Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 9781138206458, 9781315464930

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Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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. The volume explores topics such as ecophobia (dread of nature), extinction and ecological crisis, environmental injustices (particularly as they intersect with racial oppression), and human interactions with all forms of the nonhuman: animals, plants, oceans, swamps, and the climate. Chapters examine works by, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Chestnutt, and Leonora Sansay. A provocative intervention in conversations about how the ecogothic permeates the American long nineteenth century, this collection shapes diverse formulations of the ways in which “nature” always seems to be becoming uncanny, monstrous, and haunting—thus plotting the path of a new critical approach. Dawn Keetley is Professor of English at Lehigh University, author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s ­Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), and co-editor of Plant ­Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film ­( Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2016). Matthew Wynn Sivils is Professor of English at Iowa State University and the author of American Environmental Fiction, 1782 –1847 ­(Ashgate/ Routledge, 2014).

Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment

1 Captivity Literature and the Environment Nineteenth-Century American Cross-Cultural Collaborations Kyhl D. Lyndgaard 2 Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils

Ecogothic in NineteenthCentury American Literature

Edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-20645-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-46493-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic

1

DAW N K E E T L E Y A N D M AT T H E W W Y N N S I V I L S

1 “Perverse Nature”: Anxieties of Animality and Environment in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly

21

TOM J. H I L L A R D

2 “A Heap of Ruins”: The Horrors of Deforestation in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History

37

LISA M. V ET ER E

3 “The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”: Landscapes of Slavery in The History of Mary Prince

51

A M A N DA S T U C K E Y

4 “Give me my skin”: William J. Snelling’s “A Night in the Woods” (1836) and the Gothic Accusation Against Buffalo Extinction

65

J I M M Y L . B RYA N J R .

5 Failures to Signify: Poe’s Uncanny Animal Others

83

K AT E H U B E R

6 Gothic Materialisms: Experimenting with Fire and Water in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of (Im)mortality

96

LIZ HUTTER

7 “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and the Ecogothic L E S L E Y G I N S B E RG

114

vi Contents 8 Ghoulish Hinterlands: Ecogothic Confrontations in American Slave Narratives

134

Jer icho W illi a ms

9 Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees: The Ecogothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice

147

Ca r i M. Ca r pen t er

10 Vegetal Haunting: The Gothic Plant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

161

M at t h e w W y n n S i v i l s

11 Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth

175

Jen nifer Schell

12 Hyperobjects and the End of the World: Elemental Antagonists of American Naturalism

191

J ef f r ey A n dr ew W e i nstoc k

13 “Two Distinct Worlds”? Maintaining and Transgressing the Boundaries of the HumAnimal in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

206

M ich a el F uchs

Notes on Contributors Index

221 225

Introduction Approaches to the Ecogothic Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils

In its broadest sense, the ecogothic is a literary mode at the intersection of environmental writing and the gothic, and it typically presupposes some kind of ecocritical lens. Indeed, in the only book devoted to the topic, Andrew Smith and William Hughes define ecogothic as “exploring gothic through ecocriticism,” demonstrating the virtual inextricability of the two concepts.1 Emergent in the 1990s, ecocriticism has devoted itself to studying the literary and cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world—to animals, plants, minerals, climate, and ecosystems. Adopting a specifically gothic ecocritical lens illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade those relationships: it orients us, in short, to the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies. 2 In truth, the dominant American relationship with nature, whatever else it might have been, has always been unsettling. Two centuries before eighteenth-century writers Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe invented and popularized the European gothic, America was already a haunted land: the ghosts born of colonialism and its attendant environmental perversity grew entrenched in the very soil of North America’s contested ground. It’s there in Garcilaso de la Vega’s 1605 account of the adventures of conquistador Juan Ortiz when he “groped his way through the [Florida] underbrush” to view the horror of a panther “feeding at its pleasure upon the remains” of a child. It’s there in Captain John Smith’s 1624 relation of how Powhatan’s warriors chased him “up to the middle in an oozy creek” and waited until, “near dead with cold,” he surrendered to face an uncertain fate. And it’s there in that oft-cited passage from Of Plymouth Plantation in which William Bradford writes that he and his fellow Pilgrims confronted “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”3 With these deep cultural origins in mind, any definition of American ecogothic should first take into account the fact that critics have largely abandoned the idea that American gothic is merely an assemblage of transplanted European tropes modified to account for regional differences. Present from the moment European settlers arrived in the “New World” and began to write of their encounters, the American gothic is less a genre than a fluid, ubiquitous literary mode, sewn into the very warp and woof of American literature.

2  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils In a similar vein, ecocritics have pushed to expand the definition of environmental criticism, acknowledging the pervasiveness of the environmental in literary texts. Lawrence Buell models this tendency when he writes, “Once I thought it helpful to try to specify a subspecies of ‘environmental text.’” Now, he continues, “it seems to me more productive to think inclusively of environmentality as a property of any text—to maintain that all human artifacts bear such traces.”4 Each of these revised notions allows for greater flexibility in considering cultural and literary modes—insisting that one may find American gothic tropes in works not usually labeled as gothic and that sophisticated environmental concerns may emerge in texts located well beyond the shores of Walden Pond. Similar to the ways in which American literature has long been gothic, and has been profoundly shaped by the natural environment, the critical movement that explores literary representations of the relationship between humans and the nonhuman has been persistently infused with dread. Greg Garrard opens his introductory text on ecocriticism by quoting from Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which was instrumental in the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement. The opening of Carson’s book is heavy with foreboding. She draws a portrait of an idyllic town in the heart of America—green fields, deer, ferns, wildflowers, trout—but then goes on to describe how “a strange blight crept over the area.” An “evil spell had settled on the community,” Carson writes: “mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death.”5 To be under the “shadow of death” is to be squarely in the domain of the gothic. And both Garrard’s defining work of ecocriticism and Carson’s originary work of modern environmental writing begin under that shadow.6

1.  Defining Ecogothic Efforts to characterize the term “ecogothic” arguably began with Simon C. Estok’s provocative 2009 essay “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” For Estok, “ecophobia” is a term that describes the “contempt and fear we feel for the agency of the natural environment.” Recognizing (and overcoming) this contempt and fear is an integral part of Estok’s call for an ethical system that includes not only nonhuman animals but also “nonsentient entities”—indeed, our entire natural ecology. The “irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world,” he claims, is “as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.” Estok argues that control is an integral part of ecophobia: indeed, the latter was born “at the constitutional moment in history that gives us the imperative to control everything that lives. Control,” he continues, “is the key word

Introduction  3 here.”7 As we seek to master nature, however, it continually evades and exceeds our grasp: nature has its own agency (as Estok indicates with his inclusion of the natural world’s “agency” in his identification of what provokes an ecophobic response).8 Even our own actions, human actions that bear upon nature (and how many of them do not?), continually fray into unforeseen consequences. At the broadest level, then, the ecogothic inevitably intersects with ecophobia, not only because ecophobic representations of nature will be infused, like the gothic, with fear and dread but also because ecophobia is born out of the failure of humans to control their lives and their world. And control, or lack thereof, is central to the gothic.9 Since the publication of Estok’s article, two volumes have taken up the challenge of elaborating the concept of the ecogothic: Smith and Hughes’s 2013 collection EcoGothic, and a 2014 special issue of Gothic Studies edited by David Del Principe on the ecogothic in the long nineteenth century (with a focus on Italian, British, and Irish literature). While Smith and Hughes begin by defining the ecogothic broadly—it is about taking up the gothic “through theories of ecocriticism”—they go on to describe the ecogothic as a persistent attempt to confront the apparent “blankness” of nature. They describe, in other words, the way in which nature has been cast as a “crisis of representation” or a “semiotic problem.” They note that the ecogothic’s entrenched dystopianism “illustrates how nature becomes constituted in the Gothic as a space of crisis.”10 Offering examples of the “blankness” and implacable “whiteness” of nature in ecogothic literature—e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)—as well as of the inscrutability of the “wilderness,” Smith and Hughes also adduce how humans have continually desired some sort of control over the menacing problem of meaning that nature has embodied: the landscape “seems to invite mastery.”11 Smith and Hughes thus highlight, as does Estok, that whether in the realm of the real or of signification, nature poses a problem of control, inciting human efforts at dominance. In his introduction to the 2014 special issue of Gothic Studies on the ecogothic, Del Principe similarly begins broadly with a definition that asserts the interconnectedness of gothic and nature (ecology). The ecogothic approach, he writes, takes “a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear.” Whereas Smith and Hughes focus on an external nature (the “wilderness”) as marking a crisis of representation within the ecogothic, Del Principe focuses on a “wilderness” closer to home: the “Gothic body,” preeminent site of that “monstrosity and fear,” so crucial to the gothic. He thus echoes Kelly Hurley’s work, which explores how late nineteenth-century gothic both contained and provoked “anxieties about the shifting nature of

4  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils ‘the human’” at a moment when new scientific discourses were mapping emergent models of the body as “abhuman” and “ambiguated.”12 For Del Principe, whether the body is “unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid,” the ecogothic turns a “more inclusive lens” on that body, asking how it “can be more meaningfully understood as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity.”13 For Del Principe, then, the monstrous body is the linchpin of the gothic—and the ecogothic expands the terrain, the constitutive ground, of that body, which is never strictly “human” but always a blend of the human and the nonhuman. Thus far, then, critics have established the ecogothic as (1) a repository of deep unease, fear, and even contempt as humans confront the natural world; (2) a literary mode that uses an implacable external “wilderness” to call attention to the crisis in practices of representation; and (3) a terrain in which the contours of the body are mapped, contours that increasingly stray beyond the bounds of what might be considered properly “human.”

2.  Ecogothic Time and Space In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick offers a succinct definition: For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.14 Baldick captures two “dimensions” here that virtually every critic includes as crucial characteristics of the gothic: “inheritance in time” and “enclosure in space.” In this definition, the gothic represents some form of entrapment in both the temporal and the spatial realms. The ecogothic, we argue, extends these preoccupations of the gothic; it not only takes up (and has always taken 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. It has certainly been a truism of the gothic that it represents an implacable “inheritance” in time, an unforgiving return of the past in the present. This truism is no doubt in large part due to the importance within the gothic tradition of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny. Freud argued that the “uncanny” effect is produced by the resurgence of once-familiar content from the past. Forgotten or repressed, this content returns newly incarnate as hauntingly unfamiliar: the uncanny,

Introduction  5 in short, is the “unintended repetition,” as Freud put it, of the past.15 In the wake of Freud’s famous articulation, critics of the gothic repeatedly stress characters’ helplessness in the face of a past that they (or others) have tried desperately to bury. The gothic signals “the disturbing return of pasts upon presents,” Fred Botting notes. “Gothic shows time and again,” Mark Edmundson declares, “that life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed, that the present is in thrall to the past.” Allan Lloyd-Smith reiterates that the gothic “is about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present.” And Jerrold Hogle claims that within the spaces of the gothic “are hidden some secrets from the past … that haunt the characters.”16 In the traditional gothic, the past that returns is most often one shaped in the crucible of society, culture, and family—most obviously, the buried family secret, the inherited curse, the “sins of the fathers,” as Frederick Crews famously titled his book about Nathaniel Hawthorne. And indeed, Maule’s curse, which fatally shadows the Pyncheon line in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), is a perfect example of this “sin”—one of land, property, and money. American gothic has, of course, also been haunted by its collective past of colonization and slavery. Teresa Goddu reads the gothic as “intensely engaged with historical concerns,” situating American gothic in particular “within specific sites of historical haunting, most notably slavery.”17 Hence Cassy, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Linda Brent, in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), are gothic figures, their abject bodies haunting their white owners both for the abuses they have committed and for entrenched familial and racial sins. In the ecogothic, however, time is not just familial, social, cultural, and political but evolutionary. Jane Bennett has urged that we take a “long view of time,” the perspective of “evolutionary rather than biographical time.”18 The (long) past that is inexorably inherited is one that marks us in particular as animals, and it is a past that persists vestigially within us. As Del Principe astutely remarks, the ecogothic often specifies the more general human estrangement from nature—the reluctance of humans “to come to terms with their nonhuman ancestry and the common, biological origin of all life.”19 As the ecogothic develops the dictum that the present remains in thrall to the past, then, it casts its net still further back than does the gothic into the era of prehistory, into our prehuman (and nonhuman) origins. The second crucial element of the gothic that Baldick asserts is its “claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space.” Baldick elaborates this point by emphasizing the entrapping built environment, writing that the gothic transpires in a “relatively enclosed space in which some antiquated barbaric code still prevails”: a “sinister labyrinthine building,” for instance. He adds that “Gothic fiction is characteristically obsessed

6  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils with old buildings as sites of human decay.”20 Hogle reiterates this idea, arguing that the gothic tale usually takes place “in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space—be it a castle, a foreign palace, an abbey, a vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a graveyard.”21 While the castle has certainly been central to the gothic tradition (as Siȃn Silyn Roberts points out, “the metaphor of the castle—the stock-in-trade of gothic fiction—betokens everything from political tyranny to gendered oppression, ancien regime decadence to psychological trauma”), it has, for perhaps obvious reasons (not least, a distinct dearth of castles) never been quite as central to American gothic. 22 American writers have, however, materialized the crimes of family and race in more mundane houses: Poe’s crumbling aristocratic mansion, Hawthorne’s house built on land stolen from Native Americans and wrested from a working man, and the Southern plantations and slave-owning homes that entrap the resisting and haunting bodies of Stowe’s Cassy and Jacobs’ Linda Brent. While buildings have loomed large even in American gothic, critics have also noted the particular importance of natural landscapes to the gothic tradition. After Hogle describes the “antiquated space” of the gothic, he adds the “primeval forest or island” as important gothic settings. 23 And the forest has featured prominently in much British gothic (not least the fiction of Anne Radcliffe). As Lisa Kröger writes, “While much is made about the Gothic edifices, such as the ancient estate or the crumbling castle, the environment, most often seen in the Gothic forest, plays just as integral a role in these novels.”24 American gothic, however, has long been as good as defined by its representation of a haunting “wilderness.” Even as this “wilderness” was psychologized, turned into a “moral” wilderness by writers and critics—transmuted into what Joseph Bodziock calls “the howling wilderness of chaos and moral depravity”25 —the stubborn materiality of land, trees, swamps, and vegetation has meant that American gothic literature has always been ecogothic. The American gothic has embodied from the beginning, then, the ways in which the “enclosure in space” of Baldick’s definition is not only the built environment—the ruined castle, the abbey, or the dungeon—but the larger natural ecosystem in which humans are enmeshed. As Stacy Alaimo has eloquently argued (in a claim that is integral to many of the essays that follow), the human, inevitably corporeal, is in fact “trans-­ corporeal.” The human, she writes, “is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world.” The latter, moreover, is never “empty space” or a mere “resource” for our use but “a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions.”26 It is a world, moreover, animated by forms of agency (exactly what Estok claims we fear: the “agency of the natural environment”). Humans are not entangled with a passive and inert natural backdrop, then, but with a nonhuman that is, as Bennett has argued, “vibrant” and “vital.” Nonhumans, things, “act as quasi agents

Introduction  7 or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own,” all of which, Bennett argues, frequently serve to “impede or block the will and designs of humans.” What Bennett eloquently describes as “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things” counters what we readily (too readily) see only as human agency. 27 From the conventional image of the maiden in the ruined castle, imperiled by secrets that almost always turn out to be familial, by strangers that almost always turn out to be human, the ecogothic turns to the inevitability of humans intertwined with their natural environment—to humans surrounded, interpenetrated, and sometimes stalked by a nonhuman with an agentic force that challenges humans’ own vaunted ability to shape their world. As this discussion of inheritance in time and enclosure in space already suggests, what is entrapment in the conventional gothic (by family curses, within labyrinthine buildings) becomes a different kind of entrapment in the ecogothic. It is an entrapment marked by the expanded boundaries of both time and space (evolutionary time and global ecosystems). To the extent, then, that the gothic has always been marked by a profound determinism (with its tropes of ineluctable inheritance and claustrophobic entrapment), the ecogothic expands the forces that constitute our determining world. It expands, to return to Edmundson’s phrase, that to which we are “in thrall.” It brings into view, first, the shaping force of our animal nature, inherited through a long evolutionary past, and, second, the realities (and dangers) of the natural world (not just of the built, human world), including (in place of calculating and depraved villains) often indifferent or hostile predators, terrain, and climate. Both in time and space, then, we are determined by and in relation to the nonhuman, which is both within and without, a part both of the human and of the ecosystems humans inhabit.

3.  The Racial Ecogothic One particular way to think about the expanded time and space of the ecogothic is by considering the specifically (and inevitably) predatory ecosystems that humans inhabit. Humans are, of course, both predators and prey: these drives are immanent within us and concretized in the world we inhabit, both forming our evolutionary inheritance and shaping understandings of the perils of our external environment and attitudes toward land and plant life (as resources to be used for our own survival). In both the temporal (evolutionary) and spatial (ecological) domains, then, the dynamic of predation—or what Val Plumwood eloquently calls the “edible and ecological order”—exerts a determining force on who we are. 28 In the American ecogothic, relations of predation, edibility, and environmental exploitation have often been expressed specifically within the system of racial hierarchy and oppression that has

8  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils dominated American history. The American ecogothic, in other words, grows in a soil too often fed by the blood of violent oppression. In “Letter IX” from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), for instance, Crèvecoeur’s narrator, the fictional James, writes of the “physical evil” of slavery, which he finds in Charles Town, South Carolina. 29 Detailing how life for the ruling class of the town is marked by “joy, festivity, and happiness,” he then notes with revulsion how in the countryside, one finds “the horrors of slavery,” where “showers of sweat and of tears which from the bodies of Africans daily drop and moisten the ground they till” (168). In describing an agricultural economy in which the soil is cultivated and even watered by the sweat and tears of slaves, James does more than point out the horrors of chattel slavery. He pulls back a veil that hides the direct physical connection between slaves, the land upon which they toil, and the fruits of their labor. This connection makes clear that the happy, prosperous citizens of Charles Town are figurative cannibals, enjoying crops watered and fed by the bodies of slaves—a recognition Farah Jasmine Griffin makes when she argues that the “Southern earth is fertilized with the blood of black people…. On the surface it is a land of great physical beauty and charm, but beneath it lay black blood and decayed black bodies. Beneath the charm lay the horror.”30 Crèvecoeur’s narrator makes no attempt to hide his disgust and ends his letter with a horrifying encounter with a dying slave in the wilderness. Invited to dinner at a planter’s home, James walks “a small path leading through a pleasant wood” (177–78). An avid naturalist, he collects “some peculiar plants” along the way, but he soon encounters a truly horrifying sight, a slave locked in a cage, suspended from the branches of a tree and left to die: I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes; his cheek-bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places; and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood. (178) On one hand, James’s encounter is a dark allegory of a doomed man who stands in for all the horrific practices of slavery. There is, however, a deeply environmental statement here as well, one that demonstrates how slavery has perverted the natural world of the South, literally offering up a victim for the birds and insects to devour while his blood drips slowly onto the ground. Instances of humans consumed in one way or another by nature

Introduction  9 are common to ecogothic narratives (e.g., Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” [1860]), and such literal meldings of the human with the nonhuman reveal the ways these texts, as Alaimo argues, imagine the human intermeshed with the “more-than-human world.”31 Augmenting the sociopolitical implications of Crèvecoeur’s portrait of racial violence is a reminder of the ecological reality of our material selves: that our bodies— never truly separate from the nonhuman environment—will inevitably decompose and become food. Very human power relations, however, have a strong hand in determining how and when a body becomes food. Another nineteenth-century tale infused with an intermingled racial oppression and dread of environmental melding is Henry Clay Lewis’s story “A Struggle for Life” from Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor (1850). Narrated by a racist country doctor named Madison Tensas, the story begins when a grotesque dwarf slave (shades of Poe’s “Hop Frog” [1849]) approaches Tensas with a letter from his owner, a man named Disney. The letter asks the doctor to follow the slave to the bedside of Disney’s sick mother. Taking a shortcut through the swamp, the two men soon become lost, and as they camp for the night in the swamp, the slave becomes insolent and demands Tensas’s bottle of brandy. Rebuffed, the dwarf attacks the doctor, strangling him until he loses consciousness. In this death-like state, Tensas’s narration becomes a dreamy haze in which he recalls his dead mother’s “black eyes” and how “I dragged my exhausted frame through the cotton-fields of the south. My back was wearied with stooping— we were picking the first opening … the strap of the cotton sack, galling my shoulder.”32 Upon regaining his senses, Tensas realizes that the dwarf has, in a drunken rage, accidentally burned himself to death in the campfire. With any revelations from his dream obscured by his return to consciousness, Tensas forgets his figurative kinship with the slave and merely concludes that the dwarf “had died the murderer’s death and been buried in his grave,—a tomb of fire” (151). Lewis’s story invites an investigation of the junction between cultural anxiety about racial oppression and what might be viewed as generic fears of the Southern swamp. The character of the dwarf slave embodies this conjunction of fears in that he takes on the role of a vengeful Other who lashes out at a white oppressor while also, in Tensas’s racist view, taking on the features of a monster. Upon first glimpse, Tensas claims he did not initially recognize the man as a person at all: I discerned … something which so closely resembled an ape or an ourang outang, that I was in doubt whether the voice had proceeded from it until a repetition of the hail, this time coming unmistakably from it, assured me that it was a human. (146)

10  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils Once Tensas meets the slave face to face, he sees before him a negro dwarf of the most frightful appearance … his face was hideous: a pair of tushes [tusks] projected from either side of a double hare-lip; and taking him altogether, he was the nearest resemblance to the ourang outang mixed with the devil that human eyes ever dwelt upon. (147) To Tensas, the slave is a grotesque hybrid of human and ape-like features, an unnerving nonhuman “something” that he must trust to guide him through the wilderness of the equally nonhuman swamp. That swamp environment itself, while not necessarily aligned with the racist monstrosity Tensas imposes upon the slave, brings with it no shortage of trepidation. Indeed, the swamp of Lewis’s tale shares some of the traits of Crèvecoeur’s woods in that it serves as something of a middle ground between the plantation and the town, a location where racial violence emerges in stark relief against the lushness of the natural world. For Tensas, the swamp is a realm of ethereal dread and unsettling transformations: the wild hoot of an owl was heard, and directly I almost felt the sweep of his wings as he went sailing by, and alighted upon an old tree just where the light sank mingling with the darkness. I followed him with my eye, and as he settled himself, he turned his gaze towards me … the swamp moss was flowing around him in long, tangled masses, and as a more vivid gleam uprose, I gazed and started involuntarily. Had I not known it was an owl surrounded with moss that sat upon a stricken tree, I would have sworn it was the form of an old man, clad in a sombre flowing mantle, his arm raised in an attitude of warning. (149) More than merely a startling moment in the night, the encounter with the owl highlights an inherent backwardness in Tensas’s reasoning. The owl, blended into its swamp environment, becomes a man, perhaps attempting to warn him of the attack to follow. It is an act of skewed perception similar to his earlier vision of the dwarf slave as an “ourang outang mixed with the devil.” Tensas’s transformation of the owl into the image of an old man reveals his propensity to meld the human with the nonhuman, the two finally becoming inextricable. Ecogothic tales, as Del Principe argues, scrutinize “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

Introduction  11 species identity.”33 Coupled with his racist dehumanizing of the slave, Tensas’s anthropomorphizing of an owl reveals the extent to which he is given to envisioning hybrids that ultimately figure for repressed Others. Detailing the nuances of haunting in American gothic fiction, Eric Savoy writes, “The gothic cannot function without a proximity of Otherness imagined as its imminent return.”34 Ecogothic texts thus invoke this Other as a disturbed and disturbing natural world, one in which traditional boundaries between the human and the nonhuman become blurred in grotesque ways by human atrocities and amoral biological processes. Ultimately, in the nineteenth-century ecogothic imagination, the natural world becomes a deceptively beautiful repository for a shameful national legacy. It taps into the murder and displacement of indigenous peoples, the oppression of women, children, and the lower classes, and, of course, the horrors of slavery. These injustices play out upon a natural world that is likewise victimized. Deforestation, over-hunting, and unsustainable farming, along with countless other forms of shortsighted land management, have forever degraded the continent’s ecological integrity. Combined with their human toll, these practices cast the natural world as a burial ground for victims of social and environmental trauma. As the essays in this collection affirm, humanity’s continued abuses against the land and its denizens, human and nonhuman alike, have spawned a culture obsessed with and fearful of a natural world both monstrous and monstrously wronged.

4.  The Nonhuman Ecogothic Going beyond long-standing conceptions of the gothic as bound up with the histories of oppressive political, social, and economic structures, the ecogothic recognizes the imbrication of racial oppression with relations of predation, edibility, and environmental exploitation and degradation. Indeed, the ecogothic is an integral part of what has been called the “nonhuman turn.” This critical movement in the social sciences and humanities, as Richard Grusin describes it, thoroughly decenters the human “in favor of a turn toward and a concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies.”35 The nonhuman turn disputes both human exceptionalism and the hegemony of social constructivism. Thus, what we might call the nonhuman ecogothic displaces from the center of the gothic literary mode both the distinctiveness of the human and the shaping power of social discourses and institutions. As Grusin writes, the nonhuman turn challenges a human exceptionalism expressed primarily as “conceptual or rhetorical dualisms that separate the human from the nonhuman.”36 Instead, advocates of the nonhuman turn recognize the ways in which the human

12  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils and nonhuman are thoroughly entangled. The human “has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman” and is in fact “characterized by this indistinction.” The nonhuman turn also questions the dominance of social constructivist thinking that, taken to its logical extreme, “strips the world,” as Grusin puts it, “of any ontological or agential status.” Indeed, it is precisely this agency of the world for which Bennett argues so eloquently when she writes of “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things.”37 The discourses of the nonhuman turn, including what turns out to be the long history of the nonhuman ecogothic, account for this agency of “things.” Perhaps there is no better example of the agentic nonhuman than the almost-sentient “mystic vapor” that “reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn” and the “fine tangled web-work” of fungi that overspreads the house in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839): vapor, trees, wall, tarn, fungi—all seem to play their part in the climactic dissolution of the house and the last two remaining Ushers.38 Indeed, Poe’s story makes it clear that in the nonhuman ecogothic, the indistinction of the human and nonhuman and the agency of the nonhuman environment become determining forces on and in the human world, determining forces that are largely disavowed as humans strive to conceive of themselves as conscious, rational, and volitional selves. The shaping force of the human’s immanent nonhuman origins and of the agentic nonhuman world—disavowed, repressed, denied—­can always be counted on to return with a haunting and uncanny force in the ecogothic. In his 1861 novel, Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., offers a powerful allegory of the nonhuman-human indistinction, thus providing an exemplary instance of the ecogothic within the American literary tradition. The novel is predicated on the fatal encounter of a woman with a rattlesnake. While pregnant, Elsie Venner’s mother ventured into the mountains to “Rattlesnake Ledge” where she suffered a snakebite that profoundly shaped her unborn child. Her daughter Elsie is born a hybrid of human and snake, her nature traversed by a “reptilian” element that causes her to lash out and harm others in ways she does not herself understand, which she is unable to control. Perceived by most of the characters in the novel as not entirely “human” and thus “evil,” like her Crotalus progenitor, Elsie is doomed to a life of alienation. Holmes depicts his heroine as entrapped and cursed within a natural environment that is much wider than the castle or ruined abbey: it is an environment of mountains, rocks, and snakes—of predator and prey, reproduction and extermination, and the inevitably interwoven fate of humans and nonhumans. The snake bite that kills her mother and permanently (de)forms Elsie is a reminder that we are all enmeshed in a natural ecosystem that we also shape. Indeed, in her constitution by and as both human and snake, Elsie is a living embodiment of Alaimo’s

Introduction  13 “trans-corporeality.” And while the environment, Alaimo continues, is “a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” and never “empty space” or a mere “resource” for our use, 39 humans often treat the environment and its “fleshy” inhabitants as both. Hence, Elsie’s mother’s fatal snakebite takes place in the context of a ruthless campaign (in the novel and in the real world beyond it) to eradicate rattlesnakes from the environs of Boston, to make the region habitable (only) for humans. Historian Thomas Palmer has described how the Crotalus of eastern Massachusetts was turned into a monster and relentlessly hunted almost to extinction from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. In the early twenty-first century, it is all but gone, except for a few dozen in the Blue Hills. Palmer writes that the “monster” Crotalus was never really a native of Massachusetts: In a very real sense he disembarked with the first Europeans, who were sure that this strange, bewildering land must contain deadly and terrible creatures, creatures that must be removed before civilized men could inhabit it—is it any surprise that such creatures were found?40 Palmer identifies the work of fantasy, driven by fear and dread, that underwrote the campaign to exterminate the rattlesnakes of the eastern part of the US. This fantasy similarly pervades Holmes’ novel in the way his characters approach not only the snakes themselves but also the mountain and the rocks where the rattlesnakes still live and Elsie herself as a hybrid snake-human. To the extent that everyone sees Elsie as “evil” (just as they apprehend the mountain, the rocks, and the snakes as “evil”), Holmes suggests that there may be nothing behind that “evil” but a pervasive ecophobia. Elsie’s schoolteacher, Bernard Langdon, is drawn to the mountain home of Crotalus in an effort to understand his strange pupil. Demonstrating the human tendency to moralize the natural world, as he approaches the dreaded ledge where Elsie’s mother was bitten, with all its “bald and leprous-looking declivities,” Bernard cannot help but feel that the “nearer aspect of the blasted region had something frightful in it.” In this “blasted” place, Langdon encounters a rattlesnake, hears its “dreadful sound,” and is saved from its venom only by Elsie’s more powerful “poison.” He then acquires some rattlesnakes in order to study them—and although he attempts to approach them with a strictly rationalistic, scientific gaze, he fails to see them as anything other than “the natural symbol of evil.” It “was a very curious fact,” writes Holmes, “that the first train of thoughts Mr. Bernard’s small menagerie suggested to him was the grave, though somewhat worn, subject of the origins of evil.”41 Langdon is not alone, as every character in the novel sees Elsie’s

14  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils antenatal “poisoning” by a snake as “moral poison” as Holmes puts it in the preface (xii–xiii). The virtuous Helen Darley, for instance, thinks that “if there were women now, as in the days of our Saviour, possessed of devils, I should think there was something not human looking out of Elsie Venner’s eyes!” (104). All who encounter Elsie (like those who encounter the mountain, the rocks, and Crotalus) condemn rather than pity her. As a literal figure of trans-corporeality, entangled with the “evil” rattlesnake and its “blasted” landscape, Elsie is a literal figure of humans’ ecophobic relationships to their environment. The ecosystem, which Holmes depicts as indwelling in his heroine, is introjected as a “leprous” space and a malignant being, one that must be extirpated as the rattlesnake has been and as Elsie is by novel’s end. The nonhuman ecogothic shows the human “inheritance in time” to be a long, evolutionary inheritance, one that inevitably embroils us with the nonhuman. Elsie Venner doubly allegorizes this point in that Elsie is not only literally part-snake, but her “snake part” also marks a distinctly nonhuman affect that Holmes suggests is not hers alone. Grusin has argued that this “embodied and autonomous affect” is a part of what constitutes the “nonhuman.” First of all, he claims, affect is in large part “somatic and bodily” and thus will operate “autonomously and automatically, independent of … cognition, emotion, will, desire, purpose, intention, or belief—all conventional attributes of the traditional liberal humanist subject.” Grusin also claims that “affectivity belongs to nonhuman animals as well as to nonhuman plants or inanimate objects, technical or natural,” thus forging part of the “nondistinction” of humans and nonhumans.42 (Uncontrollable) affect, then, can be seen as part of the ecogothic tradition, and it is exemplified in Elsie Venner, whose affectivity is depicted as thoroughly alien. While the eyes of Langdon’s rattlesnakes, for instance, “shone with cold still light” and were “horrible to look into, with their stony calmness, their pitiless indifference” (161), Elsie’s eyes are described in the same way: “The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears.” Her look contained only “stony apathy” (143). Elsie’s snake part, in short, seems to have ushered in the death of the human. As Bernard proclaims, “there must be something in that creature’s blood which has killed the humanity in her” (165). For Holmes, this lack of humanity is the absence only of what we want to believe is the “human”: in fact, it represents a fundamentally alien nonhuman affect and “automaticity” immanent in all humans. Poe’s “mad” narrators (e.g. “William Wilson” [1839], “The Tell-Tale Heart” [1843], and “The Black Cat” [1843]), driven by “perverse” forces they can neither understand nor control, are very much a part of this nonhuman affect, which is integral to the ecogothic tradition.43

Introduction  15 According to Holmes, Elsie’s antenatal “injury” is a source of uncontrollable and unconscious action: what Holmes called in his novel “automatic action” and developed in a later essay as “reflex action.”44 Elsie is thus framed as not responsible for what she does, even when she is compulsively violent (lashing out at her cousin when they are children, trying to poison her governess). Indeed, the novel repeatedly dramatizes Holmes’s deep conviction that Elsie’s disorder began before she was born. It is littered with disquisitions on the heredity nature of character—on the fact that moral “peculiarities” are “transmitted by inheritance” (168) and that “the tricks of the blood keep breaking out” (243). As Bernard Langdon thinks, the more he thought of all [Elsie’s] strange instincts and modes of being, the more he became convinced that whatever alien impulse swayed her will and modulated or diverted or displaced her affections came from some impression that reached far back into the past… He believed that she had brought her ruling tendency, whatever it was, into the world with her. (295–96)45 The prenatal injury that shaped Elsie implanted within her a kind of memory that was unavailable to consciousness, which she would never be able to access and never understand—and it allegorizes not an anomalous but a mundane human condition. In an essay entitled “Crime and Automatism” (published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875), in which he expounds more fully than in Elsie Venner his views on the fundamentally hereditary nature of human action, Holmes argues that all of us are the product of “hereditary instincts,” are driven by “organic tendencies, inborn idiosyncrasies, which, so far as they go, are purely mechanical.”46 Violent actions (like all actions) are the inevitable product of an organic cause; they are “reflex movements, automatic consequences of practically irresistible causes existing in the inherited organization and in preceding conditions.”47 While Elsie Venner dramatizes the heritability of nature as an accident, the seemingly random bite of the snake, “Crime and Automatism” extends the inevitability of an inborn nature to everyone as a natural law, not a singular occurrence. In his profoundly ecogothic essay, Holmes argues that all humans are traversed by a substratum of automaticity that prompts them to act mechanically, without reason or volition. After all, everyone inherits “reflex movements, automatic consequences” from all that comes before.48 Elsie Venner represents the particular violent incursion into the human body and mind of a rattlesnake bite, but in “Crime and Automatism,” Holmes suggests that all of us are already uncanny ecogothic subjects, traversed by the automaticity of our nonhuman origins and affectivity,

16  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils an internal nature perhaps as inimical to the “human” as an external predatory environment. Holmes’s version of the ecogothic shows humans as haunted by a well of inherited automaticity, a “nature” that is inside as well as outside. Elsie may be an idiosyncratic human rattlesnake, but all humans incorporate a nonhuman, alien “nature” that compels them to act in ways they cannot easily know or control. The central scenario of Elsie Venner, then, illustrates the nonhuman ecogothic by describing the imbrication of the human, the animal, and a nonhuman automaticity and affectivity—embodying the “indistinction” of the human and nonhuman. It also represents the profound reciprocal effect of humans and the ecosystems in which they live, in which they encounter and create (and are in turn shaped by) “leprous” rocks, “blasted” landscapes, and “evil” rattlesnakes. The determining forces of the ecogothic are vast and echo back through millennia; they are, moreover, within as well as without—and the dread they induce is of our own nature as well as the nature that lies beyond the singular limits of the human body.

