Maria Sibylla Merian:

Crises in Spirit, Intellect and Marriage

Norman Simms

Part One: Maria Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon: Childhood Confusions

In order to understand the life of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) it is not enough to recount the events of her life in a chronological order and to note patterns of cause and affecting her development in response to the changing environment as she matures and increases her knowledge and skills sufficiently to be recognized as a major naturalist and engraver of butterflies and flowers. Her life, insofar as we can piece together the scattered fragments of evidence from a wide variety of sources, is punctuated by a number of crises that mark breaks and swerves from what would otherwise seem to be a logical or natural progression of social and intellectual maturation. These crises in her life help us creative an investigative structure for the development of her life and work, especially how the great volumes of pictures and reports on insect and plant life came about, not only as significant contributions to Enlightenment science and art, but also as manifestations of her emergence as an "exceptional woman,”[1] at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. In this essay I will look carefully at the dynamics of her marriage at the age of eighteen to Johann Andreas Graff[2] and its break-up many years later, its relation to her decision to join and then leave the radical Calvinist sect of Labadists, and her preparation for the expedition to Surinam and, thus, to her fully mature career in natural philosophy and aesthetic art.[3]

The breakdown of her marriage provides an early indication to the development of her mature personality. We therefore need to re-examine the evidence and the patterns of disjuncture, not from the perspective of nineteenth- century patriarchy, but using the insights of modern psychohistory, to see the emergence of domestic crises from the woman's and child’s point of view. The problematic relationship of husband and wife provides a clue to the understanding of Maria Sibylla Merian's intellectual and spiritual crises. The first such crisis in her life had been less openly traumatic: this may be seen in the unstable pattern of her parental and family relations. In other words, it was a crisis spread over several years, during which her natural father died after taking as a second wife the woman who was to be Maria Sibylla's mother; then her birth mother remarried, giving her a step-father who was very supportive, until illness forced him to put her into the care of other men, at least one of whom eventually became her husband. Though there was strength in the original family of Matthaus Merian and its extension into the DeBry household from which he inherited the great engraving and publishing firm he would pass on to his sons,[4] the young Maria would no doubt have experienced the deaths of parents and the reconfigurations in her own small emotional world as a profoundly confusing and troubling set of events. Her step-father Jacob Marrel's affectionate support for her precocious signs of artistic and intellectual abilities is warmly recorded in the preface to her books; but as he became increasingly ill and consequently distant, the child would have felt the pangs of neglect and abandonment. The young apprentices who were charged with caring for her also had predatory designs on the girl, if not overtly sexual, then at least professionally and financially: any ambitious young man who married into the DeBry-Merian conglomerate would gain a firm hold on the publishing and artistic world of the mid- to late seventeenth century in German and Dutch-speaking lands.[5]

Maria Sibylla eventually did marry one of her stepfather Marrel’s apprentices, and one of her first tutors in art,[6] Johann Andreas Graff (1637-1701) of Basle[7] in 1665.[8] By him she had two daughters,[9] the first, Dorothea Maria, born in 1668 and the second, Johanna Helena, in 1678.[10] They then moved in 1684 from Frankfurt to Nuremberg, her husband's hometown, another centre of publishing in the German-speaking world. This shift away from her mother, brothers, and whatever friends she may have had removed her as well from the support available to her, not only emotional, but also intellectual and artistic. For Graff, whose father "had been a poet laureate and rector of the Egidienplatz gymnasium" in Nuremberg,[11] probably, it was also a necessary step in attempting to establish his own independent career, that is, away from the role of apprentice or assistant in the city where, as well, he would always be seen as a part of the DeBry-Merian-Marrell circles. We can also guess that he sought to remove his wife and children from the pressures of Maria Sibylla's mother and brothers. How active was her part in the move five years later back to Nuremberg remains unknown. Calling herself Frau Graffin and being active in her craft suggests, however, that she was probably happy enough at this point in her marriage.

