EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century

Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers

Sue Edney

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526145680
• eBook ISBN: 9781526145673
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century provides fresh approaches to contemporary ecocritical and environmental debates, providing new, compelling insights into material relationships between vegetal and human beings. Through twelve exciting essays, the collection demonstrates how unseen but vital relationships among plants and their life systems can reflect and inform human behaviours and actions. In these entertaining essays, human and vegetal agency is interpreted through ecocritical and ecoGothic investigation of uncanny manifestations in gardens – hauntings, psychic encounters, monstrous hybrids, fairies and ghosts – with plants, greenhouses, granges, mansions, lakes, lawns, flowerbeds and trees as agents and sites of uncanny developments. The collection represents the forefront of ecoGothic critical debate and will be welcomed by specialists in environmental humanities at every level, as a timely, innovative inclusion in ecoGothic studies.

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Deadly gardens: The ‘Gothic green’ in Goethe and Eichendorff

Heather I. Sullivan

Idyllic gardens so lush and blooming as to seem almost mystical take on an ominously Gothic tone when their grounds or plant life are revealed to have startling power over the human beings who enter their space or alter their layout. In this manner, Joseph von Eichendorff's 1819 romantic fairy tale, The Marble Statue, with its enchanted yet threatening garden of Venus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe's famously enigmatic novel from 1809, Elective Affinities, with its transformation of the Baron's lands into a vast English garden that results in four deaths, can readily be studied with an ecoGothic approach. While both the fairy tale and the novel depict landscapes that appear at first encounter merely as the green backdrop for indulgent party scenes, the gardens in these two texts turn out to be associated with the re-emergence of deadly forces that escape human control.

1 ‘The North Front of Stowe in 1750’, Stowe House, Buckinghamshire. Engraving, George Bickham (1684–1758)

While Allan Lloyd Smith explains that the Gothic ‘is about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present’ (2004: 1), Elizabeth Parker defines the ecoGothic as ‘Gothic stories in which the natural environment, or the elements within it, are eerily ambient and arouse our anxieties’ and that reveal ‘the monstrous in nature’ (2016: 218). Furthermore, Andrew Smith and William Hughes note that such return of the repressed and arousal of anxieties in what should be familiar grounds means that the ecoGothic typically grapples with a ‘crisis of representation’ where ‘the environment is established as a semiotic problem’ (2013: loc. 183). Indeed, since lovely pastoral settings embodying a serene space of retreat in many nature poems, nineteenth-century novels and utopian dreams generally provide such soothing calm that Robert Pogue Harrison describes the garden as a near-universal site of ‘human happiness’ (2008: 1), then the portrayal of gardens as a site with an unexpected and thus terrifying agency creates an inevitable crisis of representation. The characters and readers alike are confronted with the unsettling alteration of a supposedly aesthetic and settled site into a place of horror, as well as the question of what has been repressed and is now ‘returning’ with sway over our lives. Such a return of the repressed exceeding human directive is especially harrowing in a garden of seemingly domesticated plants that act as the very symbol for lives dictated by human power. As Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga make evident in their volume, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016), when plants run amok, it is horrifying. In light of such plant/garden horror, I propose in this chapter a more specific sub-category of the ecoGothic, the ‘Gothic green’, in which the human is, in some way, subsumed by vegetal forces.

Viewing gardens as scenes of the Gothic green should not surprise since such aesthetic horticultural sites always contain both material and mythological power. On the one hand, gardens represent the visible power of the landed aristocracy (or the state) to create large-scale aesthetic spaces for pleasure while also functioning as physical support of daily food in the widespread kitchen gardens. And on the other hand, all gardens retain a mythological edge related to the supernatural sites such as the Garden of Eden and others. Gardens thus connote potentially both the materiality supporting our existence and the ethereal powers of destiny not entirely in our hands, and are hence readily integrated into the ecoGothic, as Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils describe it. They compare how the Gothic grapples with forms of ‘entrapment’, whereas the ecoGothic:

not only takes up … questions about our very being (such as who we are) but also more particular questions of determinism and freedom, especially as these questions play out through a long history and on the limit edges of what we think we know about the human – and what shapes or ‘possesses’ the human. (Keetley and Sivils 2018: 4)

Hence, if the traditional Gothic typically has gloomy castles and landscapes associated with a dark, possibly supernatural and definitely historical destiny that resituates the human and from which we cannot escape, the ecoGothic tends, in contrast, to trap human beings in uncertain status dominated by long-term natural and physical forces revealed not only in dramatic storms, flooding and our bodily natures but also in daily encounters such as the never-ending battle against weeds when gardening. Richard Mabey's Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants makes the case that weeds, as we arbitrarily define them according to our own whims and as the dark side of our own 10,000-year history of agriculture, will always haunt us with their wild refusal to ‘play by our rules’ (2010: 20). The very nature of the garden demands that some plants belong, whereas others do not and are hence ‘weeds’, regardless of their relevance otherwise.

