> from reading around, I suspect that the use of flowers to symbolize an
> effeminate man may have simply been a way of associating something
> considered feminine (flowers in general) with an effeminate man, and
> probably having little to do with the pansy as symbol of thought, thinking.
> I still don't have much of a clue as to the claim about pansy meaning
> effeminate man during Elizabethan times, but it sure seems the case that,
> since the late 1800s, the use of the word pansy (and flowers more generally)
> to symbolize gay men by equating them with the feminine was the dominate
> meaning, and it had little to do with associating gayness and/or effeminancy
> with thought, thinking. Consider the following:
>
> From
>
> Gay Histories and Cultures b
>
> y George E. Haggerty
>
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=L9Mj7oHEwVoC&pg=PA332&lpg=PA332&dq=pansy+%22effeminate+man%22&source=bl&ots=cbpv047RZm&sig=mC2R6Nn7KU--6VflhwdtjU9GgCM&hl=en&ei=pY-qSYTuCpDQnQe6uaTnDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPA332,M1
>
> From Gay New York (which has been on my to read list for years now. from
> skimming, I need to move it up to the top since he explores the prewar era
> in which gay and straight had not yet been turned into an absolute binary
> opposition as they are today. Better yet, he discusses differences between
> bourgeois and working class public sexual cultures that are illuminating.
>
> This is something we've often brought up at LBO, to the shock and horror of
> folks here, but Chauncey gives concrete ethnographic and historical details
> to support Foucault's thesis. Just read his introduction for a basic
> synopsis of the argument and select illustrations)
> Once you get to the URL below, search on pansy.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=NNHGuVdPELYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Gay+New+York
>
>
> Not really sure about the reliability of this one, but Herbst's discussion
> of the use of flowers to represent gender is interesting, though it does not
> illuminate much about the use of pansy or heartsease in Elizabethan times:
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=8rgUeEpWfbsC&pg=PA103&dq=Wimmin,+Wimps+%26+Wallflowers+pansy
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
Well, from looking over the paragraph in that book I see two major problems. First off, the pansy definitely was a symbol of effeminacy (in the negative sense of the term, of course). Poke around google and you can see this. But even, failing that, the Shakespeare quote I put forward earlier definitely makes the connection - as I said, it indicated seductiveness and deceitfulness which were at once the characteristics targeted in women as being "weak" and those targeted in men as a crime (this, according to Foucault, is the kernel, traceable back to Ancient Greece, of homophobia today and I ask anyone who doubts it to actually sit down and talk to someone who is avowedly homophobic without being a militant, quasi-Fascist, its ALWAYS effeminacy that's the issue, either too much, in men, or too little, in women). Secondly, the author seems to have an over-simplified view of how language functions. He seems to assume that terms just suddenly "appear" out of nowhere and attach themselves, rather arbitrarily, to other terms (flower = gay). That's just stupid. I mean if that were the case then why did some flowers signify extremely masculine characteristics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers
As for the thought/thinking aspect, I still think that the feminisation of the Latin term when imported in English (penser => pensive) is rather interesting. I've always thought that the best way to think about etymology is through the Freudian notion of "overdetermination" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdetermination). The best way to gain contemporary knowledge of the root of certain usages is by taking into account ALL the available data and trying to make connections - the same is true of cultural phenomena, as Foucault has clearly showed; a sort of pure empiricism.
Chris Doss wrote: I am pretty doubtful that the people in England who started using "pansy" to refer to effeminate men spoke French anyway. They probably had no clue of the French meaning.
That's why I disagree with this approach. People don't necessarily have to have conscious knowledge of the linguistic connections they make. I won't even bother referring to the masses of work done on this by Freud and psychoanalysis, and, from a different, but analogous, approach by structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson, but simply to an everyday occurrence.
Have you ever been in a discussion with someone where either one of you has been trying to make a point, but no matter how much you discourse on it you can't pin it down? You go through multiple approaches, take up multiple "signifying chains", but still can't satisfactorily make your point. Then the other person says something that articulates what you were trying to say perfectly. Sometimes this phenomenon can be so striking that it comes across as quasi-mystical and some superstitious people put it down to telepathy. A good example of it is when you're trying to get a name of a celebrity that's "on the tip of your tongue" but all you can do is bounce around it and then suddenly the other person comes out with it "as if from nowhere". I would argue, as would structuralists, that a certain autonomy of language is at work here. And what is really going on is a sort of language game between the two people which involves reducing the amount of "signifiers" (words, terms etc.) to a minimum until the right one(s) is reached. The key point here, regarding my assertion that etymological meaning is overdetermined, is that the people in this conversation aren't really "making" the meaning themselves, as such. The structures of language - which are quite logical - are "making" this meaning for them.