It is important to note that the first volume of Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung was already begun when her second child was born, that is, when she was still in close proximity to both sides of her family. Successful publication, with the copper plates by the author, positioned Maria Sibylla for international fame at this point. The artist-scientist's career did not properly take off until much later. This book also ambiguously appears to have been jointly worked on by her husband,[12] although she later disassociated him from serious artistic and scientific endeavours under her name. I would suggest, for reasons that will be explained in due course, that when she wrote in 1679 that Raupen was partly due to "the accomplished help of my dear spouse",[13] she only partly meant what she said; this was an unconscious slip for saying that it was her father that she really wished to thank for launching her successful career—but, because her father died too soon, he, like her husband, was partly responsible for her inability to stand on her own two feet  Just as her childish mind could not cope with contradictions and confusions of all the parents and step-fathers, siblings and step-brothers in her early life, as well as the rivalry of other relatives from different parents, so her adult consciousness was stymied in the first stages of her career from mature independence: by the ordeal of influence, in general, and the debts of gratitude, in particular, she was often asked to pay.

The reasons for this apparently sudden swerve from the logical or natural progression in her career must be sought in her domestic life. However, there is no indication that she saw herself as anything other than a good and dutiful wife, as she had been a good daughter, in her youth; but, for precisely that reason—and the way in which private and intimate issues like this were not given public utterance in the period—biographers need to be alert for signs in the psychological dimensions of her life story for those subtle and fragmentary indications of rebelliousness and independence.  Or, if we are to take the documents at face value, then we need to learn to interpret the spiritual assertiveness she comes to display in letters and actions.  These kind of oblique and understated indicators take on, in retrospect, the dimensions of a crisis, that is, radical turning points in Maria Sybilla’s life-history.

These historical markers that show that the crisis emerged in stages are hinted at in the way she described the drawings of insects she was engraving: not just as evidence of God's presence in the world, but of that presence as part of a dynamic and creative process of developmental growth and change.[14] This attitude suggests that the religious conversion she was about to undergo—or, at least, to announce to the world—had been brewing for some time below the surface of a slight tilt towards Calvinist from Lutheran views. More tellingly, though, cracks seem to have opened up in the solidarity of the Merian family, on one side, and in the public pose of conventional happy marriage with Graff, on the other. Indeed, more important than the typical arguments and lawsuits between members of her father's children was the almost sudden separation from her own husband. Davis says Maria Sibylla left him "abruptly.”[15]

It may be that her marriage to Graff did not work out perhaps because, as Valiant claims, her husband's "career did not develop as expected".[16] Obviously, there would have been some jealousy and rivalry between two artistic spouses, perhaps exacerbated by the birth of a second daughter and the young family's increased dependence on the extra money brought in from Maria Sibylla's artistic work. The usually given reason, her husband's failure in the art business, however, does not fully satisfy the urgency of the situation. Nor does the explanation that he was unwilling to follow her into the Labadist cult satisfy.[17] I is more likely that her decision to join the cult was consequent to the marriage breakdown and it provided Maria Sibylla with the means of gaining freedom from her husband’s attempts to control her life.  Once her mother died and she had effectively separated herself and her children from Graff, she saw herself sufficiently free to pursue her career with strength of character she had not been able to muster earlier in her life.

But this kind of interpretation of the situation means going beyond the very sparse and fragmentary details available in surviving written documents. We have to see between and through the lines, guided by several premises: first, that like all children brought up in dysfunctional homes, Maria tried very hard to control and hide her rage against her parents and all the surrogate authority-figures they provided for her—her brothers, her tutors, her husband.  Second, the historian needs to note that her interest in small insects, reptiles and other small animals, and the accurate depiction of their relationship to one another in a living organic environment was not merely part of an emerging new Enlightenment science but also a coded language, a means of speaking about. Terefore, it needs to be read as a way of creating herself out of her own imagination—a way of living that corrected the faults of her early childhood, compensated for the deficits imposed on her by various step-parents, and opened avenues of development otherwise unavailable, and indeed unimaginable before then.

