Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Dawn Keetley, Matthew Sivils, Dawn Keetley, Matthew Wynn Sivils

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315464916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 2017. The first of its kind to address the ecogothic in American literature, this collection of fourteen articles illuminates a new and provocative literacy category, one that exists at the crossroads of the gothic and the environmental imagination, of fear and the ecosystems we inhabit.

1 “Perverse Nature”

Anxieties of Animality and Environment in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly

Tom J. Hillard

Ian Marshall has argued that “nature is the chief determinant of plot in Edgar Huntly,” and those familiar with Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel will undoubtedly agree.¹ Set just after the American Revolution, Brown’s sometimes sprawling gothic fiction is ostensibly a murder mystery, with the title character searching for the unknown killer of his friend Waldegrave; but along the way, Huntly’s investigations lead him on a circuitous odyssey deep into the heart of Norwalk, a shadowy wilderness region in eastern Pennsylvania where he encounters a labyrinthine natural world, aggressive panthers, the violence of the Delaware Indians who reside there, and, ultimately, aspects of his own internal darkness. Indeed, much has been published about the “frontier” elements of Edgar Huntly, and scholars have long noted the centrality of its rural setting as an attempt by Brown to adapt the castles and monasteries that were hallmarks of British gothic fiction to the wilderness settings of North America. Even so, most who have written about the presence of “nature” in Brown’s novel have tended to discuss it in circumscribed ways, reading Brown’s representations of the external natural world as primarily symbolic. Jared Gardner rightly observes that since Leslie Fiedler’s analysis in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), critics have assumed that in Edgar Huntly, “the landscape is internal, the shadows and doubles are projections of the divided self of the narrator, and the Indians are figures for the ‘dark’ (uncivilized, savage) nature with which Edgar must do violent battle.”² In other words, the maze-like and often confusing forests, hills, and precipices that Huntly repeatedly traverses are seen as exterior symbols of his interior condition.

Brown himself aimed for something more than just symbolism. When an initial excerpt of Edgar Huntly appeared in the April 1799 issue of the Monthly Magazine as an advertisement for the forthcoming book, Brown included a claim to geographical verisimilitude. His preface to the excerpt explained, “Those who have ranged along the foot of the Blue-Ridge, from the Wind-gap to the Water-gap, will see the exactness of the local descriptions.”³ Moreover, in the novel’s preface, Brown famously makes the claim that he is presenting “the perils of the western wilderness … in vivid and faithful colours.”⁴ Dennis Berthold has noted that while “the landscape descriptions in the novel hardly conform to cartographic reality as precisely as Brown implies, they are clearly intended to be more particularized than many critics acknowledge.” While most of Brown’s place names are fictional, the novel is set in an actual region on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, “about fifty miles north of Philadelphia and just southwest of Stroudsburg.”⁵ The “Blue-Ridge,” the “Wind-gap,” and the “Water-gap” are real places, and thus, at least some literal geographic truth lies beneath the layers of symbolism that have tended to preoccupy readers of Brown’s landscapes.

My point, however, is not to argue that Brown was a faithful and meticulous chronicler of the natural world in the manner of his naturalist contemporaries (such as Thomas Jefferson, William Bartram, or others); other scholars have amply identified the vagueness and imprecision of the novel’s landscape descriptions. Nor do I intend to catalogue the real-world locales that the fictional Huntly might have traveled through, interesting though such a study may be.⁶ Instead, I argue that it is important to recognize that in Edgar Huntly, Brown did try to render “the perils of the western wilderness … in vivid and faithful colours.” He did strive for a degree of accurate representation. And even if he wasn’t faithful to all the geographic and botanical facts, Brown adhered to many eighteenth-century human perceptions of them. That is, Huntly’s travails in the rough landscape of Norwalk and beyond accurately depict a range of ways many Euro-Americans experienced the natural world in the early national era. More importantly, the range of perceptions of “nature” found in Edgar Huntly (and in the character Huntly) reveal deep-seated cultural anxieties about the relationship of the inhabitants of the new nation to the nonhuman nature amid which they lived.

