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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Flowers for men and women The flower culture of the 19th century Garden amidst the woods Encoding flowers Decoding flowers The Sleeping Beauty awakens High on the hill: the pastoral episode Bibliographie Annexe Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Singularités, pluralités

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    Table des matières

    Love for Love’s Sake. The Language of Flowers in Juhani Aho’s Papin rouva (The Priest’s Wife)

    Jyrki Nummi

    p. 147-165

    Résumés

    The paper deals with the images of flowers used as a “language” in the communication between two lovers in Juhani Aho’s ground-breaking novel Papin rouva (1893 [The Priest’s Wife]). Young Elli is married to a country priest Mikko whom she finds vulgar and unattractive. Olavi, a student mate to Mikko, has returned from a long excursion to Paris, and comes to spend the summer with the young couple. Elli falls in love with Olavi, who, on his part, is attracted to her but lacks a more serious interest in her. She expresses herself through floral messages, such as various flowers and floral settings, but Olavi finds difficult to understand her flower messages. The misunderstandings in communication between the desperate lovers may be traced in the patterns of floral imagery, which is a part of a larger thematic on the tension between nature and civilisation, city and countryside, centre and periphery.

    Cet article évoque les images de fleurs utilisées comme un véritable « langage » dans la communication entre les deux amants du roman fondateur de Juhani Aho, Papin rouva (1893 [La femme du pasteur]). La jeune Elli est mariée à un pasteur de campagne, Mikko, qu’elle trouve banal et peu séduisant. Olavi, un camarade étudiant de Mikko, rentre d’un long voyage à Paris, et est amené à passer l’été avec le jeune couple. Elli tombe amoureuse d’Olavi, qui de son côté est attiré par elle mais n’a pas de projets très sérieux à son égard. Elli s’exprime par des messages floraux, notamment par des fleurs ou des compositions florales, mais Olavi a du mal à comprendre ces messages. Les malentendus de la communication entre ces deux amants désespérés peuvent être retracés dans les motifs de l’imagerie florale, qui relève d’une thématique plus large sur la tension entre nature et civilisation, ville et campagne, centre et périphérie.

    Texte intégral Flowers for men and women The flower culture of the 19th century Garden amidst the woods Encoding flowers Decoding flowers The Sleeping Beauty awakens High on the hill: the pastoral episode Bibliographie Annexe The flowers in The Priest’s Wife Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    As-tu pour moi quelque message?
    Tu peux parler, je suis discret.
    Ta verdure est-elle un secret?
    Ton parfum est-il un langage?

    Alfred de Musset, “À une fleur”.

    Flowers for men and women

    1All the wonderful things that flowers can bring to the lives of men and women are found in Juhani Aho’s Papin rouva1 (1893 [The Priest’s Wife]), a masterpiece of the early Finnish Modernist novel. Flowers were important issues for the men and women of the 19th century. A well-dressed belle would often have flowers in her hair and another one pinned somewhere on her dress. Men of fashion routinely wore a flower in the buttonhole of their coat, or even a small bouquet. Talking about flowers was a part of civilised conversation; gardening and taking loving care of indoor flowers were routine female activities in any bourgeois house. Giving flowers to women during courtship became a particularly elaborate endeavour during the century2.

    2The story of The Priest’s Wife is based on a conventional love triangle, although the third party is mostly absent from the scene and completely unaware of the affair. Young Elli is married to Mikko, a rural priest whom she finds vulgar and unattractive. Olavi, one of Mikko’s former student friends whom Elli knows from an earlier time, has returned from a long excursion to Paris and comes to spend the summer with the couple in order to write his doctoral dissertation on “the woman question”. Elli realises that she has been in love with Olavi ever since she met him years ago. Olavi, for his part, is attracted to Elli, but he hesitates as to whether he has a more serious interest in her.

    3Because Elli’s husband often has to travel away on duty, the couple has plenty of opportunities to share time together. A short conversation takes place in Elli’s flower garden. Olavi flatters Elli by calling her an artistic character because of her interest in gardening. As Elli asks for an explanation to this characterisation, Olavi resorts to an easy answer about “disinterestedness”, which was a very up-to-date argument used in the “art-for-art’s-sake” aesthetics of the fin-de-siècle:

    Ettette tee sitä, mitä teette, käytännöllisessä tarkoituksessa, vaan ainoastaan sen itsensä vuoksi. Te rakastatte kukkien hoitoa kukkien vuoksi, nähdäksenne niiden kasvavan silmienne edessä. (p. 226)

    You do not do what you are doing for some practical purpose but only for itself. You love to take care of the flowers for the flowers themselves, to see them grow in front of your very eyes.

    4Immediately Olavi recalls having used the same compliment more than once before. However, this does not bother him, because he has also remarked that “all women received [the compliment] with pleasure” (p. 226). The conversation then turns to flowers, as Elli asks Olavi whether he likes lilies of the valley. What a charming surprise! Lilies just happen to be Olavi’s favourite flowers as well as Elli’s.

    5Olavi’s cliché of disinterestedness is an ironic outset for the love affair. Neither of them leaves flowers to grow for the flowers themselves; both of them use flowers for their own purposes. It is my intention to examine the most celebrated love affair in Finnish literature through the use of flower figurations and in particular the language of flowers as a specific sphere for love.

    The flower culture of the 19th century

    6Talking about flowers and “through” flowers was part of the larger flower cult of the 19th century. In The Priest’s Wife, Elli recalls an event that evokes the most conventional form of the flower cult: an old school friend, with whom she has not been in contact since their school days, sends Elli a wedding card and Elli responds with a flower card. This is a small reminder of the conventional manner of dealing with friends and acquaintances at the time: flowers played a conventional role in more elevated or supposedly refined bourgeois communication; they represented nothing very precise but were deemed to convey “kind regards” to be understood sympathetically. Flowers were a refined way of communicating one’s feelings, a sort of language of emotions.

    7In her study on the 19th-century flower cult, Beverly Seaton writes that the notion of a “language of flowers” originated in Napoleonic France among journalists who wrote flower books that served as suitable gifts to entertain the genteel female reader. The sentimental flower book does not treat flowers in botanical (scientific) or horticultural (practical) terms, but rather in terms of sentiment, feeling, and association3.

    8The editors of flower books referred to the floral symbolism of earlier periods as proof that flowers are a universal language. In the 19th century there was a popular belief based on several traditions that flowers had special symbolic meanings. To some writers of popular flower books, every flower possessed a meaning in itself, a meaning that was there for anyone to read; to others, there had been a standard set of floral emblems throughout human history. The flower books contained lists of meanings for all flowers. The most popular books – such as Charlotte Latour’s Le langage des fleurs (1819) and B. Delachénaye’s Abécédaire de flore ou langage des fleurs (1811) – both give, for example, to Olavi and Elli’s favourite flower (the lily) the meaning “the return of happiness”.