5.  Conclusion At its core, Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature challenges the popular view that America’s environmental imagination chiefly originated from and came to be defined by the pastoral, anthropocentric, and ultimately innocuous natural world found in the writings of the Transcendentalists. Rather, what follows is an invitation to journey beyond the benign shores of Walden Pond for the treacherous wilds found in works by writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles Chesnutt. These essays expose the darker aspects of the human cultural relationship with the North American natural world, a land that has variously served as predator and prey, refuge and abattoir, fertile paradise and haunted wilderness. As it has since the first Europeans set foot on the soil of the so-called New World, the nonhuman environment supports and defines the American experience while also instilling fear and, at times, even violating the bodily integrity of its human denizens. With this paradoxical conception of the American natural world in mind, the authors of this collection tackle an array of environmental anxieties that emerge from the pages of American literary culture, charting a course from the days of the fledgling republic to the dawn of the twentieth century and beyond, chasing echoes that resound in our creation of and response to the horrors of our present-day environmental (and ultimately human) crises. These essays explore the ecogothic as it emerges in literary portrayals of a range of socio-ecological issues, including those related to animal and plant studies, Native American genocide, the nation’s legacy of slavery, the oppression of women, and

Introduction  17 the ever-present blight of environmental degradation in general. What follows, then, should be viewed as part of a much longer critical project, one in which we continue to challenge and reconsider the ways fear, guilt, trauma, the uncanny, and the grotesque factor into our understanding of how the spectral presence of the nonhuman haunts America’s literary mind.

Notes 1 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 1. 2 Hillard quotes Punter to the effect that the “main element” traversing the gothic is fear. “‘Deep into That Darkness,’” 689. Virtually every critic who has written on the ecogothic describes its principal function as expressing fear and similar emotions. Bavidge, for instance (drawing, like Hillard, on Estok’s notion of ecophobia), defines the ecogothic as a literary mode that expresses unease with the environment: “The Gothic of ecophobia dramatizes and foregrounds the multiple anxieties and discomforts of our relationship with the natural environment.” “Rats,” 115. Smith and Hughes claim that the gothic is the exemplary form to capture the “anxieties” surrounding contemporary debates about “climate change and environmental damage.” “Introduction,” 5. Del Principe writes that the “ecoGothic serves to give voice to ingrained biases and a mounting ecophobia—fears stemming from humans’ precarious relationship with all that is nonhuman.” “Introduction,” 1. Certain words recur, then, in definitions of the ecogothic: fear, unease, anxiety, discomfort, hatred, contempt, and terror. In fact, these words themselves, in the context of the human relationship with the nonhuman, often seem to define what the ecogothic distinctly expresses. 3 de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca, 66; Smith, “from The General History of Virginia,” 87; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 62. 4 Buell, The Future, 25. 5 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 1–2; Carson, Silent Spring, 1–3. 6 Sivils similarly surveys the “subtle, but pervasive, environmental unease” that threads through American literature. As he puts it, in words that describe Rachel Carson’s dystopic representation, the American environmental gothic “resides in its genius for playing upon the terror that resides beneath a curtain of pastoral beauty.” “American Gothic,” 123–24. 7 Estok, “Theorizing in a Space,” 207–8. 8 As Corstorphine writes, If humans are indeed part of a symbiotic ecosystem, then the human urge to tame and control the wilderness, which has defined much of our civilization, certainly in the United States, would seem to contradict our assumed place in the natural world. “‘The Blank Darkness,’” 129–30 9 Corstorphine notes that Roderick Nash, in his influential Wilderness and the American Mind, “identifies ‘wild’ as being related to ‘will’ in its earliest form, so that the term was used ‘to denote creatures not under the control of man.’” Corstorphine goes on to point out that Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction, for example, makes it clear that “among the creatures not under the control of man might well be man himself.” “‘The Blank Darkness,’” 121. 10 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 2–3. 11 Ibid., 4.

18  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils 12 Hurley, Gothic Body, 5–6. Hurley writes of “the ruination of traditional constructs of human identity” at the turn of the century, during the transition from a “stable and integral” body to a “metamorphic and undifferentiated” body. Instead of transcendence, the late nineteenth century offered the prospect of “existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality.” Gothic Body, 3. 13 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1. 14 Baldick, Introduction, xix; emphasis added. 15 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 144. 16 Botting, Gothic, 1; Edmundson, Nightmare, 5; Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction, 1; Hogle, “Introduction,” 2. Hillard calls this buried secret from the past, which is so central to the gothic, a “primal crime.” “From Salem Witch,” 112. 17 Goddu, Gothic America, 2, 10. 18 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10–11. 19 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 2. 20 Baldick, Introduction, xv, xvi, xx. 21 Hogle, “Introduction,” 2. Kate Ellis has written about the “failed home” as a frequent preoccupation of the gothic. “Secrecy renders every interior a haunted space where past repression can be endlessly re-created, where secrets are concealed, but never fully.” The Contested Castle, ix, 73. Like many other critics, then, Ellis conjoins the haunting secrets of the gothic to the human, built environment. 22 Roberts, Gothic Subjects, 2. 23 Hogle, “Introduction,” 2. 24 Kröger, “Panic,” 16. 25 Qtd. in Goddu, Gothic America, 9. Goddu discusses at some length the tendency in criticism of the American gothic to erase history, to “psychologize” it. Gothic America, 9. 26 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 27 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii, ix. 28 Plumwood, “Being Prey,” 89. 29 Crèvecoeur, Letters, 166. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 30 Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?” 16. 31 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 32 Lewis, “A Struggle,” 151. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 33 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1. 34 Savoy, “The Face,” 6. 35 Grusin, Introduction, vii. 36 Ibid., x. 37 Ibid., ix–x, xi; Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii, ix. 38 Poe, “Fall,” 319. 39 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 40 Palmer, Landscape, 151. Palmer details the history of demonizing and killing Crotalus in Massachusetts. Landscape, 110–52. 41 Holmes, Elsie Venner, 147, 148, 158, 160–61. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 42 Grusin, Introduction, xvii. 43 Poe lays out his theory of the perverse in “The Black Cat” and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845). 4 4 For the phrase “automatic action,” see Holmes, Elsie Venner, 174. For the phrase “reflex action,” see Holmes, “Crime,” 469. For a discussion of Elsie

Introduction  19 Venner as a working out of Holmes’s view of “reflex action,” by which Elsie’s fate is decided before she is born, see Boewe, “Reflex Action.” 45 Helen Darley comes to a similar realization—that Elsie Venner is the victim of “an ante-natal impression which had mingled an alien element in her nature”­— a bit later. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 320. 46 Holmes, “Crime,” 466. 47 Ibid., 469, 474–75. 48 Ibid., 469.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Baldick, Chris. Introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Edited by Baldick, xi–xxiii. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bavidge, Jenny. “Rats, Floods and Flowers: London’s Gothicized Nature.” In London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination, edited by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard, 103–118. New York: Continuum, 2010. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Boewe, Charles. “Reflex Action in the Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes.” American Literature 26 (1954): 303–19. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647. Edited by Samuel E. Morison. New York: Knopf, 1952. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Corstorphine, Kevin. “‘The Blank Darkness Outside’: Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the End of the Frontier.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 120–33. Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth Century America. Edited by Albert E. Stone. New York: Penguin, 1986. Crews, Frederick. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. de la Vega, Garcilaso. The Florida of the Inca. Edited and translated by J. G. Varner and J. J. Varner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951. Del Principe, David. “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 16.1 (2014): 1–8. Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2 (2009): 203–25. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, 121–62. New York: Penguin, 2003. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004.

20  Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Grusin, Richard. Introduction to The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Grusin, vii–xxix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Hillard, Tom J. “‘Deep into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.4 (2009): 685–95. ———. “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 103–19. Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Hogle, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. “Crime and Automatism.” Atlantic Monthly 35 (April 1875): 466–81. ———. Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny. New York: New American Library, 1961. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kröger, Lisa. “Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-­ Century Gothic Novel.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 15-27. Lewis, Henry Clay. “A Struggle for Life.” In American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H. P. Lovecraft, 2nd ed., edited by Charles L. Crow, 146–151. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. Palmer, Thomas. Landscape with Reptile: Rattlesnakes in an Urban World. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992. Plumwood, Val. “Being Prey.” In The New Earth Reader: The Best of Terra Nova, edited by David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus, 77–91. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, 317–36. New York: The Library of America, 1996. Roberts, Siȃn Silyn. Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Savoy, Eric. “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic.” In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, 3–19. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Sivils, Matthew Wynn. “American Gothic and the Environment, 1800–­­Present.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 121–31. New York: Routledge, 2014. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 1-14. ———, eds. EcoGothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Smith, John. “from The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Beginnings to 1820, 8th ed., edited by Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, 83–92. New York: Norton, 2012.

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 mazelike 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

22  Tom J. Hillard 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 “BlueRidge,” 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

“Perverse Nature”  23 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-thanhuman 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

24  Tom J. Hillard 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

“Perverse Nature”  25 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,” understands that his “knowledge was extremely imperfect” (97). Searching for Edny, his progress is impeded by the environment itself because he lacks the tools needed to navigate, including a “lamp or a torch … to direct [his] subterranean footsteps” and also an axe needed to fell a tree (98). None are life-threatening problems; nevertheless, the ruggedness

26  Tom J. Hillard of this wild terrain repeatedly stands in Huntly’s way, forcing him to reevaluate the integrity of his perceptions of it. More important than this failure of the picturesque aesthetic to accommodate all of his experiences with his natural environment, Huntly’s search after Clithero Edny also reveals a more profound uncertainty about “nature”: that the elaborate cultural barriers erected between being “human” and being “animal” are unstable. Huntly tells us late in the novel that in his childhood, he “had delighted … in feats of agility and perseverance” and that outdoors in “the maze of thickets and precipices” he “had put [his] energies both moral and physical, frequently to the test” (212). Such contests to demonstrate his prowess arose because he “disdained to be out-done in perspicacity by the lynx, in his surefooted instinct by the roe, or in patience under hardship, and contention with fatigue, by the Mohawk.” Significantly, he admits that he “aspired to transcend the rest of animals in all that is common to the rational and brute, as well as in all by which they are distinguished from each other” (212). In articulating this sense of self, Huntly underscores his desire to prove his ascendancy over and distinction from “the rest of animals.” As the story develops, however, Huntly faces the reality that the human body is only a small part of a much larger network and often not fully under individual control; even the most educated, enlightened individual is susceptible to impulses that put all animals, humans included, on an equal plane. In the novel, there is a “nature” that governs bodies and drives actions, a force that lies beyond (or beneath) human control. Basic human biological needs, such as food and water, drive some of this, which we see when Huntly describes his hunger and thirst as “the demands of nature” (180). But “nature” also possesses a more powerful agency. In a description of Mrs. Lorimer and her identical twin brother, Arthur Wiatte, we are told that “Nature had impressed the same image upon them, and had modeled them after the same pattern” (Brown 45). More important is the assertion that “Nature seemed to have intended them as examples of the futility of those theories, which ascribe every thing to conformation and instinct, and nothing to external circumstances” (45). In these phrasings, “nature” possesses agency and even intention, dictating what people look like and how they behave. This agential nature eventually becomes threatening to Huntly’s conventional view of the world, and one of the first instances of this is when he witnesses Edny surrender to forces that challenge the demarcations between human and animal, a transformation that appears in highly gothicized ways. In his first encounter with Edny, Huntly describes him as “a man, tall and robust” with “[s]omething like flannel was wrapt around his waist”; otherwise, “his frame was naked” (10), with “brawny arms and lofty stature” (12). These descriptions of a half-dressed, muscular man suggest a wild, uncivilized aspect about him. Over the ensuing evenings, as Huntly follows the sleepwalking Edny, he progresses

“Perverse Nature”  27 (or regresses) even further, appearing increasingly animal-like. In fact, in these midnight treks through the wilderness, Edny adopts the figurative role of “prey” while Huntly “hunts” him, tracking him across the landscape “like an animal through the woods,” as Richard Slotkin aptly puts it.15 In this role of “the hunted,” it’s little surprise when Edny later metamorphoses into the epitome of eighteenth-century notions of the “wild man.” After a lengthy confession of his former crimes to Huntly, before Edny again vanishes into Norwalk, he tells Huntly that the “mountainous asperities … and its headlong streams lull [him] into temporary forgetfulness of mankind” (89). Sure enough, once Edny enters those rugged regions, he not only seems to forget “mankind” but also becomes something almost apart from humankind. In fact, he appears as much beast as man, with “shaggy and tangled locks, and an air of melancholy wildness,” wearing “scanty and coarse garb … rent away by brambles and thorns” and with “arms, bosom and cheek … overgrown and half-concealed by hair. There was somewhat in his attitude and looks denoting more than anarchy of thoughts and passions” (104). His wild countenance is so astonishing that to get his attention, Huntly shouts, “Man! Clithero!”—almost as if he must first declare Edny a “man” (instead of “animal” or “savage”) before he can call him by name (105). Myths about the “wild man” have persisted in Western culture for thousands of years, and in this form, Edny evokes contemporary eighteenth-­century versions of those stories. The wild man had long been “associated with the idea of wilderness … those parts of the physical world that had not yet been domesticated or marked out for domestication,” explains Hayden White. Appearing in art and literature, the wild man was “a hairy man curiously compounded of human and animal traits” and “exhibits upon its naked human anatomy a growth of fur … its body is usually naked except for a shaggy covering.” In the earliest years, such a being was both revered and feared. Bearing such seemingly subhuman qualities, it functioned as a repository for anxieties about uncontrollable animal impulses. By the eighteenth century, the wild man often served, in Roderick Nash’s words, “as a complex alter ego to the idealized abstraction of ‘the Citizen of Enlightenment.’”16 In other words, attributes that threatened the coherent identity of the reasoning, perfectible Enlightenment individual could be shunted off onto the equally abstracted “wild man” (or, as it also came to be known, “the savage”). Earlier in the novel, Edny describes an inclination toward urges and impulses beyond his control, talking of a “daemon that possessed me” when discussing his irrational desire to murder Mrs. Lorimer to save her from news of her brother’s death, and he later calls that same guiding force his “evil genius” (83). Daemon or genius, clearly the impulse arises within Edny, even though he casts blame on an external force. Brown

28  Tom J. Hillard never explains what the nature of this daemon is, but Edny’s subsequent descent into a “wild” existence in Norwalk suggests one. In previous centuries, the fear of the “wild man” was a fear of an entity that existed physically out there, beyond the borders of the civilized world. But in Brown’s era, those fears had evolved: the wild man no longer always lurked out there but rather sometimes also in here, within the self or as the self—what White has called the “interiorization of the wilderness and of its traditional occupant, the Wild Man.”17 But as Edgar Huntly shows, it is unnervingly easy for the apparently “reasonable” person to succumb to behaviors that threaten the boundaries between “civilized” and that which lies beyond it. The transformation of Edny is not an isolated incident and in fact prefigures Huntly’s own fate as he confronts the frailty of his concept of himself as a rational human in full control of his actions. The shift is abrupt: at the start of Chapter 16, Huntly wakes up in a dark cave, not knowing where he is or how he got there, and this scene begins a long series of traumatic experiences for Huntly as he strives to find his way back home. Critics have described his ordeal in the cave as an initiation rite or a moment of rebirth, and both interpretations hold merit.18 Slotkin rightly notes that, by going into the cave, Huntly “enters a dark world in which identities shift and blend, and beasts and men interchange shapes and qualities.”19 Indeed, when Huntly wakes up, he faces a breakdown between human and animal, civilized and savage, and is reduced to primal, bodily impulses. In the cave, his hunger becomes “ferocious,” and he bites at his shirt linen to satiate himself. The visceral hunger is so intense that he says, “I felt a strong propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth” (164). Upon escaping the pit in which he has awoken, Huntly faces “a savage” panther, which he quickly kills with a tomahawk lying serendipitously nearby (166). Still needing sustenance, Huntly fulfills his desire to devour raw flesh and feasts on the dead panther but recollects his guilt and horror at this primal meal: If this appetite has sometimes subdued the sentiments of nature, and compelled the mother to feed upon the flesh of her offspring, it will not excite amazement that I did not turn from the yet warm blood and reeking fibres of a brute. (167) Driven to partake in this gruesome drama of survival, Huntly is wracked by stomach pain—his body (or perhaps mind) rejecting what he has just done. Robert Lawson-Peebles argues that Huntly’s sickness here “represents an absolute rejection of the sentimental savagism occasionally

“Perverse Nature”  29 indulged by Revolutionary writers.”20 Nothing is attractive or romantic about this bodily experience for Huntly, even though he recognizes that the “pangs were a useful effort of nature” to digest what he “had swallowed”; it is instead merely a reflex of survival, and to him, it is horrifying. Similarly, he next faces “the torments of thirst” and finds relief when his “perspiration … supplied him with imperfect means of appeasing it” (168, 169). At this point, Huntly’s existence has been reduced to the most basic bodily animal drives. Brown further blurs the human-animal distinction by rendering the sounds of the panther in disturbingly human terms, suggesting that nonhuman animals, conversely, can possess human-like traits. The cry of one panther bears a “resemblance to the human voice,” which is “peculiarly terrific” (124). And when Huntly tomahawks the panther in the cave, it dies “struggling and shrieking,” its “voice … unspeakably rueful” (167). These sounds of mourning suggest a closer kinship between wildcat and human than Huntly would like. Moreover, the uncanny similarities between Edny’s earlier transformation and Huntly’s adventure in the cave, as well as the way that Huntly himself describes Edny, the panthers, and the local Native Indian peoples in similar terms, all indicate an erasure of what was distinct about being a civilized human in this era. Indeed, Edgar Huntly so dramatically presents the instability of human uniqueness from other animals that at least one critic has claimed that Brown single-handedly “made the Wild Man a permanent fixture in American Gothic.”21 *** When Huntly finally escapes the cave, the wilderness landscape appears to him full of agency and brimming with hostility, actively trying to keep him from making his way back home. George Toles explains that in this sequence, “the landscape acquires its energy and what one might almost call its will in the process of becoming mysterious—in creating a distance or gap between itself and the mind that wishes to penetrate it.”22 As he suggests, Huntly feels cast about in a wilderness that possesses power, the physical landscape a gothic labyrinth obstructing his way. The “soil was nearly covered with sharp fragments of stone,” and “brambles and creeping vines, whose twigs, crossing and intertwining with each other, added to the roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome” (181). As he rushes across the landscape, it seems to come alive in order to impede progress: “The ground was concealed by the bushes,” and he is “perplexed and fatigued by a continual succession of hollows and prominences” (182). Huntly is “nearly thrown headlong into a pit,” and his feet strike “against the angles of stones. The branches of the oak rebounded in our faces or entangled our legs, and the unseen thorns inflicted on us a thousand wounds” (182). In these moments,

30  Tom J. Hillard nearly all agency has been taken from the protagonist, and instead, the physical world seems a willing force trying to stop him. 23 Huntly finds himself in an environment entirely removed from his previous picturesque experiences, and in its place stands a terrifying one that is alien and alive. As Huntly makes his way through this region, the novel reaches a point of climax in a violent confrontation with a group of Delaware Indians, and in the ensuing scenes, Huntly’s transformation becomes complete. For Brown, violence and the wilderness seem to go hand in hand. In fact, in Edgar Huntly, the very image and idea of “the Indian” comes to symbolize the violence that so permeates the natural world. We learn that in recent years, “a band of [Indians] had once penetrated into Norwalk, and lingered long enough to pillage and murder some of the neighbouring inhabitants” (172–73). As Huntly recollects this, he reveals a profoundly traumatic event connected with it: his “parents and an infant child were murdered in their beds; the house was pillaged, and then burnt to the ground” (173). The trauma is such that he “never looked upon, or called up the image of a savage without shuddering” (173). The animosity that Huntly bears can be traced directly to that murderous Indian expedition. Despite his rational understanding of why they might be motivated to attack his town, Huntly rhetorically dehumanizes the Delawares to the point that they, too, become mere animals. The Delawares remain nameless entities, indistinguishable from one another, and Huntly employs animal terms to describe them. For instance, the movements of one “appeared like those of a beast. In different circumstances, I should have instantly supposed it to be a wolf, a panther, or bear” (199). Moreover, this Delaware “moved on all fours, … His disfigured limbs, pendants from his ears and nose, and his shorn locks, were indubitable indications of a savage” (199). The links are clear: by this point, both the Delawares and the panthers populating Norwalk are described with virtually the same language. As Sivils has argued, “Brown presents the Indians as a threat not unlike the panthers that Huntly is so adept at slaying. The Indians are symbolic of a malevolent wilderness that must be conquered.”24 And conquer them he does. Although he had earlier claimed that his “temper never delighted in carnage or blood,” after exiting the cave, Huntly becomes a brutal and accomplished killer, and his descriptions rival the horrors found in the most graphic of gothic novels (124). Huntly’s murderous spree begins reluctantly enough. After sneaking past the “uncouth figures” of the Delawares sleeping at the cave’s exit, Huntly encounters a sentry who, fearing he will sound an alarm, he strikes “quick as lightning” so that the “hatchet buried itself in his breast” (171, 179). The guard dies, and Huntly’s first response is to feel “remorse and dismay” (179). These emotions are forgotten when three more approach: Huntly shoots two from

“Perverse Nature”  31 his hiding place, and after a bullet grazes his own cheek, he fires on the third, killing him. The prowess with which he does this is surprising, but Huntly admits with incredulity that he “was not governed by the soul which usually regulates [his] conduct.” Instead, he “had imbibed from the unparalleled events which had lately happened a spirit vengeful, unrelenting, and ferocious” (192). Having given in to this ferocity, Huntly collapses in exhaustion near the bodies of the slain Indians. The scene is horrific: his “countenance was wan and haggard, [his] neck and bosom were died in blood, and [his] limbs, almost stripped by the brambles of their slender covering, were lacerated by a thousand wounds” (195). Later, he wakes amid a “theatre of carnage” just in time to find a fifth Delaware approaching (200). Huntly doesn’t hesitate to shoot, but this time the bullet only wounds the man. To end the “doleful shrieks” and “keenest agonies,” Huntly violently stabs the man to death with the bayonet on his gun. The brutal tableau, of the bloody Huntly surrounded by the bodies of slain Indians, emphasizes the distance he has come since his early, gentle rambles through the woods in the opening pages. Astonished by his capacity for violence, Huntly announces, “Such are the deeds which perverse nature compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness!” (202). Indeed, in a masterful stroke of symbolism, as Huntly exits the scene, he picks up the last Delaware’s “tom-hawk” in exchange for the gun he carries, sticking the “musquet in the ground, and [leaving] it standing upright in the middle of the road” (203). By choosing the Native American weapon in favor of the Euro-American one, Huntly’s movement into “savagery” appears complete. Huntly has thus realized that he has the capacity to enact the same violence as the “savages” who killed his family. Huntly’s narrative clearly conflates the Delawares and the panthers, connecting both to an external wilderness and reducing them to essential, animal natures. But importantly, as his violent encounters illustrate, Huntly and Edny have also been described in the same manner, driven by animal impulses and “savagery” that threatens their coherent identities as rational, Enlightenment individuals. Robert Newman explains, “the identification of the Indian with the evil and fearful powers of the wilderness comprises a significant aspect of the affective symbolism in Edgar Huntly,” but “the underlying irony of the novel is the revelation of the savage potential of the white man”—someone given over, as Huntly puts it, to a “perverse nature.”25 Huntly’s traumatic sojourn reveals the illusory nature of the stable, autonomous identity he thought he had. It is one thing for him to face the external dangers that reside in the environment around him, but it’s entirely another to realize that his own corporeal self is prone to and capable of the same “savagery” he has located in others. Within even the most morally upright citizen lies a nature that is potentially “perverse.”

32  Tom J. Hillard In the end, Edgar Huntly survives his ordeal in the wilderness, but it permanently unsettles him. His search for a solution to Waldegrave’s murder leads him to realize that the phenomenal world is filled with forces and violence far beyond his control—in fact, they may stem from some “perverse nature” deep within each individual. Significantly, one revelation late in the story is that, like Edny before him, Huntly has become prone to sleepwalking. While disoriented in the cave, he ponders, Methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to determine whether he intended I should perish with famine, or linger out a long life in hopeless imprisonment. (161–62) Moments later, he complains that the “author of [his] distress and the means he had taken to decoy [him] hither, were incomprehensible” (164). What Huntly doesn’t know at this point is that his own sleepwalking was the agent of his present terror—his own sleeping body propelled him, not some external “author” or “tyrant.” Sleepwalking thus marks the unbidden emergence of things normally contained, controlled, and restricted during waking hours. This turn of events is important enough that Brown subtitled the novel “Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker.” Sivils has claimed that “Brown’s novel by default embraces romantic ideas about the natural world, but it does so by replacing a shopworn pastoral environment with a dark and treacherous wilderness, where mankind, for all its power, is never quite in control.” As my analysis in this essay has shown, this is indeed part of Brown’s gothic vision. Moreover, I argue that this gothicized lack of control can be productively read in the context of recent developments in material ecocriticism. Iovino and Oppermann, in their introduction to Material Ecocriticism, contend that “[c]ompared to a human endowed with mind and agentic determinations, the material world—a world that includes ‘inanimate’ matter as well as all nonhuman forms of living—has always been considered as passive, inert, unable to convey any independent expression of meaning. The drawbacks of this vision are considerable.” An ecogothic reading of Edgar Huntly reveals that Brown, through his title character, uncovers a host of fears associated with discarding that vision. The world of Brown’s novel is teeming with such matter, living and “inanimate,” and that matter directly shapes the course of Huntly’s experiences. It is useful to think of Huntly’s ordeal through Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”—the process of psychologically expelling, or “throwing off,” all of “what disturbs identity, system, order.” The abject is that which “does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” To confront the abject is to confront “what [we] permanently thrust aside in order to

“Perverse Nature”  33 live”—all of the things that challenge our carefully constructed senses of self. David Del Principe argues that an ecogothic approach asks scholars to “reconsider the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear.” When read as a “decidedly environmental work,” to borrow Sivils’s words, Edgar Huntly is a book about the potential monstrosity of bodies, materiality, and ungovernable impulses, and it thus stands as a register for some of the deepest fears about the limits of human agency and selfhood in the late eighteenth century. 26

Notes 1 Marshall, Story Line, 133. 2 Gardner, “Alien Nation,” 429. 3 Quoted in Berthold, “Charles Brockden Brown,” 72. When this excerpt was published, its author was listed as “Edgar Huntly”—not Charles Brockden Brown. Brown’s decision to efface his own identity as author underscores the effect of making Huntly’s story sound “real.” 4 Brown, Edgar Huntly, 3. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 5 Berthold, “Charles Brockden Brown,” 72, 72–73. 6 Marshall traces Huntly’s footsteps, noting a “discrepancy between the nature I see and the nature I’m reading about” (132). While some of the place names might correspond with real locations Marshall explains, Brown’s descriptions of those places don’t resemble the landscape Marshall sees. Berthold has also charted the sites of Edgar Huntly in “Desacralizing the American Gothic.” 7 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1. The term “ecogothic” remains so new and unrefined that its spelling has yet to be regularized, appearing at times as “ecogothic,” “ecoGothic,” and “EcoGothic.” 8 Hogle, “The Progress of Theory,” 4; Hogle, “Introduction,” 4; Goddu, Gothic America, 10. 9 In addition to the work by Sivils, some recent ecocritical analyses of Edgar Huntly include Marshall, Story Line; Oliver, “Ecologies of Disaffection”; and Christopher Sloman, “Navigating the Interior.” 10 Sivils, “‘The Herbage of Death,’” 54, 41, 41–42. Similarly, Jeffrey Weinstock has noted that Brown “played a foundational role in establishing the haunted American wilderness as an archetype of American Gothic literature” (29). 11 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2; Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism,” 87. Iovino and Oppermann recently edited a collection of essays about the New Materialism, grounded in the premise that “the world’s natural phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (1). See Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism. 12 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1; Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 4; emphasis added. 13 Brown himself was familiar with such movements and between 1799 and 1807 published a number of articles about the notion of “the picturesque.” Most of these were printed in The Monthly Magazine, and American Review and The Literary Magazine, and American Register, which Brown edited. See Lueck’s American Writers and the Picturesque Tour and Berthold’s “Charles Brockden Brown” for a more detailed explanation.

34  Tom J. Hillard 14 Lueck, American Writers and the Picturesque Tour, 31. 15 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 385. 16 White, “The Forms of Wildness,” 7; Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, 1; Nash, Wild Enlightenment, 3. 17 White, “The Forms of Wildness,” 7. 18 Fiedler calls the cave an “ancient, almost instinctive symbol” akin to a “womb-tomb” (16). 19 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 385. 20 Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America, 251. 21 Thorslev, “The Wild Man’s Revenge,” 302. In fact, the connections that Brown makes foreshadow by nearly a century the human-into-animal nightmares that arise in the wake of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)— both of which present characters who elide the boundary between human and animal. 22 Toles, “Charting the Hidden Landscape,” 145. 23 George Toles has noted that by this point in the novel, “[t]he recesses of wilderness are transformed from deep, silent wells of unrevealed truth to treacherous places of ambush” (148). 24 Sivils, “The Base, Cursed Thing,” 295. Sivils expands on this discussion further in American Environmental Fiction. 25 Newman, “Indians and Indian-Hating,” 68. 26 Sivils, American Environmental Fiction, 67; Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 2; Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4, 3; Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1; Sivils, “American Gothic and the Environment,” 124.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Bernheimer, Richard. Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952. Berthold, Dennis. “Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, and the Origins of the American Picturesque.” William and Mary Quarterly 41.1 (1984): 62–84. ———. “Desacralizing the American Gothic: An Iconographic Approach to Edgar Huntly.” Studies in American Fiction 14.2 (1986): 127–38. Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker 1799. Edited by Sydney J. Krause, Bicentennial ed. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1984. Del Principe, David. “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 16.1 (2014): 1–8. Dudley, Edward, and Maximillian E. Novak, eds. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Dell, 1966. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

“Perverse Nature”  35 Gardner, Jared. “Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage Awakening.” American Literature 66.3 (1994): 429–61. Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “The Progress of Theory and the Study of the American Gothic.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow, 3–15. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Opperman. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): 75–91. ———. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Lawson-Peebles, Robert. Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lueck, Beth L. American Writers and the Picturesque Tour: The Search for National Identity, 1790–1860. New York: Garland, 1997. Marshall, Ian. Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Nash, Richard. Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Newman, Robert D. “Indians and Indian-Hating in Edgar Huntly and The Confidence Man.” MELUS 15.3 (1988): 65–74. Oliver, Susan. “Ecologies of Disaffection: Interpreting Wastelands in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor.” In An Interpretive Turn: Essays on Cultural Expressions of Art and Literature in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Heh-hsiang Yuan and Shu-Fang Lai, 23–39. Taipei: Bookman, 2010. Sivils, Matthew Wynn. American Environmental Fiction, 1782–1847. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. ———. “American Gothic and the Environment, 1800–Present.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townsend, 121–31. London: Routledge, 2014. ———. “‘The Base, Cursed Thing’: Panther Attacks and Ecotones in Antebellum American Fiction.” The Journal of Ecocriticism 2.1 (2010): 19–32. ———. “‘The Herbage of Death’: Haunted Environments in John Neal and James Fenimore Cooper.” In John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, edited by Edward Watts and David J. Carlson, 39–56. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Sloman, Christopher. “Navigating the Interior: Edgar Huntly and the Mapping of Early America.” In Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature, edited by Steven Petersheim and Madison P. Jones IV, 1–14. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

36  Tom J. Hillard Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. EcoGothic. International Gothic Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Thorslev, Peter L., Jr. “The Wild Man’s Revenge.” In Dudley and Novak, The Wild Man Within, 281–307. Toles, George. “Charting the Hidden Landscape: Edgar Huntly.” Early American Literature 26 (1981): 133–53. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. Charles Brockden Brown. Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions Series. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. White, Hayden. “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea.” In Dudley and Novak, The Wild Man Within, 3–38.