It is thus that I bring an ecogothic approach to Brown’s novel. While some scholars have been working at the intersections of gothic studies and ecocriticism for a number of years, the term “ecogothic” is a fairly recent neologism, and it deserves some discussion here. Andrew Smith and William Hughes were the first to bring significant attention to it, with their 2013 essay collection, EcoGothic. But despite the wide-ranging chapters in that volume and Smith and Hughes’s Introduction, the word itself remains ambiguous, with scholars seeming to use it to indicate at times a genre and at others a more loosely defined literary mode. David Del Principe has further developed a definition in a special issue of Gothic Studies (May 2014) devoted to the “EcoGothic,” in which he calls it an “emerging field of critical inquiry.”⁷ In this latter sense, ecogothic is a useful term, one that points toward a praxis, a way of examining a text, rather than a more rigidly defined genre. In my approach to the gothic (which is itself something of a contested term), I find most useful the definitions articulated by Jerrold E. Hogle, who notes that the gothic is “an unsettling but pervasive mode of expression” in American literature, one that “helps us address and disguise some of the most important desires and quandaries, and sources of anxiety, from the most internal and mental to the widely social and cultural.” Similarly, I follow the lead of Teresa A. Goddu, who identifies the ways that American literature often uses “gothic effects at key moments to register cultural contradictions.”⁸ The value of this new term ecogothic is that it provides specific language to describe what happens when we read such gothic effects and moments ecocritically—that is, with an eye toward understanding how they also register concerns related to environment or ecology in the broadest senses.

Recent scholarship on Brown has begun to bring a specifically ecocritical lens to analyzing his work. Most notably, Matthew Wynn Sivils has published several pieces on Edgar Huntly, and he has thus established the novel’s significant role amid current discussions about ecocriticism and the gothic; I hope for this essay to build upon the strong foundation he has laid.⁹ In one essay, Sivils offers a compelling reading of Edgar Huntly’s influence on James Fenimore Cooper and John Neal and their development of “an American landscape haunted by human trauma,” yet he notes that the novel’s setting is “a Pennsylvania wilderness far more psychological than tangible” and that it this remains “an unconvincing landscape.”¹⁰ Without discounting the book’s undoubtedly psychological preoccupations or ignoring its lack of geographical precision, I want to step into the gap Sivils opens and push the analysis in another direction: what happens when we do read the “wilderness” of Edgar Huntly as “tangible”? Or, more to the point, what happens when we read the novel as one told by a living being (Huntly) who possesses a body and exists in a system of natural phenomena—an environment—that is equally teeming with life and matter? In short, I want to break down the human/nature divide and read Brown’s novel, not solely as the story a young man struggling to come to terms with the external natural world of the Pennsylvania “frontier.” Instead, I argue that gothic dimensions of the novel can be read as a young man who has learned that, despite his wishes, his own physical, bodily self is as much an agent in his experiences as is his conscious, rational mind; moreover, his own body/self is but one small player in a much larger system of things. As the novel bears out, Huntly’s strongest desires to maintain a grip on his Enlightenment-era sense of independent selfhood and agency crumble as he realizes that the boundaries between the human and more-than-human world are penetrable and unstable—and may be entirely social constructions.