The biographer must therefore consider that her husband's financial losses or his spiritual deficiencies might have been borne with greater equanimity had he been more responsible—or emotionally responsive—in a physical way.  Yet the possibility arises that he was either a drunkard, a gambler, a wife-beater or some combination of the three.[18] Those reasons were part of her marriage for a very long time and cannot be taken in themselves as sufficient to explain the "abrupt" change in her life when she left with her mother and daughters to join the Labadists. Something deeper in her psychological makeup needs to be identified. To the end of her life, it would seem, Maria Sibylla remained "bitter" about her marriage.[19]

There is also another suggestion that Maria Sibylla at this time was exhibiting pietistic tendencies, as manifest in the "Caterpillar Hymn" by C. Arnold which was placed at the head of her 1679 volume of plates. A closer reading of this text points in a different direction, although it may well have been that she, like others around her, was unable to identify anything more in the lyrics than the religious concepts they normally held for her time. The other direction is towards the projection of her own childish helplessness, crying out for a power that would develop only after a period of metamorphosis, a withdrawal from the crawling stage of the caterpillar into the protective passivity in the cocoon, before she can emerge into the world and reveal herself as a fully developed butterfly. The God referred to here is thus, not only the Christian deity expounded by the Lutherans and then the Calvinists; but, above all, an idealized image of her father, the loving, caring, nurturing, artistically encouraging parent who, however, mysteriously disappeared from her life before she could ever really get to know him, but who is always present in her mind as a guide and a light towards which her own longings are ever turned:

Liebster GOTT so wirst Du handlen

Auch mit uns, zu zeiner Zeit;

Wie die Raupen sich verwandlen,

Die, durch ihre Sterblichkeit,

Wiederurn lebendig werden,

Gleich den Todten, in der Erden:

Lass mich armes Wurmelein

Dir alsdann belohlen sein!

Dearest GOD, thus will You deal also with us in due time; as the caterpillars are transformed, they who through their mortality become enlivened anew, like the dead in the ground: Let me, poor little worm, at that time be commended to You.[20]

We shall explore this matter further when we consider Graff’s visit to the Labadie colony in Friesland where Maria Sibylla sought refuge with her mother and daughters. But refuge from what? On the surface, of course, as Davis points out, "it was a matter of withdrawing immediately from the violence, pride, and concupiscence of the world",[21] something I would suggest is not just a formulaic recitation of Labadist pieties, but an accurate picture of her husband's abusive ways—and then, perhaps, a more general metaphorical picture of the squabbling between her brothers and their new wives and families. Digging a bit deeper into the text, however, we may also see that her self-analogy to the metamorphosing caterpillar also refers to her own need to overtake her father as an artist and a scientist. She must punish him for abandoning her and, at the same time, become a father-protector (guardian angel) to her daughters and their husbands by establishing a reputation that is commensurate with such a role and which allows her, as it would eventually to operate a fairly independent publishing enterprise that she could pass on to her children and their families.

It is therefore not at all clear whether these pious sentiments expressed by Arnold reflect accurately Maria Sibylla's own religious feelings in 1679 or at any earlier period. Pietism was more than in the air for her, as her brother Caspar's attachment to the Labadist shows; and it is also likely that her mother, who was a main mover in taking Maria Sibylla and her daughters to the cult, was drawn to this strict Calvinism from the time of her widowhood from Matthaus Merian, and certainly at the time of Jacob Marrel's death. The suggestion that the breakdown in the marriage was a result of religious interests in the Labadist cult[22] also needs to be explored further, but before that we need to examine this marital crisis in her life as part of a recurring series.