The ecoGothic shows how the presumably clear categories dividing the human and nonhuman are, in fact, artificial and shifting (as with the definition of weeds), thereby undermining our presumed status as fully independent, self-determining beings able to control the natural world from the outside. Consequently, ecoGothic texts tend to grapple with the problem of representing the (re-)integration of the human into the so-called ‘laws of nature’. When such ‘laws’ pertain especially to the vegetal realm, we speak of the Gothic green that constantly eludes our control. Indeed, as cultivated settings, gardens make most visible both the active work of humans in shaping plant life and the startling refusal of nonhuman life to conform to our demands. In this way, gardens can be more Gothic than other more expectedly uncanny landscapes such as a dark swamp or the standard ‘wildness’ of a vast forest, the supposed antithesis of culture as per Robert Pogue Harrison's formulation in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992). The Gothic green seeks to describe and represent how human bodily relationships to the nonhuman vegetal function, especially in gardens. Human beings certainly may seem to dominate such cultivated sites, yet perceiving that we are actually situated within the power of green materiality can awaken a sense of ecoGothic doom.

Exemplifying ecoGothic ‘fears of more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies’ (Keetley and Sivils 2018: 1) and, in particular, of the vegetal exuberance of the Gothic green, the narratives from Eichendorff and Goethe uncomfortably re-place the fate of human beings into natural processes and botanical energies beyond human control. Eichendorff's Marble Statue features deadly scenes of seduction in the garden when the dangerously alluring and (in his Catholic view) demonic Venus emerges, seeking to lure Florio into a world of the horrifyingly endless cycle of botanic nature that represents the earthly body. Only a properly chaste song wafting over from the poet Fortunato saves Florio, bringing him back into homosocial appreciation and out of the horrifically botanical exuberance of fertile ‘feminine’ nature that eternally (or at least every spring) threatens to return the human soul to ancient cycles of materiality. The expansive gardens in Goethe's Elective Affinities, on the other hand, seem to offer fitting aesthetic and land-shaping activity for otherwise under-tasked aristocrats. Charlotte and Edward's plan to transform his expansive grounds into an English garden mark their late marriage as an exercise in self-determination and the active shaping of their material surroundings; they also mirror Goethe's own landscaping tasks at his house at Frauenplan, Weimar. The novel's famous play with the question of inevitable chemical attractions and repulsions giving the book its title of ‘elective affinities’ already suggests that the main characters will enter a test-tube of experimental mixings beyond conscious choice (the elective is determined by physical laws, not human whim, or so it seems). Hence it is not so surprising when these very gardens dominating the aristocrats’ activities stage not control but rather a lack of control over unexpected attractions as ‘natural forces’ that eventually lead to four deaths. The gardens are not just idyllic imaginaries, but part of the very materiality essential to the Gothic green and material ecocriticism alike. In both Goethe and Eichendorff, these green sites set the stage for what appear to be humanly determined acts but that are tinged by the mysterious physicality and power befitting the ecoGothic.

In Eichendorff's Marble Statue, a palace garden is the dangerous site of Venus's threatening re-emergence every spring as an embodiment of nature's lush and cyclical powers that seek to seduce young naive males. Giving in to the seduction of the Venus garden means losing one's ‘Christian’ path and falling into nocturnal wanderings among ruins that are the entrance drug for eternal loss of one's soul. Venus's repetitive cyclical return every spring takes on a nightmarish tinge when understood through the lens of ‘plant horror’ as described by Keetley (2016). Keetley describes the wildly living power of plant life as its most frightening aspect: ‘At its most basic, plant horror marks humans’ dread of the “wildness” of vegetal nature – its untameability, its pointlessness, its uncontrollable growth’ (1). She adds: ‘Plant growth always breaks what seeks to contain it, transgressing borders meant to confine and define’ (13). Like the untameable plants, Venus and her garden wildly exceed almost any boundaries, threatening to transgress moral sensibilities and vegetal delimitations. Yet it is not just Venus who has botanical associations in Eichendorff's fairy tale; after all, the protagonist's name, Florio, itself suggests the floral. He must experience and overcome his own flowery nature.