    9The most frequently mentioned source of flower symbolism is the sélam, a Turkish language of objects supposedly used in communication between harem girls and their lovers on the outside. While sélam was not exactly the same as the language of flowers as it came to develop in the West, it did gave the idea of a language of love conveyed by objects rather than words. This language of flowers took flowers far beyond their previous connotations of love, sex, and women – as found, for instance, in Renaissance poetry. The language of flowers attempted to make flowers capable of expressing a wide range of ideas needed to conduct relationships between the sexes leading to romance4.

    10Alongside popular flower culture, a more specific “flower rhetoric” was elaborated for a new poetics. In France, right from the start flower language was implicated in the reaction against Classical diction and descriptive poetry, as flowers had become an inescapable subject in the latter. In their reaction against Classical diction, the Romantic poets soon learned to adapt other aspects of flower rhetoric to suit their own sensibilities and to make use of flowers as emblems (or metaphors) for meanings and feelings5.

    11Sélam could therefore hardly escape the attention of writers. Balzac presents sélam in great detail in Le lys dans la vallée (1836); in Illusions perdues there is a whole chapter called “Sonnets” that includes several sonnets dedicated to various flowers. In the poetry of Hugo and Musset, we meet, in their flower references and figurations, a sense of wordless language which is both doux and mysterious. Baudelaire initiated a completely new and modern tradition of flower language, one that extended as far as the symbolist poetry of the 1890s.

    12The floral tradition of French literature creates a background for the literary frame of Aho’s novel, in which the collector of flowery love affairs comes from Paris, the young and unhappy wife is occupied with the garden, and the topics of serious discussions are literary. An allusion to the novelistic flower motif is touched upon in a conversation between Mikko and Olavi, as the host asks his guest about his experiences with Parisian ladies. Olavi replies that he had “a usual grisette” (p. 178) in Paris. Mikko wonders whether these grisettes are in fact “those Camelian dames”, a reference to the well-known sentimental novel by Dumas fils, La dame aux camelias (1848). Olavi rejects the suggestion and says that his girl was just an ordinary seamstress. This exchange of ideas regarding Parisian ladies is a tacit foregrounding of the thematic contrast between a romantic and a realistic reading of flowers and women in The Priest’s Wife.

    Garden amidst the woods

    13The novel opens with a narrator who identifies himself as “an outsider”, a passenger on a steamship passing a small vicarage in the distance. The narrator mentions that large travel boats pass the house regularly and that it is a one-day journey to the nearest city. He notes that only “a distracted traveller might look at the vicarage through his binoculars and wonder what kind of house there is there” – and “if he were in a melancholic mood, he might think that the place appeared peaceful – perhaps one could lead a happy life there” (p. 245). This is the highest standpoint that frames the story. The faraway location of the ensuing love story, the distance between the dramatised and hazardous observer, a traveller who comes from somewhere else, perhaps from a larger world, and the observation in itself are important.

    14There are a number of relevant points in this anonymous observation. First of all, his observations are made with the aid of his binoculars. Secondly, his descriptions of the surrounding nature and his judgements on the quality of life at the vicarage may be read as a reference to the “scientific accuracy” of naturalism. Thirdly, the conclusion of his observations – a false one, as it turns out – as to the happy life at the peaceful and idyllic place may be read as an ironic reference to psychological naturalism: what you see is not the whole picture. The steamship passenger may be read as a literary figure representing the artistic period of naturalism as it gradually passes away6.

    15The observer’s personal presence gradually fades away as we get closer to the story’s protagonists. Firstly the narrator gives a larger description of the wilderness, then he turns to the small building on the beach near the vicarage, and finally we go through a rye field to the house’s yard, surrounded by thick birches. The narrator closes his introduction – the narrative frame – by appreciating the landscape:

    Koko tuossa maisemassa oli jotain omituisen pehmoista ja vienoa, joka tuntui tuoksahtavan esiin jokaisesta sen pienimmistäkin poimuista. Tuo pienoiskokoinen uimahuone valkoisine hiekkaan laskeutuvine portaineen, vaaleansininen venhe, joka kaarevan sulavana lepäsi omilla teloillaan, ruispelto polkuineen, vatukko aidan varrella, tuo kukkaspuutarha pellon ja rakennuksen välillä ja etupäässä itse rakennus – se oli kuin hienon naiskäden muodostelemaa. (p. 146; our emphasis)

    There was something soft and gentle about that landscape, something that seemed to exude an odour from even its smallest fold. That miniature swimming-house with the white stairs descending towards the sand, a light-blue boat resting smoothly bowed on its stocks, a rye field with a path, a raspberry patch by the fence, that flower garden between the field and the house, and, above all, the house itself – it was like the creation of a woman’s fine hand.

    16As the narrator moves from nature to the man-made, or, more precisely, from the female-designed environment to the tidy and organised farming house, the reader finally reaches the end of this extended description.

    17The garden is situated between the rye field and the house. The setting opens as a dual trope for nature and culture, body and soul, fertility and spirituality, female and male. The narrator’s description shifts towards an evaluation of the landscape. Shades of melancholy enter the picture:

    Hiljaisena, tyynenä ja vähän viileänä iltana tuntui siltä, kuin olisi sen asukkaan pitänyt istua käsi posken varassa, pää alakuloisesti kallellaan mielessä joku salainen, sanaton kaiho. (p. 146-147)

    On a silent, calm and cold evening, one felt as if the one who lived there should have sat there with her cheek leaning on her hand, her head inclining, a secret wordless longing in the soul.

    18The flower garden appears to be very dear to the lady of the house, and it is located between these poles. Elli’s melancholic feelings are anticipated here. The garden is not only a place for feelings, it is also a trope for her mind.

    19The garden serves as a meaningful frame in several key episodes. As the real story begins to unfold, the news of the arrival of the summer guest evokes memories for Elli. She quickly concedes to herself that Olavi really was her first true love and her first great disappointment – “and now he will come and will be here already this evening” (p. 149). Elli sinks into memories and then, having noticed that she does not know what to do, remembers having a nice retreat where she can reflect those memories – the garden.

    Ja tässä kohosi ruispelto kahden puolen tien. Hän peittyi melkein päätään myöten sen suojaan, ja tätä tietä laskeutuessaan tunsi hän itsensä aina niin rauhalliseksi ja turvalliseksi, niin kuin se olisi vienyt hänen omaan erityiseen maailmaansa, jossa kukaan ei kyennyt häntä häiritsemään. Sillä pihasta katsoen ei kukaan voinut nähdä häntä tänne. Hänen miehensä huoneen ja keittiön ikkunat antoivat kaikki pihalle päin. Eikä tänne rantaan juuri koskaan ollut kenellekään asiaa. Koko tämä puoli oli ikään kuin hänen omaansa, hänelle itselleen pyhitettyä. (p. 150)

    And here there grew a rye field on both sides of the road. She was hidden by it almost up to her head, and as she descended this road she always felt utterly peaceful and safe, as if the path would lead her to a special world of her own where no one could disturb her. From the yard nobody could see her here. The windows of her husband’s room and the kitchen windows gave on to the yard. And people hardly ever had any down here to the beach. This whole side of the beach was almost completely her own, sanctified for her alone.