A psychohistorian must also ask whether or not this young woman needed to measure her relationships with men against the idealized image she had of her father and the warm close love she had for her stepfather? Her real father died before she could know him in any self-conscious way, but his presence as a paradigm of ancestral prestige, honour, and artistic traditions of Central Europe remained strong, particularly because of her brothers' careers. Older by many years, these brothers played the role in her life of revenants of Matthaus Merian's emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic influence, manifest later in Maria Sibylla's “quotations” of her father's art in her own first paintings and engravings. Her step-father was both a warmer and more memorable part of her infancy and early childhood, as well as a representative of a different kind of intellectual and artistic tradition: the one, in fact, which Maria Sibylla developed to scientific accuracy in her mature work.[23] When Marrel was forced to withdraw from an active part in her child-rearing and education, it was to his chosen disciples that she was entrusted. The marriage to Graff therefore represents a continuation of her public and private attachment to her father, and perhaps her ambiguous hostilities; since she probably also harboured childish resentment at his taking the place of her real father and gaining the affections of her mother. Childhood hurts and fears of this sort are likely to reappear in disguised (projected) form during adulthood with the advent of new painful emotional experiences. Thus, the failure of this marriage to Graff involved much deeper stresses than seem apparent on the surface. The relationship between the two rival artists, the husband and wife caught up in domestic and economic tensions, could not be resolved merely by ameliorating superficial problems.

At first Maria Sibylla remained in Nuremberg near her husband, but probably not in an intimate way—or even in the same household, particularly after the birth of the second and last child. It is clear that she became the principal breadwinner through a series of books of flower engravings, as well as by teaching embroidery and painting, including the first volume of her illustrations of European insects in 1679 called The Wonderful Transformation of Caterpillars[24] (the second volume appeared in 1683, with a third and final volume appearing posthumously in 1717).[25] While she began modestly earning money through such recognizably female arts and crafts, she rapidly turned to the same kind of work both her father and stepfather had been known for. This leap from domestic to scientific craftsmanship also manifests the profound estrangement of the married couple.  The Wonderful Transformation is a first sign of her incipient sense of personal independence and integrity. It is more than interesting to note that this study showed insects "in various stages of development, with the plants on which they fed." In other words, this first of her generically non-female books already shows her aware of nature as an organic whole, and not merely a set of discrete and symbolic details typical of her father’s and brothers’ prints in the style of the previous century. In addition, her daughter Dorothea helped with the hand- colouring of the engravings that accompanied the text, a sign of close bonding of the females in the family.[26]

Nevertheless Martia Sybilla’s smouldering disappointment in marriage—she lived in Nuremberg with her husband for seventeen years before formally leaving him—may further indicate a deeper frustration in finding a more independent way of life. But in 1681, upon the death of her stepfather, Jacob Marrel,[27] she moved back to her mother's house in Frankfurt, her marriage now having all but collapsed. Though she resumed her maiden name, there was no formal divorce.[28] Whether this was due to Graff’s refusal to accept the breakdown of the marriage or Maria Sibylla's reluctance to go through the embarrassing ordeal of a court procedure, or even to her unconscious desire to maintain some tie to the man her beloved step-father had chosen for her, to all almost intents and purposes the marriage was over.

Back home again in Frankfurt, with the emotional support of her mother and possibly the financial aid of the family's friends and connections, which included the DeBry brothers and their associates in the traditional Renaissance schools of engraving and Rosicrucian occult sciences, Maria published several more books on caterpillars. But then something happened which does not fit with her increasing participation in the circles of the new art and new science of the late seventeenth century. In fact, as Valiant points out, "By the time Merian went to Surinam, she had been studying and observing animal life for forty years,”[29]—and her development of artistic techniques consonant with the Germanic (including Dutch) Renaissance. What happened at this moment of freedom from a long and unpleasant marriage that kept her from riding the crest of her own success in publishing?