One night while visiting Lucca, young Florio cannot sleep and so wanders through the moonlit grounds until he encounters the titular marble statue of Venus in a little lake. Florio's gaze animates Venus's shapely figure, and she seems to gain life and stare back at him until bright moonlight suddenly exposes her cold stone eyes, evoking the Gothic horror of a ghost: ‘the statue of Venus, fearfully white and motionless, stared at him from the marble sockets of its eyes, out of the infinite stillness, almost like a phantom’ (Eichendorff 1983: 144). Overcome by horror, Florio rushes back to the hotel, yet he is inspired to seek her again the next day. Venus's frightening attributes are clearly Gothic, but we immediately thereafter learn that they are, even more so, Gothic green in tone. Indeed, the garden is her realm and it is a zone of portentous materiality that Florio finally discovers after a long walk in the heat of the day. He eventually encounters a shady entrance to a hidden garden with tall birches, ‘golden birds’, ‘great strange flowers’ and innumerable fountains that ‘splashed monotonously in the great solitude’ behind which was the ‘shimmer of a splendid palace with tall, slender columns. No human being was in sight anywhere; deep silence reigned all around’ (147). Florio senses the languid danger of this garden: ‘he had a strange sensation, as if everything had long been submerged and the flowing stream of time were passing over him with its clear and gentle waves, and the garden were lying deep beneath, bound by a magic spell’ (147). In the distance, he sees a mysterious woman (Venus) amid the wildly colourful flowers, her lovely body in a blue dress, singing provocatively about how spring has woken her again. Florio loses sight of her but finds instead her helper, Donati, sleeping as if dead among the inevitably Gothic ruins. Deathly pale, Donati is startled upon waking and cries out, ‘How … did you get into this garden?’ (149). It is the garden of Venus who cycles awake with each spring; in other words, Eichendorff connects the seasonal flourishing of the botanical to ancient mythological powers. Indeed, Venus's garden draws Florio into her magnificent realm because of its florid, fleshy materiality which includes her body that was stone, but is now reanimating.

The Marble Statue establishes Florio's choice of mates: either the socially determined and chaste Bianca who is described as a young girl or an androgynous figure, or the florid, hyper-feminine Venus who exists in her alluring garden. In the grand Venus finale, it seems that Florio does not so much make a choice but rather is saved by spiritual and poetic intervention. Thus, Florio and Donati return to the garden at the end of the tale: ‘They had not ridden far when they saw the palace rising above them, serene in the splendour of its columns, surrounded by the beautiful garden as if by a happy garland of flowers’ (160). Venus, dressed in sky-blue, is adorned with roses, herself a garden of risk. All around her, numerous young women hold up a mirror so that she can consider her own beauty while they sing like nightingales in an overly determined poetic vision of lustful materiality, female self-assertion and floral seduction. As Venus's power expands, her pagan garden spirits reawaken, to walk among the alluring ‘fields of blossoms’, and beautiful girls emerge ‘from the flowers as if waking from midday dreams’ (161). The powerfully dangerous garden delights coming out of the blossoms manifest themselves with ecoGothic materiality. Yet, the Gothic aspects truly take form when Florio follows Venus into her palace for the final seduction. Eichendorff does not leave Florio to his fate, nor does he allow his protagonist to make his own decision about which female is the correct one, but rather interrupts the seduction with the suggestively divine intervention of lightning that distracts the young man and brings him to the window, where he is fortunate enough to experience the second form of intervention, the poetic and piously Christian tune sung by the poet Fortunato. The music awakens Florio to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Foreword: On the Gothic nature of gardens
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers
• 1 Deadly gardens: The ‘Gothic green’ in Goethe and Eichendorff
• 2 ‘Diabolic clouds over everything’: An ecoGothic reading of John Ruskin’s garden at Brantwood
• 3 The Gothic orchard of the Victorian imagination
• 4 Gothic Eden: Gardens, religious tradition and ecoGothic exegesis in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Lost Valley’ and ‘The Transfer’
• 5 ‘That which roars further out’: Gardens and wilderness in ‘The Man who Went too Far’ by E. F. Benson and ‘The Man whom the Trees Loved’ by Algernon Blackwood
• 6 Darwin’s plants and Darwin’s gardens: Sex, sensation and natural selection
• 7 ‘Tentacular thinking’ and the ‘abcanny’ in Hawthorne’s Gothic gardens of masculine egotism
• 8 Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femmes fatales
• 9 Death and the fairy: Hidden gardens and the haunting of childhood
• 10 Presence and absence in Tennyson’s gardens of grief: ‘Mariana’, Maud and Somersby
• 11 Blackwater Park and the haunting of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
• Afterword: Z Vesper, the Wilderness Garden, Powis Castle
• Index