    20The desire for invisibility is of the utmost importance for Elli. Particularly important is the fact that the windows of her husband’s room and the kitchen windows all give on to the yard, and “this whole side […] was almost completely her own”. The garden is a concrete hideaway and represents for Elli a safe haven from everyday trivialities and household activities. But it is also a place where she can lead her dream-life, a life of feeling and desire.

    21Making oneself invisible suggests a particular process in the descriptive passage. As Elli walks towards her garden “she feels herself utterly peaceful and safe, as if the path would lead her to a special world of her own where no one could disturb her”. Elli is moving into the depths of the self, to the zones of the pure intimate self where no other person can follow. The world of the flower garden is completely solitary.

    22Surrounded and protected by the garden, Elli’s life might be characterised as a modern, naturalist version of the belated life of Sleeping Beauty. A young woman lives in an unhappy marriage with a man she does not love, a man who has not been able to awaken her love. She spends her time in a garden surrounded by flowers, a place where she can dream of an imaginary prince who will take her to another world to live another life. With the arrival of Olavi, the dream appears to be coming true. To be fulfilled, the dream requires, however, a particular method of communication, a special language – and flowers serve just that purpose.

    Encoding flowers

    23The flower motif is introduced into the story in three successive scenes in an expanded exposition of Elli before the arrival of Olavi. Mikko has gone to greet Olavi, but Elli stays at home to prepare the house for the arrival of their guest. Elli’s activities are described in detail.

    Koko päivän oli hän puuhannut siinä toimessaan, puhdistellut huonekaluja, järjestellyt kirjoja salin pöydällä, muutellut hiukan kuvia albumissaan, laitellut uutimia uusiin poimuihin, pyyhkinyt tomun kukkain lehdiltä ja asettanut verestä vihreää vaaseihin. Sitten oli hän […] viivähtänyt hetken aikaa peilin edessä ja katsellut siinä kasvojaan ja vartaloaan. (p. 147)

    She had been busy all day, wiped the furniture, arranged the books on the drawing-room table, wiped the dust from the leaves of the flowers and put some fresh green into the vases. Then she […] stood for a while in front of a mirror and looked at her face and her figure in it.

    24There are two important motifs in this scene of self-identification: the flowers and the mirror. A moment later Elli cuts a flower and attaches it on her bosom, then she changes its position a few times until she is satisfied. In this first scene featuring Elli, flowers become her recurrent attribute.

    25Then Elli leaves the house and goes to the garden, her own private space where she can escape her boring everyday life and her sense of loneliness. The garden is also a pleasant place for dreaming, which is important for Elli’s spirits. This time Elli decides to pick flowers for a special bouquet:

    Ruohoja ja kukkia valikoidessaan tuli hän selville sen aatteesta. Vaatimaton ja yksinkertainen sen tulisi olla, niin ettei sitä ensi silmäyksellä huomattaisi. Mutta hieno väriltään niinkuin metsäkukka, johon kun sattuu silmä, se sitä kauan tutkii. (p. 148)

    As she chose grass and flowers she found certainty regarding the idea of the selection. It should be modest and simple so that it would not be noticed at first glance. But [it should be] refined in colour, like a forest flower that a sharp eye will examine for a long time.

    26Elli’s notions of the bouquet are linked to the preceding mirror scene. She wants her flowers to be modest and simple so that no one should notice them at first glance; only a sharper onlooker would notice them. The flowers represent what Elli thinks of herself, including her desire to be plucked. But what kind of a bouquet is she making?

    Hitaasti ja huolellisesti kokosi hän siihen enimmäkseen heiniä ja taittoi sitten ruispellosta aidan ylitse heilimoivan tähkän. Hän tarvitsi siihen sinistä ja oli jo ottamassa lemmenkukkaa, mutta hylkäsi sen ja sijoitti ruiskukan sen sijalle. Mutta mistä saisi hän siihen tuoksun? Hän otti muutamia reseedoja ja pisti ne heinien väliin piiloon. (p. 148)

    Slowly and carefully she collected mostly hay for the bouquet and picked up a blooming spike over the fence of a rye field. She needed some blue for it, and she was already about to pluck a forget-me-not, then rejected it and replaced it with a cornflower instead. But where would she add scent to it? She took some mignonettes and hid them among the hay.

    27Clearly, Elli is not following any visual reasoning here. She wants her bouquet to contain particular flowers in a particular order, as if she were carefully building up a sentence.

    28How do we “read” the bouquet? Here we find ourselves stepping into the slippery field of symbolic systems – just like Elli. Let us go through the “meanings” that the most popular flower books of the 19th century attached to these flowers (see appendix). First of all, Elli picks a forget-me-not (lemmenkukka) that, according to Latour and Delachénaye, means “remember me!”. Then she quickly changes her mind and replaces it with a cornflower (ruiskukka), denoting “delicacy”. Both flowers are blue, the colour being an important attribute to flowers and a symbolic sub-system in its own right. In this context, blue refers to romantic love. Then Elli wants to add some scent to her bouquet and she takes a few mignonettes (reseda), denoting “happiness of the moment”. However, she hides them in the bouquet behind the green hay. Now the “message” is ready.

    29Elli then takes the bouquet to the guest room, where she faces a problem:

    Mihin paikkaan panisi hän kukkasvihkonsa? Ei keskelle pöytää, ei niin näkyvälle paikalle. Johonkin kulmaan, josta se olisi löydettävissä. Uunin reunan kupera oli kaikista sopivin paikka, ja siihen hän sen jätti. Nyt vasta hän huomasi, että siinä olivat hänen pukunsa värit: harmaa ja sininen. (p. 149)

    Where should she put her bouquet? Not in the middle of the table, not in such a visible place. In a corner, where someone might find it. The round border of the fireplace was most suitable, and there she left it. It was only now that she noticed that her dress had the same colours: blue and grey.

    30The hesitation regarding the placement of the bouquet is telling. Elli is uncertain as to what she really wants to say with her flowers – or whether she wants them to say anything – and lets the flowers be just the way they are. She does not place the bouquet in the middle of the table, because she thinks the “message” would be too obvious. Thus, she decides to leave the bouquet “in a corner, where someone might find it”. The flower sequence ends with Elli’s final observation. She notes that the mixture of the colours – the flowers and the fireplace – are exactly the same as her own dress: grey and blue.

    31What kind of language is represented in Elli’s flower bouquet? Elli is playing a solitary game. It takes place in her mind and with an imagined partner, using idiosyncratic meanings to form her “message”. The sequence of the flower motif is, however, quite clear to the reader: Elli has identified herself with flowers, and with the kind of flowers she has chosen herself, but she is not sure whether she really wants to say anything with her bouquet. She only wants the bouquet to be noticed and to be plucked like a flower.

    Decoding flowers

    32What do the flowers mean to Olavi? As he climbs that first evening up into his attic room he soon notices the bouquet on the fireplace. He takes it in his hands, examines it and pronounces judgement: “This is fine, a nice choice of colours”. Then he replaces it on the table where Elli had first thought of leaving it.