“In about 1685,” according to Valiant, “Merian, together with her mother and daughters, moved to Castle Walta in Friesland to join the Labadists, a communal religious sect.”[30] While there were cabinets of mounted tropical insects to tempt her artistic and scientific temperament, and Maria Sibylla studied them over the next few years,[31] why did these women join this radical Protestant cult? Surely it was not purely so that Maria Sibylla could study mounted butterflies or make a contact for visiting Surinam. The decision came two years after the second volume of her butterfly book was published, again to enthusiastic response, so that again an entry into the scientific circles of Western Europe was possible. Instead, she went into spiritual retreat, and seemed, like Anna Maria van Schurman, to be closing herself off from an intellectual career in favour of radical pietism.[32] She might have been prompted to do this either by her mother or by one of her stepbrothers. Caspar Merian had written to tell her about his decision to join the cult and Maria had spoken in her letters to him of her enjoyment of Labadist hymns.[33]

But was it a purely spiritual decision or did it also, and perhaps predomi- nantly, satisfy a number of different psychological needs that Maria and her mother felt strongly? It is very likely that the scandal caused by Anna Maria van Schurman's decision to join the Labadie community, a decision justified in her spiritual auto- biography Eukleria,[34] influenced Maria Sibylla's decision, as well as the example of her brother and the promptings of her mother. Of van Schurman's book, Saxby writes:

In simple yet beautiful Latin she speaks of her disenchantment with Cartesianism, which she saw as profane, with the world of learning and with the established church of her day. Its honesty of spiritual confession and its accomplished style have led to Eukleria's comparison with Augustine's Confessions. Its effect was immediate. Throughout Germany and the United Provinces Eukleria was read and approved.[35]

If Merian agreed with van Schurman in theological matters and in anti- Cartesianism,[36] nevertheless, a decision to leave the world of learning went against Maria Sibylla's pattern of increased personal independence. On the one hand, Van Schurman's “independent act of joining a breakaway religious movement was a bold rejection of the polite society that had shaped and in some ways confined her.”[37] On the other, there is no indication that Merian was making this kind of radical break with her own intellectual and artistic development. Nor had she shown any earlier signs of being drawn to the strict spiritual governance practiced among the Labadists, although she may have been attracted by the ideal of a primitive Christian simplicity and the model of intellectual independence demonstrated by van Schurman in her Eukleria.

She may have sympathized with her brother Caspar's reasons for joining the cult, but also saw-consciously and/or unconsciously—in this retreat a strategic move to establish her independence as a woman in preparation for the career moves evident in her last years. This need not be seen in purely modern, cynical terms, however, as the Labadists scrutinized their new members carefully and were highly sensitive to hypocrisy and half-hearted commitments. Maria Sibylla and the others would not have been let in had they not proved their spiritual bona fides to the managers of the cult headquarters.

Yet we know today that people who join religious cults of this sort go in for a variety of contradictory reasons, no matter how much they may convince themselves and others of the purity of their vocation.[38] For instance, Saxby suggests that Caspar joined the Labadists for reasons familiar to those who study modern cult movements; namely, at the death of his first wife and child, he felt lonely and depressed. Soon after he moved into the community at Wieuwerd in 1677 he started to write to his relatives to beg them to join him there.[39] Saxby's next description is therefore peculiarly interesting.

His sister Maria Sibylla, who had not long published a book of entomological drawings of exceptional merit, proved open to the Labadist message, but there was a snag. Since 1665 she had been married to Johann Andreas Graff, a pupil of her father's, but the marriage was not a success and Graff was not a spiritual man. So Maria was not free to follow her own inclinations, and the situation worsened when in 1681 her stepfather, Jacob Marrelus, died and she went to look after her mother, Johanna Catherina (nee Heim). Correspondence continued and Maria found her heart drawn, particularly by the hymns and poems sent to her from Wieuwerd (doubtless Heylige Gezanges, the Labadist hymnal), and finally in 1685 she determined to travel to Wieuwerd with her mother and her two daughters, Johanna and Dorothea. Whether or not with was with Graff s permission is uncertain, but she was there a year before her husband came to take her to Nurnberg.[40]

Let me comment and correct a few points here before moving on to the crucial account of Graff's visit to Merian among the Labadists and his attempt to take her home.

Maria Sibylla' s marriage was probably only nominal before she went to Amsterdam or joined the Labadists.  She had become the main breadwinner of the family, living separately from her husband and supporting the children through her art publications. In other words, the death of her step-father did not precipitate her decision to leave Graff altogether, although the need to move in with her mother provided an excuse for the more radical break with him, since it meant taking the children away from him altogether. To say that Graff "was not a spiritual man," as Saxby does, is an understatement, to say the least  The implications are that he was an unstable character with drinking problems, and, no doubt as so often is the case, violent, especially when he would feel humiliated by Maria Sibylla's increasing recognition as a painter and engraver.[41]

From what follows, it may be that when Maria Sibylla took her daughters home to her mother in Frankfurt, she was in possession of further information that Graff would follow after her and attempt to take her and/or the children with him; and hence the decision to enter the Labadist community was made in terms of safety. It was something that allowed her to effect a divorce more easily than through normal civil and ecclesiastical channels. In Wieuwerd, Maria Sibylla went under the title of Mme Merian and not Mme de Graff.[42]

 Saxby's account of J.A. Graff’s visit to Wieuwerd in 1682 fills out this picture a little more, as it replicates a scene all too familiar to contemporary social workers reporting on the attempts of abusive husbands to retrieve their wives and children from women's refuges.[43] In the late seventeenth century, of course, there were no non-molestation orders to be requested from the civil courts.

Pastor of the Labadists, Copper was a former Reformed Minister from Issburg, and his efforts here were to intercept Graff and protect Maria Sibylla and her daughters. Yet he had no authority to force the "aggrieved" husband to leave, and when Graff started to whine about having no money, the Christian community permitted him to stay-but not "to sleep with her in a holy place",[45] as Maria Sibylla herself stipulated with her iron will. Instead, he was offered a rather menial laboring position to earn his keep, "outside the main complex." Again, this behavior is familiar as the typical of abusive husbands—men who humiliate and beat their wives—and who pretend (and perhaps at the time believe themselves) to be sorry for their action, hiding their anger behind promises, penitence and reform. Years later, for those who took Graff’s side, the break-up of the marriage had been due to her "ca- price", a euphemism for the determination of an independent woman unwilling to surrender to a husband's demands for authority; for the others who sympathized with her plight, the separation was due to Graff’s "shameful vices.”[46]

The continuation of the story recalls still more the generic pattern of the dysfunctional husband-wife relationship even further.  Saxby writes that
 

Graff tried on two separate occasions to become a member, but on both occasions his motives were suspected and he was refused. Finally, with the strain of work and the emotional torment of his marital position, he fell ill. Normally permission would have been needed to visit a non-member in such circumstances, but Maria went of her own accord to see him.[47]

Though Saxby seems to take the side of Graff as the put-upon husband in these sentences, the scenario is nevertheless clear. All Graff s efforts to see his wife were rejected by the Labadist community and his claim to be a spiritual convert eager to join their movement was seen through as without merit and hypocritical. Though hardly a site of feminist feelings, despite the major position held by Anna Maria van Schurman in its formative years in exile,[48] Wieuwerd was a spiritual community that protected its own and were acutely sensitive to the wiles of the outside world. Nevertheless, either to urge him to depart peacefully or drawn by some residual affection for the man, Maria Sibylla agreed to meet him at the gate of the compound.

Following this brief encounter at the gate, Graff left Friesland. Reading between the lines of Saxby's account which continues here, it possible to see that Maria Sibylla gave him money to leave, otherwise he could not have taken the time for the extended journey before returning to his home. The other remarks made by Saxby show that he is more sympathetic to the husband than the wife and so misinterprets the details of the account of their final meeting. For instance, one must ask what is meant by "when he recovered"? Probably Saxby intends the reader to see Graff as deeply hurt by this final rejection by his wife: another blow to his delicate masculine ego! Then it is argued that the drawing he later made of the Labadist compound is a sign of his pleasure at living and working on the construction site of the compound, as though he really found spiritual fulfilment on the margins of their religious life doing donkey work and being in close proximity to his family.