2 “A Heap of Ruins” The Horrors of Deforestation in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History Lisa M. Vetere

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) horrified nineteenth-century America. Antebellum print culture transformed the Caribbean antislavery and anticolonial insurrection into a gothic tale: grisly atrocities and tortures, brutal images of impaled infants, and torched ruins terrified both proslavery and abolitionist audiences throughout the US and the world. Indeed, as Matt Clavin notes, “the rise of the popular Gothic romance at the turn of the nineteenth century coincided with the publication of the biographical and historical narratives of the Haitian Revolution.”1 According to a recent study by James Alexander Dun, these gothic tales reached the shores of the capital city of Philadelphia, where newspapers published account after bloody account of what they repeatedly called “the Horrors of St. Domingo”—so much so that the name “St. Domingo” itself had by 1804 “become a metonym for black violence and white death.”2 Stories of revolutionary violence “too gory, horrible, and repugnant to imagine”3 prompted famous figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington to debate the significance of the violence on the former French colony. But a lesser known writer whose father ran a tavern across the street from Independence Hall also joined this conversation. In 1808, Leonora Sansay published The Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo, an epistolary fiction derived from her actual travels to this Caribbean island of terrors.4 Sansay, however, does not limit her tale to the brutality of murderous humans; Sansay’s “horrors of St. Domingo” include its nonhuman forces as well—the rocks, trees, plants, and soil that turn the text into a profoundly ecogothic story. Ecogothic is a mode dedicated to exploring the “ecophobia”—the fear and loathing of nature—identified by Simon Estok. 5 Tom Hillard asserts the value in studying such dark views of nature: “ecocritics stand to learn a great deal by looking seriously at the long history of unsettling and horrific depictions of the natural world.”6 In a 2014 issue of Gothic Studies devoted exclusively to the ecogothic, editor David Del Principe explains, “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

38  Lisa M. Vetere understood as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity.”7 From the very first scene in the novel, Sansay’s narrator locates the hideousness and horror of Saint Domingue in its landscape; ecophobia pervades Secret History. Arriving in Cape François, the capital city of the colony known as the “pearl of the Antilles,” Mary, the main narrator of the novel’s letters, is aghast to find it “a heap of ruins,”8 a scorched and devastated landscape, the wood of its buildings reduced to ashes and only the skeletal stone walls of the city structures remaining. Cape François (or Le Cap or “the Cape”) had been burnt nearly to the ground by a leader of the black army, General Henri Christophe, and his armed revolutionary forces now occupied the plains just beyond the extensive mountains surrounding it. From the very first scene in the novel, then, Sansay’s narrator describes the land as monstrous. Mary laments, “I feel like a prisoner in this little place, built on a narrow strip of land between the sea and a mountain that rises perpendicularly behind the town” (77). Mary sees the mountains as her jailors, trapping her in the city and threatening further destruction. An ecogothic perspective on Secret History offers an explanation for the novel’s seeming neglect of the infamous human-on-human violence of the Haitian Revolution. As Elizabeth Dillon observes, the novel seems to give scant attention to the cataclysmic events of the Haitian Revolution, the complex politics of race and colonial power, and the often horrific scenes of warfare that took place during the very years of the novel’s exposition.9 Secret History does indeed pay attention to “horrific scenes” from the Haitian Revolution, although one must view the novel from “Earth magnitude” in order to see them.10 Just as the gothic mode explores the return of the historically and psychologically repressed, so too does ecogothic provide a theoretical lens through which to see how Earth itself has a traumatic past haunting its present. It introduces a more expansive spatial and temporal frame to the novel, exposing traces of the environmental history of Saint Domingue. While both Abby L. Goode and Monique Allewaert explore the ecological horrors of Sansay’s account of life in Saint Domingue in the final days of the Revolution, thus far, no critic has explored Sansay’s work through Estok’s call to engage in an ecocriticism linking literary texts with the history of the environment.11 The human history of revolutionary upheaval in Saint Domingue cannot be separated from the history of its trees, plants, soil, and rainwater—­a mesh of objects interacting within the dense forest that greeted Christopher Columbus when he arrived on Hispaniola in 1492.12 In Deforesting the Earth, Michael Williams reminds us that forests have a history: “Just as people have biographies, so forests have their own histories that can be unraveled and documented.”13. Yet like so

“A Heap of Ruins”  39 much of Haitian history, this ecological history vanishes from Sansay’s account as it does from so many of the accounts of Haitian Revolution published throughout the US and Europe.14 A major element of that history is the ecological destruction of Hispaniola by European colonization.15 Not only did the Spanish colonizers quickly annihilate the island’s Arawak and Caribe peoples, but their importing, both intentional and otherwise, of non-native plants and animals helped to disrupt efficient and sustainable agricultural systems that minimized tree clearing and soil erosion.16 Yet the Spanish ecological devastation of indigenous ecologies was surpassed by the French colonizers with their establishment of enormous, mass-producing sugar plantations. Under French control, Saint Domingue became the dominant sugar-producing island in the West Indies from 1763 to 1791.17 The colony’s growth was, in terms of Timothy Morton’s “Earth magnitude,” profoundly rapid and intensely transformative. David Watts calls it a “spectacular expansion,”18 occurring within just decades. From 1697, when the Treaty of Ryswick recognized Saint Domingue as a French colony, to 1730, more than two hundred sugar estates were established.19 Throughout the eighteenth century, Saint Domingue continued its unchecked growth: “between 1720 and 1775, St. Domingue’s exports in sugar were raised five-fold,” and “by the close of the 1760s, she raised almost as much cane … as the whole of the British West Indies put together, and was, needless to say, also overwhelmingly dominant among the French colonies.”20 Such rapid agricultural development required massive deforestation. Watts quotes J. Davies’s seventeenth-century The History of the Caribby Islands on the extent of the clearing of trees: “if the plantation be but newly establish’d, it is requisite that it should have been cleer’d of wood some considerable time before” in order that “there remain not any wood, nor bark, nor leaf, nor so much as the least grass.”21 With the extermination of so many trees, the planters experienced unforeseen consequences. Watts declares, “There is no doubt that, as more and more forest was cut down to make way for new estates, an ecological maelstrom was unleashed.”22 How did this happen? First of all, the planters were working under the false assumption of the limitless and unchanging fertility of the island’s soil. Morton terms such thinking an axiom of “the logical structure of agrilogistics,” the ideological justification for the ecological destruction of the Anthropocene. Such practices assume that “Existing means being constantly present,” that if the soil is fertile, it will always remain fertile.23 Yet the fertility of the soil depended on the trees of this mountainous tropical biosphere. Watts explains, “most of the nutrient store of this biological complex lay in the vegetation itself, and this of course had been largely removed in the land-clearance process.” The trees had also inhibited the “unrestricted soil movement downslope” that created further erosion. This was exacerbated by the relentless succession of crops “raised year after year with

40  Lisa M. Vetere very little being put back into the soil.”24 French Creole M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s nearly eighteen hundred-page study of Saint Domingue, Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique, Et Historique de la Partie Française de L’Isle Saint-Domingue, published in 1798, attests to the extent of the deforestation and soil depletion and to the colonists’ knowledge of it. According to Sherrie Baver, the work is a comprehensive account of the impact of the intensification of sugar production on a Caribbean island. With impressive foresight, he chronicled the colonists’ indifference to the impact of the colony’s too-rapid deforestation, especially on the extinction of local animal species, the intensification of soil erosion, and the reduction in rain levels. 25 One of the many unintended consequences of the deforestation of Saint Domingue was the burgeoning of the slave system—itself a major contributing force of the Revolution. “Slaves from Africa were set directly and immediately onto the task of land clearance.”26 This contributed to the high mortality rate among the slaves of Saint Domingue and the need for the massive importation of new slaves. As historian D. Per Lindskog writes, The importation of slaves to Saint Domingue in the eighteenth century was exceptional. The number of slaves increased from 172,500 in 1754 to 249,000 in 1775 and 434,400 in 1789, thus by far outnumbering the number of slaves in the other Caribbean colonies. 27 The more slaves, the more deforestation, the more the exhaustion of the soil, the smaller the crop yields, and the harsher the work conditions for the slaves. 28 This relentless cycle of depletion also introduced harsher sorts of tasks to slaves’ labors as they now had to work to help revitalize the depleted soil: “a substantive distribution of natural animal manures on particularly impoverished land was required, and this was achieved largely by hand-carriage of ‘dung’ from animal pens.”29 A vicious circle indeed but one that, according to Watts, the planters refused to acknowledge: Yet at the time nowhere was the connection between these enhanced rates of death among slaves and their use in forest removal made clear, at least not in the literature: perhaps it was sufficiently obvious to property owners for them not to have to mention it. 30 French and Creole planters’ mistaken notion of the infinite abundance of the soil derived from their mistaken notion that they had full knowledge of the forest as well as from their blindness to the interrelationship

“A Heap of Ruins”  41 between trees, water, soil, and slavery. This ignorance reflects the Enlightenment assumption that forest was mere matter that could be manipulated without consequence, that all effects could be known, predicted, and controlled. This idea of forest as a soulless lump of matter began to circulate so fully in the late eighteenth century that it was inscribed in Denis Diderot’s French Encyclopedia (published between 1751 and 1772) in Charles-Georges LeRoy’s entry on “forêt.” According to Robert Pogue Harrison, LeRoy defines the forest as timber or “a quantifiable volume of usable (or taxable) wood” rather than a habitat. The new science of forestry even emerged to study the forest’s “enduring maximum availability, and its continuous renewal.”31 This refusal to look at trees as nothing more than sources of wealth, of soil as nothing more than piles of dirt, parallels the Creole planters’ treatment of the slaves of Saint Domingue as an unending resource to fuel their economic development and wealth, a resource that gives without needing anything in return—and a vivid and indeed horrifying illustration of the interconnection between human and nonhuman beings. Yet the ecology of Saint Domingue resisted being so quantified. It wouldn’t, so to speak, be treated like dirt. The environmental history of the island demonstrates Enlightenment arrogance and the “drastic finitude” of its knowledge of forest, soil, and mountains; this ecosystem exists in a “profoundly ‘withdrawn’ way,” to borrow Morton’s description of an object world “that restricts my access to things in themselves.”32 From such a limited perspective, the land seemed “mysterious and magical” to the Creole planters, 33 its violence and destruction inexplicable. Never really understanding the unintended results of their agricultural practices, the planters are later haunted by this ignorance. Indeed, it creates an uncanny effect, as Morton suggests: As if in a disturbingly literal proof of Freud’s refutation of the idea that the unconscious is a region ‘below’ or ‘within’ consciousness, we find the unconscious style of a certain mode of human being sprayed all over what lies outside the human, the biosphere. This unconscious is decidedly (geo)physical.34 Their trees cleared and their soil eroded, the mountains that comprise 85% of Saint Domingue’s land became the space of an ecological uncanny. Their powers returned to haunt the Saint Domingue planters of sugarcane, who disavowed the role that sugar plantations played in facilitating both the terrors of the slave revolt as well as the horrors of deforested mountains. Mary’s letters to then-Vice President Aaron Burr from Cape François repeatedly recount the menacing force of these geological structures, their participation in both revolutionary violence and domestic intrigue. In her study of “plantations, personhood, and colonialism in the tropics,”

42  Lisa M. Vetere Allewaert comes close to noticing the importance of mountains in Secret History when she interprets them as a form of political “surrogacy” for Clara, the narrator’s sister.35 While in Cuba, Clara finds freedom from the tyranny of her husband by imitating, in a sense, the escaped slaves, or maroons, who established their refuge from slavery in those “hills and low mountains enclosing Cap Francois” that “figure centrally” in Sansay’s narrative.”36 However, Allewaert imagines mountains more as a setting for a drama of “marronage” than as actors in their own right. If understood as more than a landscape, the deforested and destructive mountains expose the revolutionary violence that the text otherwise seems to evade. This linkage between dangerous mountains and the Haitian Revolution abounded (and continues to abound). The situation in Saint Domingue was known throughout the US as a “slumbering volcano,” to cite the subtitle of Alfred Hunt’s book, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America, itself a reference to Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), a story about a vicious slave insurrection aboard the slave ship San Dominick. The deforested mountains surrounding Cape François manifest the destructive powers of a volcano in the very first letter of Sansay’s text. Mary describes women and children ascending the mountain to escape the burning city. But the mountain conspired with the fire and prevented their escape: “Climbing over rocks covered with brambles, where no path had been ever beat, their feet were torn to pieces and their steps marked with blood” (62). Further, when a powder magazine exploded, large masses of rock were detached by the shock, which, rolling down the sides of the mountain, many of these hapless fugitives were killed. Others still more unfortunate, had their limbs broken or sadly bruised, whilst their wretched companions could offer them nothing but unavailing sympathy and impotent regret. (62) Mary recounts “these heart-rending scenes of tenderness and woe” (63) and imagines the horror and “terrible apprehensions” felt by these assaulted innocents (62). She does not terrify readers with accounts of slaves hacking off limbs with bloody machetes but instead with images of spikey “brambles” of the underbrush tearing apart flesh. Nature itself seems to massacre the Creoles. Mary mostly blames the avalanche on the rebelling former slaves. She relates how Christophe, the Black general, who commanded at the Cape, rode through the town, ordering all the women to leave their houses—the men had been taken to the plain the day before, for he was going to set fire to the place, which he did with his own hand. (62)

“A Heap of Ruins”  43 That is her only explanation. But environmental history informs contemporary readers of what Mary omits. Why was the mountain so rocky? Why were those rocks so easily loosened from the mountain and transformed into weapons? Why were there so many brambles? Deforestation suggests an answer to all of these questions. Without trees, the land is rockier, the soil looser, and the brambles more profuse. 37 Thus, the violence was the return of the repressed environmental history, obscured by ignorance of the larger ecosystem. The avalanche that murdered the Creoles was an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements that complicates causality and mystifies the deeds of the mountains. Those very same mountains that crushed the Creoles later assist General Rochambeau in attacking other Creoles—or, more specifically, just a single Creole, his romantic rival. Rochambeau, who replaced the deceased General LeClerc as the leader of the invading French forces, not only commands the Imperial navy; he also tries to command Clara. This sexual pursuit, in fact, becomes the main focus of Mary’s letters throughout Secret History, challenging critics to understand the relationship between the delights of Clara’s intrigues and the “horrors of St. Domingo.” From 1995 to the present, critics such as Joan Dayan, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Michael Drexler, Elizabeth Dillon, Gretchen Woertendyke, Tessie Liu, Michelle Burnham, Melissa Adams-Campbell, Allewaert, Goode, and Marlene L. Daut have offered compelling arguments about the intersections between these two disparate dimensions of Sansay’s plot. As Dillon points out, Sansay’s “narrative of domestic intrigue” and her narrative of “anti-colonial revolution” strikingly “cross, recross, and displace one another as the novel unfolds.”38 Other critics explore how, for instance, Rochambeau’s desire for Clara informs his political decisions or how Clara’s liberation from her marriage mirrors the slaves’ liberation from their masters—and hence the interrelations between politics, race, and gender, between history and genre, and between sexuality and commerce. An ecogothic perspective sheds additional light on these interconnections. The ecological uncanny of the mountains exerts a formidable, integral, and destructive force on the “romantic” triangle of Rochambeau, Clara, and her husband, St. Louis—a force that the general assumes he can harness and control. Rochambeau’s use of the destructive force of the mountains echoes the French Encyclopedia’s definition of forest: inert matter exclusively for the use of human purposes. In this case, however, Rochambeau deploys the deforested mountain to conquer a woman. Rochambeau’s quest for Clara on Saint Domingue in some ways emblematizes the French agricultural colonization. Following his European predecessors, both human and nonhuman, this French general arrives on the island, an invasive life form aiming to plant his seed in indigenous soil. Based on an ignorance of the “Earth magnitude” of his actions, Rochambeau’s effort to control and conquer indigenous

44  Lisa M. Vetere territory ultimately backfires and rebounds upon the one seeking control: the ecological uncanny once again erupts in Sansay’s text. This eruption begins with revolutionary violence. Mary recounts how the black revolutionary forces, or “brigands” (to use her term), massacre twelve Creole soldiers, an officer, his wife, and their small child (82) in an attack on Fort Belleair. This political event, as critics such as Dillon note, provides Rochambeau with an excellent opportunity in his quest for Clara. He orders the Creole troops, including St. Louis, “who commands a company in the guarde nationale,” to defend the fort (82). Rochambeau’s military strategy here, however, is dictated by his sexual desires. He wielded his military authority to put St. Louis in a place where something or someone else could do his dirty work: St. Louis, with sixty men, had been placed in the most advanced post, on the very summit of the mountain, where they were crowded together on the point of a rock. In this disadvantageous position, they had been attacked by the negroes; forty men were killed; and the troops of the line, who were a little lower down, had offered them no assistance. It being the first time that the guarde nationale had been placed before the troops of the line the common opinion is, that it was the general’s intention to have St. Louis destroyed, as it was by his order that he was so stationed, and kept there all night, though the other posts had been relieved at midnight. (85; emphasis added) As in the first scene, here too we can detect how the deforestation of the mountain has endowed it with malefic powers. For the very top of the mountain was not verdant but rocky. It was denuded and thus refused protection to St. Louis’s military company, becoming instead a source of menace and danger. Because Rochambeau alone could not have dispatched St. Louis, he must join a much larger and older process engaging multiple temporalities. Rochambeau cannot so easily exterminate St. Louis and conquer Clara. The Creole planter refuses his commander’s control and leaves “his post [on the mountain] without orders, and thus exposed himself to all the rigours of a court-martial” (84). This resistance to Rochambeau’s control sparks a rage within the general that eventually leads to a murderous madness—a madness birthed from his failure to control the resources of both mountain and woman. Immediately following the incident with St. Louis, Mary writes her last three letters from Cape François; they recount the tyranny of an obsessed Rochambeau. She sees a dangerous monstrosity manifesting in Rochambeau’s increasingly obsessive pursuit of Clara. In particular, Mary observes, “it is only since he has attained the summit of power that he has appeared regardless of public opinion!” (92; emphasis added). A telling metaphor, as Rochambeau’s efforts to

“A Heap of Ruins”  45 acquire power have involved his manipulation of the powers of Saint Domingue’s barren mountains. In one such tyrannical act, Rochambeau issued an order revoking all the passports “granted during the last three months” (100), a political act intended to prevent Clara in particular from leaving Saint Domingue. Rochambeau issued this official “proclamation,” according to Mary, within hours after Clara “positively refused” (100) to respond to a letter from him “filled with professions of admiration and unalterable love” (100). This rejection led him to abuse his political and military authority in the pursuit of love. Intoxicated with his own power and indifferent to public opinion, Rochambeau proceeds to stalk Clara during a visit she and her sister Mary make to Fort Picolet. The road there, Mary informs Burr, “winds along the seashore at the foot of the mountain” (100). To tour the fort, therefore, is to ascend the mountain. But this is not just any mountain. For it was from Fort Picolet, historians record, that General Christophe ordered the first shots fired against the French fleet: “The guns of Fort Picolet had opened a cannonade upon a [French] vessel of the squadron … and this was the signal for a new conflagration which was about to desolate that unfortunate city” of Cape François.39 Thus, the guns that fired on the French ship were the signal to torch the city and marked the beginnings of the malevolent stirrings of the mountain. As Mary and Clara prepared to leave Picolet, they saw a troop of horsemen descending the mountain. They came full speed. We soon discovered they were the general [Rochambeau] and his suite; and as they followed the windings of the road, with their uniform a la mameluc, and their long sabres, they appeared like a horde of Arabs. (101) Materializing almost magically from the “summit of the power” (92) on Fort Picolet, Rochambeau demonstrates his effort to claim the mountain. He chooses it as the location on which to try to seize Clara. Jumping dramatically from his horse, Rochambeau manages to corner Clara on “a point of the rock” (101) and “offer at your feet that homage which envious fate has hitherto deprived me of an opportunity of paying” (101). The couple teasingly accuse each other of witchcraft and prophesy, although Clara continues to deny his appeals and to insist that she “used no art” in enchanting him. Interrupting this tête-à-tête, Mary urgently warns the couple that St. Louis has somehow appeared on the scene and “is ascending the mountain” (102). Mary can only see his ascent because “the road winds round its base with so many turnings that it is of considerable length” (102), and so St. Louis is too late to catch his wife in a compromising position. Strangely enough, St. Louis is not angry or jealous, even when Rochambeau jokes that the husband “came

46  Lisa M. Vetere in time to prevent him from running away with his wife” (102). Instead, St. Louis almost miraculously forgets the entire scandalous scene as he begins conversing “on the situation of the colony” (102). The ecological uncanny has worked its magic. It pervades this mountain scene on a site that is, in fact, a vodou shrine in present-day Haiti.40 But the mountains behind Picolet do not seem to be behaving malevolently this time. It’s a scene of seduction rather than destruction. No one is killed. The mountain’s powers do seem to collude, however, with the desires of a malevolent tyrant. The mountain offers Rochambeau its help in several ways. First of all, its lack of trees facilitates the seduction by, first, providing a rocky plateau for his private time with Clara. Cleared of trees, the mountain also allows for the detection of St. Louis from enough of a distance that the couple have ample time to “compose” (102) themselves before his arrival: Mary can watch St. Louis as he winds his way up the mountain. And finally the mountain emanates some kind of force that lured the characters there. Clara tells Rochambeau that she “was led here by curiosity,” a force that she depicts as controlling her. One similarly wonders how St. Louis knew exactly where to find his wife, as Picolet is some distance from Cape François. Also wondrous is St. Louis’s forgetting of what he saw: his wife in a “dangerous” situation with another man—who had tried to have him killed. With what powers does the mountain entice its victims? A seductive scent. On the peak of Picolet, Mary reports, the “rocks are covered with the Arabian jessamin, which grows here in the greatest profusion. Its flexible branches form among the cliffs moving festoons and fantastic ornaments, and its flowers whiter than snow, fill the air with intoxicating fragrance” (100–1). The shrub has flowers with the power to alter human consciousness. Further, that power is linked with Rochambeau, whose party Mary describes as looking “like a horde of Arabs,” wearing turbans on their heads. The Arabian jasmine, or Jasminum Sambac, is a vining, non-native shrub that spreads rapidly (as Mary notes), especially when not impeded by competitors.41 And, as Watts notes, shrubs took root best in the West Indies after deforestation.42 The jasmine assumes a menacing presence, not only because it lures the lovers to Picolet but also because its vines allow Mary to transform the shrub into a kind of manacle. Once St. Louis arrives on the scene, Rochambeau takes a “wreath of jessamin” that Mary had been unconsciously weaving and, “twining” it “round her [Clara’s] arm,” says, “with such fetters only you should be bound!” (102). Scheming with Rochambeau’s nefarious purposes, the “profuse” jasmine try to chain Clara to the hillside in yet another gothic trope. Once again, then, the deforestation of Saint Domingue’s mountains, allowing the proliferation of the jasmine, endows them with eerie powers. The mountain’s powers, however, fail Rochambeau in the end: he cannot seduce Clara, and he becomes maddened and even more monstrous. Planters suffered unintended and often horrific consequences because

“A Heap of Ruins”  47 they wrongly assumed that they could manipulate the soil, the trees, and the mountains of Saint Domingue, ruthlessly depleting these resources for the profit of a sugar plantation. So too is Rochambeau’s effort to manipulate the flowers and rocks of the mountain damned because the totality of the ecosystem’s powers eludes him. The ecological uncanny curses Rochambeau with a devastating madness. Right after Clara rejects him at Picolet, Mary vividly depicts Rochambeau as an unhinged fiend. She relates how “three negroes were caught setting fire to a plantation” and “sentenced to be burnt alive” (103). In a subsequent anecdote, Mary tells a horror tale of a Creole viciously executed by Rochambeau for failing to pay him twenty-thousand dollars on command (103–4). She describes both chilling scenes in gruesome detail. She can barely “find expressions to convey to you an idea of the horror that fills my soul,” to “describe scenes at which I tremble even now with terror” in relaying (103). Impotent to control the magic of the mountain, Rochambeau descends into madness. An agent of the French powers that first colonized Saint Domingue and instituted its lethal sugar plantations, he overestimated his ability to control; he couldn’t see that the mountain wielded its powers not at the command of humans but within an intricate and inaccessible ecological mesh. In order to begin to understand this mesh, humans must cease to deny the reality of that interconnection between human and nonhuman, between history and ecology. Environmental history affords such a link. The lack of knowledge, bordering on wanton refusal to acknowledge the effects of its environmental history, has continued to haunt perceptions of Haiti and the Haitian people. Baver notes that one of the “sad aftermaths of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, which left over 300,000 dead and initially 1.5 million homeless, was a widespread perception in the media and the collective imaginary that the country somehow deserved it.”43 As Baver continues, to blame the Haitians for these ecological disasters is to ignore the effects of three hundred years of exploitation—the conquest, colonization, and economic and diplomatic isolation—that devastated its landscape and therefore contributed to Haiti’s environmental vulnerability. Within an ecogothic perspective, this repressed history finds a way to return as the “geophysical unconscious,” thus offering an important contribution to literary studies and even to the living planet.

Notes 1 Clavin, “Race, Revolution, and the Sublime,” 4. 2 Dun, Dangerous Neighbors, 232. 3 Clavin, “Race, Revolution, and the Sublime,” 14. 4 For the life of Sansay, see Lapsansky, “Afro-Americana”; Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods; Drexler, “Brigands and Nuns”; and van Bergen, “Reconstructing Leonora Sansay.” 5 Estok, “Theorizing in a Space,” 208.

48  Lisa M. Vetere 6 Hillard, “‘Deep Into That Darkness,’” 691. 7 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1. 8 Sansay, Secret History, 61. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 9 Dillon, “Secret History,” 78. 10 Morton, Dark Ecology, 22. 11 Estok, “Theorizing in a Space,” 211. 12 My survey of the environmental history of Hispaniola and Saint Domingue is informed largely by Watts, The West Indies. See also Williams, Deforesting the Earth; Lindskog, “From Saint Domingue to Haiti”; and Baver, “Hispaniola’s Environmental Story.” 13 Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 5. 14 In one of the most influential studies of the Haitian Revolution, Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers an in-depth analysis of this pervasive cultural forgetting of the Haitian Revolution, the first successful slave revolt that led to the first successful republic created by former slaves. 15 Watts, The West Indies, 3, and throughout. 16 Ibid., 60. 17 Ibid., 232. 18 Ibid., 298. 19 Lindskog, “From Saint Domingue to Haiti,” 74–75. 20 Ibid., 299. 21 Watts, The West Indies, 393. 22 Ibid., 231. 23 Morton, Dark Ecology, 47. 24 Watts, The West Indies, 398, 393, 536. 25 Baver, “Hispaniola’s Environmental Story,” 650–51. 26 Watts, The West Indies, 394. 27 Lindskog, “From Saint Domingue to Haiti,” 79. 28 Watts, The West Indies, 397. 29 Ibid., 309. 30 Ibid., 394. 31 Harrison, Forests, 122. 32 Morton, Dark Ecology, 16. 33 Ibid., 17. 34 Ibid., 23. 35 Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 161. 36 Ibid., 143. 37 Harmer, Kiewitt, and Morgan. “Can Overstorey Retention Be Used,” 141. 38 Dillon, “Secret History,” 78. 39 Brown, The History and Present Condition, 61. 40 In my 2013 visit to Cap Haitian (current name of Cape François), I visited Fort Picolet and saw this shrine for myself. 41 Gowdhami and Rajalakshmi, “Ethnobotany,” 40. 42 Watts, The West Indies, 440. 43 Baver, “Hispaniola’s Environmental Story,” 648.

Bibliography Adams-Campbell, Melissa. “Romantic Revolutions: Love and Violence in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo.” Studies in American Fiction 39.2 (2012): 125–46. Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

“A Heap of Ruins”  49 Baver, Sherrie L. “Hispaniola’s Environmental Story: Challenging an Iconic Image.” Callaloo 37.3 (2104): 648–61. Brown, Jonathan. The History and Present Condition of St. Domingo. Vol. 2. Philadelphia, PA: W. Marshall, 1837. Burnham, Michelle. “Female Bodies and Capitalist Drive: Leonora Sansay’s Secret History in Transoceanic Context.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 28.3 (2011): 177–204. Clavin, Matt. “Race, Revolution, and the Sublime: The Gothicization of the Haitian Revolution in the New Republic and Atlantic World.” Early American Studies 5.1 (2007): 1–29. Daut, Marlene L. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Del Principe, David. “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 16.1 (2014): 1–8. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “The Secret History of the Early American Novel: Leonora Sansay and Revolution in Saint Domingue.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40.1/2 (2006–2007): 77–103. Drexler, Michael. “Brigands and Nuns: The Vernacular Sociology of Collectivity after the Haitian Revolution.” In Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies, edited by Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts, 175–99. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Dun, James Alexander. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2 (2009): 203–25. Goode, Abby L. “Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History.” Early American Literature 50.2 (2015): 449–73. Gowdhami, T., and A. K. Rajalakshmi. “Ethnobotany and Pharmacognostical Studies of Jasminum sambac Linn.” International Letters of Natural Sciences 37 (2015): 39–45. Harmer, Ralph, Andrea Kiewitt, and Geoff Morgan. “Can Overstorey Retention Be Used to Control Bramble (Rubus fruticosus L. agg.) During Regeneration of Forests?” Forestry 85.1 (2012): 135–44. Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hillard, Tom J. “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.4 (2009): 685–95. Hunt, Alfred N. Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Lapsansky, Phillip S. “Afro-Americana: Rediscovering Leonora Sansay.” In The Annual Report of the Library Company of Philadelphia for the Year 1992, 29–46. Philadelphia, PA: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1993. Lindskog, Per D. “From Saint Domingue to Haiti: Some Consequences of European Colonisation on the Physical Environment of Hispaniola.” Caribbean Geography 9.2 (1998): 71–86.

50  Lisa M. Vetere Liu, Tessie P. “The Secret beyond White Patriarchal Power: Race, Gender, and Freedom in the Last Days of Colonial Saint-Domingue.” French Historical Studies 33.3 (2010): 387–416. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Sansay, Leonora. Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura. Edited by Michael J. Drexler. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Black Gothic: The Shadowy Origins of the American Bourgeoisie.” In Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, edited by Robert Blair St. George, 243–69. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995. van Bergen, Jennifer. “Reconstructing Leonora Sansay.” Another World Is Possible. 3 January 2010. www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2010/01/03/reconstructingleonora-sansay. Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Woertendyke, Gretchen. “Romance to Novel: A Secret History.” Narrative 17.3 (2009): 255–73.

3 “The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking” Landscapes of Slavery in The History of Mary Prince Amanda Stuckey On May 30, 1812, the Bermuda Royal Gazette reported the eruption of Mt. Soufrière and a series of earthquakes that shook the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The volcano had “slumbered in primeval solitude and tranquility” for almost a century, until “just as the Plantation Bells rang 12 at noon on Monday the 27th, an abrupt and dreadful crash from the mountain, with a severe concussion of the earth, and a tremulous noise in the air, alarmed all around it.” A heavy cloud of vapor and rumbling noises from within the earth warn of the imminent eruption, and “terror and consternation now seized all beholders” as “the Negroes became confused, forsook their work, looked up to the mountain, and as it shook, trembled, with the dread of what they could neither understand, nor describe.” Finally, the volcano overflows as “earthquake followed earthquake almost momentary” and as “the miserable Negroes flying from their huts, were knocked down, or wounded, many killed in the open air.” Chaos envelops the island in “a continued state of oscillation” as the land “undulated like water shaken in a bowl.”1 Within this account of upheaval collide the conventions and dynamics of two fields of literary critique. The Gazette’s detailed record of the eruption and resulting earthquakes demonstrates the field of ecocriticism’s fundamental inquiry into “human attempts to record, order, and understand their own landscapes.”2 In the Gazette’s account, St. Vincent’s environment, far from being mere backdrop within the control of human subjects and actors, defies the very notion of control. In turn, the instability of this landscape and the ability of natural disasters to shift the surface of the Earth transforms the Earth’s surface to a space much like the nineteenth-century gothic novel, a “highly unstable genre” that “scattered its ingredients into various modes.”3 Broadly defined, the ecocritical and the gothic meet on St. Vincent’s shaky plane and in the Gazette’s attempts to record and order the events of its landscape. The island was not always a place of disorder and chaos, however. In the same article, the Gazette notes that A century had now elapsed, since the last convulsion of [Mt. Soufrière], or since any other elements had disturbed the serenity of this

52  Amanda Stuckey wilderness…. it apparently slumbered in primeval solitude and tranquility, and from the luxuriant vegetation and growth of the forest, which covered its sides from the base, nearly to the summit, seemed to discountenance the fact, and falsify the records of the ancient volcano.4 Such visions of tranquility and solitude gave rise to the central European pastoral, a foundational genre of ecocritical analysis. The article’s momentary reflection or “return” to a past tranquility recalls and almost longs for these years of undisturbed harmony with the natural world in a celebration of untouched rural life. 5 British ecocritic Greg Garrard has recently described the pastoral as outdated in its reflections on “harmony and balance,” yet critics of literature and the environment continue to return to the pastoral as a mode through or against which certain populations define their own version of “harmony and balance”—or, more importantly, disruptions therein.6 The colonial environment of nineteenth-century Bermuda may have been a space where this mode and its disruptions traveled. As Lawrence Buell argues, as they moved farther away from their metropolitan centers, Europeans could invoke the pastoral mode “to underwrite a program of conquest.”7 The account of natural events on Mt. Soufrière cannot be separated from the very unnatural system of British colonial slavery that also shaped the island’s landscape.8 In the Gazette’s account, the “plantation bells” herald not just “12 at noon” but also the “crash” of the mountain. The “Negroes” become conflated with the agitating volcano; the mountain “shakes” as the enslaved “tremble,” and the proximity of these convulsions, both in the structure of the Gazette’s description and on the island, paints these confused observers into St. Vincent’s landscape. Its “primeval solitude and tranquility” may not be just the mountain’s slumber, but the uninterrupted regularity of slave labor that both shaped and blended into the colony’s operation. The Gazette’s article deftly weaves the African and Afro-Caribbean presences into the backdrop of the formerly untouched island’s landscape. When the volcano erupts and the ground shakes, the enslaved continue as part of this confusion as they too convulse “with the dread of what they could neither understand nor describe.” Michael Bennett points out that the term “pastoral” locates its roots in the activities of fourteenth-century English shepherds and makes the key observation that Africans were “more likely to be referred to in the lexicon of slavery as sheep rather than shepherds.”9 Masked as a “natural” quantification and domination of the land, British colonialism disrupted the indigenous and African lives it violently conscripted into its imperial efforts. In the Gazette’s description, as in the “logic” of colonial slavery, African witnesses are unable to process or make sense of what they see as the land seems to possess more agency than the people who work it. The article

“The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”  53 discloses the island’s African presence only when the volcano erupts, as if the island’s enslaved labor only becomes visible when, like the land, it acts outside of century-long expectations of submission. And when the “Negroes” do act, according to this account, they do so within the parameters of the natural disasters themselves, shaking and trembling in time with the Earth. Similarly, from its inception, the genre of the gothic has been bound to extra-national and colonial settings. As Lizabeth ParavisiniGebert writes, colonial settings, encounters, and subjects offered up the figures of horror, terror, and fright that the metropole and the gothic hero or heroine sought to conquer and dominate. By the 1790s, she observes, gothic writers came to realize that the expanding boundaries of the British empire “could provide a vast source of frightening ‘others’” against which to pit their protagonists.10 Even as it seeks to render the Afro-Caribbean presence a mere backdrop, the Gazette also unwittingly depicts rebellion against such marginali­ zation and dehumanization. The earth upon which colonial slavery and conquest is enacted is fundamentally unstable. The “Negroes,” shaking alongside the mountain, may also erupt, may also speak out against over a century of enslavement, and may do so in ways that the Gazette, and, by extension, the lexicon of British colonialism, may not be able to detect. The repressed landscape flares up against this seeming tranquility to demonstrate that such “harmony” never existed in the first place.11 Yet what relevance do the pastoral and the gothic have to dormant volcanoes and slave rebellions? If both genres are steeped in Western literary, cultural, and even imperial formations, why should we read cultural activities of the enslaved according to these conventions? In his analysis of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Bennett asks a question that resounds throughout the Americas in its applicability to other slave narratives and other African cultural forms produced within enslavement: “of what use,” he asks “is ecocriticism if the culture under consideration has a different relationship with pastoral space and wilderness than the ideal kinship that most nature writers and ecocritics assume or seek?”12 Similarly, if in the Caribbean and other spaces of the British empire, the pioneers of gothic fiction found a new “darkness” represented in enslaved Africans and the violence of the colonial landscape, how might this “darkness” speak back, not as embodied “darkness” but as thinking, feeling human subjects? The genre of the slave narrative, then, especially narratives generated by unstable colonial locations like the Bermudan and Caribbean islands, complicates some of the critical and representational frameworks we associate with the gothic and ecocritical modes. Here, I examine the structure of the slave narrative in order to demonstrate how the natural, material environment of slavery operates as a gothic force that