    33What does Olavi do? He observes the bouquet as Elli had wished, then he gives it close examination as Elli had wished, and he appreciates it just as Elli had wished. There is, however, one thing Olavi does not do: he does not read a message into it. The bouquet is charming, but it does not mean anything to Olavi. The next morning Olavi descends from his room to the balcony for breakfast:

    Kahvipöytä oli valmistettu verannalle, otettu esille nähtävästi uusimmat kupit, ja keskellä niitä oli kukkasvihko laitettu samaan henkeen kuin se siellä ylhäällä. Mutta tässä oli jotain auki puhkeavaa, helakampaa, iloisempaa ja vähemmän arkaa. Hän tarkasti sitä, kun rouva ilmaantui salin oveen ja toivotti hyvää huomenta. (p. 172)

    Coffee was served on the balcony and fresh new coffee cups were set on the table. Amidst the coffee cups there was a bouquet of flowers made in the same spirit as the first one upstairs. But this one had something more blossoming, brighter, more joyful and less shy. He examined it, when the vicar’s wife appeared at the door to the hall and wished him good morning.

    34Again, Olavi proves to have a sharp eye; he sees the changes and nuances in the new bouquet. This time he also reads human qualities into it. In addition to the conventional floral attributes “blossoming” and “bright”, there are also such attributes as “joyful” and “shy”, referring to human conduct and easily to be associated with Elli.

    35The idea of women as flowers is not unknown to Olavi. As he later unpacks in his room, he picks up a book from his baggage. The book happens to be Anna Karenina, a tale of marriage, adultery and a suffering woman. These are not, however, the ideas that attract Olavi in the novel. His interests are sentimental. He carries the novel with him because it brings back memories of his past love affairs.

    Kun hän ensiksi tutustui teokseen, oli hän tehnyt nuo huomautukset hienoimpiin paikkoihin ja lähettänyt kirjan morsiammelleen, sillä hän oli silloin kihloissa. Hän oli alleviivannut sellaiset kohdat kuin: ”Minun rakas ystäväni”, ”Rakkauteni kestää kaikki koetukset…” ”Hän oli nuori kaunis mies”. Se oli tuntunut vähän äitelältä ja ollut yhtenä alkusyynä hänen tunteittensa laimenemiseen. (p. 183)

    When he had become familiar with the work, he had made remarks on its finest passages and sent the book to his fiancée, for he was engaged at the time. He had underlined phrases like “my dear friend”, “My love will endure all trials…” “he was a handsome young man”. It was a bit sugary and had been one reason for the weakening of his feelings.

    36Olavi uses Tolstoy’s novel as a conduit for an exchange of feelings in his love games. This is a kind of sélam, a more artificial way of exchanging thoughts than “ordinary language”. The banality of the literary “love game” is obvious and it quickly becomes boring, as the addressee no longer pleases Olavi.

    37Olavi too has a special game involving flowers. After leafing through Anna Karenina, he picks up a bundle of letters and chooses two separate bunches that include an exchange of letters with a young lady to whom he had become acquainted the previous summer.

    Kirjeet olivat kujeita täynnä, niissä muisteltiin kävely- ja veneretkiä ja alla piillyt tunne kävi esille ainoastaan kirjeeseen liitetyistä kukkasista, jotka olivat kauan sitten jo kuihtuneet. (p. 183)

    These letters were still full of memories and reminiscences of rowing journeys and walking tours and the only sign of the underlying feeling was the flowers that were attached to the letter, and they had withered a long time ago.

    38The flowers are no more than signs in mutual communication. As they have withered, they have turned into items of Olavi’s collectibles. Not surprisingly, at the end of the novel the last words Elli and Olavi exchange at the moment of their farewell are about flowers. Olavi asks whether Elli would give him the flower in her hand, and Elli answers: “What would you do with it?” (p. 391). She gives it to him anyway. The irony of the lines are never revealed to Elli – she does not know that Olavi collects flowers, flowers just like the one he receives from Elli. Indeed, Elli does not know that Olavi is a collector of love affairs7.

    39Olavi’s games make a complete parallel to the language of flowers that Elli uses. But his intentions and meanings are quite different from Elli’s. She always puts a fresh bouquet of flowers on the coffee tray that she sends to Olavi who is working upstairs.

    Olavi ei niistä koskaan kiittänyt; ei koskettanut sitä sanallakaan, mutta palkitsi kuitenkin kohteliaisuuden kohteliaisuudella siten, että hän päivälliselle mennessään taittoi niistä oksan tai lehvän ja kiinnitti sen rintaansa. (p. 221)

    Olavi never thanked her for them, never touched upon them with one word, but he paid back the compliment by picking one branch or a leaf and by attaching it to his breast as he came down to dinner.

    40Elli also takes care to use flowers in her own attire. As she and Olavi take a trip to meet friends in the neighbourhood, Elli pins flowers to her summer dress and has flowers attached to her hat. Olavi cannot help noticing the decoration.

    41The beautiful brilliance of flowers has often been associated with immaculate female beauty. As a flower metonym, Elli is closely attached to her garden; she adores gardening and her (and, incidentally, Olavi’s) favourite flowers are lilies and cornflowers and “forest flowers”. The most relevant association to flowers is made by Olavi who visualises her with flowers on many occasions. However, he never really calls her a flower; instead he sees her as the metaphor of a flower, obviously not fully understanding his own imagery.

    42First of all, there is a classical carpe diem allusion at the beginning of the novel when the visitor Olavi cuts a cornflower by the roadside to give it to Elli as she comes to the gateway of the garden, but then suddenly hesitates and throws it away. The idea of seizing the day becomes blurred in a moment of uncertainty, an indication of more general difficulty to know what to do with flowers. Later on, Olavi muses about “seizing” Elli:

    Kaikki noina iltoina, kun he istuivat ja puhelivat Ellin kanssa verannalla, oli Olavi aina noussut ylös huoneeseensa omituinen itseensä tyytyväinen tunne rinnassaan. Olihan Elli hänen… eihän hänen olisi tarvinnut muuta kuin ojentaa kätensä ja ottaa. (p. 291)

    In all those nights when they sat and talked on the veranda, Olavi had always risen to his attic room with a curious self-satisfied feeling in his breast. Elli was his… it really did not take anything but to reach out his hand and pick her up.

    43Horace uses the Latin verb carpere, which generally denotes the picking of flowers, in his advice to Leuconoe: “carpe diem” (“seize the day”)8.

