The Prohibition Against Bringing May Flowers Indoors

The Prohibition Against Bringing May Flowers Indoors is a household taboo that Christabel LaMotte turns into both a concrete detail of domestic life and a figure for controlled access. In a letter, she evokes hawthorn heavy with pink and creamy blossoms and an almond-sweet scent, but refuses to say where the tree stands or how old or large it is. Its presence is disclosed; its exact reality is withheld. The May must not be brought into the house, and the prohibition gives the imagined flower a charged place at the threshold between invitation and refusal.

The Rule in Domestic Life

LaMotte presents the taboo while teasing her correspondent about the limits of what she will reveal. She offers a “small Clue” about the house and its surroundings, then names the hawthorn without supplying enough particulars to make it fully knowable. The blossoms are described as “Paradisal and Dangerous,” an alluring presence whose sweetness seems almost excessive, yet the rule keeps them outdoors. The prohibition is not explained as a practical necessity; its force lies in the boundary it establishes and in the imaginative possibilities that boundary opens.

Threshold, Secrecy, and Imagination

The taboo belongs to a wider pattern in LaMotte’s letter, where domestic space and poetic imagination are linked to thresholds and prohibitions. She describes herself as being, like the May, only a “threshold-presence, by decree,” and reflects on places made compelling by being enclosed or barred. In her account of riding in Richmond Park, restrictions on entry make the forbidden space more vivid, while the possibility of being invited inside remains unresolved. The May rule likewise keeps the desired thing near but not possessed: the correspondent can imagine the flower and its setting, but cannot simply cross from suggestion to complete knowledge.

The arrangement also gives the letter a form of playful control. LaMotte offers clues while reserving the right to confound the reader’s imaginings; withholding is not an absence of communication so much as one of its methods. The taboo lets her make a domestic custom carry the larger tension between disclosure and privacy, and between access granted by invitation and access assumed without permission.

Literary and Thematic Significance

The rule’s significance rests on that double movement. The flowers are described sensuously, and their exclusion intensifies rather than cancels their appeal. By keeping the hawthorn outside the house, the taboo preserves it as an object of thought and poetic imagining instead of allowing it to become an ordinary domestic possession. This echoes LaMotte’s broader attention to women’s spaces and to the limits imposed on entry, while leaving the rule itself unexplained. The passage does not establish why May flowers must remain outdoors; it makes the prohibition’s imaginative and relational effects its focus.