54  Amanda Stuckey destabilizes boundaries between dominance and oppression, interior and exterior, surface and core. In a reading of The History of Mary Prince, published in London in 1831, I attend to various surfaces of the slave narrative—the surface of the landscapes through which Prince passes, the surface of Prince’s body as it is abused and suffers in and out of enslavement, and the surface of the text itself in all its compositional complexities—in order to illuminate an argument the text makes about the nature of dependence and independence. This narrative, I suggest, does not seek to break down the hierarchical structures of colonial slavery but rather to illuminate the fragility of this hierarchy. Conventions of the gothic have the power to dismantle rigid oppositions and taxonomies like black and white, slave and free, and colony and metropole, while ecocritical perspectives might propose that these distinctions never truly existed as binary oppositions, that they are mutually produced and dependent upon each other. Merging the two concepts reveals the intimacy of what is held at a geographic distance. The ecogothic, then, operates on broad as well as intimate scales, ultimately destabilizing the literal, geographic distance between metropole and colony as well as the intimately produced distances between the white and black surfaces of the bodies that exist in the spaces between.13 Studies of gothic tropes and conventions often collect around national frameworks, distinguishing between a standardized form of British gothic and a more flexible, less canonically fixed form of American gothic.14 The Atlantic slave narrative begins to destabilize some of the more traditional boundaries around which such literary criticism can be organized as liminal and shifting geographic conditions generate slave narratives like The History of Mary Prince. Born in slavery in Bermuda, Prince is sold almost one thousand miles away to the Caribbean islands of Turks Island and Antigua. Later in life, she travels to England, where she meets members of London’s Anti-Slavery Society who help her produce her narrative. Prince’s life maps, in her individual movements, the larger cultural location Paul Gilroy describes as the Black Atlantic. The paradigm of the Black Atlantic has continued to shape critical analyses of black cultural production for more than twenty years, yet only recently have critics formulated transnational spaces like the Black Atlantic, not just as geopolitical locations but also as environments and ecologies that transcend national boundaries.15 Though her life in slavery falls within the British national realm, the environment of slavery that Prince experiences is closer in proximity to that of the hemispheric Americas. Furthermore, the slave narrative as a genre seems antithetical to the work of gothic conventions. As Teresa Goddu has written, the two genres seem to be in “direct opposition”; the “documentary form” and “adherence to veracity” of the slave narrative “announce a refusal of any imaginative rendering,” which colored fictional gothic novels.16 In its most conventional form, the slave narrative followed an abolitionist

“The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”  55 agenda of portraying slavery “as it is,” of being witness to the physical, mental, and emotional dehumanization required to maintain this system of power and domination. Yet the abolitionist agenda behind the slave narrative sought to assert not just the slave narrator’s veracity but also the slave narrator’s very humanity.17 If the purpose of the slave narrative in its British, American, and Atlantic iterations was to attest to the horrors of slavery, then the conventions of the gothic genre perhaps became most useful as a representational strategy, as a means of “unveiling the atrocities of the slave system” and of unmasking the humanity of its slaves.18 The appearance of gothic conventions within the slave narrative becomes even more complicated when we consider that, as in the case of Prince, the primary slave narrator could read and write very little and likely had little access to the gothic novels that established these conventions. Prince dictated her narrative to an unnamed white woman, later revealed to be author Susanna Strickland. Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, edited and published it as a thirty-eight-page pamphlet. If deliberately gothic tropes appear in Prince’s narrative, they are likely the work of the collaborative voices involved in composing the narrative and of the abolitionist’s role in weaving elements of realism, the sentimental, and the gothic into the slave narrative genre.19 Following Robin Winks and Francis Smith Foster, Paravisini-Gebert notes that the tension between the gothic and the “real” could transform the slave narrative into gratuitous scenes of brutality and near-pornography, scenes that were “safe” to read because they are couched within the political rhetoric of abolitionism. 20 As a representational tool, especially one wielded in part by a white man and a white woman who had an interest in producing narratives that would appeal to a reading public conditioned by gothic conventions, the gothic within the slave narrative might assume a sensational cast and even drain slavery of its historical and experienced realities. 21 In efforts to rescue Prince and other subjects from the violence of this sort of representation, critics often attempt to separate the various voices that combine to form the slave narrative, seeking to detect Prince’s “true” voice and to release it from Pringle’s domineering interventions. 22 These reading strategies excavate the text to find what Prince is “truly” saying as evidence of her resistance to the violence of representation often enacted and described through gothic tropes. Samuel Otter has recently questioned the “excavation” approach in order to attend to the “expressiveness and trenchancy – the depth – of [textual] surfaces.” He maintains that the complex exteriors represented in narratives like The History of Mary Prince constitute a sort of “deep textual surface,” one that carries with it all the dislocations, upheavals, and reversals that scenes like the eruption of Mt. Soufrière denote. In a reading of The History of Mary Prince that follows Otter’s parameters, Rachel Banner

56  Amanda Stuckey also resists “symptomatic” readings of the narrative that seek “signals” of Prince’s authentic voice or resistance to the interventions of her abolitionist interlocutors. 23 Rather than excavate and extract meaning from the depths of the text, an ecocritical perspective might draw our attention to the surfaces of the text, its bodies and its landscapes, to notice the ways in which these are interwoven and the ways in which they render the very division between surface and core unstable. The multiple facets of The History of Mary Prince’s surface demonstrate the interrelatedness of textual, landscape, and bodily surfaces. This perspective does not excuse any deliberately gothic representational violence on the part of Pringle and Prince’s other interlocutors but rather attends to the complexities of the environment of slavery and the environment of the slave narrative’s composition. Gothic representations of slavery in Bermuda and the Caribbean in The History of Mary Prince emphasize the intimate entanglement between the body and the environment. The narrative’s attention to the built environment, for example, connects its gothic structures directly to the island’s primary resources. When Prince is first separated from her family, sold to new owners on a distant part of the island, she arrives at her new home at night: The house was large, and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it that night. I saw too much of it afterwards. The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners. (13) Dwight McBride notes that this description bears “traces of the Gothic”; 24 the imposing house beneath an even more imposing hill and the darkness that cloaks it prefigure a more symbolic “darkness,” which later makes the house all too visible. The description weds the built landscape to the environment of Bermuda, both its natural environment and the environment imposed by colonial slavery. The first enslaved persons arrived on Bermudan shores in 1616 to work as pearl divers off the island’s coast, but when the reefs surrounding the island proved unfruitful, colonists turned to other extractive endeavors, including felling timber and diving for stones, to secure the island’s infrastructure. 25 Later in her narrative, Prince recalls the dangers of harvesting these materials, “div[ing] for large stones to build a wall round our master’s house.” With “the great waves breaking over us continually,” she remembers, “we lost our footing, and were in danger of being drowned” (20). The “hard hearts” of her new owners also become part of the island’s built environment, externalized in a comparison to the landscape of colonization. The comparison of the unforgiving landscape of slavery and its more sinister, inner core violates the division between surface and interior,

“The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”  57 demonstrating Prince’s view of slavery as a shifting landscape, one that is in continual flux and negates any easy distinction between cracking surface and erupting interior. The “surface” of Prince’s text, too, experiences an interruption of sorts as Pringle footnotes this passage with the assertion “These strong expressions, and all of a similar character in this little narrative, are given verbatim as uttered by Mary Prince” (13). While in this note, Pringle might seem to qualify Prince’s “authentic” voice and to, at the same time, disqualify it with the interrupting presence of his own, it also demonstrates the “deep surface” to which Otter refers, the layered voices that intermingle to produce the slave narrative. The surface of the text, too, becomes unstable and uneven. Pringle’s voice appears throughout the text, often in conjunction with Prince’s descriptions of the local environment of slavery. In describing the auction in which she was separated from her family, Prince notes that “slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards the blacks, and many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us loud… though their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts” (11). The reference to cayenne, one of the products extracted and exported from the southern hemispheric Americas, as abrasive to the heart’s surface demonstrates the intimate connection yet friction between body and place, one that locates Prince in a global, colonial context through channels of commerce that lead not ever outward but inward, to the heart. In a lengthy footnote to this passage, Pringle avers the violence of this account of family rupture and asks readers to compare Prince’s description of the slave auction with one that he himself witnessed on the Cape of Good Hope. Pringle writes that he overheard one trader’s promise to “train” his new purchases “with the sjamboc” or, as Pringle clarifies parenthetically, “a whip made of the rhinoceros’ hide” (12). In supplementing Prince’s account, Pringle draws more attention to the materiality of the enslaved body by corroborating the cayenne with the sjamboc. Though he expands slavery’s reach outward, as far as South African shores, Pringle also references the very “local” material of the rhinoceros hide, skin that comes into violent and intimate contact with the skin that marks the enslaved. Surfaces come into contact in multiple ways within the slave narrative, including the surface of the page on which Prince and Pringle’s accounts meet. The text connects South Africa and Bermuda (and London, the site of Prince and Pringle’s own meeting) on the surface of this page only to focus inward, on the surface of the individual’s skin where, as Prince attests, the division between feeling body and feeling heart can collapse. These passages may represent what Orlando Patterson has defined as the “materialistic idiom” of power in which dominance and subjection are hidden when this “power relation is no longer viewed as power over persons but as power of commodities.” This “disguise,” writes Patterson, masks slavery’s structure as a system of power instead of as a system

58  Amanda Stuckey of labor. 26 Yet Prince describes the built environment—the stones and timbers of her master’s house—as “the best things” in comparison with the “hard hearts” of her owners. Beyond unveiling the power structures upon which slavery relies, Prince suggests that the dynamics of power are built into the physical landscape of slavery. Furthermore, her narrative proposes the slave’s body is not the only body vulnerable to the environment of slavery or the natural environment. In a description that recalls the eruption of Mt. Soufrière, she recollects a series of natural disasters that unmasks not just different configurations of power but the instability of power itself. During a “heavy squall of wind and rain,” Prince’s mistress sends her on an errand with an earthen jug “already cracked with an old deep crack that divided it in the middle,” and as Prince empties it, “it parted in my hands.” Her mistress “flogged me… as long as she had the strength to use the lash, for she did not give over til she was quite tired” (16). Prince’s master also beats her for the broken jar; afterward he “sat down to take breath; then after resting, he beat me again and again, until he was quite wearied, and so hot (for the weather was very sultry), that he sank back into his chair, almost like to faint.” Just as he rests, “there was a dreadful earthquake. Part of the roof fell down, and everything in the house went—clatter, clatter, clatter… the earth was groaning and shaking, everything tumbling about, and my mistress and the slaves were crying out” (17). Prince punctuates her account of the Earth’s upheaval with instances of the vulnerability of not just her own body but of her owners’ bodies; the details of her floggings are, in turn, punctuated with the fatigue and weakness of the flogger. Ostensibly neutral forces, like the crack already present in the jug, foreground the violent beatings in which the scene of the earthquake is embedded, and Prince’s body is not the only one to suffer the ill effects of these beatings. Both her master and mistress beat Prince until they themselves are worn out and must cease. This observation does not suggest that slavery takes an equal toll on the bodies of all it involves nor does it over-emphasize the characterization or apparent suffering of the white body in a scene of black violation. Rather, the uneven vulnerability of all bodies in this scene contributes to Prince’s reconfiguring of the material world around her. No longer is her body, beaten, kicked, and maimed, front and center in a display of visible, graphic materiality for the readers of the slave narrative to witness, but the entire world of Prince’s Bermuda is literally crumbling. The vernacular objects—the cracked jar that she must fill, the roof under which she is enslaved—become emblems of slavery that fail and fall, not only because of the earthquake but because the surface of slavery is unstable and uncertain. 27 Yet Prince does not ignore the direct abuse that she suffers at the hands of her master. Her narrative jumps from the earthquake to “some time after,” and the abuses she suffers become the mark of temporal

“The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”  59 continuity. Accusing Prince of letting a cow wander loose, Prince’s master “struck me such a severe blow in the small of my back, that I shrieked with agony, and thought I was killed. I feel a weakness in that part to this day” (17). She feels she “was killed,” and the beating transcends the pages of the text to continue to affect Prince in the very moment that she recalls this cruelty. Her body itself becomes a kind of gothic space in which the physical memory of pain is housed, and this memory flares back up in a physical sensation as she tells her story. The gothic disjunction between surface and interior and its motifs of imprisonment find their clearest articulations within and upon the individual body in slavery. The relationship between the individual body and the larger environment continues to produce these images of rupture and imprisonment when Prince is hired out to work in the salt ponds of Turk’s Island, nearly one thousand miles south of her Bermudan home. She and the other salt miners endure the heat of the day; the sun flaming upon our heads like fire and raising salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered. Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment… we [continued] our employment til dark at night… [then] went down to the sea, where we washed the pickle from our limbs. (19) As Barbara Baumgartner has observed, this description highlights the agency of the salt pond’s environment: it “flames,” “eats,” and “pickles,” and even when the workers attempt to erase the salt water’s effects on their bodies, they must repeat the process each night only for the blisters and pickle to return the next. 28 These material instances of imprisonment seem to trap Prince within her own skin, to attempt to confirm her status as a slave. Unlike most of her fellow laborers, however, Prince has an opportunity to leave the Caribbean islands, themselves insular spaces of imprisonment that made escape all the more difficult. 29 Sold to the Wood family, Prince leaves the salt ponds of Turks Island and travels with Mr. Wood to Antigua. Prince becomes a member of the Moravian church and marries a free man she meets on the island, yet her physical health still plagues her. The freshwater ponds of Antigua even make her ailments worse. Prince’s main task with the Wood family is to take care of the children and “go down to the pond and wash the clothing.” She contracts rheumatoid arthritis “by catching cold at the pond side, from washing in the fresh water; in the salt water I never got cold” (25). She suffers bouts of rheumatism during her time in Antigua but must work whether sick or well. She takes the opportunity to travel with the Woods

60  Amanda Stuckey to England, however, to care for the children during the family’s time abroad and hopes to find a cure while there. “I thought that by going [to England],” she notes, “I should probably get cured of my rheumatism and should return with my master and mistress, quite well, to my husband” (31). The destruction that the working environment of the Caribbean wages over Prince’s body, according to this thinking, can be cured with a voyage to an entirely different environment, far removed from the chilling freshwater and the abrasive salt water. While in England, Prince hopes, she might find relief and release from her bodily suffering and regain her mobility in order to return to Antigua to be with her husband. England also represented a space of freedom for slaves in British colonies. Though the Somerset case of 1772 was largely ambiguous in its language, it perpetuated the image of England as “free soil” and revoked support of slavery within national boundaries (while still maintaining its legality in many British colonies).30 The ruling, in part, inspired poet William Cowper to pen these lines from Book 2 of The Task: Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall. 31 The metropole, in opposition to the “darkness” and imprisonment of the colonial islands, here becomes not just free soil but free air, as if the mere intake of breath enacts the transition from slave to free. Yet Prince’s arrival on English soil and intake of English air contradicts the naturalness of this transition. As her ship approaches England, she recalls that “the rheumatism seized all my limbs worse than ever, and my body was dreadfully swelled” (31). English shores become a location of continued imprisonment, a pain “worse” than in Antigua. Prince carries with her to the imperial center the very “darkness” that metropolitan gothic writers distanced themselves from in their visions of the Caribbean, closing the space between the Self and the Other and suggesting that the “Other” is in close proximity to and indeed produced by the seemingly unblemished center. In the final pages of her narrative, Prince’s embodied state in some ways mirrors her legal and social condition: though technically free, she is a stranger in London, is for the most part unable to work, and is unable to support herself outside of the Wood household. The Wood family ignores her ailments and threatens to throw her onto London’s unfamiliar streets if she does not resume her work. Yet the debilitating reaction between water and Prince’s body continues when she learns how “to wash in the English way”: In the West Indies we wash with cold water—in England with hot. I told my mistress I was afraid that putting my hands first into the hot water and then into the cold, would increase the pain in my

“The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”  61 limbs. The doctor had told my mistress long before I came from the West Indies, that I was a sickly body and the washing did not agree with me. But… I grew worse, and I could not stand to wash. (31–2) The water of England, like the water of Turks Island and Antigua, continues to disable Prince’s body, and though she is technically free in London, her body and her continued confinement within the Wood household do not permit her to realize this freedom. Her narrative suggests that the physical ailments that slavery incurs do not just cross the Atlantic with her but that they are continually generated in and by an environment that condones and profits from enslavement. The History of Mary Prince employs the representational tools of the gothic to close the distance between dark colonial imprisonment and the “air” of freedom. These tools also extend beyond representation to articulate the text’s surface tensions between the enslaved voice and the intervening abolitionist agenda. In one of several supplements to Prince’s narrative, Pringle echoes Cowper’s version of freedom as he proclaims, “NO SLAVE CAN EXIST WITHIN THE SHORES OF GREAT BRITAIN” (63). Yet Prince’s experience demonstrates that remnants of slavery do exist and can be amplified by the very water that delineates these shores. In the years leading up to British abolition, the true “horror” represented in the slave narrative is, perhaps, that the same waters touch England’s coastlines as Bermuda’s. Prince’s narrative collapses the distance between these shores, dismantling the environmental, textual, and embodied structures meant to keep them apart. The surfaces of Prince’s slave narrative, then, destabilize some of the paradigms fundamental to literary categories of both the gothic and the ecocritical models. Spanning Britain and the Americas, Prince’s Atlantic slave narrative invokes gothic tropes as Western tools of representational that expose the material horrors of slavery as they played out on the surface of the Earth and of the human body. The relationship between the geographically distanced plantation environment and the metropole are brought together when the Earth quite literally crumbles beneath these structures, reveling not “harmony” but fragility. Where the slave narrative complicates the gothic and the ecocritical, the lens of the ecogothic may act as an analytic tool to understand what happened across the landscapes of Atlantic slavery and its narratives.

Notes 1 “Description,” 2. 2 Armbruster and Wallace, “Introduction,” 4. 3 Hogle, “Introduction,” 1. 4 “Description,” 2. 5 In its broadest definition, according to Buell, the pastoral encompasses “all literature that celebrates an ethos of rurality or nature or wilderness

62  Amanda Stuckey over against an ethos of metropolitanism” (Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 439, n. 4). 6 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 65. Terry Gifford argues that the pastoral has “transformed into a concept,” citing as examples the “post-pastoral,” “urban pastoral” and “gay pastoral” as current ecocritical articulations of the genre that demonstrate its continued relevance (Gifford, “Pastoral,” 17). Bennett discerns an “anti-pastoral” tradition in African-American literary reflections on the environment and natural world (Bennett, “Anti-Pastorialism,” 196). 7 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 54. 8 Frederick Douglass himself characterizes slavery as an unnatural order of the world; in “The Nature of Slavery,” he asserts, “There can be no peace to the wicked while slavery continues in the land. It will be condemned, and while it is condemned there will be agitation. Nature must cease to be nature; men must become monsters; humanity must be transformed” (434). 9 Bennett, “Anti-Pastorialism,” 196. 10 Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic,” 229. Goddu writes that “many of the eighteenth-century British male gothicists—such as Monk Lewis and William Beckford—were either slaveowners or proslavery; moreover, the rise of the gothic novel in England at the end of the eighteenth century occurred during the heighted debate about abolition, a debate in which William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, both authors of gothic novels, actively participated” (Goddu, Gothic America, 133). 11 Even though the Gazette may not have been a “literary” production, it nonetheless was part of British imperial print culture. As Iannini writes, following Michael Warner, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds of print culture included colonial reportage like the Gazette and “comprised not only belletristic genres such as novels, plays, and poems, but also those forms of written discourse devoted to the cultivation of practical knowledge” (Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 4). 12 Bennett, “Anti-Pastorialism,” 195. 13 Here, I am thinking of Connolly’s argument that what contemporary scholars consider to be the “transnational” was historically “constituted at the intimate level of conjugality” or the level of the individual body and self (Connolly, “Intimate Atlantics,” paragraph 13). 14 The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, for example, separates out the American gothic in its organization. Goddu focuses her study on a distinctively American gothic, noting that “the canonical British gothic serves as the reference point for readers attempting to locate the less identifiable American version” (Goddu, Gothic America, 3). Smith and Hughes also organize their collection into sections based on national categorizations. 15 Of the transnational turn in American literature, Goode has written that “critics tend to situate [literary productions] within an exclusively geopolitical framework, eliding the larger environmental context” of these works (Goode, “Gothic Fertility,” 463). 16 Goddu, Gothic America, 136. 17 In his analysis of scientific, anthropological, and political rhetoric that shaped the abolitionist agenda of the slave narrative, McBride writes that “from the content and rhetoric of the debates waged between the anti-­slavery agitators and the pro-slavers, one can see that the major debates were not only over the nature of slavery as an institution but also over the nature of the slave” (McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 2). 18 Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic,” 232. 19 See McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 21.

“The Earth Was Groaning and Shaking”  63 20 Quoting Robin Winks, Paravisini-Gebert writes that gothic figures turned slave narratives into “the pious pornography of their day, replete with horrific tales of whippings, sexual assaults, and explicit brutality” (Paravisini-­ Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic,” 232). 21 See Goddu, Gothic America, 35. 22 See, for example, Paquet, “The Heartbeat,” 131–46 and Larrabee, “‘I know what a slave knows’,” 453–73. 23 Otter, Philadelphia Stories, 111 and 118; Banner, “Surface and Stasis,” 302. 24 McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 10. 25 Timber was also an important commodity for the shipbuilding industry. The mention of timber in this passage gestures toward the overall geography of Bermuda as well as its insularity as an island yet its “global” position as a crossroads of sorts for maritime passages from the “old” world to the “new.” See Kopelson, “‘On Indian,” 273–74 and Jarvis, In The Eye of All Trade, 219, 232, and 252. 26 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 19. 27 Ryden notes that a “vernacular object,” like this jug or a “stone wall,” does not “erase nature but rather helps us understand nature—or, more particularly, the attitudes toward and relationships with nature held in the minds of people who create that artifact (Ryden, “Robert Frost,” 297). 28 Baumgartner, “The Body as Evidence,” 257. 29 Kopelson notes that the “intimate island geography made runaway communities impossible” (Kopelson, “‘On Indian,” 274). 30 Brown, Moral Capital, 97. 31 Cowper, Selected Poems, 84.

Bibliography Armbruster, Karla, and Kathleen R. Wallace. “Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature Writing, and Where To?” In Armbruster and Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing, 1–25. ———, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Banner, Rachel. “Surface and Stasis: Re-reading the Slave Narrative via The History of Mary Prince.” Callaloo 36.2 (2013): 298–311. Baumgartner, Barbara. “The Body as Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in The History of Mary Prince.” Callaloo 24.1 (2001): 253–75. Bennett, Michael. “Anti-Pastorialism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery.” In Armbruster and Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing, 195–210. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Connolly, Brian. “Intimate Atlantics: Toward a Critical History of Transnational Early America.” Common-Place 11.2 (January 2011). www.common-­ place-archives.org/vol-11/no-02/connolly/. Cowper, William. Selected Poems. Edited with an introduction by Nick Rhodes. New York: Routledge, 2003. “Description of the eruption of the Souffrier Mountain.” Bermuda Royal Gazette (May 30, 1812): 2. Bermuda National Library Digital Collection,

64  Amanda Stuckey http://bnl.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Bermuda NP02/id/27269/rec/46. Accessed May 18, 2016. Douglass, Frederick. “The Nature of Slavery.” In My Bondage and My Freedom, 429–434. New York: Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, 1855. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2011. Gifford, Terry. “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westling, 17–30. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Goode, Abby L. “Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History.” Early American Literature 50.2 (2015): 449–73. Hogle, Jerold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” In Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 1–20. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Iannini, Christopher. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Jarvis, Michael. In The Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudans, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Kopelson, Heather Miyano. “‘On Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had’: Imagining the Archive in Early Bermuda.” Early American Studies 11.2 (Spring 2013): 272–313. Larrabee, Mary Jeanne. “‘I know what a slave knows’: Mary Prince’s Epistemology of Resistance.” Women’s Studies 35.5 (Summer 2006): 453–73. McBride, Dwight. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Otter, Samuel. Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean.” In Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 229–257. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince.” African American Review 26.1 (Spring 1992): 131–46. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. Edited with an introduction by Sarah Salih. New York: Penguin, 2004. Ryden, Kent. “Robert Frost, the New England Environment, and the Discourse of Objects.” In Armbruster and Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing, 297–311. Sharpe, Jenny. “‘Something akin to freedom’: The Case of Mary Prince.” Differences 8.1 (Spring 1996): 31–56. Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

4 “Give me my skin” William J. Snelling’s “A Night in the Woods” (1836) and the Gothic Accusation Against Buffalo Extinction Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. A hunter squints against the blankness of a prairie snowfield. Through the cold that turned his whiskers into icicles, he approaches a lone buffalo that stomps at the hard ground searching for the meagre grass beneath. “He was a grim-looking barbarian,” the stalker claims as he raises his rifle and fires. 1 “He ran—and I ran; and I had the best reason to run— for he ran after me” (41). Exhibiting the characteristic obstinacy of the species, the bull does not die immediately. Instead, it chases the narrator who, in the panic of his flight, disencumbers himself of his gun, flint, and other accoutrements. He finds refuge at the center of a small frozen lake. The treacherous footing of the ice obstructs the maddened animal’s pursuit. Stubborn in a need to slake its vengeance, the beast “perambulated the periphery of the pond” (41). After several hours, during which time the hunter catalogs his regrets, the bull stumbles away. The narrator follows the wounded creature to a grove of trees where it collapses and expires. He skins the buffalo, obtaining the hunter’s prize, only to realize the lateness of the day and that he had lost his sparking flint in his hurry to elude pursuit. The dire winterscape had become so cold, he “could hear the ground crack and the trees split with its intensity” (42). He has little option other than wrapping himself in the freshly fleeced robe “with the hair inward” and abiding the night without a fire (42). As he drifts toward slumber, a raven alights on a branch and caws at him. He recognizes it as a “note of evil omen” (42). In the distance, wolves howl, magnifying the foreboding. The hunter sleeps erratically and dreams. His victim revives as a nightmare, rising “slowly to his feet, skinless as he was, and gave me such a look as I have heard called a tanyard grin” (43). Furious, the gory buffalo charges, attempting to impale the dreamer and scowling the ghoulish expression of scorn formed on the skull of an animal after a tanner has removed its lips, exposing its teeth (43). The apparition rolls the hunter on the ground, sits on his chest, and demands, “Give me my skin—give me my skin” (43).

66  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. The dreamer awakens momentarily only to find that the exposed wetness of the robe has frozen, entrapping him. He warns his readers that “the raven kept up his ominous noise all the while, as though he were my evil spirit” (44). The hunter returns to sleep and his visions intensify. The enraged, fleece-less bull reappears and blasts him with a breath that “savored of sulphur [sic]” (44). The stink discloses its hellish origins, but the narrator knows that he is ultimately responsible for creating the horror that torments him. “I could see every vein and muscle, even the hole where my bullet had entered, just as my knife had laid them bare” (44). The monster calls out and gathers other buffalos that encircle the hunter. The beak of the raven elongates into a flute, and it pipes a tune as the group joins in a weird dance. The narrator admits his terror, but he cannot escape because the robe yet binds him. The herd transforms into a pack of wolves—“My arch enemy was still distinguished by the absence of epidermis”—and the transmuted devils perform a new routine: “Snapping, snarling, and gnashing of teeth succeeded; and it was all at me!” (46). At the conclusion of their ritual, the wolves shake from their bodies fleas that enter the hunter’s ears and eat his brain. The fleas enter his nose, travel down his throat, and feed on his innards. The raven replicates into a flock that attacks and pecks at his flea-infested body. The wolf pack returns, “and my old enemy flew at my throat, and tore out my windpipe, and bolted it before my face” (47). Before the dreamer perishes, he awakes to the voice of an Indian who laughs at him and “speedily unrolled” him from the buffalo robe (47). After enduring the ridicule of his Indian rescuer, the narrator concludes the story with the intentionally vacuous statement that he has learned his lesson: not to lose his flint during a winter hunt. William J. Snelling, the author of this short story, was a practiced satirist. He intended for the inane conclusion to contrast with his obvious message about a destroyer who deserved his penance and a victim entitled to its revenge. When the hunter moans, “There I lay…, enduring… torments that which the Inquisition has none greater; and all for having deprived an old buffaloe [sic] of his skin,” he confirms the origin of the creature’s animosity (47). 2 When he completed “A Night in the Woods” in 1836, William J. Snelling joined a national admonition against the extinction of the buffalo. In the early nineteenth century, US traders, explorers, and other travelers traversed the Great Plains and observed the astonishing numbers of buffalos that migrated in large herds from Canada to Mexico. Some reveled in the myth of nature’s abundance. Others such as Snelling, who perceived the waste of over-hunting, prophesized the eventual extinction of the species (Bison bison) and condemned the actions of thoughtless men. George Catlin, Josiah Gregg, Washington Irving, and other cultural leaders identified the avarice of the market economy as the monster that hungered for this destruction. To adequately convey their

“Give me my skin”  67 dismay, this small but widely regarded cadre of writers and artists summoned the gothic to appall their audiences and rouse their sympathies. They portrayed herds fleeing in wide-eyed terror or retaliating with outrage, enduring wounds with supernatural tenacity or bellowing in gory deaths. When they foretold the vanishing, they warned that the buffalo would haunt the nation that gorged on its slaughter. Having resided on the northern plains, Snelling wrote about the plight of the buffalo with some authority. Around 1820, after dropping out of West Point, the Boston native traveled to the Falls of St. Anthony on the Upper Mississippi, where his father, Colonel Josiah Snelling, took command of a US Army post at the mouth of a river that the Dakota Sioux called Minnesota. For about seven years, William gathered stories and experiences while he alternated between the soldiers at Fort Snelling, the Dakotas, government explorers, and multi-ethnic traders. When his father died in 1828, he returned to Boston and began a twenty-year career as an essayist, editor, and social critic. He first published Tales of the Northwest (1830), which retold some of the stories that he acquired in the Minnesota region, but he would attain a reputation as a crusader against the corruption and hypocrisies of the cultural and economic elites of New England and New York. 3 Snelling published “A Night in the Woods” in Henry T. Tuckerman’s anthology The Boston Book (1836), and he expanded it for an 1840 number of The New-York Mirror. Snelling called on his experience on the northern plains and lent his acerbic talents to this short tale that, although focused on the slaying of a single buffalo, implied a warning against speciocide and the destructiveness of American cupidity. The story received little critical or scholarly attention, and the few notices characterized it as a comedy or “a masterpiece of fantasy.”4 Although it contained elements of wit and perhaps magic, Snelling nevertheless imbued his work with gothic tropes such as a desolate landscape, grotesque imagery, a hallucinogenic nightmare, and transmogrification that heightened the extremity of the buffalo’s rage and foretold its destruction. By the 1830s, when Snelling wrote the story, the notion of the disappearance of an entire species was quite new. In 1796, French naturalist Georges Cuvier suggested that fossils preserved the remains of animals that no longer existed, and in 1813, he argued that the planet had endured numerous extinctions in its past. Cuvier examined a variety of fossils, including mastodons from the US, where his theories attained wide circulation. When Snelling wrote that the “tormentors fled, as if the mammoth of the Big Bone Licks was behind them,” he connected the plight of Bison bison to the well-known extinction site on the Ohio River. In the hunter’s dream, the buffalos-as-wolves scamper from the woods lest they become like the mammoth (47). 5 With his short story, Snelling joined other writers and artists in expressing national anxieties over the loss of the buffalo. In 1819,

68  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. Stephen H. Long explored the Platte River and, in 1823, the region of the Minnesota River. The journalists for both expeditions commented on the lamentable prospects of the species. In the earlier effort, Edwin James apprised his readers of how the populations had diminished in the eastern sections of the continent and how that same “process of extirpation” continued in the West. As a guide and interpreter for Long’s 1823 effort, Snelling may have discussed the bleak future with William H. Keating, who reported that the buffalo had “diminished so rapidly within a century… that there is reason to apprehend that it will soon disappear from the face of the land.”6 By the time Snelling published his story, army officers, overland traders, fur trappers, artists, and other travelers warned their audiences about the likelihood of extinction. Artist George Catlin described it as “a melancholy contemplation.” He augured a time “when the last of these noble animals” would vanish and leave “these beautiful green fields, a vast and idle waste.” In his poem, “Indians Hunting the Buffalo” (1840), Matthew Field blamed Native Americans for the declining numbers. Although he seemed to relish their gruesome deaths, he echoed Catlin when he concluded with a haunting prophecy: Thus fall the untamed monarchs of the waste; But centuries shall seek eternal rest, Ere the last, lonely buffalo is chased From the wild, grassy gardens of the West. Then, like the mastodon, a ripped-up bone Shall be his funeral stone! In the last couplet, Field confirmed Snelling’s linkage between the mammoths of the Ice Age and the disappearance of the buffalo, perhaps presaging a future monstrosity.7 During the previous 10,000 years, however, the species had flourished on the Great Plains. The animals ranged from Canada to Texas, filling an ecological vacuum left by the Pleistocene extinctions, surviving eons of climate swings and human predation. Environmental historians have estimated that in 1800, the herds included about 30 million and declined to half that by 1860. At its height, however, the fur trade collected only about 100 thousand robes annually, representing less than one percent of the population. When Snelling, Catlin, and other visitors to the plains recorded the killing of tens or hundreds of buffalos during any given hunt, they witnessed the loss of only a small, and perhaps sustainable, fraction of the total. The mathematics did not warrant the raven’s caw of doom.8 Snelling and his contemporaries did not exhibit some remarkable or ecologically sensitive perception, but they were accurate predictors of the human capacity to destroy. Even if by tens or hundreds, the butchery often stunned observers, especially when inflicted during acts of