    44A second flower metaphor is linked to the association of the flower stalk and a woman’s leg. During one of their “serious” conversations, Olavi examines Elli, and finds himself looking at her feet, which appear beneath her skirt: “a beautiful leg, by the way, and an impeccable ankle” (“kaunis jalka muuten ja nilkasta virheetön”, p. 191). Later on, as Olavi looks at Elli with a lover’s eyes, the leg motif ends the round:

    Hän seurasi Ellin liikkeitä, hiveli silmillään hänen muotojaan. Hänestä oli hänen otsansa niin puhdas, silmäkulma niin salaperäinen, posken ja tukan raja niin houkutteleva, olkapää niin pyöreä, rinta niin täyteläinen ja tiukka, ja jalka, joka Ellin ommellessa oli toisen jalan päälle nostettuna, niin kaunismuotoinen ylhäältä alas. (p. 331; our emphasis)

    He followed Elli’s movements, caressed her figure with his eyes. Her forehead was so pure to him, her eyebrow so mysterious, the border between her cheeck and hair so attractive, her shoulder so round, her bosom so full and poised, and the leg, which was raised on the other leg, had such a beautiful form the top down.

    45This is the language of a lover whose gaze captures his loved one by description. Elli’s foot is like the stalk of a flower.

    The Sleeping Beauty awakens

    46Elli’s life as a Sleeping Beauty has lingered in a passive stage, but it is activated once Olavi reappears on the horizon. He also reminds her of the painful memories of her own wedding, which had taken place in winter and which is no time for flowers. She had made a freezing trip to her future home, to the clergy, on a sledge. As they had finally arrived, the young bridegroom had tried to kiss her, but she had rejected him. Elli had felt “as though she were buried alive” (p. 234).

    47As she remembers it, Elli had asked the bridegroom to leave the bedroom but he had not done so. Then Elli recalls having a kind of illumination in which she imagined that Olavi had come to liberate her:

    Hän luuli näkevänsä Olavin, joka tuli häntä vapauttamaan, joka vaati hänet omakseen ja joka lähti viemään häntä pois täältä kaukaisiin ihaniin maailmoihin. Se kasvoi varmaksi toivoksi, hän uskoi siihen kuin annettuun lupaukseen, hän odotti… (p. 234)

    She thought she could see Olavi, who had come to liberate her, to ask her to become his own, and who left the house bringing her with him to faraway worlds. This grew to a sure hope, she believed in it and took it as if it were a given promise, she waited…

    48The experience of being buried alive is a frequently used trope in the Greek novel and associated in particular with young maidens. The trope offers “an expression of our own Knowledge of Death – a deep image of the negative aspects not merely of Death, but of life”.

    The individual finds him / herself entombed in a particular and separated body. Not only so, but each human being feels what is thought of as the Self to be buried alive in the cultural envelope – particularities of time, place, social class, civic role, relationships, and so on. These cannot but oppress even the healthiest and wealthiest from time to time9.

    49The nightmare reminiscences turn from dream to reality during the long summer while Mikko is away because of his clerical duties. Elli and Olavi have a lot of time to spend together, and they can both concentrate on each other. As they sit on the veranda after dinner, Elli always places “a pail full of fresh flowers in the middle of the table and takes a seat beside it with her needlework while Olavi was smoking” (p. 264). Clearly, fresh flowers represent happiness for Elli, though their precise meaning is not at all obvious.

    50Elli has awakened and she enjoys living with the illusion of love. The language of flowers is a language for herself, not for the addressee. This is revealed in her dream-like experience on the lake: Elli is sitting in a boat rowed by the field workers as she and Olavi return from their haymaking in a distant field. Elli is sitting at the front of the boat and is caught in a reverie:

    [Hän] oli omissa mietteissään, oli vähän väsynyt, mutta onnellinen niin onnellinen, ettei tahtonut mitään muuta ajatella, ei eteensä eikä taakseen. Ja niissä ajatuksissaan noukki hän hauenkukan kokan edestä, tarttui lumpeeseen tai taittoi kaislan mennessään viistättäen niitä pitkät matkat venheen kupeella. (p. 263)

    [She] was lost in thought, a bit tired but happy, so happy that she could not think about anything else, neither the future nor the past. And in these thoughts she picked up a marsh marigold, grabbed a water lily and cut a rush in drawing them alongside the boat.

    51Picking up the water lily suggests that for Elli love is “pure” and that she is not even thinking of a more intimate relationship with Olavi. One curious feature regarding the flowers in The Priest’s Wife is the conspicuous lack of the rose – the classical and established flower of love10. The obvious reason for this omission is thematic: according to contemporary flower books, most of the flowers mentioned signified something to do with feelings of happiness and friendship – the mildest possible reference to a love affair. There is no flower that refers only to love, and the rose is the most direct suggestion of love, referring as it does by virtue of its form and colour to sexuality.

    52How does the floral communication between Elli and Olavi work? It does not. Sending a message by placing a bouquet of flowers on the coffee tray or the fireplace, without indicating that it is a message, does not communicate anything at all. There is no way of decoding the combination of flowers, even if the addressee knows the bouquet is a message. The closest the couple gets in speaking of their relationship is the moment they reveal their use of flowers in messages. Elli has enough courage to say to Olavi that she was very embarrassed and clumsy the night he arrived. Olavi asks Elli whether she had put the bouquet of flowers in his room. “Yes, it was me…” she replies. “I was so afraid that you might remark upon it” (p. 326).

    53As Seaton has pointed out, in the most frequently read flower books there was no agreed set of meanings attached to flowers. Instead of a universal language, the language was a vocabulary list, matching flowers with meanings that differed from book to book. Thus, the language of flowers was controlled not so much by the flowers themselves (either their natures or past emblematic meanings) as by the vocabulary needed to conduct a love affair11.

    54Another way of looking at the language of flowers, however, may be suggested. There is one sequence in the novel, spanning a whole chapter, that conveys a sense of movement in which the couple moves towards each other day by day. This is a day of happiness for Elli who sinks into a heuristic state:

    Elli antautui [onnellisen tilaansa] niin kuin soutaja, joka kokkaan selälleen heittäytyen antautuu verkalleen vuotavaan virtaan, joka viepi ja viepi ohi niittyisten lempeitten rantojen, eikä siinä silmä näe muuta kuin korkean kaartuvan taivaan. Olihan hän tätä tällaista elämää joskus kuvitellut mahdolliseksi, oli silloin tällöin loihtinut toiveensa toteutuneiksikin. Ja nyt hänestä näytti, että se ja se, mitä hän oli kuvitellut, oli sitä mitä hän nyt sai todellisuudessa elää. Kaikki entiset toiveet ja kuvittelut, sanoi hän, ne olivat aikain kuluessa muuttuneet kuin kuiviksi kukkasiksi, jotka hän huolellisesti oli kätkenyt elämänsä kirjan lehtien väliin, uskomatta, että ne koskaan tulisivat esille otettaviksi. Ja nyt ne ikäänkuin itsestään olivat alkaneet uudelleen vihannoida ja uudelleen tuoksua! (p. 328)

    Elli surrendered [to her happiness] like a rower who lays back into the prow, letting herself float along the gently flowing river, taking her past the sweet meadow beaches, and her eye does not see anything but the high vault of the sky. All her past hopes and dreams were the stuff that she was now allowed to live, she said, they were turned in the course of time into dry flowers that she had carefully hidden between the pages of the book of her life without the slightest belief that they would ever have the opportunity to be taken alight again. And now they had, as if by themselves, begun to bloom and emit odour again.

