Pansy - Pansies in The Arts and Culture

Pansies in The Arts and Culture

The Pansy has figured in literature and the visual arts. In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the juice of the heartsease is a love potion and "on sleeping eyelids laid, will make a man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees." (II.1). In Hamlet, Ophelia distributes flowers with the remark, "There's pansies, that's for thoughts" (IV.5). Other poets referencing the pansy include Ben Jonson, Bernard Barton, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, William Wakefield, and William Wordsworth.

Elsewhere in literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne published his last literary effort, an unfinished piece, entitled Pansie, a Fragment, sometimes called Little Pansie, a fragment in 1864. D. H. Lawrence's Pansies: Poems by D. H. Lawrence was published in 1929, and Margaret Mitchell originally chose Pansy as the name of her Gone with the Wind heroine, but settled on Scarlett just before the book went into print. In the Harry Potter series, a character named Pansy Parkinson is a bully, and just one of the characters in the novels who has a flower related name, including Lavender Brown and Lily Potter.

In the visual arts, Pierre-Joseph Redouté painted Bouquet of Pansies in 1827, and, in 1874, Henri Fantin-Latour painted Still Life with Pansies. In 1887, van Gogh painted Mand met viooltjes, and, in 1926, Georgia O'Keeffe created a painting of a black pansy called simply, Pansy and followed it with White Pansy in 1927. J. J. Grandville created a fantasy flower called Pensée in his Fleurs Animées, and the 1953 Disney animated film Alice in Wonderland featured a chorus of singing pansies in the Garden of Live Flowers scene.

The Pansy is a symbol of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority,the Delta Delta Delta sorority and the Sigma Lambda Upsilon (ΣΛΥ) or Señoritas Latinas Unidas Sorority, Inc. The Pansy is the flower of Osaka, Japan, and was the name of the Epiphone Elitist Les Paul Custom guitar with an Alpine White finish played by guitarist Frank Iero (whose nickname, coincidentally, is also Pansy) of the band My Chemical Romance. Pansy was broken during a show.