“Give me my skin”  69 wantonness. “The slaughter of these animals is frequently carried to an excess,” Santa Fe trader Josiah Gregg complained, “which shows the depravity of the human heart in very bold relief.” He wrote in response to those who hunted beyond the need for food, satiating “the mere pleasure of taking life.” Often, the killers would only carve out tongues as trophies, and as naturalist John J. Audubon recorded, they would abandon the buffalos’ remains for carrion. He calculated, “[T]hus it is that thousands multiplied by thousands of Buffaloes are murdered in senseless play, and their enormous carcasses are suffered to be the prey of the Wolf, the Raven and the Buzzard.”9 When Snelling confronted this concern in his story, he drew on the relatively new expression of American gothic. Building on the work of Charles Brockden Brown, his contemporaries, such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, formulated a genre that emphasized excesses, terror, the supernatural, and depravity. This literary strategy created egresses that permitted explorations into realms that seemed too traumatic or taboo to deal with directly. As literary scholar Allan Lloyd-Smith explains, “Gothic is in essence a reactionary form…, one that explores chaos and wrongdoing in a movement toward the ultimate restitution of order and convention.” These storytellers tackled a variety of concerns, but in general, they responded to anxieties generated by modernity. In examining the fiction of the period, scholars more often identify class or ethnic angst as the essential apprehension of early nineteenth-century gothic writers.10 The modern world, however, also clashed with the natural world. In the 1830s, US storytellers, artists, and travel writers often employed extremes, horror, and perversity as devices to call attention to the injury that the rise of market capitalism and consumer materialism inflicted on the environment. Snelling represented an early example of this ecogothic project to address the widening gulf between humanity and nature. As literary scholar David Del Principe observes, nineteenth-century industrialization and “the commodification of animals caused a paradigmatic breach in our relationship with nature,” and the ecogothic “often portrays this estrangement in panicked, dystopian terms, as humans’ reluctance to come to terms with their nonhuman ancestry and the common, biological origin of all life.”11 Not all of Snelling’s contemporaries shared his concern. Some believed that nature had supplied them with the abundance to satisfy their whims. During an 1839 caravan over the Santa Fe Trail, Matthew Field and his companions dedicated an entire day to a killing spree. They “chased the poor brutes about the prairie, killing the unfortunate animals in mere wantonness, as we were not in want of meat,” leaving the landscape strewn with crimson heaps: “The brutes that we killed feed only our love of excitement, made food for the starving wolves.” Francis Parkman Jr., author of The California and Oregon Trail (1849), found

70  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. that the buffalo’s “ugly and ferocious aspect” banished any sympathy for it and further argued that “no man who has not experienced it, can understand with what keen relish one inflicts his death wound, with what profound contentment of mind he beholds him fall.”12 A number of popular and influential writers and artists, however, did not accept this myth of abundance. They rejected Parkman’s lack of sympathy and judged the wantonness of Field and others like him as a failing of their humanity. Gregg and Irving both admitted to succumbing to what the former called “the cruel temptation,” but they expressed remorse for their personal frailties. After the excitement of the chase had ebbed, Irving recalled how a “poor animal that lay struggling and bleeding at my feet” provoked his shame and sympathy: “It seemed as if I had inflicted pain in proportion to the bulk of my victim.” Fur trader David L. Brown felt similar pangs after killing a bull: “I cannot say that I experienced any of those feelings of exultation…. Its death was wholly gratuitous.” When Snelling’s narrator reveals that he intended to inflict pain and “to put an end to [the buffalo’s] long, turbulent and evil life,” he identifies himself as one of the depraved and one deserving of censure (40).13 Together with other sympathetic storytellers, Snelling developed a variety of ecogothic strategies to warn audiences against a future when the buffalo would vanish. These authors crafted stories that presented the species as monsters that rampaged against their demise and possessed a preternatural obstinacy. In “A Night in the Woods,” the old bull does not immediately die after it sustains the rifle shot. Instead, it turns on its would-be destroyer, chases him onto a frozen pond, and stalks him from the bank for four hours. Others witnessed this resilience and compared it to a near-supernatural desire to live and defy its predators. As Gregg remarked, “The tenacity of these animals for life is often very extraordinary.” Rufus Sage, a Louisville journalist who, in the 1840s, crossed the plains, reported “the remarkable tenacity of life peculiar to the buffalo.” If not supernatural, the use of terms such as “extraordinary,” “remarkable,” and “peculiar” classified buffalos as something incredible.14 The creature’s defiance originated from a wellspring of rage. In Snelling’s nightmare, the infuriated bull snorts sulphur, and its tanyard grin seethes with the “double distilled essence and essential oil of spite.” As Gregg and Irving personally encountered, the placid grazer became a demon when provoked. Irving explained that its ferocity transformed it into “an aspect… most diabolical…. [H]is eyes glow like coals…. [H]e is a perfect picture of mingled rage and terror.” After Brown charged into a herd, he found himself in a “cataract” amidst the “gigantic animals…. Their blood-shot eyes, gleaming fitfully…, and their shaggy manes, streaming meteor like [sic] on the swift and cleaving air, was a sight at once sublime, fearful, and menacing” (43).15 As Snelling’s dark vision further revealed, a devious heart beat within these monstrosities. They were fiends scheming to avenge the wrongs committed against them. “I was doomed for the murder of—an old

“Give me my skin”  71 bull,” Snelling’s hunter moans, but he concedes, “I felt the extremity of mortal terror aggravated by remorse; for conscience told me that his claim was just” (41). The author reiterated how, in its different abominations, the aggrieved took pleasure in its tortures. Travelers to the plains often recorded the horrifying moment when the creature turned on its ­ merican Buffaloe chaser, and it became a popular subject for artists. In A (1832), Titian R. Peale, who had accompanied Long on his 1819 expedition, depicted a bull charging its Native American assailant with eyeballs glaring, tail uplifted, head lowered to gore. Catlin placed himself as the unfortunate one fleeing from a maddened creature in Buffalo Hunt, Chasing Back no. 12 (1844). Matching Peale’s depiction of a head-lowered, bounding profile, Catlin added the spew of froth from the its mouth and the streaming blood from a gunshot wound as well as the stricken expressions of fear on both the rider and his frantic horse. Alfred Jacob Miller produced Pierre and the Buffalo (1858–1860) (Figure 4.1), based on his 1837 trek across the plains. Here, dust billows as the herd stampedes through the background. An enraged bull tumbles his pursuer. The horse, on its back, kicks at the air with its hooves, while the red-shirted hunter lands in the dirt on his face. His rifle and knife scatter beyond his reach. The monster, according to Miller’s commentary, gores the horse to death, but before it turns on the hunter, the blueshirted rescuer dashes into the scene and kills the buffalo with a rifle. Peale, Catlin, and Miller not only capture the species’ determination to live but also its vengeful desire to torment its attackers.16

Figure 4.1  G eorge Catlin, Dying Buffalo Bull in a Snowdrift, 1837–1839. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

72  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. In Snelling’s story, the buffalo’s revenge assumes several forms, including wolves that succeed in tearing out the narrator’s throat just as he awakes from his dream. In a similar telling, “Dreadful Fate of ‘the Buffalo Destroyer’” (1841), wolves also represent avenging surrogates. In Spirit of the Times, a sports hunting magazine, an author writing under the name Pensyl told the story of Bill Maserve, who attains his sobriquet for having “killed… as many of that animal [buffalos] perhaps as any half-dozen of his comrades.” Returning home through the woods, he falls under the sway of an “immense oak…. It was in reality a monster.” Sleeping beside its “gnarled trunk,” Maserve suffers a nightmare in which a pack of wolves chases him over the prairie. The lead tormentor with “mouth, wide open, displayed a most formidable array of ivory, and its eye-balls gleamed like coals of fire.” Within the veteran hunter, the wolf inspires “a cold chill of horror like an ice-bolt through his veins.” Similar to Snelling’s narrator, Maserve awakens before the pack kills him, and in both tales, frightful dreams vividly lay bare the guilt hunters harbor for their roles as buffalo destroyers.17 Had the millions slaughtered been so furiously obstinate, however, the species would have prevented their own destruction. Most accounts, perhaps more correctly, portrayed animals that were frightened and men fleeing for their lives. Like Maserve, the hunter in “A Night in the Woods” suffers “accumulated horrors,” and he is “stupefied with fear” (46). In Catlin’s Buffalo Hunt, Chasing Back and in his Buffalo Chase, Bulls Making Battle with Men and Horses (1832–1833), fear colored the confrontation between humans and the natural world. In the latter, he depicted a melee. One bull lies on its side, gasping blood that splatters on the green prairie; another with an arrow drawing fluid from its side gores a horse, tumbling its rider, and yet a third flees with crimson gushing from its wound and nostrils as fright lights the expressions of the horses and hunters.18 As Matthew Field reminded, this characteristic rage and tenacity originated from the bison’s dread of death: Pain, misery, anger, wonder, blind fury and overwhelming terror seem to speak in this mute denotement [sic] of parting life. Again and again will they rouse themselves from the approaches of death, and make new efforts at escape or revenge. He also portrayed their panic in verse: On! On! Now hither, thither wildly speeding, Their starting eyes in phrenzy glaring round, Bends the vast throng, some staggering and bleeding, Goring the air and tearing up the ground— Crossed, turned, cut off, and maddened by the foe— Ill-fated buffalo! Field was unconcerned about the demise of the species, but his depiction acknowledged its terror of extermination.19

“Give me my skin”  73 Furthermore, if ecogothic stories prefigured extinction, then in the end, the buffalo must die. Horror confirmed their determination to survive, but like the skinless revenant of “A Night in the Woods,” depictions of traumatic and gruesome death underscored the injustice of this disappearance. Indulging in rank voyeurism, Catlin rode up to a wounded bull to watch its suffering. Yet sustained by vengeance, the animal “would bristle up with fury enough in his looks alone, almost to annihilate me… and making one lunge at me, would fall upon his neck and nose.” The artist deemed that capturing “this grim-visaged monster” as it suffered its last throes would make for a good picture, and he started to sketch its “horrid rage hissing in streams of smoke and blood from his mouth and through his nostrils.” He later rendered the image in oil with Dying Buffalo Shot with an Arrow (1832–1833) (Figure 4.2). The bull sits, its hind legs folded, useless. Garish red streams, red tongue, red mucus, and a red tear contrast with its dark coat. Catlin mixed the urgency of fear and livid gore in other scenes, such as Dying Buffalo Bull in a Snowdrift (1837–1839) (see Figure 4.3). Here, in a cold world reminiscent of Snelling’s “bleak, desolate, uncomfortable” landscape with “trees… like bleaching skeletons,” a group of faceless native hunters find their comrade lying in the snow, caught beneath a severely wounded bull. Enraged, it had turned on its attacker, and despite the blood flowing from its nostrils and viscera spilling on the snow, it achieved its vengeance. 20

Figure 4.2  Alfred Jacob Miller, Pierre and the Buffalo, 1858–1860. Watercolor on Paper. Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.

74  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.

Figure 4.3  G eorge Catlin, Dying Buffalo Shot with an Arrow, 1832–1833. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Gothic writers and artists took this fear and gore and created nightmares that haunted the perpetrators of speciocide. Snelling chose an extremist tactic, portraying the resurrected buffalo as a skinned phantasm with its exposed veins and telltale bullet wound. In one scene of his A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Irving opted for a more subdued haunting. He lingered as his comrades departed their camp, leaving it “forlorn and desolate” in their wake. They flattened the grass, cut down trees, and left their refuse, which included a gruesome scattering of remains. Irving waited until the last man entered the woods so that he “might behold the wilderness relapsing into silence and solitude” as if to salve the wounds inflicted by the “reckless improvidence and wastefulness” of his companions. 21 Here, Irving identified American cupidity as the transgression that instigated such hauntings. The bison-as-monster motif dealt less with anxieties about social Others, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Maria Beville, and their scholarly contemporaries suggest. Instead, as Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann show in their study of a later generation of horrors, the figment of the rampaging buffalo projected the human self. It reflected both the guilt over the greed that festered within as well as the rage that gothic writers and artists felt when they confronted the fear

“Give me my skin”  75 that capitalism and industrialization could destroy their world. This anthropomorphic strategy created an empathetic connection between species. It enabled the reader to understand better the terror of extinction. The buffalo did not become enraged until disturbed by the unnatural forces of commodification and consumption. Their monstrousness did not originate from the heart of the natural beast but from the perverse avarice of humanity. 22 The traffic in peltry multiplied the waste that Irving deplored into the tens of thousands. In supplying this market, Native American, métis, and Anglo-American hunters amassed furs, leaving the killing ground strewn with fleeced hulks, smiling their “tanyard grins.” Catlin described this trade as a “cruel and improvident rapacity.” As a discerning analyst of markets, Gregg matched the artist’s bitterness over the practice of butchering the animals “for the skins and tongues alone” and predicted the demise of the species, warning that commerce was “fast reducing their numbers, and must ultimately effect their total annihilation from the continent.”23 In his short story, Snelling encoded this same accusation within the motif of skin. The fur was the prize that Snelling’s narrator coveted: “Would that I had a skin like a buffaloe!” (44). It served as both his prison and the focus of the creature’s resentment: “Give me my skin— give me my skin” (43). The innards-consuming fleas spring from the fur of wolves, and when summoned, the “cohort of incarnate fiends” dance around the restrained hunter and sing, “Rouse him about, and touze him about,/And frighten him out of his skin” as if to show the protagonist what it would feel like to become skinless (45). In the 1840 version, Snelling autobiographically revealed that the hunter of his story was an Indian trader operating from a post established by the North American Fur Company, reaffirming his culpability as an agent of destructive commercial forces. 24 In an earlier essay, Snelling made a more explicit complaint against American enterprise. Without naming him, he implicated William H. Ashley who, in 1822, inaugurated the rendezvous system in the fur trade and whose hunters depleted the buffalo and other fur-bearing animals east of the Rocky Mountains. The native groups, according to this argument, culled the herds responsibly, but Ashley’s “corps of white sharp-shooters… were more thorough-spirited, and made root and branch work… and when they left [a region], they left no living thing behind.”25 Many observers echoed this incrimination of American avarice. Gregg called it “these cruel excesses,” while explorer John C. Frémont condemned it as “a thoughtless and abominable extravagance.” He reported further, “With inconsiderable exceptions, the business of the American trading posts is carried on in their [buffalos’] skins.” Parkman, Field, and fur trapper Warren A. Ferris shifted the guilt of extinction to plains

76  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. Indians, but they could not dismiss the pernicious influence of American commerce. “The robes they obtain…,” Ferris explained, “are most frequently exchanged for WHISKEY, with the traders at their establishments on the Missouri, Arkansas, and Platte rivers.” Among the Sioux, with whom Snelling had resided, Catlin also witnessed this destructive system. Merchants had established a post within their midst, peddling “the most extensive assortments of goods, of whiskey, and other saleable commodities” in exchange for buffalo hides. The number of animals that the Sioux destroyed far exceeded their need for food and supplies. Catlin protested, “[T]hey have little other object for this unlimited slaughter… than that of producing their robes for traffic with their Traders.” Thus, he placed the blame on both “red men and white.”26 As a vehicle to publicize his artwork, Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians (1841) was a monument to the romantic invention of the West, but in a lengthy section in which he discussed the imperiled buffalo, he enlisted the gothic. He conjured a vision that enabled him to travel aloft and explore the world in search of a “similar spectacle to the buffalo.” When he could not locate an equal wonder, he returned to the Great Plains only to find the marvel despoiled. Floating above, cursed by the panoramic vista, he watched as “red men and white” wrought carnage on the herds. Some animals fought back, infuriated. Others fled in panic: “Hundreds and thousands were strewed upon the plains—they were flayed, and their reddened carcasses left.” Dismayed, Catlin watched as Indians dragged the robes to their villages where they “dressed [them] for white man’s luxury!” The vision caused him to cry out, “Oh insatiable man, is thy avarice such! [W]ouldst thou tear the skin from the back of the last animal of this noble race” in order to supply “a new and useless article to the fashionable world’s luxuries[?]”27 Despite the dark prophecies and gothic warnings of Snelling and his peers, the North American Bison bison very nearly became extinct. Natural history scholars have catalogued the many factors that lead to this decline—settlement, drought, disease, railroad construction—but most agree that over-hunting, driven by profit, was the decisive culprit. “The emerging global market… released the selfish gene in human nature,” as Great Plains scholar Dan Flores observes. That process “could and did convert the living, nonhuman world into a congress of resources, inert matter waiting to be organized into wealth…. [I]t proved an irresistible force.” In 1870, the Great Plains accommodated 14 million bison, but professional hunters harvested the animals for their hides. During the next six years, they killed over 11 million. The decimation continued so that by 1889, William T. Hornaday, superintendent of the National Zoo, estimated that only 85 wild individuals remained within the US. Not until the moment of their demise did the ghosts of the buffalo generate enough concern to foster private and public conservation

“Give me my skin”  77 efforts. Fortunately, the species survived. In 2008, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the group as “near threatened” with about 30 thousand buffalo split between wild and conservation herds and another 500 thousand on commercial ranches. 28 The survival of the species resolved the cultural need for the buffalo as an appalling metaphor, but as literary scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen theorizes, the monster must return. If the true wrong had been American avarice, then the devil could assume many different forms over the decades, but in 1977, the demon bison re-emerged in the format of a movie: The White Buffalo. The title creature haunts the dreams of “Wild Bill” Hickok, portrayed by Charles Bronson as an aging gunfighter, weary with the burdens of his violent past. Similar to Snelling’s hunter, he confronts the “Hell-spawn” in a wintry landscape: “There must be snow.” Its breath steams in the cold air, its red eyes glare, and it calls out with an unearthly bellow. The mountains tremble in its rampage, bringing down rock slides and avalanches, but it is also more than a vision. The White Buffalo destroys a Sioux village, bounding, trampling, goring. It killed the daughter of Crazy Horse (Will Sampson), who must pursue and slay the beast, shear it of its robe and wrap his child in it. Hickok must atone for his past crimes by teaming with Crazy Horse, and together, they defeat their tormentor. Critically and popularly, The White Buffalo did not fare well. In an attempt to duplicate the success of Jaws (1975), Dino De Laurentiis produced the film based on a novel by veteran pulp fiction author Richard Sale, who also wrote the script. Despite its lack of success, the release occurred at a time that historian Mark V. Barrow Jr. describes as “a remarkable environmental awakening” within the US, and the movie contained echoes of ecogothic warning. When Hickok arrives in 1874 Cheyenne, the train passes by a hecatomb of thousands of bison bones. The scale of the slaughter that it represents astonishes the jaded gunfighter. Later, when he attempts to justify the dispossession of Indian lands, Hickok claims, “That’s a thing called progress” to which Crazy Horse replies, “It’s a thing called greed.” Eventually, Hickok concedes. When his old friend Charlie Zane (Jack Warden) insists on killing Crazy Horse and stealing the white robe for its $2,000 prize, Hickok intervenes against the commercial world and sides with his former Sioux enemy, who would use the fur to spiritually redeem his child. 29 In the early nineteenth century, however, many of those who ventured to the Great Plains recognized the danger facing the vast herds. In the midst of abundance, the negligence and wastefulness of the multiethnic hunters dismayed Snelling and his fellow commentators, some of whom admitted to their own participation in the killing. They understood that American greed, empowered by the dynamism of the market economy and material consumerism, fueled this destruction. Together, they reached for the gothic to formulate an incrimination against the ministers

78  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. of these crass and wanton forces, perhaps in hope of raising sympathy for the conservation of their nation’s environmental treasures. 30 With “A Night in the Woods,” Snelling assembled extreme, gruesome, and dark imageries that his contemporaries shared when they attempted to grapple with their own anxieties about the detrimental impact of commerce on the natural world. Through the prism of a nightmare, Snelling explicitly portrayed the freakish tenacity, demonic rage, avenging torment, wild-eyed panic, and gory death of the species. In this haunting, as a warning or as an accusation, the buffalo became monstrous in defiance of its extinction.

Notes 1 The author wishes to thank the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, for providing the time, space, and resources for the research and writing of this essay. Snelling, “A Night in the Woods” (1836), 41–42. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 2 Edwin James recorded that the Minitari-Hidatsa told stories about how slain buffalos would reanimate overnight and thereby sustain the abundance of the herd. A boy killed one of the animals, and to escape the cold, he lay within the cavity of its carcass and became entrapped when it returned to life. Assuming their Sioux enemy had murdered the boy, the Minitari were startled a year later when they slaughtered the host, and alive, the boy spilled out of its abdomen. A version of the story, perhaps relayed by the Dakota-­ Sioux, may have inspired Snelling. James, Account of an Expedition, 1: 278–79. 3 After publishing Tales of the Northwest (1830), Snelling showcased his sarcastic acumen with a poem, “Truth; A New Year’s Gift to Scribblers” (1832), in which he took jibes at every major American literary figure. He joined the New England Galaxy as editor, took on the gambling rings of the city, and became an outspoken abolitionist. His wit cost him when he lost a libel suit and spent sixty days in jail. In 1841, he moved to New York where he inaugurated the flash press, a form of journalism that publicized the vice of the city. He returned to Boston by 1843 when he hired on with The Boston Herald as editor. His alcoholism contributed to his early death in 1848 at the age of forty. Snelling, “A Night in the Woods” (1840), 132; Woodall, “William Joseph Snelling,” 367; Cohen et al., The Flash Press, 28–36, 110–11. 4 Review of The Boston Book, in The Athenaeum, 2 June 1838; Woodall, “William Joseph Snelling,” 384; Flanagan, “Snelling’s Western Narratives,” 441. “A Night in the Woods” first appeared, as an excerpt of The Boston Book, in Eastern Magazine (December 1835) and in The Ladies Companion (January 1836). In 1840, Snelling published an expanded and moderately altered version in The New-York Mirror. This essay relies on the 1836 edition with occasional references to the later version. 5 Outram, Georges Cuvier, 122, 152–59; Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 19, 30–32, 39–43; Mehne, “Reading Nature,” 105–10; Conniff, “All-American Monsters,” 38–45. 6 James, Account of an Expedition, 1: 471-72; Keating, Narrative of an Expedition, 2: 25, 30; Woodall, “William Joseph Snelling,” 369–71.

“Give me my skin”  79 7 A Reader to Mr. Editor, Fort Gibson, 1 August 1833, 71; Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 2: 149–50, 213; Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 81–82; Catlin, Letters and Notes, 1: 247–61; Field, “Indians Hunting the Buffalo,” in Santa Fe Trail, 96. 8 Flores, American Serengeti, 20–21, 113–19; and “Bison Ecology,” 470–71, 480–482; Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 24–29, 83, 105, 138; Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 93; Hämäläinen, “The First Phase,” 102–107, 110–11. 9 Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 2: 149–50; Audubon, Audubon and His Journals, 1: 508–509. 10 Savoy, “The Face of the Tenant,” 4–6; Veeder, “The Nurture of the Gothic,” 21, 23; Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction, 5–6, 26. 11 Principe, “Introduction: The EcoGothic,” 2; Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 1–5. Noël Carroll suggests that by the late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had fostered a sufficient scientific literacy “to generate the requisite sense of violation of nature” that provided the basis for the modern horror genre. The Philosophy of Horror, 57. About the same time, Ursula K. Heise notes, environmental concern developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, and for the first time, humans attained the perspective that they “were endangering nature on a grand scale, rather than the other way around.” Imagining Extinction, 6–8. 12 Field, Santa Fe Trail, 92; Parkman, The California and Oregon Trail, 401. See also A Reader to Mr. Editor, Fort Gibson, 1 August 1833. 13 Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 183, 227–28; Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 2: 150; Brown, “Rocky Mountain,” 286. 14 Italics in the original. Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 2: 219; Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 183; Sage, Scenes in the Rocky Mountains, 47, 277. 15 Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 220; Brown, “Rocky Mountains,” 285–86. 16 Snelling, “A Night in the Woods” (1836), 41, and (1840), 133; Catlin, Catlin’s North American, plate 12; Barsness, The Bison in Art, 53; Harris, Catlin’s American Buffalo, 11–12. 17 Pensyl, “Dreadful Fate,” 31–32. 18 Snelling, “A Night in the Woods” (1836), 46, and (1840), 133. 19 Field, Prairie and Mountain, 120; Field, “Indians Hunting the Buffalo,” in Santa Fe Trail, 94. 20 Snelling, “A Night in the Woods” (1840), 132; Catlin, Letters and Notes, 1: 26–27, 247; Harris, Catlin’s American Buffalo, 46, 48, 66, 74; Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 88. In depicting the hunter and prey in mutual death, Catlin linked the mutual extinction of Native Americans and the buffalo. See also, Field, Santa Fe Trail, 92; Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 81; Parkman, The California and Oregon Trail, 176, 401. 21 Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 215–16. 22 Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” 6–20; Beville, The Unnameable Monster, 1–9, 14, 179, 185–86; Murray and Heumann, Monstrous Nature, xviii, 4–5, 37; Flores, American Serengeti, 113–33. 23 Catlin, Letters and Notes, 1: 256; Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 2: 213; Hornaday, The Extermination, 487–513; Dary, The Buffalo Book, 69–77; Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 483–84; Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 105; Hämäläinen, “The First Phase,” 102–103. 24 Snelling, “A Night in the Woods” (1840), 132. 25 Snelling, “Oregon Territory,” 127. 26 Capitalization in the original. Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, 215; Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 2: 150; Frémont, Report of the Exploring Expedition, 81; Parkman, The California and Oregon Trail, 229; Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains, 287; Catlin, Letters and Notes, 2: 249–57.

80  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. 27 Catlin, Letters and Notes, 2: 258–61. 28 Hornaday, The Extermination, 464–525; Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 94–96, 108–34; Flores, American Serengeti, 119–34; Roe, The North American Buffalo, 416–520; Dary, The Buffalo Book, 93–120; Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 130–98; C. Gates and K. Aune, Bison bison. 29 The White Buffalo (Blu-ray disc); Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 2. 30 Only Catlin seems to have suggested a specific conservation plan when he recommended the creation of “a nation’s Park” in the Yellowstone region for both wildlife and Native American groups. Catlin, Letters and Notes, 1: 262; Hausdoerffer, Catlin’s Lament, 84–85, 150–55; Harris, Catlin’s American Buffalo, 24–27.

Bibliography Audubon, John J. Audubon and His Journals. Edited by Maria R. Audubon and Eliot Couse. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897. Barrow, Mark V., Jr. Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Barsness, Larry. The Bison in Art: A Graphic Chronicle of the American Bison. Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1977. Beville, Maria. The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film. New York: Routledge, 2014. Brown, David L., as Quondam Trapper. “Rocky Mountains Sketches.” Western Literary Journal and Monthly Review, 1 (March 1845): 285–86. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Catlin, George. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians. 2 vols. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996. Cohen, Patricia Cline, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Conniff, Richard. “All-American Monsters.” Smithsonian, 41 (April 2010); 38–45. Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal. Revised edition. Columbus, OH: Sage Books, 1989. Del Principe, David. “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies, 16 (May 2014): 1–8. Ferris, W. A. Life in the Rocky Mountains: A Diary of Wanderings on the Sources of the Rivers Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado from February 1830 to November 1835. Edited by Paul C. Phillips. 1843–1844 rep. Denver, CO: Old West Publishing Company, 1940. Field, Matthew. Prairie and Mountain Sketches. Edited by Kate L. Gregg and John Frances McDermott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957. ———. Matt Field on the Santa Fe Trail. Compiled by Clyde Porter and Mae Reed Porter. Edited by John E. Sunder. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960.

“Give me my skin”  81 Flanagan, John T. “William Joseph Snelling’s Western Narratives.” Minnesota History, 17 (December 1936): 437–443. Flores, Dan. “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850.” The Journal of American History, 78 (September 1991): 465–485. ———. American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2016. Frémont, John C. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843–44. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1845. Gates, C., and K. Aune. Bison bison. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2008 (website). http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2008.RLTS. T2815A9485062.en. Accessed on 31 March 2016. Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies or the Journal of a Santa Fe Trader. 2 vols. New York: Henry G. Langley, 1844. Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The First Phase of Destruction: Killing the Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790–1840.” Great Plains Quarterly, 21 (Spring 2001): 101–14. Harris, Adam Duncan. George Catlin’s American Buffalo. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2013. Hausdoerffer, John. Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. Heise, Urusla K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hornaday, William T. The Extermination of the North American Bison. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889. Irving, Washington. A Tour on the Prairies. Philadelphia, PA: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1835. Isenberg, Andrew. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. James, Edwin. Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains. 2 vols and atlas. Philadelphia, PA: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1822–1823. Keating, William H. Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of the St. Peter’s River. 2 vols. Philadelphia, PA: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1824. Lloyd-Smith, Alan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. Martin, Robert K., and Eric Savoy, eds. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Mehne, Philipp. “Reading Nature: Emerson, Cuvier, Lyell, Goethe and the Intricacies of a Much-Quoted Trope.” Comparative American Studies, 6 (June 2008): 103–122. Murray, Robin L., and Joseph K. Heumann. Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Outman, Dorinda. George Cuvier: Vocation, Science and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. Dover, DE: Manchester University Press, 1984. Parkman, Francis. The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life. New York: George P. Putnam, 1849. Pensyl. “Dreadful Fate of ‘the Buffalo Destroyer.’” Spirit of the Times, 11 (20 March 1836): 31–32.

82  Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. Reader, A, to Mr. Editor, Fort Gibson, August 1, 1833, American Turf Register, 5 (October 1833): 71–72. Review of The Boston Book, in The Athenaeum, 2 June 1838. Roe, Frank Gilbert. The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951. Sage, Rufus B. Scenes in the Rocky Mountains. Philadelphia, PA: Carey and Hart, 1846. Savoy, Eric. “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic.” In Martin and Savoy, American Gothic, 3–19. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Snelling, William J., as W. S. J. “Oregon Territory.” New-England Magazine, (February 1832): 123–132. ———. “A Night in the Woods.” In The Boston Book, Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature, Occasional and Periodical, edited by H. T. Tuckerman, 40–48. Boston, MA: Light and Horn, 1836. ———. “A Night in the Woods.” The New-York Mirror, 18 (17 October 1840): 132–34. Veeder, William. “The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive?” In Martin and Savoy, American Gothic, 20–39. The White Buffalo. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis, directed by J. Lee Thompson, written by Richard Sale. 1977 original release. Blu-Ray Disc, Kino Lorber Incorporated, 2015. Woodall, Allen E. “William Joseph Snelling and the Early Northwest.” Minnesota History, 10 (December 1929): 367–385.

5 Failures to Signify Poe’s Uncanny Animal Others Kate Huber

Faced with the guilt of murdering his once favorite pet, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843) raves, “a brute beast to work out for me—for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable wo!”1 Despite the narrator’s obvious madness, the hierarchy of human and animal he emphasizes here was long unquestioned, and the cat’s identity as animal remained unexamined. But as a growing, interdisciplinary ecological perspective has challenged such speciesist anthropocentrism, readings of Poe’s long-neglected animal characters have become far more common, with many critics commending Poe for blurring or transgressing the line between humanity and animality. 2 Just as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) explores the limits of the globe, Poe’s animal stories—including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Raven” (1845) as well as “The Black Cat”—examine the limits of human sovereignty. 3 In a short essay about his own pet cat, “Instinct vs Reason – A Black Cat” (1840), Poe describes “[t]he line which demarcates the instinct of the brute creation from the boasted reason of man” as “of the most shadowy and unsatisfactory character—a boundary line far more difficult to settle than even the North-Eastern or the Oregon.”4 For Poe, the division between human and animal is nearly impossible to delineate, yet in calling it a “boundary line,” however “difficult to settle,” Poe suggests that there is at least some distinction to be made. In this way, Poe’s characterization of the difference between human and animal life anticipates Jacques Derrida’s critique, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, of the way in which human discourse appropriates animality.5 Derrida rejects any “homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal,” but, without denying that “there is a limit that produces a discontinuity,” he shifts the discussion to “determining the number, form, sense, or structure, the foliated consistency, of this abyssal limit, these edges, this plural and repeatedly folded frontier.”6 Like Poe’s North-Eastern or Oregon boundaries, the line exists but is indeterminate, plural, and inherently unsettled (or perhaps unsettling). Reducing it to anything as simple as same or different creates a foundation for anthropocentric appropriation of animal being.

84  Kate Huber The exaggerated extremes of sameness and difference that humans impose onto animals often accompany feelings of love and enmity toward nature. This chapter extends the work of Sara L. Crosby, who has positioned Poe between the attitudes of “ecophilia that loves nature as mirror” and “old-fashioned ecophobia.”7 Both attitudes appropriate animality as an ideological figure, whether as humanity’s mirror or its evil foil. As Matthew A. Taylor argues, love of animals often rests on an equation of human and animal consciousness that “can lapse into the very colonizing, anthropocentric subjectivism it seeks to escape.”8 While some animal lovers or pet owners respect animals as sovereign beings, many express their love by anthropomorphizing their pets, loving their animals for how they fit or are made to fit the image of their human counterparts. On the level of discourse as well, works that take animals as their focus, such as fables, stories, or philosophical treatises, may anthropomorphize animality for the intellectual benefit of humanity. An apparent love of nature thus often relies on both intellectual and physical domination. The opposite response of loathing and enmity also wrests animality for an anthropocentric worldview but as a foil rather than a mirror. As Poe explains in “Instinct vs Reason,” the “self-love and arrogance of man will persist in denying the reflective power to beasts, because the granting it seems to derogate from his own vaunted supremacy” (478).9 Simon C. Estok defines such “ecophobia” as “contempt” for and “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world.”10 Oftentimes, self-interest underwrites ecophobia, causing humans to exaggerate the difference between the mental capacities of human and animal and thus emphasizing the animal’s brute nature. So much of humanity’s conception of animals, and of nature generally, falls into these extremes of ecophilia or ecophobia because the real relationship between humans and the natural world, and the shadowy boundary between human and animal, has a disturbing lack of clarity. Derrida explores this unsettling relation by describing an encounter with his own pet cat: “caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment” (3–4). His “bad time” is caused by the “impropriety of a certain animal nude before the other animal” (4). The shared nudity troubles the boundary between human and cat, but the man’s feeling of “impropriety” remains something that is “proper to man, that is to say, foreign to animals, naked as they are, or so it is thought, without the slightest consciousness of being so” (4). The cause of his “bad time” lies somewhere between the cat’s similarity (another naked being) and its difference (naked yet neither aware nor ashamed of being so). The cat is Other but at the same time familiar, neither totally alien nor fully knowable. This uncertain border between the nature of human and animal occasions the same Freudian terror of the “uncanny” that David B. Morris

Failures to Signify  85 associates with the gothic’s “preoccupation with death,” which “shocks us with the return of something familiar and old-established in the mind but also estranged and unknowable.”11 With striking similarity to Derrida’s experience of nakedness, gothic uncanniness makes the animal visible as a sovereign being by deconstructing the binary of ordinary and alien. Hence, “The Black Cat” opens with the narrator calling his tale “the most wild, yet most homely narrative” (849).12 In their introduction to the collection EcoGothic, Andrew Smith and William Hughes take Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as an archetypal example of the ecogothic in which attempts to tame nature fail because “nature fails to signify as anything other than a type of blankness” and thus becomes “a semiotic problem.”13 Likewise, Poe’s ecogothic employs the uncanny to unsettle the easy and anthropocentric classification of animals as friend or foe. Poe’s narrators seek both extremes as they appropriate animals for humanity’s use, whether as literal pets or ideological figures, but their failures demonstrate the folly of anthropomorphism and taming.

