of the peacock flower in Plate 45 (Cochran 24). After its global redistribution via trading ships and slave ships, P. surinamensis has never adapted to live in kitchens and pantries like other cockroaches; it is prone to desiccation and it prefers damp soil. Nonetheless, it is a major pest in spaces cultivated by humans. It is also known as the “greenhouse cockroach” or “plantation cockroach,” because it thrives in these disturbed and simplified ecosystems; few natural predators, it can be a major threat to ornamental plants and cash crops (Suiter and Koehler). P. surinamensis would have willingly colonized Merian’s study garden or the hot houses of Amsterdam botanical gardens. Cockroaches of various species were material threats to Merian’s form of production and representation— eager to eat paper and vellum, the living insects them selves would have been able to destroy their symbolic counterparts. Libraries and museums still hire pest technicians and maintain careful temperature controls in order to suppress hungry bodies (Copeland). Merian recognized cockroaches as pests, but the nature of her work was to aestheticize the insects and translate them into economic terms. Like other non-humans, the insects of seventeenth-century Suriname had agency in the same landscape which Merian studied and inhabited. Merian’s artistic renderings of life were truly from life; she was enmeshed in a not-entirely-human world of global migration and colonization, parasitism, predation, and symbiosis.

Following Kohn and seeing “symbolic reference and by extension human language and culture as emergent… in continuity with matter at the same time that it can come to be a novel causal locus of possibility,” we might consider how Merian’s form of artistic-naturalism was a reproductive act, in and of a colonial economy and

a global ecology, grounded in the movement and interaction of bodies across space and time (Kohn 56). Recognizing that non-humans (namely, cockroaches) were active participants in the making and re-making of these material and semiotic worlds, how might we return to the question of (reproductive) agency?

The Suriname cockroach was able to successfully establish new colonies because of an adaptive trait; after leaving South Asia, some colonial populations became parthenogenetic; females could produce fertile eggs without the presence of a male (Bell et al. 122). This allowed the Suriname cockroach to establish new, entirely female colonies descended from a single isolated individual (Bell et al. 122). Cockroaches, including P. surinamensis, are more “gregarious” than most other insects; they organize their colonies communally and extend high levels of reproductive care (Bell et al. 122). Merian paints what she believed to be the ootheca, a protective egg casing, in Plate 1. This mode of reproduction requires significant energy expenditures from females, especially in the parthenogenetic populations of P. surinamensis. Likely because of the energy involved, Suriname cockroaches have developed “mechanisms for terminating reproductive investment” (Bell et al. 134). In a laboratory environment, they will “jettison” and abandon their ootheca, leaving the eggs to die rather than having to rear them under harsh conditions (Bell et al. 134). Under the scientist’s observational gaze, the cockroach responds.

This pattern parallels the enslaved women’s use of abortifacients as described in the Metamorphosis, revealing biological agencies which exist below and outside of imperial ontologies. Merian’s representations of the cockroach and its egg case speak to her economic fascination with plant and insect reproduction and the latent sexual anxiety of the colonial imaginary. Yet the abundance and fertility of exotic nature threaten violence as much as they are displaced by it. Paths of colonization by and with cockroaches unsettle the stable center-versus-periphery-oriented geopolitics of European colonial imaginaries. Such an entangled web of ecological and semiotic relations challenges the rational naturalist’s contained ‘nature’ and draws lines of connection across indefinite spatial and temporal scales. A cockroach history is one that spans millions of years and emerges out of Peircean thirds: “habits, regularities, patterns, relationality, future possibilities, and purposes” (Kohn 59). Signs of reproductive agency proliferate through unnamed female bodies, human and nonhuman. Movement, consumption, transformation, reproduction, and adaptation are sign processes which play out in instants of interspecies encounter and over millennia of earthly cohabitation, in cockroach genealogies and colonial histories. Below, despite, and within Merian’s vision of the metamorphosis of insects of Suriname, life’s generative agencies refuse to be entirely contained.

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