    55The sequence describes Elli in a state of powerful emotional happiness; she feels that she is in love. But the sequence also forms an ironical node in the novelistic structure: the experience that the withered flowers Elli had once “hidden between the pages of the book of her life” were now once again coming to life are synonymous with the withered flowers that Olavi had collected between the pages of his books. It never occurs to Elli that she might be just another flower in Olavi’s vast collection. Obviously, she is not aware of such a crude possibility. Instead she imagines that Olavi has saved her and lifted her up from the tomb: “Was it really to her that all this was happening, to one that had considered herself as buried alive?” (p. 329).

    56Flowers are an essential part of the sphere that Elli has created for herself and in which she can passionately experience her longing for love – though not love itself. The fact that the language of flowers is an artificial mock language makes the point most clearly. Elli needs it simply because it is not real; it offers her the imaginative sphere to feel her solitary passion more intensively. Reality would unravel this sphere, as it finally does. This is also the deep motif of not getting into any real, straightforward and physical contact. Passion-love cannot be consummated. Even Olavi later admits to himself that “it would have been spoilt at the very moment” if they had consummated their love (p. 342). The blue lady of the novel is not expecting roses from her lover12.

    57As much as Olavi actively takes part in Elli’s dream building, his understanding of a love affair is different. One of the ironies of Olavi’s flower collection is that, as many times as he connects his past loves to flowers, he never mentions the species of the flower in question – to him, flowers are all the same. This inability to individualise one single flower reveals, perhaps, something of his temperament and his emotional response to the women he thinks he loves; he is not equal to the task of affectively inventing in another individual. Is it so that between man and woman amitié virile proves the only viable and enduring relationship possible for Olavi?

    High on the hill: the pastoral episode

    58Climbing to high places is an important contemporary motif in the literary breakthrough in which Aho’s novel also took part and it was the leading notion in the work of Ibsen and Strindberg. Looking from a high position or place is frequently used as a motif for idealistic aspirations, or an idealistic attitude towards the thing one is looking at. In The Priest’s Wife the perspective from high above is used both as a motif linked to specific episodes and a structural principle of the plot.

    59The motif occurs the first time during the episode in the attic, in which Elli is decorating with flowers and preparing for her guest. Elli looks out of the window and wonders whether Olavi is coming to visit them because of her:

    Hän halusi nousta nyt niin ylös, vapautua kaikesta niin, ettei hän enää koskaan voisi tulla siihen takaisin. Joskus ennenkin oli hän joutunut tämän tunteen valtaan: silloin kun oli lukenut jotain jaloa ja suurta, joka antoi hänelle uusia ajatuksia, vapautti ja ylensi hänet, tyydytti ja antoi ihastuneelle mielelle miettimistä. (p. 200)

    She wanted to rise so high, liberate herself of everything so that she could never come back. This feeling had seized her on earlier occasions, when she had read something noble and great that gave her new ideas, liberated and elevated her, satisfied her and gave her enthusiastic mind something to think about.

    60All this momentary high temper is connected to the books Elli has read, and quite clearly the books come from the idealistic tradition of the “noble and [the] great”, against which the modern literature of realism and naturalism is written13.

    61The celebrated pastoral episode in The Priest’s Wife is a turning point in the plot as well as in the linear structure of the novel14. The trip to the cattle house begins in joyful spirits, and as they approach the house Olavi observes the rugged woods that surround the hill:

    – Mutta tämä alkaakin lupaavasti… katsokaa noita koivuja, kuinka ne ovat solakoita ja valkoisia ja puhtaita… tämä on kuin pyhä lehto, temppelien etehistö… tuolla taampana on tuo jylhä hongikko, ja se on itse kirkkoholvi…
    – Se on minun koivikkoni ja minun hongikkoni… ja minä en ole niistä kummastakaan antanut oksaakaan taittaa.
    – Teitä saattaa siis sanoa tämän temppelin papittareksi. (p. 336)

    – But this is a promising beginning… Look at those birches, how they are slender and white and pure… this is like a sacred grove, the entrance to a temple… over there is that rugged pine forest, and it is like a church vault…
    – It is my birch forest and my pine forest… I have never let anyone cut a single branch.
    – You may thus be called the priestess of this temple.

    62The couple walks through the woods and moves first from a birch forest to a rowan forest, then through an aspen forest to a pine forest again, and finally to a fir forest, “where there was a mystical shadowy twilight, the sound of a murmuring forest brook […] then again to the alder grove” (p. 337). The couple hears the cattle bells, and they arrive at the cattle house only to find it empty.

    63This is the spot where Olavi the knight finally meets the lady of the castle15. This is the moment where the couple has to face their real feelings and understand where they stand in this relationship. Olavi throws himself to the hays of the barn, and he wants to embrace Elli. She rejects him wordlessly, and Olavi is disappointed. Finally they manage to kiss, but Elli withdraws and realises that she is unable to go further. Olavi begins to understand the nature of the love affair:

    Ja kun hän näki Ellin kulkevan edellään kukkivaa ojanreunaa pitkin ja sitten veräjän yli noustuaan siihen nojaten häntä odottavan ja leikillään tarjoovan hänelle kätensä avuksi, hellä, syvä ja luottava ilme noissa suurissa, aina vähän surullisissa silmissä, niin hän käsitti kuin yht’äkkisenä ilmauksena, että jos heidän suhteensa olisi siitä, mitä se nyt oli, muuttunut toisenlaiseksi, se olisi samalla ollut pilattu ja menettänyt sen hienon lemunsa, jota hän siinä oikeasti rakasti. (p. 342; our emphasis)

    And as he saw Elli walking in front of him along the flowering border of the ditch and then after having climbed over a stile, reaching out her hand to help him with a tender, deep and expression in her big, always sorrowful eyes, he understood as if in a sudden manifestation that if their relationship had changed from what it was now to another kind, it would have been spoilt at the very moment and it would have lost the fine odour that he really loved in it.

    64Olavi’s visual experience concludes with sympathetic thoughts about Elli. The descriptive passage is framed by flowers. Olavi sees Elli on the flowery brink of the ditch, suggesting a very fine line between something beautiful and something degenerating and dirty (the ditch). Then his thoughts about the nature of their friendship are expressed by olfactory sense experiences. Thus, he does not touch the flower, he does not tear it from the ground and kill it – he smells it, and in this particular flower it is the odour that he really loves. Elli is much slower than Olavi. She understands that this must be the end of the affair, that they have met the limits of it and that there is no future for it. They begin to walk down the hill, Elli’s eyes filling with tears, and she tries to hide them – by picking flowers.

    65This pastoral episode is the turning point of the novel. The love affair cannot go on as it has: Elli is wife to another man, and Olavi is just an occasional visitor at the priest’s house. Olavi had wanted Elli, but at the very moment Olavi makes a move to take her, Elli rejects him realising that she is neither capable nor willing to move over the decisive threshold. The illusion breaks away. Olavi realises, as if in a sudden manifestation, that if their relationship had changed from what it was at that moment and assumed another form, it would have been spoilt and it would have lost the “fine odour” that he loved in it so dearly.