1.  Encountering Poe’s “Black Cat” Although Derrida discusses “The Purloined Letter” (1844) at length in his essay “The Purveyor of Truth” (1975), Poe is not among the authors Derrida surveys in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Nevertheless, Derrida’s encounter with the gaze of his pet echoes the far more nightmarish events of “The Black Cat.” Both deconstruct the simple binary of sameness and difference that has characterized humans’ views of animals. Poe’s ecogothic cat encounter highlights the uncanniness of animals in order to caution readers against the extremes of both ecophilia and ecophobia. The cat is a sovereign being, and the narrator is constantly thwarted by his attempts to tame (name) it into a pet or monster. Pluto begins as a beloved pet. The narrator was originally known for the “docility and humanity of [his] disposition” and was “especially fond of animals” (850). But this initial ecophilia is only another form of mastery.14 Living in a state of anthropocentric ignorance, the narrator refuses to regard his pets as sovereign beings and to encounter them on their own terms. He is like those Derrida describes who have “no doubt seen, observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal,” who have “taken no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ could look at them, and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin” (13). Instead, Poe’s narrator declares, “To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable” (850). This enjoyment is entirely self-centered. He cherishes not the animal itself but the “fondness” he enjoys feeling for it as well as its “faithfulness” in serving humanity. His “gratification” likewise implies the self-congratulatory

86  Kate Huber feeling obtained by observing in oneself this love of animals, putting very little emphasis on his feeling for the animal itself, let alone any possible mutuality in that relationship. Instead, the narrator’s love of pets is merely a type of domestication, appropriating animals to meet humanity’s needs instead of encountering them on their own terms.15 As this self-centered, false idyll is disrupted, the narrator shifts from extreme ecophilia to ecophobia in a series of uneasy encounters with a cat. The first confrontation occurs when the narrator returns home from a late-night debauch and becomes angry that his cat, Pluto, seems to avoid him. He “grasp[s] the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut[s] one of its eyes from the socket!” (851). Such violence indicates that the narrator feels threatened by the animal’s gaze, by the very encounter that Derrida describes.16 Of course, as the narrator himself diagnoses, there is a perversity, a self-thwarting, in his actions, and in this and the ensuing scenes, he finds both the presence and the withholding of the animal’s gaze threatening. Later, he becomes angered that the cat now “fled in extreme terror at [his] approach” (852) and he ultimately hangs it for avoiding him again. After replacing the cat with its near doppelgänger, the positions are reversed. As he explains, I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it.... I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence (854) In this extreme version of Derrida’s cat encounter, the narrator is once again threatened by seeing and being seen by the animal, but instead of the nakedness of Derrida’s account, it is the revelation of his inner cruelty that precipitates the narrator’s shame. In the end, the narrator’s “bad time” is so extreme, his joy at the seeming absence of the cat even outweighs the guilt of murdering his wife as he gloats, “I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme!” (858). Shifting from one extreme to the other, the narrator now sees his beloved pet as a kind of demon or monster. In contrast to Derrida’s insistence that his cat is “a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat” and not “the figure of a cat” (6), “The Black Cat” is filled with “figures” of the cat, and the ultimate problem with Pluto is that he is all too substitutable.17 The narrator first mutilates his pet due to a refusal to see the cat on its own terms. But rather than stop at merely seeing the beast as an inferior creature, he begins to see it as not a real creature at all but as a symbol and representation. After he hangs his cat and his house subsequently catches fire, he is confronted by an image of his crime “as if graven in bas relief..., the figure of a gigantic cat” (853). To his horror, the “real cat” is replaced by a “figure,” what he also calls a “portraiture”

Failures to Signify  87 and an “impression,” which makes a further “deep impression upon [his] fancy”; it is a representation not of the animal in its individuality but as a reflection of his own cruel deed, manifest with “a rope about the animal’s neck” (853). Then, the narrator actively seeks out a second “portraiture” by searching to replace his former pet, “to look about... for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place” (853–54). True to his previous inability to recognize the animal in what Derrida calls its “unsubstitutable singularity” (9), the narrator replaces Pluto with a double, first observed as “some black object” but revealed to be “a black cat... fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one” (854). Finally, as the narrator seeks to regain not a real, individual cat but a substitutable figure of one, he finds instead a symbol of horror and death, signaled by the only difference in the replacement cat: a white mark on its chest. The narrator’s account of this image is filled with references to writing and symbols. He first calls the appearance “one of the merest chimeras,” then his wife points out “the character of the mark of white hair,” two plays on the sign system of writing; the mark gains “a rigorous distinctness of an outline” and becomes “the representation of an object that I shudder to name... the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the Gallows!—oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!” (855; emphasis added). The various plays with images, language, figures, and other terms of representation culminate in a terrified reading of the mark’s, and hence the animal’s, ultimate symbolism, climaxing in the capitalized ideas “Horror,” “Crime,” “Agony,” and “Death.” The cat is no longer a real animal but the very image of horror. Moreover, this horror derives not from the creature itself (as a patch of white hair is inherently harmless) but from the narrator’s interpretation of that mark. By thus reading the animal, the man appropriates its Otherness for humanity’s symbolic meaning, an intellectual domestication. It is tempting to conclude that neither the original Pluto nor its hellish doppelgänger is what Derrida calls “truly a little cat” at all (6) but rather a literary device for incorporating horror into the story. But this simple reading is complicated by the obvious mediation of Poe’s not simply unreliable, but alcoholic, murderous, and quite likely insane narrator. Poe emphasizes the madness of his tale with the narrator’s ludicrous attempts to tame its horrific and seemingly supernatural contents to the standards of rationality. He calls it “the most wild, yet most homely narrative,” wishing ultimately to domesticate that wildness into “a series of mere household events” and hoping that “some intellect may be found which will reduce [his] phantasm to the common-place” (849–50). Just as an animal owner seeks mastery over his beasts, the narrator seeks mastery over the wild events he is about to recount. By calling it “commonplace” and “an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects,” he seeks

88  Kate Huber to name away the unknown just as Adam demonstrated his mastery over animals by naming them (850). The narrator’s madness most notably masquerades as exaggerated rationality when he provides an explanation for how the image of Pluto appeared in bas relief on his wall: Upon the alarm of the fire,... the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it. (853) The utter ridiculousness of this account of the Good Samaritan catthrower and subsequent chemical portraiture has been well established.18 Such a demonstration of seemingly rational science is not only unconvincing but so improbable as to seem totally irrational. As Niles Tomlinson argues, “rationality itself is exposed as a kind of madness.”19 Later, when the narrator observes the second cat’s marking of the same image, he says “my Reason struggled to reject [it] as fanciful” (855). As the cat’s terrible Otherness grows, so do the man’s attempts to tame that Otherness with scientific rationality; he tries, as Smith and Hughes say of Frankenstein, “to find a language which ‘owns’ the ecological and so anchor it as a site of coherent meaning.”20 In Poe’s ecogothic, it is not some demon cat that drives the narrator to murder his wife and then exposes his crime but his own inability to accept the animal on its own terms. Instead, his failed attempts to tame the cat’s uncanny Otherness into either a beloved pet or a symbol of horror send him spiraling into insanity.

2.  Ecogothic Animals in “Rue Morgue” and “The Raven” Reading “The Black Cat” through Derrida exposes a pattern in Poe’s animal characters. As with Pluto, both the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the eponymous “Raven” derive their terror from their uncanny closeness to yet difference from humanity, and Poe exposes his characters’ attempts to tame that uncanniness literally and figuratively. In the former, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin reveals that an escaped orangutan savagely murdered and mutilated two women. Overemphasizing the divide between human thought and animal bestiality leads to fear of the animal Other, and Poe critiques ecophobia by pushing this contrast to its limits in the opposition of Dupin’s hyper-rationality

Failures to Signify  89 and the murderous brute beast. As Dupin explains how he solved the mystery, he emphasizes the utter strangeness of the culprit and its crime, calling it “very unusual,” “very extraordinary,” “almost praeternatural,” “very peculiar,” “excessively outré,” and “altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action.”21 Shortly afterward, Dupin further emphasizes animal difference by calling attention to “the brutal ferocity of these deeds” (557). 22 Similarly, the raven, though far less obviously ferocious, is nevertheless “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous.”23 The orangutan, like Pluto, is another example of failed taming and domestication, but its uncanny similarity to humans makes its difference even more unsettling. The sailor who brought the ape to Paris recounts how, despite “the intractable ferocity of his captive... he at length succeeded in lodging it safely at his own residence” (564). When he finds the animal in an anthropomorphic activity, “sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master,” he fears it as “an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use [the razor],” again emphasizing the orangutan’s bestiality in tandem with its anthropomorphic use of human tools (565). 24 The sailor’s temporary success in containing the wild beast within his domestic space is shattered when the animal escapes, and the anthropomorphic image of the shaving ape is soon undercut when the animal enters the chamber of its victims, another domestic space, and uses the same razor blade to “nearly [sever]” a woman’s head (567). 25 Like Pluto, the orangutan is never allowed to exist on its own terms. Instead, it is either an anthropomorphized image held captive in human lodgings or a ferocious and brutal killer. The conflict in “The Raven” also occurs when the animal enters the domestic space of a chamber. It too has been at least partially domesticated, taught to say “Nevermore” by “some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster / Followed fast and followed faster” (63–64), which could just as well describe the unfortunate pet owner of “The Black Cat.” Like the bird’s first “unhappy master,” the student also attempts to domesticate the animal on at least a figurative level, greeting the “stately Raven” as if it were the human visitor he predicted several stanzas before by describing the bird anthropomorphically “with mien of lord or lady” (38–40). As he asks the raven a series of self-torturing questions, the student invents explanations of what the bird is and from whence it came—another mentally distraught narrator trying to make rational sense of his threatening encounter with an animal Other. Like the orangutan, the raven is also uncanny in its closeness to yet strange difference from humanity. This is most obvious in the bird’s vocalizations. Human language, when placed in the mouth of an animal, is inherently uncanny—familiarly recognizable yet also strange. 26 Referencing Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and Alice’s

90  Kate Huber hurried conclusion that “one cannot speak with a cat on the pretext that it doesn’t reply or that it always replies the same thing,” Derrida goes on to assert that the “said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means” (8). This is essentially the plot of “The Raven”: the student goes mad trying to determine if the repeated reply of “Nevermore” is indeed a response to his questions. Equally uncanny animal “speech” also appears in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as all of the witnesses report the sounds of the murderer as a human voice (familiar) although speaking a foreign language unknown to them (strange). The same spurious rationality we see in both the unreliable narration of “The Black Cat” and the student’s attempts to rationalize the presence of the ominous raven features even more prominently in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Dupin proves his deductive skills by tracing the narrator’s train of thought through a long series of associations. Yet it is a stretch of credibility to take Dupin’s feats of deduction at face value. While Dupin may “prove” his astounding ability on a literal level by accurately predicting the narrator’s thoughts, the chain of associations he follows has been shown to be as ridiculously improbable as the narrator’s explanation of the bas relief image in “The Black Cat.”27 The juxtaposition of this specious rationality and the identification of the orangutan as the murderer casts doubt on all the scientific discourse that appears in Poe’s detective story, including the works of natural history that were the source of Poe’s orangutan descriptions. 28 Like Pluto’s figurations, Dupin’s ratiocination is an anthropomorphic attempt to impose order and human meaning on the natural world, to force animal uncanniness to signify in human terms. By exaggerating human rationality to the point of ridiculousness, Poe casts doubt on the ecophobic contrast of human reason and animal ferocity that treats the orangutan as an evil brute rather than a confused and misunderstood creature thrust into an urban environment in which it does not belong. In both “The Black Cat” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” hoaxes of ratiocination—of outlandish madness masquerading as “homely” reason—accompany depictions of animals, exaggerating and critiquing the anthropocentric distinction between “Instinct” and “Reason” that Poe deconstructs in the essay of that name. Poe’s raven is also accompanied by such a hoax in its companion essay, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846). While the essay is posed as a nonfictional explanation of Poe’s writing process for the poem, the method it describes proves just as unbelievable as the ratiocination of Poe’s fictional characters. 29 Like Dupin’s retracing of his companion’s train of thought at the beginning of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe sets out to “retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been attained,” demonstrating “that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion

Failures to Signify  91 with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”30 Throughout, he maintains this position of scientific cause and effect with transitions such as, “It appears evident, then,” “I did not fail to perceive immediately,” “This led me at once,” “these considerations inevitably led me,” and so on (62, 64). In his search for an appropriate refrain, to take one example, Poe asserts, “In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word ‘Nevermore.’ In fact, it was the very first which presented itself” (65). Throughout all this, it is very difficult to take Poe seriously when he is arguing, in effect, that with the proper application of reason, anyone sitting down to write the best poem possible will inevitably produce “The Raven.” Strikingly, just as Dupin’s rationality contrasts so strongly with the ape’s wildness that the two seem to cast doubt upon each other, Poe’s far-fetched account of “The Raven” casts doubt upon the symbolic nature of his most famous animal. Science and poetics may seem antithetical, but both appropriate animality for human discourse. Taking the essay at face value, one might trust Poe when he asserts that the bird is “emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (70). Pushing this symbolism even further, William Freedman argues that “the raven is simultaneously poem and poet.”31 In this sense, Poe’s raven transcends the usual level of symbolism in poetic expression and becomes a symbol of symbolism itself. Indeed, as the student attempts, like the reader, to discern the significance of the bird, he twice addresses it, “Prophet!... thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil” (85, 91). Just as in “The Black Cat,” the student is unsure if the raven is an actual animal or some supernatural messenger. The poem puts additional emphasis on the image of the animal as a representation in its concluding stanza. In an effect quite similar to the “portraiture” of the black cat, the raven creates its own image as “the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor” (106). Moreover, just as the narrator in the short story is trapped in a spiral of mental breakdown by the several figures of the cat, the student closes the poem by declaring, “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!” (107–108). In the end, the bird, like the cat and orangutan, transforms from a homely pet into an image of itself and a symbol of the student’s depression, a literal and figurative shadow. Filled with symbolic and fabular animals, Poe’s tales may seem to be yet another appropriation of animal figures. Not only do Poe’s characters fail at literal domestication, but the tales themselves enact an ideological taming, what Derrida calls “fabulization”: an “anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man” (37). Poe remarks upon this tendency in “Instinct vs Reason” when after two lengthy paragraphs discussing the possible nature of animal intelligence, Poe interrupts his musings, “But we are preaching a homily, when we

92  Kate Huber merely intended to tell a short story about a cat” (479). But throughout the examples examined here, this appropriation is carried out neither earnestly nor unmediated by its author. On the contrary, Poe’s narrators, speakers, and literary hoaxes cast constant doubt on the interpretations of animality they recount. Poe’s wild tales tempt the reader to convert animal alterity into an anthropomorphic symbol or to normalize the uncanny animal through scientific discourse and rationality. But either of these attempts to make animals signify would appropriate the figure of the animal in order to “preach a homily” rather than focus on the being itself and tell a story about what Derrida calls “a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat” (6). The lure of following Poe’s unreliable narrators into madness with such fabulization is yet another of Poe’s hoaxes. Mastery over the animal takes the form of both taming and naming—­ domesticating the animal into livestock or pet, anthropomorphizing the animal into friend or fable, or labeling the animal as adversary or symbol of evil—but in the end, all of these appropriations rely on the same philosophy of domination and Adamic hierarchy of human over beast. The ecogothic uncanniness of Poe’s animals shows the folly of such attempts, whether ecophobic or ecophilic, to tame animal Otherness and make animals signify in human discourse.

Notes 1 Poe, Tales, 856. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 2 Readings emphasizing the blurred line between human and animal include Mastroianni, “Hospitality,” 185; Taylor, “Nature of Fear,” 370; Boggs, Animalia Americana, 120; Ziser, “Animal Mirrors,” 11; Tomlinson, “Creeping,” 235. For other readings of Poe’s animals, see Peterson, Bestial Traces, 22–42; Ravindranathan, “Unequal Metrics”; Dayan, “Amorous Bondage.”. 3 Smith and Hughes mention The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket as an example of the role of the wilderness or frontier in the American gothic. Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 4. 4 Poe, Tales, 477–78. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 5 Tomlinson also connects Derrida’s lecture to “The Black Cat.” Tomlinson, “Creeping,” 260. 6 Derrida, Animal, 30. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 7 Crosby, “Beyond Ecophilia,” 518. Similarly, Taylor argues that Poe’s “association of environmental contact with death” is only ecophobic “with the important proviso that it does not authorize a reactionary domination of the natural world” but instead presents “the human self … in danger of being destroyed.” Taylor, “Nature of Fear,” 364. 8 Taylor, “Nature of Fear,” 359. 9 In contrast, Poe is “as interested in our access to the minds of cats as to the minds of people.” Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable,” 40. 10 Estok, “Theorizing in a Space,” 207, 208. 11 Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” 310.

Failures to Signify  93 12 Tally similarly observes that Poe makes “even the domestic sphere seem very ‘un-homely,’ unheimlich or uncanny.” Tally, Poe and the Subversion, 45. 13 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 2–3. 14 For a critique of pet ownership and discussion of animals in nineteenth-­ century hierarchies of slaves and children, see Keralis, “Feeling Animal,” 123–27. Joan Dayan also argues that “Poe writes ‘The Black Cat’ to demonstrate how destructive is the illusion of mastery.” Dayan, “Amorous Bondage,” 252. 15 In this “most wild, yet most homely narrative,” Poe writes (Tales, 849), domestication is closely allied with domesticity, and the narrator’s violence toward the cat culminates in his murder of his wife. Gargano’s reading of the story is one of many to equate wife with pet, and Amper suggests that “the supposed cat-killing is a fiction,” substituting for the earlier murder of his wife. Gargano, “The Black Cat,” 173, 177; Amper, “Untold Story,” 476. See also Tomlinson, “Creeping,” 238; Bliss, “Household Horror,” 97; Crisman, “‘Mere Household Events,’” 88. 16 For a Lacanian reading of why the narrator chooses to cut out the eye, see Ki, “Diabolical Evil,” 576–77. 17 Tomlinson likewise analyzes how the cat becomes “more haunting, multiple, and pervasive.” Tomlinson, “Creeping,” 242. 18 See Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 48; McElroy, “Kindred Artist,” 105; Gargano, “The Black Cat,” 175; Amper, “Untold Story,” 480; Nadal, “Variations on the Grotesque,” 458. 19 Tomlinson, “Creeping,” 253. Tally similarly argues that Poe’s terror derives from the failure of the “comforting domestication” of reason or sense. Tally, Poe and the Subversion, 80. 20 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 3. 21 Poe, Tales, 555, 557. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 22 In his analysis of Poe’s newspaper sources for the tale, Kopley describes Poe’s “focus on the horror and his heightening of it,” which “heightens both the mystery and the satisfactoriness of its solution.” Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe, 36. 23 Poe, “The Raven,” 71. Subsequent references to line numbers in this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 24 For a Lacanian reading of Poe’s detective stories, including how this scene anticipates Lacan’s mirror stage, see Ziser, “Animal Mirrors,” 16. 25 Silverman suggests that the story “curiously reflects Poe’s lifelong yearning for domesticity,” despite its gruesome killings of women. Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 173. See also, Bryant, “Poe’s Ape of UnReason,” 35; Frank, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’’’ 182. 26 Connecting “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to “The Raven,” Ziser suggests that “the passage from mimicry to full speech takes place only at the cost of a clear physical division between man and animal.” Ziser, “Animal Mirrors,” 27. See also, Boggs, Animalia Americana, 127; Weber, “Ec(h)opoetics,” 283. 27 Bryant calls this faux rationality a “hoax.” Bryant, “Poe’s Ape of UnReason,” 32. Van Leer argues that “Dupin talks as if his own thinking were free, whereas the narrator’s was determined.” Van Leer, “Detecting Truth,” 73. Dupin’s prejudice mirrors humanity’s denial of rationality to the animal. 28 See Frank, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 178–82. Stark connects Frank’s argument to Poe’s critique of scientific thought in “The Black Cat.” Stark, “Motive and Meaning,” 256. Similarly, Peterson calls the orangutan “a foil to Dupin’s hyperrationality.” Peterson, Bestial Traces, 37. See also, Boggs, Animalia Americana, 126.

94  Kate Huber 29 See Hartmann, Marketing, 97; Tally, Poe and the Subversion, 91. 30 Poe, “Philosophy of Composition,” 61–62. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 31 Freedman, “Poe’s ‘Raven,’” 28.

Bibliography Amper, Susan. “Untold Story: The Lying Narrator in ‘The Black Cat.’” Studies in Short Fiction 29.4 (1992): 475–85. Benfey, Christopher. “Poe and the Unreadable: ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The TellTale Heart.’” In Silverman, New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, 27–44. Bliss, Ann V. “Household Horror: Domestic Masculinity in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat.’” Explicator 67.2 (2009): 96–99. Boggs, Colleen Glenney. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Bryant, John. “Poe’s Ape of UnReason: Humor, Ritual, and Culture.” Nineteenth-­C entury Literature 51.1 (1996): 16–52. Crisman, William. “‘Mere Household Events’ in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat.’” Studies in American Fiction 12.1 (1984): 87–90. Crosby, Sara L. “Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.3 (2014): 513–25. Dayan, Joan. “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves.” American Literature 66.2 (1994): 239–73. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2 (2009): 203–25. Frank, Lawrence. “‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.2 (1995): 168–88. Freedman, William. “Poe’s ‘Raven’: The Word That Is an Answer ‘Nevermore.’” Poe Studies / Dark Romanticism 31.1/2 (1998): 23–31. Gargano, James W. “‘The Black Cat’: Perverseness Reconsidered.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2 (1960): 172–78. Hartmann, Jonathan H. The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe. Studies in American Popular History and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008. Keralis, Spencer D. C. “Feeling Animal: Pet-Making and Mastery in the Slave’s Friend.” American Periodicals 22.2 (2012): 121–38. Ki, Magdalen Wing-Chi. “Diabolical Evil and ‘The Black Cat.’” Mississippi Quarterly 62.3/4 (2009): 569–89. Kopley, Richard. Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Mastroianni, Dominic. “Hospitality and the Thresholds of the Human in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Studies in American Fiction 40.2 (2013): 185–202. McElroy, John Harmon. “The Kindred Artist; or, the Case of the Black Cat.” Studies in American Humor 3.2 (1976): 103–17. Morris, David B. “Gothic Sublimity.” New Literary History 16.2 (1985): 299–319.

Failures to Signify  95 Nadal, Marita. “Variations on the Grotesque: From Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to Oates’s ‘The White Cat.’” Mississippi Quarterly 57.3 (2004): 455–71. Peterson, Christopher. Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” In Critical Theory: The Major Documents, edited by Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine, 55–76. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. ———. “The Raven.” In Complete Poems, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 350–74. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ———. Tales and Sketches. 2 vols. Edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Ravindranathan, Thangam. “Unequal Metrics: Animals Passing in La Fontaine, Poe, and Chevillard.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 24.3 (2013): 1–35. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. ———, ed. New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Stark, Joseph. “Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat.’” Mississippi Quarterly 57.2 (2004): 255–63. Tally, Robert T., Jr. Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Taylor, Matthew A. “The Nature of Fear: Edgar Allan Poe and Posthuman Ecology.” American Literature 84.2 (2012): 353–79. Tomlinson, Niles. “Creeping in the ‘Mere’: Catagenesis in Poe’s ‘Black Cat’ and Gilman’s ‘Yellow Wallpaper.’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56.3 (2010): 232–68. Van Leer, David. “Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales.” In Silverman, New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, 65–91. Weber, Julien. “Ec(h)opoetics in Mallarmé’s Translations of ‘The Raven.’” DixNeuf 19.3 (2015): 274–84. Zimmerman, Brett. Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style. Montreal, QC: McGill­- Queen’s University Press, 2005. Ziser, Michael. “Animal Mirrors: Poe, Lacan, Von Uexküll, and Audubon in the Zoosemiosphere.” Angelaki 12.3 (2007): 11–33.

6 Gothic Materialisms Experimenting with Fire and Water in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of (Im)mortality Liz Hutter Elemental matter—air, fire, water, earth—in all its physical and metaphoric forms inhabits our environments, infuses our texts, and illuminates our relationships and our lived experiences. When magnified in scale, amplified in scope, and intensified in power, elemental matter takes shape as an ecocatastrophe—tornado, wildfire, flood, hurricane—­ bringing human and nonhuman existence into frightening yet fragile entanglement.1 Ecocatastrophes provided nineteenth-century readers evocative material for popular broadsides, ballads, lithographs, and paintings. Broadsides, for example, detailed heart-pounding spectacles of enflamed buildings and storm-wrecked ships as sensationalized though sobering news. 2 With desperate victims clinging perilously to survival amidst searing flames and billowing smoke or saturating rains and unruly winds, broadside accounts of ecocatastrophes upended the perceived stability and predictability of humans’ relationships to each other and to the nonhuman entities around them. “Violent Storm,” the simple but startling headline of an 1804 broadside, details the long trail of wrecked boats, buildings, barns, houses, fences, chimneys, roofs, and orchards left in the wake of a storm that “raged till Wednesday morning with unprecedented fury and destruction.”3 Not only does this broadside capture the storm’s destruction to property, but it also engulfs readers and listeners in the terrifying auditory and captivating kinesthetic experience of being immersed in the storm: “The tempest howl’d with dreadful roar, / We never heard the like before: / Our houses they did greatly shake / And all within them seem’d to quake.” Immersed in wind and rain, safety is untenable and survival fleeting. Tornadoes, too, effected extensive loss of life and damage to property while propelling human and nonhuman entities into unfamiliar, chaotic circumstances. An 1821 broadside documents wind, thunder, and rain converging to topple trees, upturn rocks, and disperse “peaceful flocks” indiscriminately. “Striking all nature with surprise,” the tornado not only rips up the landscape but carries away barns, houses, and the material possessions inside, “leaving whole families in woe, / And some with broken bones.”4 Explosions aboard ships and fires in homes and buildings similarly generated alarm and curiosity as newsworthy events. The interweaving of larger-than-life

Gothic Materialisms  97 flames and more-than-human utterances of woe and fear animate the verses of an 1840 broadside ballad dramatizing a conflagration from ignited gunpowder onboard a steamer in Long Island Sound: “[T]he devouring element” captivates spectators as the fire “rose in volumes high” and engulfed the steamer’s deck. Cries, shrieks, and moans generate a soundscape that “Would cause the stoutest heart to break / Of marble or of stone.”5 Disorienting, destructive, and awe-inspiring, ecocatastrophes and their life-in-death experiences engender inquiry about the interrelationship of the human and nonhuman at the limits of endurance and mortality. Whether experienced as victim, witness, or reader, the communal, multisensory experience of nineteenth-century ecocatastrophes coupled with the unpredictable and often indiscriminate high human and nonhuman casualties created riveting and terrifying gothic spectacles. In a century distinguished by progressive developments in technological and commercial enterprises, these phenomena upset a tenacious equilibrium between perceptions of security and vulnerability. Besides recording newsworthy events, broadsides also registered the communal, social impact of ecocatastrophes. Revell Carr writes, “Disaster songs function as redressive action, communicating shared sentiments and emotions, through which a social bond with others can be solidified in the days and weeks following a disaster.”6 Often, a catastrophe registered among a community as an experience too difficult to describe and too hard to believe as in the case of a gunpowder explosion aboard a ship anchored in Brooklyn harbor that killed or wounded some hundred men: “No mind can paint the Horrid scene; / it’s ‘yond my power to write; / And all that words or colours mean / Fall far below the sight.”7 Echoing Simon Estok’s conception of ecophobia, Tom Hillard remarks on the enormous popular appeal of contemporary cinematic and literary ecocatastrophes that embrace “a nearly ubiquitous cultural fascination with the hostile and deadly aspects” of nature. Hillard proposes that scholars might use the gothic lens to examine how the American literary tradition “embodies anxieties about nature within its respective cultural and historical moment.”8 This chapter examines the elemental foundation of two ecocatastrophes—vortex and conflagration—and their gothic effects in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of immortality in order to explore how fire and water are enfolded into the lives and deaths of nineteenth-century Americans. Poe’s tales of immortality inhabit the threshold between life, death, and the afterlife, offering an examination of the relationships that develop and dissolve in these liminal spaces. Indeed, representations of life in these thresholds serve as an ideal means of exploring the processes of knowing and being that influence what we become and structure how we know. It is these experiences that this chapter conceptualizes as ecogothic—specifically, the imbrication of the human and nonhuman in volatile, elemental environments

98  Liz Hutter and the epistemological and ontological transformations precipitated by dwelling in elemental matter. Whereas “[t]he Gothic mode has always been,” according to Hillard, “a means for confronting (safely) that which is threatening, frightful and culturally or socially reprehensible,” the ecogothic engenders the possibility of challenging essential notions of certainty, constancy, and safety.9 In the peripheral spaces between life and death, the ecogothic exposes experiences that are almost indescribable and grapples with their ability to form new relational modes of thinking and being among human and nonhuman entities. “The story of the elements,” Valerie Allen asserts provocatively, “is the story of genesis and the shape of belief.”10 In Edgar Allan Poe’s A Descent into the Maelström” (1841) and “Metzengerstein” (1832), the process of coming to terms with “the shape of belief” demands physical immersion in aqueous and flaming environments to foster the protagonists’ inhabitance rather than entrapment in their environments. I first analyze elemental entanglement in “A Descent into the Maelström” and explore how the fear of being drawn into the bottomless depth of a vortex masks a deeper curiosity about what we do not know and what seems too difficult to comprehend. I then examine the smoldering family rivalry in “Metzengerstein” and its renewal in a human-animal hybrid that exists in a space between life and the afterlife. In this tale, I show how deep-rooted jealousy and revenge materialize in conflagration and expose uncertainty about the experience of possession and the longevity with which one can claim ownership over someone or something. In both “A Descent into the Maelström” and “Metzengerstein,” the dynamic and recursive character of elemental water and fire, as well as the ecocatastrophes they manifest, resist metaphorical and physical experiences of death and dying as frightening, permanent finalities. The ecogothic displaces anthropocentric phobic perceptions of nature in both tales to enable exploration of alternate configurations of human and nonhuman interactions that promote the capacity for perseverance in spite of imminent death, loss, and dispossession.

