EcoGothic

Andrew Smith, William Hughes

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526102928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book will provide the first study of how the Gothic engages with ecocritical ideas. Ecocriticism has frequently explored images of environmental catastrophe, the wilderness, the idea of home, constructions of 'nature', and images of the post-apocalypse – images which are also central to a certain type of Gothic literature. By exploring the relationship between the ecocritical aspects of the Gothic and the Gothic elements of the ecocritical, this book provides a new way of looking at both the Gothic and ecocriticism. Writers discussed include Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Dan Simmons and Rana Dasgupta. The volume thus explores writing and film across various national contexts including Britain, America and Canada, as well as giving due consideration to how such issues might be discussed within a global context.

1

Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Introduction: defining the ecoGothic

This volume is the first to explore the Gothic through theories of ecocriticism; its appearance might seem timely given current concerns about climate change which have helped shape an ecological awareness, but in fact the belated presence of this volume should be surprising when we consider the history of criticism on the Romantic Gothic. That the ecological has been hitherto overlooked in accounts of the Romantic Gothic is strange given the critical synergies that exist between accounts of Romanticism and the Gothic that go back to Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1933). This is not to suggest that the Gothic exists only as an offshoot of Romanticism, but to acknowledge that shared critical languages exist between the two. To that degree Jonathan Bate’s seminal Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) seems an odd omission from Gothic consideration and one which this Introduction will address by briefly sketching a point of origin for an ecologically aware Gothic that has its roots within the Romantic, and not just within recent environmental concerns.

Bate argues that a ‘green reading of Wordsworth’ moves the critic into a Romantic vision because:

if one historicizes the idea of an ecological viewpoint – a respect for the earth and a scepticism as to the orthodoxy that economic growth and material production are the be-all and end-all of human society – one finds oneself squarely in the Romantic tradition.¹

This, however, raises the question of whether the Gothic vision is a more troubling one. In part this is because of that key Gothic term: ambivalence. The type of questioning posed by the Gothic has traditionally raised concerns about its political orientations. How the Gothic’s representation of ‘evil’ can be used for radical or reactionary ends becomes an important consideration within this context. Certainly it poses a different order of problem than that encountered by Bate, who argues that Wordsworth’s pastoral extols a life free from the dictates of capitalism which means (pace Coleridge) that ‘pastoral life begets republicanism’, due to its comparative political and economic freedoms.² The problem with the Gothic is that, at one level, ‘nature’ is a more contested term as it is one which (at least in its post-Radcliffean guise) appears to participate in a language of estrangement rather than belonging. For Bate, it is Ruskin (the inheritor of Wordsworth’s model of nature) who identifies this problem of alienation as one which reflects the fragmented subject who is forced to work within the divided labour system of industrial capitalism. In his chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ from The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Ruskin argues that ‘It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men: – Divided into segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life.’³ This contrasts with the more holistic approach to nature taken by the Romantics. However, it is the image of fragments which seems to persist in the Gothic and it meets its clearest expression in Victor Frankenstein’s horror at his first sight of the patchwork creation that is his creature:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.⁴

This disjunction between the utopian idealism of the project and its dystopian aftermath is intended as a critique of a Romantic idealism which asserts that nature can be apprehended as natural rather than cultural. The creature’s function is to challenge what is meant by nature and to erode Victor’s sense that nature represents a transcendent category of experience. To that degree Frankenstein (1818; revised 1831) can be read as the dark shadow that critiques a Wordsworthian model of nature. This is also manifested in how the novel ends (and indeed begins), in the ecological dead zone of the polar ice cap. Nature fails to signify as anything other than a type of blankness which also demonstrates a crisis of representation. This means that the environment is established as a semiotic problem, one which is addressed in this volume by Catherine Lanone in a chapter centring on Arctic voyages that have been shaped by Shelley’s novel.

