In a brief Appendix to his canonical work of structural anthropology, La Pensée Sauvage (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss addresses the double entendre inherent in the book’s title, originally translated into English as The Savage Mind and more recently as Wild Thought (Portuguese O Pensamento Selvagem). The translations do not preserve the double meaning of ‘pensée,’ a word that denotes both ‘thought’ and the small flower known as viola tricolor or field pansy, and more provocatively as the flower of the Trinity. A survey of German, Polish and Ukrainian folklore reveals various interpretations of the five-petalled flower as a family merged together through an unseemly marriage. The ‘little stepmother’ of German lore represents the displacement of the children of a first marriage by the entitled offspring of a second pairing, signified by the sumptuous hues of the lower petals. In the Polish version, the first two children are forced to share a single petal as a chair, while the stepmother and her children spread out in a more comfortable seating arrangement. Other versions figure the pansy as an orphan or an incestuous marriage between siblings, who will bow their heads as the flower wilts in shame. At the whim of the patriarch, who is conspicuously absent from the scene, each family constellation is beset by uncomfortable strains and compromises. In this structuralist game of musical chairs rendered in a botanical idiom, the relations among the petals qua family members are more significant than the positions themselves.
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