1.  Elemental Matters A critic of the gothic in Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction is always mucking about in elemental matter. Usher’s house crumbles into the earth, Mason’s balloon makes an aeronautical transatlantic voyage, a simoom capsizes a ship, and M. Valdemar’s body decomposes into an organic mass of liquid flesh. Elemental matter saturates the pages of Poe’s texts as a vehicle for metaphorizing experiences of revenge, obsession, or desire; as a catalyst generating suspenseful and haunting atmospheres; and as a material conduit for loss, destruction, and death. “Like fire leaping or water that seeps and drenches, air that rises or earth that clings and pulls,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert announce, “the

Gothic Materialisms  99 elements press insistently against boundary, spark couplings and fertile schisms.”11 Because elemental matter is dynamic, “inherently creative, motile, experimental” and “never inert,” earth, fire, water, and air are, in Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino’s words, “generative, always becoming, always in flux, going through inevitable stages of metamorphosis.”12 When boundaries are pressed, perspective shifts and change is often initiated. Fred Botting notes, “Questioning as well as promoting the dark powers of the imagination, Poe’s fiction leaves boundaries between reality, illusion and madness unresolved rather than, in the manner of his contemporaries, domesticating Gothic motifs or rationalizing mysteries.”13 Elemental matter insists on an “enmeshment,” as Cohen and Duckert put it,14 and in “A Descent into the Maelström” and “Metzengerstein,” the enmeshment of water, fire, and air thwarts efforts to demarcate clear distinctions between experience and imagination, impressions and facts, sense and thought, and the material and discursive. A consequence of this irresolution is that Poe’s protagonists dwell in the uncertainty of irresolution, experimenting with a different mode of survival or existence along the edges of (im)mortality. As fire and water press, permeate, or perforate boundaries, they build relationality with bodies and objects, animals, and other nonhuman matter. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis claim, “Thinking with water encourages relational thinking, as notions of fluidity, viscosity, and porosity reveal.” They further add, “Water is a matter of relation and connection. Waters literally flow between and within bodies, across space and through time, in a planetary circulation system that challenges pretension to discrete individuality.”15 Not only does water develop connections among bodies and facilitate their interaction: so, too, does fire. “Our relationship with fire thereby,” philosopher David Macauley summarizes, “has been deeply reciprocal.”16 A consequence of elemental enmeshment is an understanding of how human and nonhuman entities inhabit land, air, or sea. The etymological roots of “inhabit” capture the notion of dwelling: to dwell in a place entails an immersive, active engagement with and participation in one’s environment. Inhabitance embraces a totality of experience and builds connections through kinesthetic, visual, auditory, perceptual, and imaginative interactions of bodies. Human beings and nonhuman entities are not passive, unreactive spectators but are inclusive of the material environments and discursive formations that surround, impinge upon, and shape them. “Even when our elemental stories are mired in anthropocentrism,” Cohen explains, “their animating vectors are capable of inhuman transport, capable of provoking a vision of the world that does not simply reaffirm human primacy but conveys toward an elemental elsewhere.... Yet inhabitance is capacious entanglement.”17 Whether immersed in the watery vortex or engulfed in fire, to dwell in elemental materiality is a defining characteristic of the ecogothic. Through entangled

100  Liz Hutter relationships that support, even necessitate, the multiplicity of thinking and feeling, believing and doubting, doing and observing, and listening and feeling, the ecogothic facilitates interpretation of what Iovino and Oppermann call “a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes” that infuses human and nonhuman relationality in the liminal spaces of living and dying.18

2.  Voracious Vortices At the core of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” whirls the great Norwegian Moskoeström—a vibrant, voracious vortex of gothic proportion, strength, and magnitude. Frederick Frank compares Poe’s vortex—“nature’s most voracious monster,” an aqueous gothicism—to more conventional expressions of “earthly terror” in gothic literature.19 “[T]he great Maelström,” Frank claims, “is a fluidic equivalent of the dark pit, crypt, cavern, or cellar of the old Gothic fiction.” A central narrative tension associated with these earthen abysses is the ascension or “release” from these dark and deep spaces at risk of permanent “entrapment.”20 J. Douglas Perry cites the vortex as an emblematic gothic structure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts. “The most pervasive gothic theme, the most pervasive gothic image,” he writes, points to the over-all [sic] gothic structure: the fear of being drawn in and the image of the whirlpool find their expression in a structural vortex, composed of a series of rings or levels which create a kind of hierarchy of horror, like Dante’s inferno. 21 Perry’s analysis suggests how a whirlpool’s concentric formation and staggered structure might serve as a heuristic device, correlating with a text’s character development, relationships among characters, sequencing of plot details, and even the audience’s experience of reading the text. Conceptualizing the vortex as a flat, two-dimensional object constrains movement to vertical ascension from its core toward its outer edge at the top and descension, falling (literally or metaphorically) into the vortex’s infinite bottom. The dialectic of ascent and descent and its corresponding sensations of rising and falling readily coalesce around associations of terror and death and insight and salvation, respectively. 22 With objects and bodies positioned above or below one another, relationality is restricted to hierarchical, linear relations. Caught in a vortex, a body is either falling toward death—a dark, bottomless, unknown center—or rising toward safety along the external, visible edge. In Allen’s analysis of a vortex as quintessential elemental matter, however, this static image of the vortex’s tiered concentricity becomes animated: air, wind, and water commingle and lend material presence to a scientific and aesthetic phenomenon. Allen points out that its circular

Gothic Materialisms  101 movement uniquely distinguishes the vortex from other images of linkage. The physics of air and wind generate a circular, recursive rotation that sends it “coiling and roiling indefinitely on its own axis.” This is the “principle of recursivity writ large,” explains Allen, “where the self-energizing vortex loops around to feed and perpetuate itself, even as friction with the surrounding air sends it tractoring forward.”23 In motion, a vortex breaks, rearranges, and distorts linear, progressive logic, as Cohen points out: “Chains, ladders, scales, steps, and other placidly transcendent schematics yield to life lived within the thick of the world, life in a vortex of shared precariousness and unchosen proximities.”24 This circular motion does not necessarily bring objects and bodies into vertical or horizontal alignment but propels them forward at varying velocities. Suspended in a shattered ship that hangs in the mouth of the maelstrom at a forty-five-degree angle, for example, the fisherman in Poe’s tale describes the maelstrom’s halting movement: But our farther descent was by no means proportionate. Round and round we swept—not with any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred feet— sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. 25 The recursive movement of the vortex brings about a relationship of proximity among objects and bodies rather than the movements of rising and falling. The distinction of the vortex as a rotating elemental force creates the possibility for an array of potential connections, relations, and intersections. This capacity leads “to thinking within the spirals of entanglement that the elements in motion form.”26 Often unremarked on in the scholarship is that Poe’s tale contains three maelstroms—that is, three versions of the one Moskoeström. In the opening pages of the story, the narrator and fisherman witness a vortex developing from atop their perch on the summit of Helseggen. Observing this vortex, the narrator compares what he sees and hears below him with a description of the Moskoeström that he recalls from the Encyclopedia Britannica. A third vortex, and the one that attracts the bulk of scholarly analysis, is the vortex of the tale’s title. This is the whirlpool from which the fisherman harrowingly escapes three years prior while on a routine fishing trip, and it is the subject of the story he tells the narrator. The relationship among the three vortices resembles a moving Venn diagram with shifting points of contact. “Nature does not love... any device for thwarting entanglement,” Cohen muses. “Nature loves perspective shift and motion.”27 Individually, these three vortices illuminate the particularities of a single experience and showcase the different ways of demonstrating and communicating the vortex’s unrelenting energy. Collectively, the fluid relationality among these three vortices creates entanglement within which one finds momentary, liminal

102  Liz Hutter thresholds from which to test out the reach of a new perspective and ascertain certainty in a space of flux and danger. Allen comments, “At the collision boundary of different languages, geometries, and realities, we find a vector of zero, a moment of stability in the middle of turbulence that allows one to doubt and speculate.”28 Shifting among the multiple versions of the vortex allows for the narrator and fisherman to engage in a process of comparative evaluation that allows them to come to terms with a hard-to-believe tale. As the narrator gazes at the ocean and witnesses the sea metamorphose “into ungovernable fury,” he is enveloped in a synergy of noise, motion, and spectacle. He notes, “I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie” (434). This is quickly followed by a change in the surface of the sea, where the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion—­heaving, boiling, hissing—gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents. (434) Recalling Jonas Ramus’s account from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the narrator compares what he sees and hears with what he has read. He determines that Ramus’s description “cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene— or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder” (435). 29 Further on, the narrator remarks, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest ship of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once. (436) Not only does the narrator compare what he sees with what he has read, he solicits the opinion of the fisherman and notes that with which the fisherman finds agreement and that which he does not understand (437). The lack of a consensus on the details of the vortex’s depth, velocity, and strength reinforces the three vortices’ collective significance as a process of shifting perspectives in order that one might know, evaluate, and come to terms with what a vortex is or might be. The enmeshment of the tale’s vortices permits a ratiocination method akin to what Sara Crosby associates with an ecodetective’s response to ecohorror. “Ecohorror,”

Gothic Materialisms  103 she elaborates, “underlines the successful survivor’s special capacity for empathy, careful observation, particularly of the relations between things, and deployment of scientific/esthetic knowledge.”30 From their various positions within the vortex, along its rim, or elevated above it, the narrator and fisherman make careful observations, comparing different forms of evidence from different sources, raising doubt, and ascertaining information about the object in question. A vortex is a three-dimensional aperture, and such open spaces, Allen asserts, are elemental for their containment of air. As “empty” spaces, they entice curiosity and wonderment. We are drawn in, not solely by fear but by the more complicated desire to plumb the depths of our knowledge and conviction of our beliefs based on that knowledge. Using the Christian figure of “doubting Thomas,” Allen argues that the meaning of our place (where we dwell) is acquired through “groping” the aperture or, in the case of Thomas, through sticking his finger in the wound of Christ to know if it is real. 31 What Poe establishes in “A Descent into the Maelström” is a gothic version of poking one’s finger into a wound to ascertain whether or not it really exists. Immersed in the vortex, the fisherman acutely perceives his vulnerable position: I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power. (443) Yet rather than being drawn into fearful contemplation of dying, he expresses his compelling curiosity to explore the vortex’s abyss-like funnel: I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. (443) Entangled, elemental relationality among the story’s several vortices is necessary because the experience of the Moskoeström strains credulity. The fisherman knows too well that when he relates his harrowing experience of near death and survival in the maelstrom, he tests the limits of what his listeners deem believable. He confesses to the narrator, “I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden” (448). As evidence of the extreme edges of his experience, the fisherman draws the narrator’s attention to the radical change in his physical appearance: The six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man—but I am not. It

104  Liz Hutter took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. (432) The terrifying experience induces inexplicable physical changes that defy biological processes. The fisherman’s tale is difficult to believe because it challenges the listener’s capacity to imagine existence at the peripheries of life and death in intense, threatening, and volatile environments. For the fisherman, the Moskoeström that he and the narrator witness forming from the mountaintop echoes in part the experience he endured three years prior. “I have brought you here,” the fisherman explains to the narrator, “that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned—and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye” (432–33). Dwelling among dizzying altitude, precipitous cliffs, tempestuous winds, volatile seas, and deafening noise, the narrator is permitted to doubt the tale’s veracity but also, surrounded by water and waves, to speculate on its possibility and even to imagine its probability. “The whole story” is not simply a suspenseful survival from a horrific ecocatastrophe; the (w)hole story is a vortex(t)—an enmeshment of vibrant ontologies, materialities, and histories.

3.  Catalyzing Conflagrations Kate Rigby observes in Dancing with Disaster that “A true catastrophe, then, is not only a terminus but a turning point.”32 In an ecogothic framework, Poe’s ecocatastrophes facilitate a turning point that promotes the protagonists’ curiosity rather than apprehension and makes comprehensible previously inconceivable relations. The recursive energy of the elements, and of the ecocatastrophes they manifest, resists progress down toward death and destruction as terminal conclusions. Just as the ecogothic facilitates movement of the vortices in “A Descent into the Maelström” to bring into alignment different perspectives from which to ascertain belief in the unbelievable, the ecogothic in “Metzengerstein” kindles conflagrations that render possible the hardto-believe coexistence, rather than vanquishing, of enemies. The plot of “Metzengerstein” unfolds under the weight of a paradoxical prophecy that exacerbates the long-standing tension and bitter rivalry between the Metzengerstein and Berlifitzing aristocratic families. Count Wilhelm Berlifitzing, “an infirm and doting old man,” is poised on the cusp of death; his noble temperament is offset by the volatility of his neighbor, the 18-year-old Baron Frederick Metzengerstein, who has recently inherited his family’s estate.33 Berlifitzing oversees his property while indulging daily his passion for horses and hunting (135); in stark contrast, the youthful Metzengerstein is prone to “shameful debaucheries—flagrant

Gothic Materialisms  105 treacheries—unheard-of atrocities” (136) that taint the once esteemed Metzengerstein family. The prophecy’s enigmatic prediction—”A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing” (134)—casts uncertainty over the enduring legacy of the two families. Whereas the elements of water and air are woven into the text of “A Descent into the Maelström,” “Metzengerstein” capitalizes on what Stephen Pyne calls elemental fire’s most defining attribute: its “capacity to catalyze”34 —in this case, new configurations of the relationship between victor and vanquished, the dispossessed and their masters. Two conflagrations structure the story’s plot: early in the tale, a fire in Count Berlifitzing’s stable takes his life and mobilizes the transmigration of his soul to the body of his favored horse and initiates the resuscitation of Baron Metzengerstein’s ancestor. Following these new embodiments, the horse (Berlifitzing) and rider (Metzengerstein) become an inseparable entity, ultimately plunging together into the flames of a fire at Metzengerstein’s palace in the tale’s conclusion. Because fire is, Harris claims, “a living thing,” it demonstrates “movement and aspirations”; it embodies a plethora of dualities that render it amenable to gothic modes and representation.35 As an object of imaginative and philosophical contemplation, it inspires “both fear and respect”; as a technology in laboratories, industrial settings, and natural environments, it catalyzes transformations, yet “it is the one element in which nothing can live and thrive.”36 Unlike water or earth, fire “can vanish in a puff, ceasing to exist without oxygen or fuel, but it is also as violent as it is fragile. It can be smothered by the ash it makes,” muses John Peters.37 Like the vortex, a conflagration displays a recursive energy when it burns for fire is “constantly interrupted yet consistently rekindled.”38 Fire’s metaphoric potential is similarly capacious, aligning with a spectrum of dualistic experiences, including desire and obsession, regeneration and death, revenge, and justice. Elemental fire thus seems a more than suitable choice for Poe’s exploration of ancestral rivalry and revenge. On the threshold of imminent loss and “predisposed to quarrel by every instigation of hereditary jealousy” (135), both the Baron and Count await with trepidation the veracity of the prophecy to be realized. The “fearful fall” of either family risks collapse of a family’s social stature and reputation. The right to claim dominance, to “triumph” over another family and possess the total power and unyielding authority of a victor over his enemy, will ensure the victorious family its continuing legacy. The Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein rivalry establishes a rigidly hierarchical relation between the families in which the dilemma of inheritance is posed as an either/or resolution, the uncertainty of which leaves both Metzengerstein and Berlifitzing vulnerable. “Like love,” writes Matthew Taylor, “fear can be an experience of vulnerability.”39

106  Liz Hutter As the Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein rivalry represents not just individuals but also long-standing genealogies, rooted in two different cultural traditions and ideologies, much is at stake. Maurice Lee, for instance, uncovers the resonance of antebellum racial politics within the tale’s plot of rebellion and revenge. Framing the Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein feud as a representation of the antebellum slavery debates, Lee articulates white Americans’ “fear of incendiary slave revolt.” He argues that the relationship between Berlifitizing and Metzengerstein enacts the darkest fears of anti-abolitionists—that the emancipation of African slaves would destroy both North and South, that blacks would come to rule over whites, and that the United States would go up in flames in the shadow of slaves without masters.40 Travis Montgomery offers an alternate interpretation of “Metzengerstein,” which draws an analogy between the Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein rivalry and the religious conflict between the European Christians (Metzengerstein) and Middle Eastern Muslims (Berlifitzing) of the sixteenth century. The tale’s Hungarian setting heightens the East/West conflict, he explains, which “carries much of the tale’s allegorical weight.”41 With an imminent change in power at stake, the presence of elemental fire in “Metzengerstein” explores the relationship between enemies and the desperation and fragility associated with imminent dispossession—­of losing one’s livelihood, of breaking historical tradition—­as an experience akin to near death. In “Metzengerstein,” fire and air initiate a “generative becoming,” to use Iovnio and Opermann’s phrase, by setting in motion transformations that reconfigure the antagonistic relationship between the two aristocratic families.42 By means of metempsychosis, Berlifitzing inhabits the body of one of his horses, and Metzengerstein inhabits the body of his deceased ancestor, the murderer of a Berlifitizing nobleman. The family rivalry is reproduced anew, albeit through a human-animal hybrid that retains the energy and expressiveness of fire. Early in the tale, a fire erupts suddenly on Berlifitzing’s estate, and Berlifitzing “perished miserably in the flames” while rashly trying “to rescue a favorite portion of his hunting stud” (139). Outside Metzergerstein’s quarters, an agitated horse is found: “With much difficulty, and at the imminent peril of their lives,” Berlifitzing’s ostlers strain to control “the convulsive plunges of a gigantic and fiery-colored horse” (137). Further description suggests this horse is not simply a gothic symbol of vengeance: the horse is fire embodied. “We caught him flying, all smoking and foaming with rage, from the burning stables of the Castle Berlifitzing,” remark the men (137–38). Simultaneous with the Berlifitzing stable fire, Metzengerstein, alone at home, becomes engrossed in the tapestry on the wall, seemingly

Gothic Materialisms  107 oblivious to the “increasing uproar” and impeding catastrophe looming in the stables on his neighbor’s property (136). He intently contemplates a scene of ancestral victory woven in the tapestry hanging on his wall. A decorative and emblematic testament to the enduring strength of his family genealogy, the tapestry “represented the shadowy and majestic forms of a thousand illustrious ancestors”—priests, dignitaries, princes, and dames staged to reflect the power and decisive victories of the Metzengerstein family (136). In one scene, a horse’s rider, a member of the Berlifitzing family, lies stabbed by one of the Metzengerstein princes. Metzengerstein becomes peculiarly attached to an “enormous, and unnaturally colored horse” that belonged “to a Saracen ancestor of the family of his rival” (136). The Baron’s fixation with the tapestry intensifies to the point where he is unsure of what is real and what is part of the tapestry: It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake. The longer he gazed, the more absorbing became the spell—the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry. (137) As Metzengerstein “falls” into the tapestry, the horse in the tapestry gains vitality—woven image becomes real, ancestral history becomes Metzengerstein’s present. “To his extreme horror and astonishment,” Metzengerstein observes, “the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position.” As the reanimation of the horse progresses, it acquires human expressiveness: The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his sepulchral and disgusting teeth. (137) Although its “compassionate” stance over its owner’s corpse suggests an understood empathy between a horse and its rider, the horse’s eyes and teeth connote antagonism and disgust. As a final step, Metzengerstein inhabits the body of the horse’s rider, one of his ancestors. A sudden “flash of red light” casts Metzengerstein’s shadow against the tapestry, “and he shuddered to perceive that shadow—as he staggered awhile upon the threshold—assuming the exact position, and precisely filling up the contour, of the relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing” (137).

108  Liz Hutter Detailing the process of metempsychosis here highlights the processual enmeshment of human and animal generated by the fire in Berlifitzing’s stable and the aerial transport of Berlifitizing’s soul to his horse. The aerial movement of organic and inorganic matter from one “body” to another thematizes inquiry about the relationship between the living and their deceased ancestors, between the physical body and the soul, and between human and animal forms. Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1805) notes the derivation of metempsychosis from the Greek, meaning “beyond,” “animate,” and “enliven.” Its etymology highlights the importance of movement through air from one body to another, which confers upon the new body renewal or immortality. Death, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis, was merely a change in “lodging; and only ceased to live to begin a new life.”43 Poe’s depiction and use of metempsychosis in “Metzengerstein” demonstrates what Stacey Alaimo terms “trans-corporeality.” Catalyzed by fire and transmitted through air, the resulting entity of horse and rider affirms that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-thanhuman world.”44 Dwelling in a different body creates different ways of thinking and being. Examination of the stakes of family rivalry across the human-animal body in “Metzengerstein,” for example, engenders uncertainty about the ephemerality of human mortality, the object and trajectory of one’s revenge, and one’s responsibilities to long-standing tradition. The resulting human-animal coupling—the “rider over his horse” — “became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous and unnatural fervor” (140). The transformed Berlifitzing and resuscitated Metzengerstein keep exclusive company “in the glare of noon—at the dead hour of night—in sickness or in health—in calm or in tempest” (140). Poe further elaborates the synergy of human and animal: “The young Metzengerstein seemed riveted to the saddle of that colossal horse, whose intractable audacities so well accorded with his own spirit” (140). The synergy of the “mania of the rider” and the aggressive “capabilities of the steed” embody the qualities of elemental fire (140) as individual vengeance kindles mutual animosity: “Indeed, the Baron’s perverse attachment to his lately-acquired charger” seemed “to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal’s ferocious and demon-like propensities” (140). Where “the excess of fire produces continuous heats and fevers,” Macauley writes,45 the horse-rider relationship progresses toward pathological intensity, becoming repulsive and incomprehensible. Characters’ reactions to the rider-horse are not unlike the response of spectators to a spectacle of burning fire: And it is said there were times when the animal caused the gaping crowd who stood around to recoil in horror from the deep and impressive meaning of his terrible stamp—times when the young

Gothic Materialisms  109 Metzengerstein turned pale and shrunk away from the rapid and searching expression of his earnest and human-looking eye. (141) Though the horse is untouchable, it rivets the spectators’ attention while also repulsing them. Though animal, its “earnest and human-looking eye” registers a familiar, even intimate expression. In a final elemental flourish at the tale’s conclusion, Metzengerstein’s residence burns “under the influence of a dense and livid mass of ungovernable fire” (141). Horse and rider are witnessed plunging into “the whirlwind of chaotic fire” (142). The Empedoclean death of Metzengerstein and Berlifitzing is purposeful. Harris claims, “The will of fire burns brightly,” elaborating that it “has direction and volition, an elemental will to gather and surge.”46 If, as Macauley theorizes, fire “proceeds through three identifiable stages”—incipient, smolder, and flame47—then the “dead calm” that follows the horse and rider’s plunge is a smoky epilogue: The fury of the tempest immediately died away, and a dead calm sullenly succeeded. A white flame still enveloped the building like a shroud, and, streaming far away into the quiet atmosphere, shot forth a glare of preternatural light; while a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct colossal figure of—a horse. (142) The smoke image is not just a gothic afterthought to accent the dubious prophecy nor is it an atmospheric prop to cement the terror of a horse with supernatural capabilities. The entity of rider and horse metaphorically and materially exists as a living-dead, human-nonhuman body. The importance of “Metzengerstein” lies not in words becoming true (or not true) but rather in words materializing in embodied form as a hybrid human-animal. Thinking across the enmeshed human-animal entity renders belief in the resolution of the Berlifitzing-Metzengerstein rivalry moot and interposes questions about more insidious expressions of revenge and forms of (dis)possession. By staging a conflict of vengeance, inheritance, and genealogical longevity through elemental fire, Poe shifts the tale’s focus away from the identity of victor and vanquished and from the take-all stakes of revenge. Rather, Poe’s interest in this tale lies in the process of the younger Metzengerstein’s and the older Berlifitzing’s preservation through inhabitance and the entanglement of identity and temperament in embodied form. The “fall” predicted in the prophecy does not terminate in death but rather sustains their perseverance in the smoldering irresolution of unsated jealously. As witnesses to or victims of an ecocatastrophe, one is always immersed in elemental matter—if not fire and water, then air. “The unseen

110  Liz Hutter air,” Steve Mentz recognizes, “provides a less celebrated image of the fragile connection between human bodies and the nonhuman environment to which we should attend.”48 David Abram elaborates, “Itself invisible, the atmosphere is that through which we see everything else.”49 An ecogothic perspective theorized through elemental matter unsettles conventional perception of human and nonhuman relationality as antagonistic, non-reciprocal, or hierarchical in the liminal transitions between life and death. If elemental enmeshment in an ecogothic framework is an inherent condition of our living and dying, we must reconfigure our relationships to the experiences and entities that shape our phobias rather than remain confined or oppressed by them. “The stories we tell about rain are also the stories rain tells about us” reflects Duckert. His observation could apply equally as well to Poe’s fictional vortex and conflagration and to a nineteenth-century audience. The vortex, like rain, is an elemental phenomenon that soaks the bodies immersed in it. Fire, unlike water, burns, heats, and dries out bodies. Yet, “rain catches us,” much like the vortex engulfs the old man and the narrator and much like fire engulfs Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein. The experience of the vortex shared by the narrator and the fisherman atop the mountain as well as the fiery coupling of Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein enact what Duckert proposes we should do in the rain: “I suggest that we listen to the rain, when it rains, more closely.”50 Just as listening to the thundering reverberations of a maelstrom or absorbing the heat and energy of fire require an immersive position, so too does an ecocatastrophe demand an observer’s or reader’s full participation—engagement of all one’s faculties of imagination, reason, and emotion—to wrestle with how to understand our shifting relations to the human and nonhuman environments in which we dwell.

Notes 1 Following Kate Rigby’s discussion of the distinction between disaster and catastrophe, I use the term ecocatastrophe (rather than natural disaster) to describe early nineteenth-century elemental phenomena, such as tornadoes or hurricanes. Not only is natural disaster a construction of the late nineteenth/­ early twentieth century, explains Rigby, but by the “early nineteenth century, catastrophe had found its way into ordinary parlance, as a synonym for disaster or calamity, whether personal or collective, but with the lingering connotation of a terrible event that is not only of great magnitude but brings about a change of direction or perception.” Rigby, Dancing, 17–18. 2 For an analysis of nineteenth-century broadsides and their social value, see Cohen, Social Lives, 17–59. 3 “Violent Storm.” 4 Shepardson, “Reflections.” 5 “On the Burning of the Steamer Lexington,” qtd. in Carr, “We Never Will Forget,” 37. 6 Carr, “We Never Will Forget,” 38. 7 “Awful Catastrophy.”

Gothic Materialisms  111 8 Hillard, “‘Deep Into that Darkness,’” 688, 692. 9 Ibid., 690–91. 10 Allen, “Airy Something,” 77. 11 Cohen and Duckert, “Introduction,” 10. 12 Ibid., 3; Oppermann and Iovino, “Coda,” 310. 13 Botting, Gothic, 120. 14 Cohen and Duckert, “Introduction,” 6. 15 Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis, “Introduction,” 12. 16 Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 38. 17 Cohen, “Sea Above,” 114. 18 Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction,” 1–2. 19 Frank, “Aqua-Gothic Voyage,” 87. 20 Ibid., 87, 86. 21 Perry, “Gothic as Vortex,” 154. 22 Scholarship on “A Descent into the Maelström” is not extensive, and the work that is published tends to interpret (almost exclusively) the significance of the vortex’s verticality. It has been argued, for instance, that ascension and descension resonate with religious themes of salvation and enlightenment—­ the dark, deep and unseeable depth contrasts with beauty, light, truth, and God at the top. For example, in Frank’s reading, the old man is an ideal transcendental subject—both poet and scientist relying on imagination and reason/deduction to endure the descent and ultimately liberate themselves from the whirl. 23 Allen, “Airy Something,” 94. 24 Cohen, “Sea Above,” 107. 25 Poe, “Descent,” 445. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 26 Cohen and Duckert, “Introduction,” 6. 27 Cohen, “Sea Above,” 127. 28 Allen, “Airy Something,” 99. 29 See Turner, “Sources,” for discussion of Ramus and other of Poe’s sources. 30 Crosby, “Beyond Ecophilia,” 520. 31 Allen, “Airy Something,” 81. 32 Rigby, Dancing, 18. 33 Poe, “Metzengerstein.” This tale was first published in 1832 in the Saturday Courier. Poe revised the story in subsequent publications. See Fisher, “Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein,’” for discussion of the differences among the story’s different versions. I cite the Library of America edition of Poe’s poems and tales, which uses Griswold’s 1850 The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe as the source text for “Metzengerstein.” Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 34 Pyne, “Fire,” 86. 35 Harris, “Pyromena,” 28. 36 Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 38, 37. 37 Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 117. 38 Harris, “Pyromena,” 29. 39 Taylor, “The Nature of Fear,” 362. 40 Lee, “Absolute Poe,” 756. 41 Montgomery, “Poe’s Oriental Gothic,” 10. 42 Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism,” 77. Recent scholarship in multispecies ethnography similarly postulates an understanding of human ontology as entangled with other organisms. For example, see Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich, “Introduction.” 43 Rees, The Cyclopaedia [no page number].

112  Liz Hutter 4 4 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 45 Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 71. 46 Harris, “Pyromena,” 44. 47 Macauley, Elemental Philosophy, 40. 48 Mentz, “Poetics of Nothing,” 40. 49 Abram, “Afterword,” 303. 50 Duckert, “When It Rains,” 115.

Bibliography Abram, David. “Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath.” In Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, 301–14. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Allen, Valerie. “Airy Something.” In Cohen and Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism, 77–104. “Awful Catastrophy of the Explosion of the Ship at N. York, June 4th, 1829: When 100 Men Were Mostly Killed or Wounded.” Broadside. New York: [s.n.], 1829. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996. Carr, Revell. “‘We Never Will Forget’: Disaster in American Folksongs from the Nineteenth Century to September 11, 2001.” Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 30.3/4 (2004): 36–41. Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis. “Introduction: Toward a Hydrological Turn?” In Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis, 3–22. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “The Sea Above.” In Cohen and Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism, 105–33. ———, and Lowell Duckert. “Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements.” In Cohen and Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism, 1–26. ———, and Lowell Duckert, eds. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Cohen, Michael C. The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Crosby, Sara L. “Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.3 (Summer 2014): 513–25. Duckert, Lowell. “When It Rains.” In Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, 114–29. Fisher, Benjamin F. “Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein’: Not a Hoax.” American Literature 42.4 (1971): 487–94. Frank, Frederick. “The Aqua-Gothic Voyage of ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom.’” American Transcendental Quarterly29.1 (1976): 85–93. Harris, Anne. “Pyromena: Fire’s Doing.” In Cohen and Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism, 27–54. Hillard, Tom J. “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.4 (2009): 685–95.

Gothic Materialisms  113 Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, 1–18. ———. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@ 3.1 (2012): 75–91. ———, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Kirksey, Eben, Craig Schuetze, and Stefan Helmreich. “Introduction.” In The Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey, 1–24. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Lee, Maurice S. “Absolute Poe: His System of Transcendental Racism.” American Literature 75.4 (2003): 751–81. Macauley, David. Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Mentz, Steve. “A Poetics of Nothing: Air in the Early Modern Imagination.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 4.1 (2013): 30–41. Montgomery, Travis. “Poe’s Oriental Gothic: ‘Metzengerstein’ (1832), ‘The Visionary’ (1834), ‘Berenice’ (1835), the Imagination and Authorship’s Perils.” Gothic Studies 12.2 (2010): 4–28. Oppermann, Serpil, and Serenella Iovino. “Coda: Wandering Elements and Natures to Come.” In Cohen and Duckert, Elemental Ecocriticism, 310–17. Perry, J. Douglas, Jr. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 153–67. Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Poe, Edgar Allan. “A Descent into the Maelström.” In Poe, Edgar Allan Poe, 432–48. ———. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Edited by Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984. ———. “Metzengerstein.” In Poe, Edgar Allan Poe, 134–42. Pyne, Stephen J. “Fire.” In A Companion to American Environmental History, edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman, 69–91. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Rees, Abraham. The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, vol. 24. Philadelphia: Samuel F. Bradford and Murray, Fairman and Co., 1805. Rigby, Kate. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Shepardson, John. “Reflections on the Tornado, Which Passed from Northfield through Warwick and Orange, in the Ninth of September, 1821.” Broadside. Warwick, MA: [s.n.], 1821. Taylor, Matthew A. “The Nature of Fear: Edgar Allan Poe and Posthuman Ecology.” American Literature 84.2 (2012): 353–79. Turner, Arlin. “Sources of Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom.’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 46.3 (July 1947): 298–301. “Violent Storm: Boston, October 15, 1804.” Broadside. Boston: [s.n.], 1804.

7 “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and the Ecogothic Lesley Ginsberg

Who can forget the Edenic gardening in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks, “the original Adam’s occupation,” providing “a pleasure” similar to what the author supposed “Adam felt…in Paradise….” The author rhapsodizes about the humble “squash in our garden” that “might be copied by a sculptor, and would look beautifully in marble, or in china-ware.” He celebrates the humble winter squash, “when it turns up its big belly to ripen in the autumnal sun.”1 The satisfactions of the garden led Hawthorne to muse on the “bliss of paternity” in the preface to Mosses from an Old Manse. 2 Henry David Thoreau planted a vegetable garden at the Old Manse as a wedding gift for the Hawthornes, tangibly linking the newlyweds to transcendental practices. Then, there are the armfuls of flowers, symbolizing the joys of marriage.3 This sanguine view of Hawthorne’s relationship to nature is epitomized by much of the scholarship on the Hawthornes’ stay at the Old Manse; one recent essay dubs that era “the height of the author’s transcendental turn.”4 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature (1836) at the Old Manse, a fact memorialized in Hawthorne’s preface to Mosses: “It was here that Emerson wrote ‘Nature’” (5). Yet Hawthorne remained skeptical of Emerson’s “subtile [sic] influence” and his transcendental views of nature.5 As Larry Reynolds explains, “[t]he adjective ‘subtile,’ with its meanings of fine or keen on the one hand and sly or insidious on the other, captures the ambivalent feelings of attraction and repulsion with which Hawthorne regarded Concord’s leading citizen.”6 It was as a resident of the Manse that Hawthorne wrote some of his most forceful gothic ripostes to Emersonian and Thoreauvian views of nature, including “The Birth-mark” (1843) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844). Both tales have recognizably gothic features: the extreme isolation of female characters who are menaced and ultimately killed off by male would-be protectors, the mad scientist protagonists, the motif of a drinkable remedy that turns out to be a deadly poison. Other gothic works included in Mosses offer a glimpse into “the desolate heart of Nature,” as the narrator of Hawthorne’s “Roger Malvin’s Burial” puts it (357). In the words of Andrew Smith and William Hughes in their recent collection, EcoGothic, the “presumptive dystopianism” of ecogothic fiction in the

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  115 romantic era “illustrates how nature becomes constituted…as a space of crisis which conceptually creates a point of contact with the ecological.”7 While “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is putatively set within the confines of an overly cultivated, old-world, walled garden in the middle of citified Padua and “The Birth-Mark” is set in a fancifully gothic laboratory, nature in these tales is clearly “a space of crisis” linked to larger concerns about the status of humans in nature, a crisis refracted through gothic extremes of power and abjection. Treatments of the environment in antebellum American literary histories still skew heavily toward the romantic; “the gothic” remains a vexed term. The Cambridge History of the American Novel devotes fewer than ten of its almost 1, 200 pages to the gothic and relegates discussion of “ecofiction” to the “contemporary.”8 This chapter explores post-human/ nonhuman territories of antebellum American literary history through two of Hawthorne’s Old Manse tales. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” features the gothic transgression of boundaries both human and nonhuman in a landscape in which “every portion of the soil was peopled with plants” (emphasis mine), a treacherous environment of “poisonous flowers” (95, 115). And in “The Birth-Mark,” Georgiana’s innocent facial feature becomes a thing portending death, “the spectral Hand that wrote mortality,” a human mark that in Aylmer’s eyes takes on a nonhuman life of its own while he is doubled by the “low…bulky…shaggy” Aminadab whose “indescribable earthiness” renders him an animalistic symbol of “man’s physical nature,” separated completely from the “spiritual,” here represented by his monomaniacal “master” (39, 43). If there is terror in the specter of death as nature’s inevitable gift to humanity, Matthew A. Taylor points out that there is a “thin line” between the fear of nature and the love of nature: “If ecophobia can lead to domination, then so, too, can ecophilia.” Taylor critiques the love of nature espoused by Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau for “…subordinating the natural world to an occasion of the self’s realization.”9 The same perhaps could be said about Hawthorne’s fatally domineering anti-heroes. Rappaccini transforms flowers, the hapless Giovanni, and his own daughter from living beings into objects of his “experiments”; Alylmer’s love of his wife’s natural beauty turns quickly to disgust once they are married as he transforms her into another subject of one of his “abortive experiment[s]” (45). With attention to these concerns as well as what has been called the “Frontier Gothic” in American literature, Hawthorne’s ecogothic is revealed.10 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review of December 1844. In the table of contents for the magazine, the story appeared as “The Writings of Aubépine:–­ Rappaccini’s Daughter—by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” The French term refers to the hawthorn plant and forges a playful link between the author and the natural world. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is thus framed in part as a dispatch from the writings of a nonhuman but living entity, as if

116  Lesley Ginsberg written by an emissary from nature. Yet there is much more to the print culture contexts of the tale than simply the conceit that the tale stands as a gothic warning to human readers from the pen of nature.11 Indeed, the nature of nature was very much at stake in the 1830s and the 1840s. Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s take on the question of the nature of humanity and the human place within nature in the November issue of the magazine (just a month before “Rappaccini’s Daughter” appeared). As Poe opines in one of his “Marginalia,” “The theorizers on Government, who pretend always to ‘begin with the beginning,’ commence with Man in what they call his natural state—the savage. What right have they to suppose this is his natural state?” In this meditation on the natural state of humanity, Poe offers a syllogism that appears to be based on cool rationality: Man’s chief idiosyncrasy being reason, it follows that his savage condition—his condition of action without reason—is his unnatural state. The more he reasons, the nearer he approaches the position to which this chief idiosyncrasy irresistibly impels him; and not until be attains this position with exactitude…not until he has stepped upon the highest pinnacle of civilization—will his natural state be ultimately reached, or thoroughly determined.12 Here, Poe seems to argue with a dominant strain of American romanticism, epitomized by Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1833–1836), a series of paintings depicting an ecologically determined historical cycle of human achievement in which humanity originates in what Cole labels The Savage State and proceeds through increasing heights of classical, rational civilization until this achievement is destroyed by marauding hordes and the cycle begins anew. Alternatively, Poe proposes that high civilization is the most truly natural state for humankind, rather than the conventional binary in which nature and civilization are opposed. As Barbara Cantalupo has shown, Cole’s paintings (though she does not mention The Course of Empire) were exhibited in New York in 1844 and 1845 while Poe was living there and writing for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which was published in that city. Cantalupo critiques art historian Sarah Burns whose Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (2004) “contends that [in] both Poe’s and Thomas Cole’s works…’the idea of democracy raised specters of disaster and decline.’” Cantalupo argues that Burns “ignor[es] the ‘other Poe,’” meaning the Poe “who loved beauty and who found that beauty in the works he saw by such artists as Thomas Cole… and in the sculpture and paintings he saw in New York galleries or ‘rooms on Broadway….’”13 In February 1845 (just a few months after the publication of “Rappaccini’s Daughter”), The Broadway Journal published a review of