    66Elli’s love for Olavi is passion, the love of medieval romances. As Denis de Rougemont notes in his classic study, passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person. Their love is mutual in the sense that Tristan and Iseult “love one another”. What they love is love and being in love. To love love itself more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to love suffering and to court suffering, all the way from Augustine down to modern Romanticism16. Elli and Olavi’s love affair points out that, in Western literature, there are no happy romances. Because love that is not mutual cannot pass for true love, the only possible solution is unhappy mutual love.

    Bibliographie

    Aho Juhani, Papin rouva [1893], in Kootut teokset, vol. II.2-III, Porvoo – Helsinki, WSOY, 1949.

    Castrén Gunnar, Juhani Aho, vol. 1-2, Joel Lehtonen (trans.), Porvoo, WSOY, 1922.

    Doody Margaret Anne, The True Story of the Novel, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1996.

    Huysmans Karl-Joris, À Rebours [1884], Pierre Waldner (ed.), Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1978.

    Knight Philip, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986.

    Koskimies Rafael, “Karjamajan runoutta”, in Kymmenen tutkielmaa Juhani Ahosta, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1975, p. 32-50.

    Lyytikäinen Pirjo, “Palimpsestit ja kynnystekstit. Tekstien välisiä suhteita Gérard Genetten mukaan ja Ahon Papin rouvan intertekstuaalisuus”, in Intertekstuaalisuus. Suuntia ja sovelluksia, Auli Viikari (ed.), Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1991, p. 145-179.

    Moi Toril, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. Art, Theatre, Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

    Molarius Päivi, “Toteutumaton unelma onnesta – erään rakkauden anatomia”, in Juhani Aho, Papin rouva; Papin tytär, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002, p. vii-xxiii.

    Nalbantian Suzanne, The Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel. A Crisis in Values, London – Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1983.

    Nummi Jyrki, Aika Pariisissa. Juhani Ahon ranskalainen kausi 1889-1890, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002.

    Nykänen Elise, “Sanaton kaiho ja ohikulkevat laivat. Negatiivinen kuvaus Juhani Ahon papin rouvassa”, in Pariisista Iisalmeen. Kansainvälinen ja kansallinen Juhani Aho, Jyrki Nummi, Rikka Rossi, Saija Isomaa (eds.), Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2010, p. 61-91.

    Rossi Riikka, Le naturalisme finlandais. Une conception entropique du quotidien, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007.

    Rougemont Denis de, L’amour et l’Occident, Paris, Plon, 1939.

    Seaton Beverley, The Language of Flowers. A History, Charlottesville – London, University Press of Virginia, 1995.

    Tanner Tony, Adultery in the Novel, Baltimore – London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

    Tipper Paul Andrew, Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert, Lewiston – Queenston – Lampeter, E. Mellen Press (Studies in French Literature; 63), 2003.

    Valkama Leevi, Proosan taide. Viisi tutkielmaa, Helsinki, WSOY, 1983.

    Annexe

    The flowers in The Priest’s Wife

    Types of flowersMeanings
    Finnish namesEnglish names
    hauenkukka (= rentukka)“pike’s flower” (= marsh marigold)pain, chagrin
    kaislarush, reeddocility
    lemmenkukka (= lemmikki)forget-me-notremember me
    lummewater lily--
    metsäkukkawild flower--
    forest flower--
    reseda (= reseeda)mignonettehappiness of the moment
    ruiskukka (= ruiskaunokki)cornflowerdelicacy
    syreenililacfirst emotion of love
    tädykespeedwell, veronica--
    valkolumme“white water lily”purity

    The “meanings” are based on the lists of Latour’s Le langage des fleurs (1819) and Delachénaye’s Abécédaire de flore ou langage des fleurs (1811) and may be found in Seaton’s combined vocabulary17.

    Notes de bas de page

    1J. Aho, Papin rouva [1893], in Kootut teokset, vol. II.2-III, Porvoo – Helsinki, WSOY, 1949. All references to this book are taken from this edition (all translations are ours).

    2See B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers. A History, Charlottesville – London, University Press of Virginia, 1995, p. 4-15.

    3Ibid., p. 2.

    4Ibid., p. 37-38; see also P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 33-34.

    5See P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 33.

    6In the critical reception of The Priest’s Wife, the naturalistic perspective has dominated those readings that emphasise the themes within the naturalistic agenda of the time, in particular, the description of reality and the ugly aspects of reality (E. Nykänen, “Sanaton kaiho ja ohikulkevat laivat. Negatiivinen kuvaus Juhani Ahon papin rouvassa”, in Pariisista Iisalmeen. Kansainvälinen ja kansallinen Juhani Aho, J. Nummi, R. Rossi, S. Isomaa (eds.), Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2011, p. 69). These readings have, however, passed over with relative ease elements that anticipate some of the most important features of the emerging poetical currents, symbolism and respective movements. The garden topos, flower tropes and allegorised landscapes are signs of the shift in poetical context that is reflected in this single work by Aho.

    7See P. Molarius, “Toteutumaton unelma onnesta – erään rakkauden anatomia”, in J. Aho, Papin rouva; Papin tytär, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002, p. xvi-xix for a detailed discussion of Olavi as a “wandering student”.

    8Horace, Odes, I, xi, 8. In one of his poems (“Carminas”, LXII, 43), Catullus cynically points out that the flos of virginity fades when picked: “carptus defloruit”; P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 4.

    9M. A. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1996, p. 356.

    10Orchids, the popularised symbol of decadent aestheticism, are also missing. The orchid became the password for the Decadents, processed by Huysmans’ portrayal of Des Esseintes as a prototype in his decadent novel À rebours. Proust makes the cattleya a sign for the art of love-making in Du côté de chez Swann. See S. Nalbantian, The Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel. A Crisis in Values, London – Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1983, p. 7-8.

    11B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers…, p. 158.

    12In criticism Elli has often been compared to Emma Bovary in her character and fate, and the similarity of these two unhappy wives has been taken for granted. Lyytikäinen has shown that the differences between them are nonetheless abundant and significant; P. Lyytikäinen, “Palimpsestit ja kynnystekstit. Tekstien välisiä suhteita Gérard Genetten mukaan ja Ahon Papin rouvan intertekstuaalisuus”, in Intertekstuaalisuus. Suuntia ja sovelluksia, A. Viikari (ed.), Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1991, p. 145-179. The choice of flowers proves the point. Emma’s flower-likeness is different from Elli’s flower-likeness. Emma is linked to roses, violets; Elli is associated with lilies, “forest flowers” and cornflowers, and there is a significant difference between the Northern and Southern flora, a different emphasis with regard to sexuality, sensuality and love. For the use of flowers in Flaubert’s novels, see P. A. Tipper, Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert, Lewiston – Queenston – Lampeter, E. Mellen Press (Studies in French Literature; 63), 2003.