Bate addresses the issue of naming as one which is rooted in the Bible and in Paradise Lost (1667). Bate sees Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ (1800) as a reworking of Adam’s responsibility to name the animals in Milton’s version of the biblical injunction in Paradise Lost. This gives Adam control over nature, but also symbolically represents Wordsworth’s poetic mastery over nature. This means that for Bate, while images of rustic life might constitute ‘idealizations’ in Wordsworth, they are ‘worth making in order to bring writer and reader back to nature’.⁵ Writing thus serves to make present a meaningful sense of the ecological by inserting both reader and writer into arealm in which meaning can be generated in an unmediated way. This leads Bate to argue that the sequence of poems in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) begins with Schiller’s conception of the Sentimental (in which the poet is self-conscious about their reflections) and progressively embraces the Naive (in which one confronts experience in a seemingly unmediated fashion).⁶ Lyrical Ballads thus represents an attempt to get back to nature and this is a journey which is, as this volume testifies, more problematically constructed in the Gothic. Victor Frankenstein’s creature, an auditor of Paradise Lost, repeatedly refers to himself as a potential Adam (as a type of first man – one who sees Victor as his God), but his language is second-hand and he has no authority to name and so claim ownership over nature. Instead he is unable to discriminate between fact and fiction and he is excluded from the utopian vision of the De Lacey family and their warm cottage-life and propelled towards the dystopian cold blankness of the polar ice cap. Frankenstein thus reverses the tendency of the Lyrical Ballads as it heads towards death, alienation and emptiness. The Romantic Gothic, in other words, does the ecological in a different way to the Romantics, but its presumptive dystopianism (certainly in Mary Shelley’s case) illustrates how nature becomes constituted in the Gothic as a space of crisis which conceptually creates a point of contact with the ecological. As in the creature’s problem in Frankenstein, the key issue is how to find a language which ‘owns’ the ecological and so anchor it as a site of coherent meaning.

This very brief sketch of how Frankenstein can be read as repositioning the ecological beyond a Wordsworthian tradition is intended to give a flavour of how the Gothic approaches environmental factors. This issue of meaning touched on above is central to the Gothic (at least in its more radical guises) as it variously questions, compromises and challenges the way in which the world has been understood. The Romantic context sketched here is one addressed in the opening chapter of this book by Lisa Kröger. However, debates about the environment are also nationally inflected and Bate acknowledges an alternative North American strand of ecological writing that was inaugurated by Thoreau’s Walden (1854). The role of the wilderness and the frontier is a recurring motif in American fiction. Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) provides an interesting counterpoint to Frankenstein; it, too, is a voyage narrative and centres on a monomaniacal attempt to tame nature. The whiteness of the whale constitutes a blankness which cannot be read by ‘unlettered Ishmael’, and which echoes the whiteness of the polar cap.⁷ In some ways this appears to be a gloss on Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) which concludes on a mysterious white figure that brings the voyage to an end, where Pym notes ‘there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.’⁸ However, these images are surrounded by an aura of menace, whereas in Frankenstein there is a contrary feeling of fatigued, and so failed, revenge.⁹ The landscape in the North American context seems to invite mastery through images of the frontier and this dynamic is explored in a number of essays in this volume which address changing representations of the wilderness in American and Canadian Gothic writings and films. Such issues have been shaped by ecocriticism and this volume explores how current ideas about ecocriticism can be applied to Gothic narratives in order to help draw out their often dystopian ecological visions. Ecocriticism also acknowledges a number of theoretical paradigms that help to critically reinvigorate debate about the class, gender and national identities that inhere within representations of the landscape. To that end this volume also makes explicit these links in a chapter by Emily Carr which explores how ecocritical issues can be aligned with feminist praxis, illuminated by an analysis of Gothic texts by Joy Williams.

There are national variations in what might be termed the ecological. The British Romantic Gothic can be contrasted to a post-Thoreauvian North American tradition, for example. However, Sharae Deckard, in an innovative concluding essay on Rana Dasgupta, explores how far it might be possible to establish a global geopolitical context for an ecocritical engagement with the Gothic and images of the ecological. This volume thus begins a debate on how we might examine the cultural and national diversity of the environment through a number of critical prisms that are linked to the ecocritical.

Debates about climate change and environmental damage have been key issues on most industrialized countries’ political agendas for some time. These issues have helped shape the direction and application of ecocritical languages. The Gothic seems to be the form which is well placed to capture these anxieties and provides a culturally significant point of contact between literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process. While the origins of this ecoGothic can be traced back to Romanticism the growth in environmental awareness has become a significant development. The political urgency of ecological issues is often self-consciously elaborated in many of the contemporary novels and films which are discussed here.

The structure of the volume broadly follows national trends, beginning with a British tradition, moving through a Canadian context, and then through a specifically American model of the ecoGothic, before concluding with Deckard’s discussion of a possible global context which could overcome national variations.