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  117 Cole’s paintings exhibited at the New York Gallery of the Fine Arts; this group hosted an exhibition of The Course of Empire series in 1844 and 1845, after the death of Luman Reed, the patron who commissioned the series from Cole.14 Although the review is not attributed to Poe (except by the New York Historical Society), the review does hew to one of Poe’s most recognizable aesthetic tenets, in addition to his love of beauty: his horror of the didactic in art.15 A picture need not be didactic like the picture-stories of Hogarth, to do good….If every field of flowers had its medicinal qualities inscribed upon its petals, we should take as little pleasure in wandering through the fields as in going to an apothecary’s shop…. Perhaps these remarks will prepare the way for us to say, that we dislike exceedingly Cole’s allegorical landscapes in the New York Gallery. The pictures in themselves are truly beautiful, but the plan of them is against nature. Their beauty is marred by being seen together. We perceive directly that we are being imposed upon. Instead of looking upon beautiful landscapes, we discern that they are sermons in green paint; essays in gilt frames. The charm of nature is destroyed…and we turn from them in disgust, without knowing the cause of it.16 Although this critique is not attributed to Poe, the reviewer does share some of Poe’s aesthetic standards and his rather contrarian definitions of nature and the natural. For this reviewer as well as for Poe, art should be separated from the didactic, lest we debase the beauty of visual art by allowing art to be reduced to prosy, reductive statements: “sermons in green paint; essays in gilt frames.” This criticism is extended when the reviewer suggests that placing the paintings in allegorical or narrative relationship is unnatural: “the plan of them is against nature.” Interestingly, the fraught relationship between art and allegory was at the core of Poe’s criticism of Hawthorne’s work. Hawthorne is “infinitely too fond of allegory,” complained Poe in 1847.17 Poe addresses Hawthorne’s work in particular in an installment of “Marginalia” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review of December 1844, the same issue in which “Rappaccini’s Daughter” appeared. Poe praises Hawthorne: “His sense of art is exquisite….He handles all subjects in the same subdued, misty, dreamy, suggestive, innuendo way.” Yet Poe also admits that although “I think him the truest genius…I cannot help regarding him as the most desperate mannerist of this day.”18 Aesthetically, this is akin to the criticisms leveled at Cole’s The Course of Empire. As in Poe’s critique of a political/social science that sees the savage state as humankind’s most original or natural condition, the reviewer takes issue with Cole’s representation of the idea that the most natural

118  Lesley Ginsberg state for of humanity is not one of reason but one of primitivism and irrationality. Consider the critique of the first painting in The Course of Empire series, known as The Savage State: The first of the series represents a wild scene of green trees and so forth; meant to typify the beginning of empire; the sun is just rising from the sea, which symbolises the mind rising from the darkness of ignorance; a mass of heavy paint which obscures a good part of the canvas represents the mists of error fleeing before the rising sun of intelligence. The painting is rightly understood as allegory, but the reviewer takes issue with the allegory developed and the view of the natural state of humanity implied by the painting. As in many of Cole’s works, humans are proportionality small next to the grandeur of the natural world, illustrating a more sublimely gothic view of man’s place in the natural world than Poe or the editors of The Broadway Journal may have had in mind. The small humans in The Savage State, dressed in skins and engaged in the hunt, are singled out as a “defect” in the painting: “The men in them are not seen at all when they are viewed at a proper distance, and if seen they are subordinates, not principals, as they should be, in a performance which professes to point a moral [sic].” In other words, the painting shows nature as a dominant force against which humans are puny non-entities. The reviewer complains, “This first picture has the least artistic merit of the series, and at once lets us into the secret of the allegory.… No landscape can ever teach a profitable lesson, when nature is caricatured or exaggerated.” The last picture in the series is singled out for praise (Desolation, the scene in which civilization has been destroyed and nature once again begins to reassert itself), but it is praised as a painting that stands on its own rather than as a culmination of a series: “It should, indeed, be exhibited by itself, without any hint being given of its allegorical character, that it might be enjoyed without any uncomfortable feeling of its didacticism.”19 The aesthetic principles underlying The Broadway Journal’s critique of The Course of Empire also include a philosophical position about the relationship between humans and the natural world that points to a core difference between Poe and Hawthorne. Hawthorne uses allegory and the didactic in his works in the 1840s to highlight views of nature and human significance much more in accord with what Sarah Burns sees in The Course of Empire, including its implication “…that the savage state would inevitably succeed the melancholy dusk of Desolation.”20 Poe’s contention that reason is the most natural state for humanity is, in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” undermined by Dr. Rappaccini’s malignant rationality. Rappaccini is repeatedly described in terms of the language of reason: he is a “scientific gardener” who “examined” his plants, he

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  119 works his way through his garden “making observations” and “discovering.” Yet “in spite of the deep intelligence on his part,” he creates a toxic parody of nature: “the man’s demeanor” in the garden of his own making “was that of a man walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license would wreak upon him some terribly fatality.” Rappaccini’s reason has given birth to savagery within civilized walls. When Giovanni forces himself “to take a most rational view of the whole matter” and temporarily supposes that the garden may serve “to keep him in communion with Nature,” rationality is the symbol, if not the cause, of the young man’s deluded views, including his estimation of the natural (95, 96, 98). “Rappaccini’s Daughter” offers a strong counterpoint to Poe’s contention that civilization is the most natural state of humankind. So does Emerson: “In the wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages,” opines the speaker of Nature. 21 But neither is Hawthorne’s tale a romantic nor Emersonian celebration of humanity’s place within the natural world. “Wilderness has long been identified as a key component of what constitutes the American Gothic,” writes Kevin Corstorphine, and, as he observes, “The figure of the Native American looms large in any discussion of the wilderness….”22 Anna Brickhouse has shown that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is haunted by Indians and Hawthorne’s ambivalence about the mixture of native peoples and settlers, as is the gothic wilderness of “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) and “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1831), both of which were reprinted in Mosses (1846). 23 In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Beatrice’s early conversation with Giovanni links her to native island peoples who find themselves discovered by the so-called civilized: she “appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion with the youth, not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have felt, conversing with a voyager from the civilized world” (112). Yet notions of wildness linked to putatively uncivilized peoples also haunt Hawthorne’s perceptions of Thoreau: Emerson’s disciple, whose deliberate understanding of nature differed radically from his mentor’s benign views and from their peer Bronson Alcott’s rigorously platonic conceptions of nature. While at the Manse, Hawthorne recorded his impressions of Thoreau, who …seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men…. and, strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, a spearhead, or other relic of the red men—as if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth. 24 Hawthorne essentially repeats this conceit when he writes to Epes Sargent in a letter promoting Thoreau as a contributor to Sargent’s New

120  Lesley Ginsberg Monthly Magazine, speaking of Thoreau as “…a wild, irregular, Indian-­ like sort of fellow….”25 Hawthorne praises Thoreau as “a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer…and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness.” Thoreau is able to commune with the nonhuman: “He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has…friendly passages with these lower brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in garden or wildwood, are also his familiar friends.”26 Hawthorne’s diction, with its slightly biblical lilt, renders him closer to his Puritan forebears, at least in relation to Thoreau, than he might otherwise have cared to admit. Thoreau’s first publication is also notable in that Hawthorne left a brief record of his response to it (the records of Hawthorne’s responses to his reading are rare). Hawthorne dubs Thoreau “… a good writer, –at least he has written a good article, a rambling disquisition in the last Dial, which, he says, was chiefly made up from journals of his own observations.” Given Hawthorne’s praise for Thoreau, it would appear that Dr. Rappaccini’s objectifying observations differ qualitatively from the more gentle or curious form of the study of nature that Hawthorne sees in Thoreau: Methinks this article gives a very fair image of his mind and character—­so true, minute, and literal in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as the letter of what he sees, even as a lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving a wild beauty of the whole scene…. Hawthorne reads Thoreau’s nature writing as a naturally reflective surface imparting an additional “wild beauty.” In Thoreau’s reflections, Hawthorne sees “good sense” and “moral truth….On the whole, I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know,” 27 a vision that contrasts sharply with Rappaccini: “an emaciated, sallow, and sickly looking man” who walks “like a person in inferior health….” (95, 106). In his Dial essay, Thoreau claims that “Nature is mythical and mystical always,” yet Thoreau expresses a humility before the mysteries of nature: “Wisdom does not inspect, but behold. We must look a long time before we can see.” In contrast to Dr. Rappaccini or to the pale Aylmer, both of whom inspect nature as a means toward control, Thoreau remarks that such aims are suspect: He has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law, or a couple two facts.…The true man of science will know nature better by his fine organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  121 mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics; we cannot know truth by contrivance and method…and with all the helps of machinery and art, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom. 28 Hawthorne may have borrowed a page from Thoreau in his portraits of Rappaccini and “pale Aylmer,” these “demoniacal” men of science who use their powers not for a “deeper or finer experience” of nature but rather in an attempt to transcend nature. These “scientific” men are the least “healthiest and friendliest,” profoundly lacking in “sympathy.” Yet Hawthorne does not follow Thoreau into the romantic fantasy of return to “a more perfect Indian wisdom” through the study of nature nor is he entirely in accord with Thoreau’s brand of transcendentalism. In the preface to “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne locates his art as a neutral territory, residing between two uncongenial poles, an imaginative midpoint occupying “an unfortunate position between the Transcendentalists…and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitudes” (91). Finished by mid-November of 1844, toward the end of his Old Manse newlywed idyll, Hawthorne’s preface to “Rappaccini’s Daughter” reflects his uneasy intellectual tenancy in the mid-1840s in Concord, the home of Emerson and his circle. Though the preface to “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was omitted from the 1846 edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, it is Emerson who haunts the preface as well as Mosses from an Old Manse, the collection of stories that Hawthorne published at the end of his first sojourn in Concord. Despite the gothic presence of more explicit ghosts haunting the Manse—the sighing, rustling ghost who “wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses” or the “ghostly servant-maid” whose antiquated sense of duty “kept her at work…without any wages” (17, 18)—it is the shape of Emerson’s Nature that wafts through the preface, shaming the author in his “resolve at least to achieve a novel, that should evolve some deep lesson” (5). Short fiction was not serving the development of the author’s career. He faced pressure to compose a stand-alone work, such as a novel, that might presumably garner more income than the paltry sums he received from publishing short works in financially struggling periodicals. But why would Hawthorne imagine that his future project “should” contain “some deep lesson”? And how does Hawthorne’s “position” somewhere between Emerson’s Transcendental views of nature and “the intellect and sympathies of the multitudes” shape the development of an ecogothic aesthetic? While “Rappaccini’s Daughter” has been variously understood as being rooted in nineteenth-century language theory (Roger), Nathaniel and Sophia’s marital tensions (Reynolds, Miller), antebellum ideas about disease (Bensick), race mixing

122  Lesley Ginsberg (Brickhouse), female poisoners (Keetley), female sexuality/reproductive medicine (Brenzo, Medoro), the objectification of women (Person), and as an allegory for the brutally rigorous education imposed on Margaret Fuller by her father (Mitchell), this chapter reads Hawthorne’s story as a reflection in part on the development of an ecogothic in response to more conventionally romantic views and shows how Hawthorne’s ecogothic vision has roots in “The Birth-Mark.”29 In Concord of the 1840s, the natural world was linked to the figure of the Indian. Though Thoreau maintains a sanguine view of what he calls “Indian wisdom” and Hawthorne repeatedly allies Thoreau with the Indian and with nature, Hawthorne’s engagements in fiction with the figure of the Indian and, by association, with nature, are far more fraught. Even the study in which Nature was written is haunted by the ghosts of Indian enemies past, despite what may have been an ineffectual makeover by Sophia Hawthorne of Emerson’s study at the Old Manse: When I first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil, that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now. A cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted paper-hangings, lighted up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eaves, attempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints, there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael’s Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns. (5) The redecoration of the room—“the cheerful coat of paint,” the copies of Italian masters, the “fresh” flowers and “graceful ferns”—reads as an attempt to redecorate using a romantic aesthetic. But Hawthorne implicitly suggests that the legacies of the past cannot be simply painted over. Tom J. Hillard suggests that the Puritan view of nature is an antecedent of the ecogothic: the “symbolic, ‘cursed,’ postlapsarian earth [of the Puritans] anticipates the settings of the literary Gothic mode a century later, and it possesses interesting implications for ecocriticism.”30 By recalling his and Emerson’s “study” as he first knew it—not only “blackened” with “unnumbered years” of smoke but “made still blacker” by the notions of the “bad angels” of the past—Hawthorne suggests the darkly gothic roots of the putative Newness, as Transcendentalism was also called. As David Mogen suggests, the origins of the American gothic can be found in the genre of the captivity narrative and its sojourn into the

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  123 wilderness: “…the encounter with the wilderness was no mere struggle against natural elements, but a pitched battle between the forces of light and agents of Satan himself, the ‘Black Man’ whose realm the settlers sought to wrest from him.” Mogen comments, “The practical, political implications of these [Puritan] symbols are apparent—they provide an early rationale for Manifest Destiny.”31 In this light, Hawthorne’s imagery invokes that of the best-known Puritan captivity narrative: Mary Rowlandson’s. The heavy smoke is reminiscent of the fiery beginning of her ordeal: “several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven.” The “murderous wretches,” “burning” and “destroying,” are “black creatures” of “the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.”32 Hawthorne also suggests that despite its romantic trappings, his Old Manse fiction may be haunted by generations of Puritans past for whom the wilderness was a fallen and frightening realm, occupied by ruthless Indian enemies. In April of 1843, while his wife visited family in Boston, Hawthorne was briefly left to his own devices in the Old Manse. In the common journal—­a form of communication both private and communal and linked to the Transcendental pedagogical practice of keeping school journals—kept by the newlyweds, Hawthorne notes, “after dinner, I lay down on the couch, with the Dial as a soporific, and had a short nap.” The next day, “I took up the Dial, and finished the article on Mr. Alcott.” Hawthorne reports that the essay “is not very satisfactory, and has not taught me much.”33 The lead article in the Dial for April 1843, “A. Bronson Alcott’s Works,” was written by Charles Lane, an English disciple of Alcott who met him in England and who followed the American pedagogue back to Concord.34 While the Hawthornes enjoyed their private Eden, as they called it, at the Old Manse, Lane would fund Fruitlands, Alcott’s short-lived utopian experiment, which, like the private references of the Hawthornes to their joint “Paradise” in Concord, was also shrouded in Edenic terms. In October 1842, the Dial included a long piece on “English Reformers,” which looked ahead to Fruitlands and in which the reformers propose “to select a spot whereon the new Eden may be planted”: “Providence seems to have ordained New England, as the field wherein this idea is to be realized.”35 Later in life, Alcott recalled time spent in England “…discussing ideals and Edens….” Alcott House in England was where he “Resolve[d] to plant ‘the Paradise’ in New England.” After his English friends followed him to Concord, Alcott recalls “Ideas of Eden planting” just before Lane purchased the property that was to become Fruitlands. 36 Alcott spoke of Fruitlands as “a second Eden to be planted…in the Paradise of Good— whereinto neither the knowledge of Death nor Sin shall enter, and man pluck wisdom from the tree of life alway.”37 Although Alcott was speaking at least partly in terms of his vegan/fruitarian version of dietary utopia, his prelapsarian vision of humanity’s potential relationship to

124  Lesley Ginsberg the natural world is notable for its double in the Hawthornes’ language of marital bliss. But for Alcott and Lane, to imagine an Edenic communion with nature is not the same as equating the natural with the Edenic. For all their hopefulness, the founders of Fruitlands saw nature, however lovely, as a fallen realm. Consider the following commotion as narrated by historian Richard Francis: Lane accused Thoreau of a love of nature….According to Lane, loving nature was a vice worse than the grossest sin….an aesthetic delight in nature is a manifestation of our original [sinful] alienation from it. Thoreau’s reply was that Lane and Alcott…did not appreciate nature in the first place.38 Emerson firmly distanced himself from Alcott and Lane’s Transcendental extremism; after all, as Emerson had stated in Nature, “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to one another….In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.” As in Hawthorne’s preface to “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Emerson imagines a speaking entity: “Nature says…he shall be glad with me.” For Emerson, nature is predictable and salubrious, if not Edenic: “Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign…. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.”39 But as Matthew Wynn Sivils argues, Emerson’s sanguine view of nature stands in opposition to Hawthorne’s: “…Hawthorne’s fiction promotes the idea that America’s dark past results in a haunted landscape that exists beyond all reason.”40 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is conspicuously set in the old world rather than the new (and, by coyly disguising himself as a French author in the preface, Hawthorne may be signaling his ambivalence with his place as a writer in an age without international copyright laws). However, the foreign disguise is an in-joke, the lack of seriousness of which allows the tale to be read as a reflection of the new American nation. The Fruitlands community lasted from the spring of 1843 through January 1844. Hawthorne’s gothic tales of ecological disaster from this period may in part reflect on Alcott’s experiment in living closely to with the earth. Hawthorne’s distaste for Alcott is on display in “The Custom House” when he jokes that even the corpulent, sensuous, and decidedly fallen Inspector is a welcome “change” to “a man who had known Alcott.”41 Hawthorne’s less explicit take on Alcott’s plans for a pastoral Eden may perhaps be glimpsed in the dark paradise of Rappaccini’s garden, which the narrator calls “that Eden of poisonous flowers.” As the narrator asks rhetorically of Rappaccini’s garden, in terms that may mirror Hawthorne’s skepticism about Alcott’s ideas, “Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? –and this man, was he the Adam?” (115, 96).

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  125 Francis suggests that Fruitlands was founded in part on the notion that humans could live “an uncorrupted life at one with their surroundings,” a notion that Francis claims is a mirror “of twin preoccupations of our own time, ecology and environmentalism.” According to Francis, Alcott and his followers “treated the landscape around them as a single phenomenon of which they themselves were a component.”42 As Francis notes, although Alcott and his associates took up residence of the Fruitlands property on June 1, 1843, Alcott and several of his acolytes “had started living together as one household, in Concordia Cottage in Concord, during the October of 1842,” at the same time that the Hawthornes occupied the Manse. “Concordia” links the Concord intellectuals to a vision of living in harmony with nature. For Alcott, the community offered its associates the chance to return to Eden to become “a primeval creature…in his original estate on earth, in harmony with nature, the animal world, his fellows, himself, and his creator.”43 The “original estate” for Alcott is not a savage state, as it is in Cole’s darker vision. Rather, it is a grand attempt to invoke a version of heaven on Earth. In the fall of 1843, William Henry Channing’s short-lived Transcendental magazine The Present reported a visit from “the gardeners of ‘Fruitlands,’” whom Channing dubs “Therapeuts, (or Healers),” language that in some ways may be echoed in the figure of Dr. Rappaccini, who is also a “gardener” and who, as a medical professional, is a putative practitioner of what his colleague Baglioni describes as “the healing art” (100). (Before he left England to found Fruitlands, Alcott edited an edition of a journal published out of Alcott House, the Healthian.) Channing calls Fruitlands an “experiment,” a word that is repeatedly associated with both Rappaccini’s and Aylmer’s ultimately fruitless efforts; it is the very last word in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” as Baglioni chides, upon Beatrice’s death, “And this is the upshot of your experiment?” (128). Lane also refers repeatedly to Alcott’s pedagogy as an “experiment” in The Dial.44 Further, although Channing lauds the desire for “purity” at Fruitlands, he presciently warns that the “experiment” of Fruitlands is one that “has too often failed. A life of action… even if imperfect…is a far healthier atmosphere to breathe.”45 Rappaccini’s garden is the dark double of Channing’s vision; there, the “pure and healthful flowers” (104) that Giovanni buys from a florist stand in stark contrast to the artificial ones in Rappaccini’s garden, plants that “were probably the result of experiment, which, in one or two cases, had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth of the garden” (110). Finally, unlike the healthy air of imperfection that Channing celebrates, Beatrice has been cultivated to perfection by her father such that even the airy “atmosphere” of her “breath” is tainted (103).

126  Lesley Ginsberg Lane’s essay on Alcott in The Dial, read by Hawthorne, is ripe with quotes from Alcott’s pedagogical tracts, extolling the virtues of education as a means of human perfection in terms that echo the garden imagery in Hawthorne’s tale: “And thus, shall man grow up, as the tree of the primeval woods, luxuriant, vigorous…and bearing his Fruit in due season.” In Alcott’s pedagogy, the child is “a young bud,” “a tender leaf,” a “sensitive plant.” The job of the transcendental teacher is to promote the “inner world” or inner growth.46 Rappaccini approaches his vegetable progeny similarly: “Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path; it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative essence.” Consumed by his theories, however, Rappaccini lacks “warmth of heart”: “in spite of the deep intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and these vegetable existences.” The sin of Rappaccini, who first appears in the story like a teacher, “dressed in a scholar’s garb of black,” is cultivation without “intimacy” (95–96). For Alcott, the teacher and his Genius take on a Godly function, almost usurping the role of Providence: “Under the melting force of Genius…Mind shall become fluid, and he shall mold it into Types of Heavenly Beauty.”47 However, no matter how lovely the plants in Rappaccini’s garden seem, the narrator warns, “all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier malice.” For Lane, Alcott’s pedagogy is “the exponent of a divinely inspired idea,” “the God-born idea.”48 Yet the language of divinity that surrounds Alcott is reminiscent of the usurping powers appropriated by Rappaccini: his plants are “no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty,” while Rappaccini’s human offspring, Beatrice, is the “daughter” of “pride and triumph” (96, 110, 127). Scholars have made much of flowers as erotic symbols in the nineteenth century. In the mutual journal kept by Hawthorne and Sophia as newlyweds in Concord, the armfuls of flowers, the productive gardens, the fruits, the coy and repeated references to Eden, and the metaphors of cultivation have been understood in these terms. As the consummation of their extended honeymoon in Concord, Una Hawthorne was born at the Manse in March of 1844; “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was composed in the following fall. About his wife, Hawthorne notes in their shared journal, “She has, in perfection, the love and taste for flowers, without which a woman is a monster.”49 As Dana Medoro reminds us, “monstrosity [is] a botanical term for hybrid or irregular plants” like those Rappaccini creates: unnatural, mixed, and adulterated. 50 Though Beatrice calls herself a “monster,” in the common journal—a form of communication both private and communal and linked to the transcendental pedagogical practice of keeping school journals—, Sophia evidences the required normalcy when she luxuriates in the flowers her husband gathers: “the

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  127 superb scarlet,” “the rich purple,” “the golden stamens.”51 Hawthorne, in turn, learns from Sophia’s language. Both create a new, shared form of expression through the journal, one of the first things they created together as a married couple. Hawthorne’s nascent paternity is expressed through gardening: “…we love to see something born into the world.”52 In the preface to Mosses, Hawthorne expands on those sentiments in a metaphor that is reminiscent of Dr. Rappaccini’s fatally creative powers: “Childless men, if they would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy to maturity” (13). After Sophia’s miscarriage, her hope for a new pregnancy may be expressed in a long journal entry about a flower garden, started in the spring of 1843: “It is the first time I ever put any seeds into the earth.” She then lists sixteen types of flowers planted. In the sensuous bliss of an extended honeymoon, earthly life may possibly be understood as Edenic, even for Hawthorne: “I seem to have cast off all care, and live on with as much easy trust in Providence, as Adam could possibly have felt, before he learned that there was a world beyond his Paradise.”53 “Possibly”—the qualifier suggests that Hawthorne remained skeptical of bliss. Further, the Paradise shared by the author and his wife was radically opposed to the teachings of Alcott and Lane. In the alternate paradise of Fruitlands, operating during the same months as the Eden at the Old Manse, abstinence is the correct answer to a variety of questions that range from the trivial “Shall I sip tea or coffee?” to “Shall I become a parent?” “Outward abstinence is a sign of inward fullness,” taught the founders of Fruitlands. 54 As Larry Reynolds suggests, Hawthorne’s fiction of the Old Manse era offers a “critique of the perverse purity of Emerson and his followers.”55 Similarly, growing in Rappaccini’s “Eden of poisonous flowers” is a tarnished image of Concord’s versions of paradise. Although Fruitlands was not quite an extension of Alcott’s pedagogy—Lane would complain that Alcott wanted to make neither a “hospital” nor a “school” out of his utopian community—it is notable that Fruitlands seems to have been conceived at the Alcott House school and out of Alcott’s plans to regenerate the world through transcendental education. And while this chapter reads “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a gothic riposte to the Transcendentalism of Emerson, Alcott, and Lane, it is not clear whether Hawthorne may have known that Thoreau was responsible for “rewriting” Lane’s article (according to Buford Jones) and that Alcott was a profound influence on the young naturalist during the mid-1840s. The other “man of science” who conspicuously appears in Mosses is Aylmer of “The Birth-Mark,” published in The Pioneer in March of 1843. As decades of scholars and students have shown, both Rappaccini and Aylmer are obsessive, deeply flawed men who seek the power to create through intellectual and technical means and who kill the women

128  Lesley Ginsberg they ostensibly love in trying to perfect them. Both stories are haunted by the imprint of what appears to be a tiny hand on white flesh. When Beatrice pushes Giovanni from the beautiful but poisonous plant, he is marked by “a purple print, like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb.” Aylmer’s wife, Georgiana, sports a crimson birthmark on her cheek, “whose shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size.” When Aylmer grabs Georgiana’s arm after she enters the inner sanctum of his laboratory, he does so “with a gripe that left the print of fingers on it.” While Aylmer is professedly in love with science rather than nature (“In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy”), his philia is also a phobia driving toward dominion as his goal is to “lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself,” especially if he “possessed this degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over Nature” (115, 38, 51, 36). While symbols remain a bit more mysterious in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the narrator of “The Birth-Mark” can’t quite resist spelling it out: the mark is the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature…stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer’s somber imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object…. (38–39) Several decades before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Hawthorne imagines a link between the human and the nonhuman through the power of an irresistibly powerful force of nature, its “ineludible gripe” of “mortality” the power by which the “highest and purest” are “kindred with lowest, and even with the very brutes” from “dust” to dust. Like nature as it is depicted in The Course of Empire, nature in “The Birth-Mark” is not a benign, life-affirming space of “perpetual youth” as it is in Emerson’s Nature. Rather, nature is what links humans to mortality, “sin, sorrow, decay, and death.” This vision of nature may be closer to that of Emerson’s Puritan ancestors, whose portraits hung on the walls of the study in the Manse before it was made over into a study fit for a Transcendentalist, a décor that failed to match

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  129 the tenor of Hawthorne’s fiction, especially with regard to the crisis of control over nature in his works and the inflexible binaries between the spiritual and the earthly. Nature is personified in the tale as the ultimate foil for Aylmer’s attempts at control: “…Nature….our great creative Mother….permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make” (42). His doomed attempts to control nature allow the tale to be read ecocritically; however, Aylmer’s struggle also reveals the ecogothic genre of a tale in which humanity cannot extricate itself from the deterministic powers of nature. The notion that humans can transcend any portion of natural cycles, let alone human nature, is radically skewered in “The Birth-Mark.” Georgiana’s fatal end is foreshadowed when she reads “Aylmer’s journal.” Journal-keeping was a cornerstone of Transcendental practice—Alcott required it of his students, as Hawthorne would have known. Thoreau’s first essay in The Dial was based in part on his journals, and the newlywed Hawthornes kept a shared journal during their residency at the Old Manse. Aylmer’s journal is where he “recorded every experiment of his scientific career,” a record of school, so to speak. Yet just as Alcott’s school failed when his Conversations with Children on the Gospels appeared, Georgiana “…could not but observe that his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if compared with the ideal at which he aimed.” Although “In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul,” the journal is a sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part. (49) Aylmer struggles with his own part in nature as a part of nature. At the center of the story is an unwinnable struggle of gothic proportions. The dystopian finalities of “The Birth-Mark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” signal Hawthorne’s development of a genre—the ecogothic— in response to Transcendental conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature. In Hawthorne’s ecogothic of the mid-1840s, the space of nature is the location of a gendered scene of crisis, ignited by deluded men, that leads to horrific consequences with the hint that these results may not be entirely unintended. In resisting the forces of Transcendentalism, Hawthorne may have presciently understood the advice of Poe, who remarked in his review of Mosses that Hawthorne seemed “too fond of allegory,” an ultimately Puritanical approach to the natural world in which all things ecological were understood as symbols, a view not unlike that of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. As Poe prescribed, “Let him…come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, [and] hang (if

130  Lesley Ginsberg possible) the editor of ‘The Dial.’”56 Perhaps the Hawthornes’ ignominious expulsion from the Old Manse after the completion of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was really a fortunate fall, for then the author could begin to free himself from Concord’s beautiful but poisonous views of nature.

Notes 1 Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, 328–29. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 2 Hawthorne, preface, Mosses from an Old Manse, 13. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 3 Valenti, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, 216–17. 4 Murphy, “Thoughts for Nathaniel Hawthorne,” 34. 5 Hawthorne, “The Custom House,” The Scarlet Letter, 25. 6 Reynolds, “Hawthorne's Labors in Concord,” 12. 7 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 3. 8 Levin, “Contemporary ecofiction, [sic],” 1123. 9 Taylor, “The Nature of Fear,” 354, 355. 10 See Mogen. Smith and Hughes published the term “EcoGothic” in 2013. For a subsequent use of the term “EcoGothic” as applied to nineteenth-century literature, see Del Principe. 11 Anna Brickhouse has linked the tale’s publication in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review to that magazine’s concurrent coinage of “manifest destiny.” See Brickhouse, “Hawthorne in the Americas,” 233. 12 Poe, “Marginalia,” (November 1844), 486. 13 Cantalupo, “Poe and the Visual Arts Scene,” 9, 5. 14 Gerdts, “Newly Discovered Records,” 2–3. 15 In a lengthy bibliography attached to its online gallery notes on “The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire,” The New York Historical Society attributes the review to “Edgar Allen [sic] Poe.” I have not found any other source that attributes the anonymous review to Poe, which leads me to suspect that it was not written by Poe. 16 “The New York Gallery of the Fine Arts,” 103. 17 Poe, “Tale Writing—Nathaniel Hawthorne,” 256. 18 Poe, “Marginalia,” (December 1844), 585–6. 19 “The New York Gallery of the Fine Arts,” 103. 20 Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 24. 21 Emerson, Nature, 217. 22 Corstorphine, “The Blank Darkness Outside,” 120, 122. 23 See Brickhouse, “I Do Abhor an Indian Story.” 24 Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 5. 25 Qtd. in Jones, “The Hall of Fantasy,” 1430. 26 Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 354. 27 Ibid., 355. 28 Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” 36, 39, 40. 29 See Roger, “Taking a Perspective”; Reynolds, “Hawthorne and Emerson”; Miller, “Fideism vs. Allegory”; Brickhouse, “I Do Abhor an Indian Story”; Keetley, “Beautiful Poisoners”; Brenzo, “Beatrice Rappaccini”; Medoro, “Looking into Their Inmost Nature”; Person, Aesthetic Headaches; Mitchell, “Rappaccini’s Garden and Emerson’s Concord.” 30 Hillard, “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch,” 110. 31 Mogen, “Wilderness, Metamorphosis, and Millennium,” 94–95. 32 Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration, 257, 259. 33 Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 371, 374.

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  131 34 Lane’s article was “carefully rewritten” by Thoreau, according to Jones, 1433. 35 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “English Reformers,” The Dial, 246. 36 Edgell, “Bronson Alcott’s ‘Autobiographical Index,’” 708, 710, 712. 37 Qtd. in Francis, Fruitlands, 78. 38 Francis, Fruitlands, 128–29. 39 Emerson, Nature, 216–17. 40 Sivils, “American Gothic and the Environment,” 125. 41 Hawthorne, “The Custom-House,” 25. 42 Francis, Fruitlands, 7. 43 Qtd. in Francis, Fruitlands, 58. 4 4 Lane, “A. Bronson Alcott’s Works,” 427, 436, 452. 45 Channing, “Consociation, or the Family Life,” 71. 46 Lane, “A. Bronson Alcott’s Works,” 440, 432. 47 Ibid., 441. 48 Ibid., 442. 49 Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 319. 50 Medoro, “Looking into Their Inmost Nature,” 81. 51 Sophia Hawthorne, qtd. in Ordinary Mysteries, 65. 52 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ordinary Mysteries, 69. 53 Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ordinary Mysteries, 217, 71. 54 Lane, “The Consociate Family Life,” 120. 55 Reynolds, “Hawthorne’s Labors in Concord,” 26. 56 Poe, “Tale Writing,” 256.

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132  Lesley Ginsberg Edgell, David P. “Bronson Alcott’s ‘Autobiographical Index.’” The New England Quarterly 14.4 (December 1941): 704–15. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. 1836. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th ed., vol. B., edited by Nina Baym, et al., 214–43. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. ———. “English Reformers.” The Dial 3 (October 1842): 227–46. Francis, Richard. Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Gerdts, Abigail Booth. “Newly Discovered Records of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts.” Archives of American Art Journal 21.4 (1981): 2–9. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The American Notebooks. 1972. Edited by Claude M. Simpson et al. Vol. 8 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by William Charvat et al. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–1994. ———. “The Custom-House.” 1962. Edited by William Charvat et al. Vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by William Charvat et al., 3–45. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–1994. ———. Mosses from an Old Manse. 1974. Edited by William Charvat et al. Vol. 10 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by William Charvat et al. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–1994. ———. Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, 1842–1843. Edited by Nicholas R. Lawrence and Marta L. Werner. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2005. Hillard, Tom J. “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 103–19. Jones, Buford. “‘The Hall of Fantasy,’ and the Early Hawthorne-Thoreau Relationship.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 83.5 (October 1968): 1429–38. Keetley, Dawn. “Beautiful Poisoners: ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ Hannah Kinney’s 1840 Murder Trial, and the Problem of Criminal Responsibility.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 44.3 (1998): 125–59. [Lane, Charles]. “A. Bronson Alcott’s Work.” The Dial 3.4 (April 1843). In The Dial: Reprinted in Numbers for the Rowfant Club, edited by George Willis Cooke, 417–54. Canton, PA: Kirgate, 1901–1902. ———. “The Consociate Family Life,” (dated August 1843). The New Age, Concordium Gazette, and Temperance Advocate 1.2 (November 1843): 116–20. Levin, