Carnal Flowers, Charnel Flowers

This chapter focuses on a single flower scent—the tuberose—strongly associated with the fragrance of Victorian decadence. Contrasting with the more delicate scent of the violet explored in Chapter 2 is the powerful perfume of the tuberose, an exotic hothouse flower, its fragrance evoking the body and decay. Starting with Shelley, this chapter tracks this heady fragrance through a range of texts to concentrate on three poems by late Victorian minor poets—Mark André Raffalovich, Mary Robinson, and Theodore Wratislaw—and shows how the scent of the tuberose is bound up with dangerous or voluptuous pleasures, with love, eroticism, criminality, and death.