Lisa Kröger, in ‘Panic, paranoia and pathos: ecocriticism in the eighteenth-century Gothic novel’, argues that an overview of Gothic criticism would seem to suggest that the castle and the convent are the only spaces which the Gothic inhabits because critics often overlook the third space: the forest. Kröger’s examination of these forested spaces reveals that the early Gothic novel foreshadows an ecologically aware society, one in which the heroines are often depicted as sympathetic to their surroundings. One example is Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Emily St Aubert is connected to nature – so much so that she is ignorant of any other way of life. Emily’s experience of nature is feral, almost primitive, as she gleans both solace and inspiration from the natural world. The forest is not, however, an entirely idyllic space. The benevolent nature of the pastoral lands eventually gives way to a darker, more sublime environment. During his visit to the St Auberts, Monsieur Quesnel indicates that he wants to chop down the chestnut trees, an idea that horrifies Emily and her father. In most of these novels, the desecration of the natural world is met with psychological trauma and can usually be traced to an oppressive ruling power (a structure which mirrors modern conceptions of a feminized nature attacked by a patriarchy – technology, industry or even society itself). As the attack on nature progresses in these novels, the environments become more frightening. Using the works of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and the Marquis de Sade, Kröger’s chapter explores the dual nature of the Gothic environment and how it foreshadows modern ecocriticism, particularly an awareness of wilderness preservation and the fear of an impending environmental catastrophe.

In ‘Monsters on the ice and global warming: from Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons’, Catherine Lanone argues that, from chilling Victorian panoramas to films such as Frankenstein or The Thing (1951) the Arctic looms large as a blank screen on which fantasies of Gothic entrapment may be projected. At a time when global warming turns the sheltering ice and starving bears into the victims of hubris rather than the monsters of yore, Lanone considers the evolving versions of ice monsters, beginning with Mary Shelley’s paradigmatic hideous creature, drawing Victor farther and farther north and emblematizing Shelley’s uneasiness about colonial conquest. Lanone argues that the fate of the 1845 Franklin expedition located the monster within the self, as the myth of British technological progress was inverted into a tale of disaster complete with rumours of cannibalism among the crew. The Franklin story haunts the twentieth century, from Margaret Atwood’s 1991 short story ‘The Age of Lead’ (in which Franklin’s spectacular disaster portrayed on TV becomes a metaphor for waste, pollution and the mysterious diseases both trigger) to Dan Simmons’s loose, baggy monster of a novel, The Terror (2007). Rewriting the 1845 Franklin expedition, The Terror gives a Gothic twist to the tale, adding to the frozen ships a gigantic mysterious white Thing that plagues the crew, cunningly maiming, killing and wreaking havoc. Lanone thus explores how Gothic motifs are transposed and used to raise complex, urgent environmental issues, addressing global warming through the metaphor of the lost expedition.

David Punter, in ‘Algernon Blackwood: nature and spirit’, explores selected tales of Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), who was regarded in his time as one of the great masters of the supernatural short story. The particular stories under discussion are ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’ (1912), ‘The Willows’ (1907) and ‘The Lost Valley’ (1910). Punter’s principal concern is to show some of the ways in which Blackwood blurs the distinctions between the human world and a wider natural and spiritual ecology. In his stories human beings are constantly shown as being at the mercy of larger forces of nature, such that, for example, Bittacy, the forest-ranger protagonist of ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’, eventually becomes ‘one with the trees’, being subsumed into a different life which is only barely comprehensible to the fellow humans whom he has left behind. In the course of the discussion, Punter examines the relations between nature and spirit in relation to similar concerns found in Hegel, principally in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821–31). Punter draws attention to the possibilities which might be contained within this fiction of ‘writing like the forest’, or ‘writing as the forest’. These are an extension – before the fact – of the considerations offered by Deleuze and Guattari in their conceptualization of ‘becoming’: ‘becoming-animal’ or ‘becoming-woman’, for example, which are relevant to Blackwood’s version of ‘becoming-forest’, which he underpins with an eclectic mix of theology, philosophy and mythopoeia.¹⁰ Punter argues that, while it would be obviously terminologically incorrect to think of Blackwood directly in ‘ecological’ terms, the kinds of consciousness he is attempting to describe are eminently suited to responding to an ecological criticism, which enables the stories to yield a new life that places the concept of the ‘supernatural’ itself in a different light.

William Hughes, in ‘“A strange kind of evil”: superficial paganism and false ecology in The Wicker Man’, argues that The Wicker Man (1973) has not yet attracted a significant body of criticism from a specifically Gothic perspective. This is surprising, giv...