Such anxieties about body and environment can be read productively in the context of the recent “material turn” in ecocriticism—a developing theoretical shift that focuses attention on the role and agency of the body, materiality, and matter in general. Stacy Alaimo, one of the key voices in this movement, notes that “[i]magining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlies the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’” Such a recognition of the “mesh” of all matter, and particularly the amount of agency all matter has in shaping the human and more-than-human world, is potentially revolutionary. As Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann contend,

All narratives that explore and challenge the borders between the ‘inner’ self and the ‘outer’ world in terms of materiality, of causality, of intertwined agency are de facto part of a project of liberation—a cultural, ecological, ontological, and material liberation…. It is liberation from dualisms, from ideal subjugations, from the perceptual limits that prevent our moral imagination from appreciating the vibrant multiplicity of the world.¹¹

Material ecocriticism does indeed have the potential to be liberating. But the implications of such a liberation can also be deeply unsettling, even terrifying—and this, I argue, is what the ecogothic elements of Edgar Huntly reflect. Del Principe hints at this possibility (but without directly addressing the recent material turn) when he explains that “the EcoGothic examines the construction of the Gothic body—unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid—through a more inclusive lens, asking how it can be more meaningfully understood as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity.” Because the gothic has nearly always addressed (often in monstrous forms) things that individuals (or cultures) have repressed or denied—or would like to repress or deny—these other ways of imagining humans, bodies, and matter often carry gothic inflections. For instance, Alaimo observes that “Those particular sites of interconnection demand attention to the materiality of the human and to the immediacy and potency of all that the ostensibly bounded, human subject would like to disavow.”¹² In short, a material ecocritical approach points to the frailty of long-standing Western world assumptions about the autonomous and unique elements of being human—independent individuals above, apart, and, usually, superior to the rest of the phenomenal world. And reading the “tangible” aspects of Edgar Huntly reveals a narrative about the eighteenth-century fears and horrors that can arise upon recognizing such frailty.

* * *

From the opening pages, it’s clear that Huntly (the first-person narrator) is a typical late eighteenth-century subject, educated by Enlightenment principles and with a propensity for romantic appreciation for the natural world. In fact, the first half of Edgar Huntly is dominated by picturesque renderings of the natural world that evoke the aesthetics developed by the likes of Edmund Burke and William Gilpin as well as the Italian landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvatore Rosa, which had become widely influential by the 1790s.¹³ Huntly begins his tale by describing a nighttime walk home through scenes “romantic and wild,” which “was more congenial to [his] temper than a noon-day ramble” (7). Renewing his quest to discover who killed his friend Waldegrave and visiting once more the scene of the crime, he “climbed the steeps, crept through the brambles, leapt the rivulets and fences with undeviating aim, till at length [he] reached the craggy and obscure path” (9). Having “arrived at the verge of a considerable precipice,” Huntly sees a “dreary vale … embarrassed with the leafless stocks of bushes, and encumbered with rugged and pointed rocks” (19). This is Norwalk, “in the highest degree, rugged, picturesque and wild,” and it represents Huntly’s vision of the natural world in these early pages as quintessentially picturesque (19). The protagonist’s education in the Enlightenment natural history of his era is also strong, with Huntly having often rambled outdoors with his mentor to seek “picturesque scenes” and also to explore “botanical and mineral productions” (97). He clearly has a naturalist’s eye, as is apparent in his description of Norwalk:

The basis of all this region is limestone; a substance that eminently abounds in rifts and cavities. These, by the gradual decay of their cementing parts, frequently make their appearance in spots where they might have been least expected…. A mountain-cave and the rumbling of an unseen torrent, are … dear to my youthful imagination.

(22)

This is a man who has a basic scientific understanding—for his era—of the environment around him.

However, such a conventional eighteenth-century picturesque vision of nature begins to break down. Many of the hardships presented by the comparatively rough and untamed landscapes of North America made importing the European aesthetics and the type of nature tourism associated with them “unsuccessful and even ludicrous,” to borrow Beth Lueck’s words.¹⁴ Huntly’s repeated forays into the wilds to search for the mysterious Clithero Edny reveal to him the challenges created by the physical region. He understands that “to subsist in this desert was impossible” and that it “could not be uninterruptedly enjoyed” without returning to more settled areas for provisions (95). Even Huntly, who boasts that “no one was more acquainted with this wilderness than I,...