    13Here Aho’s novel links to Ibsen’s idealistic heroines from A Doll House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Elli’s “idealistic” attitude to love has not been recognised in Aho’s criticism. See Toril Moi’s study on the conflict of idealism and modernism in Ibsen and her brilliant analyses of Ibsen’s women; T. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. Art, Theatre, Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

    14See R. Koskimies, “Karjamajan runoutta”, in Kymmenen tutkielmaa Juhani Ahosta, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1975, p. 32-50.

    15Riikka Rossi has pointed out the role of such motifs as “sacred grove!” and “temple” and analysed the episode in term of romance; R. Rossi, Le naturalisme finlandais. Une conception entropique du quotidien, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007. The first appearance of the romantic “sacred wood” is to be found in Aho’s earlier novella Kosteikko, kukkula, saari…, which he wrote in Paris in autumn 1889; see J. Nummi, Aika Pariisissa. Juhani Ahon ranskalainen kausi 1889-1890, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002, p. 119-121.

    16D. de Rougemont, L’amour et l’Occident, Paris, Plon, 1939, p. 37-38.

    17B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers…, p. 168-197.

    Auteur

    • Jyrki Nummi

      University of Helsinki

      Jyrki Nummi est professeur de littérature finlandaise à l’université d’Helsinki. Il a publié de nombreux articles sur les premiers prosateurs modernistes finlandais au tournant du siècle, Juhani Aho, Arvid Järnefelt et Karl-August Tavaststjerna. Parmi ses livres publiés, mentionnons son ouvrage sur le séjour littéraire d’Aho à Paris en 1889-1890, Juhani Ahon ranskalainen kausi 1889-1890 (Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002).

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    1J. Aho, Papin rouva [1893], in Kootut teokset, vol. II.2-III, Porvoo – Helsinki, WSOY, 1949. All references to this book are taken from this edition (all translations are ours).

    2See B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers. A History, Charlottesville – London, University Press of Virginia, 1995, p. 4-15.

    3Ibid., p. 2.

    4Ibid., p. 37-38; see also P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 33-34.

    5See P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 33.

    6In the critical reception of The Priest’s Wife, the naturalistic perspective has dominated those readings that emphasise the themes within the naturalistic agenda of the time, in particular, the description of reality and the ugly aspects of reality (E. Nykänen, “Sanaton kaiho ja ohikulkevat laivat. Negatiivinen kuvaus Juhani Ahon papin rouvassa”, in Pariisista Iisalmeen. Kansainvälinen ja kansallinen Juhani Aho, J. Nummi, R. Rossi, S. Isomaa (eds.), Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2011, p. 69). These readings have, however, passed over with relative ease elements that anticipate some of the most important features of the emerging poetical currents, symbolism and respective movements. The garden topos, flower tropes and allegorised landscapes are signs of the shift in poetical context that is reflected in this single work by Aho.

    7See P. Molarius, “Toteutumaton unelma onnesta – erään rakkauden anatomia”, in J. Aho, Papin rouva; Papin tytär, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002, p. xvi-xix for a detailed discussion of Olavi as a “wandering student”.

    8Horace, Odes, I, xi, 8. In one of his poems (“Carminas”, LXII, 43), Catullus cynically points out that the flos of virginity fades when picked: “carptus defloruit”; P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 4.

    9M. A. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1996, p. 356.

    10Orchids, the popularised symbol of decadent aestheticism, are also missing. The orchid became the password for the Decadents, processed by Huysmans’ portrayal of Des Esseintes as a prototype in his decadent novel À rebours. Proust makes the cattleya a sign for the art of love-making in Du côté de chez Swann. See S. Nalbantian, The Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel. A Crisis in Values, London – Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1983, p. 7-8.

    11B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers…, p. 158.

    12In criticism Elli has often been compared to Emma Bovary in her character and fate, and the similarity of these two unhappy wives has been taken for granted. Lyytikäinen has shown that the differences between them are nonetheless abundant and significant; P. Lyytikäinen, “Palimpsestit ja kynnystekstit. Tekstien välisiä suhteita Gérard Genetten mukaan ja Ahon Papin rouvan intertekstuaalisuus”, in Intertekstuaalisuus. Suuntia ja sovelluksia, A. Viikari (ed.), Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1991, p. 145-179. The choice of flowers proves the point. Emma’s flower-likeness is different from Elli’s flower-likeness. Emma is linked to roses, violets; Elli is associated with lilies, “forest flowers” and cornflowers, and there is a significant difference between the Northern and Southern flora, a different emphasis with regard to sexuality, sensuality and love. For the use of flowers in Flaubert’s novels, see P. A. Tipper, Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert, Lewiston – Queenston – Lampeter, E. Mellen Press (Studies in French Literature; 63), 2003.

    13Here Aho’s novel links to Ibsen’s idealistic heroines from A Doll House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Elli’s “idealistic” attitude to love has not been recognised in Aho’s criticism. See Toril Moi’s study on the conflict of idealism and modernism in Ibsen and her brilliant analyses of Ibsen’s women; T. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. Art, Theatre, Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

    14See R. Koskimies, “Karjamajan runoutta”, in Kymmenen tutkielmaa Juhani Ahosta, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1975, p. 32-50.

    15Riikka Rossi has pointed out the role of such motifs as “sacred grove!” and “temple” and analysed the episode in term of romance; R. Rossi, Le naturalisme finlandais. Une conception entropique du quotidien, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007. The first appearance of the romantic “sacred wood” is to be found in Aho’s earlier novella Kosteikko, kukkula, saari…, which he wrote in Paris in autumn 1889; see J. Nummi, Aika Pariisissa. Juhani Ahon ranskalainen kausi 1889-1890, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002, p. 119-121.

    16D. de Rougemont, L’amour et l’Occident, Paris, Plon, 1939, p. 37-38.

    17B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers…, p. 168-197.

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    Nummi, J. (2015). Love for Love’s Sake. The Language of Flowers in Juhani Aho’s Papin rouva (The Priest’s Wife). In M. Carayol & R. Peltola (éds.), Singularités, pluralités (1‑). Presses universitaires de Caen. https://doi.org/10.4000/13tfa
    Nummi, Jyrki. « Love for Love’s Sake. The Language of Flowers in Juhani Aho’s Papin Rouva (The Priest’s Wife) ». In Singularités, pluralités, édité par Martin Carayol et Rea Peltola. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4000/13tfa.
    Nummi, Jyrki. « Love for Love’s Sake. The Language of Flowers in Juhani Aho’s Papin Rouva (The Priest’s Wife) ». Singularités, pluralités, édité par Martin Carayol et Rea Peltola, Presses universitaires de Caen, 2015, https://doi.org/10.4000/13tfa.

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    Carayol, M., & Peltola, R. (éds.). (2015). Singularités, pluralités (1‑). Presses universitaires de Caen. https://doi.org/10.4000/13tfk
    Carayol, Martin, et Rea Peltola, éd. Singularités, pluralités. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4000/13tfk.
    Carayol, Martin, et Rea Peltola, éditeurs. Singularités, pluralités. Presses universitaires de Caen, 2015, https://doi.org/10.4000/13tfk.
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