Other reasons suggest themselves, however, such as that he had obsessively stared at the forbidden grounds where his wife and children were always out of his control and sought to gain possession of them through this minutely detailed drawing. What he did while on "tour" and why he prosecuted divorce proceedings against his wife upon his return to Germany are not explained in Saxby's text. Again we have to guess, basing our speculations on the behavioural patterns of contemporary family break-ups. These suggestions would, of course, not at all be sympathetic to Graff.

It could not, however, save the marriage, and when he recovered, Graff embarked on a tour of the United Provinces before returning to Nurnburg, where he started divorce proceedings. He died in 1701. His gift to posterity, however, is the ground plan and inset picture of Waltstate, drawn in 1686, in great detail and suggesting that he did, in fact, have some enjoyment and leisure during his abortive stay in Friesland.

That Maria Sibylla Merian's motives for joining the Labadists were not purely a search for spiritual fulfilment or salvation may be adduced from the fact that soon after her mother died in 1690, she took her children and returned to Amsterdam in 1691.[49] There she was recorded as studying the cabinet collections of Nicolas and Jonas Witsen, Frederick Ruysch and Caspar Commelin, men who also helped her before and again after her journey to South America.[50] Davis suggests, too, that her book of spiritual exercises was at the same time a collection of naturalist records and sketches,[51] which as in the past indicates that her deep interest in small creatures and their relation to one another served as a double form of projection: on the one hand, the ideal of holy family headed by a perfect father- husband like Labadie also was mirrored in God's divine governance of the natural world she studied as a way of pleasing her father and the memory she was always trying to surpass; on the other, her stay in the Calvinist colony provided a temporary but necessary transitional state in her development as a scientist, artist, and independent woman, and she could justify her departure from Graff as having both natural and divine sanctions.

But this is something we must infer rather than find explicitly stated; for as Davis puts it, “Merian made no statement about the Labadists afterward—no assessment, appreciation, or denunciation. As always, she protectively kept her inner life to herself.”[52] The only hint at an alternative appears in the coded language of the Metamorphosis, where she states in the Preface that previous to her trip to Surinam-that is, in her formative years as daughter and wife, and then in her cocoon years among the Labadists—her study of nature was incomplete: “something important was missing from all these collections” upon which she based her drawings and descriptions:  “the origins and subsequent transformations of the insects.”[53] It was not just that she herself felt that her life hitherto had been either that of a specimen displayed for the pleasures and curiosity of the male authority figures in her life, or that she shared her own father's penchant for Neo-Platonic reading of mystical significance in the natural world, to which she thought of herself a part, as one of God's creatures; but that she could not express her rage at her father or stepfather, any more than at her mother or stepmother, until she had laid to rest the ghosts of their influence; and this could only due by assuming the role of head of family—over her daughters and their husbands—and of the engraving business.

The process of transformation plays itself out further after her departure from the Labadist community. The next year her elder daughter Johanna married Jakob Herold. Though he too had been a Labadist in Wieuwerd, he chose to leave the community, having made himself “unpopular at Walta-state by claiming that the mortifications served only to force certain people to leave,” as Saxby puts it.[54] Very likely, then, Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughters also felt out of place in this strict community and, once older Mrs. Merral had passed away they could depart. For we must assume that it was the Maria Sibylla's mother who was the only person in their family who had a positive and coherent reason for joining it.

The others had a mixture of reasons, none as strong, and so could find various reasons for leaving the Labadist compound. Having sent away and perhaps bought off Graff, the dangers of either a violent outburst or a legal attack had greatly diminished. For the first time in many years, Maria could feel emotionally free enough to follow her career. It was not just that Graff wouldn't bother her, but at a psychological level, that her mother's passing cut certain ties to the childhood doubts and anxieties inherent in the confused dangers a little girl experienced after a succession of deaths, changes, and competing intellectual pressures. Maria Sibylla could now concentrate her efforts on art and science. Yet she had to do one more thing before she could emerge fully from the cocoon of her self-doubts and emotional confusions: she had to undertake what, under "normal" circumstances for a woman of the period would have been an almost impossible adventure, a scientific expedition to Surinam.[55]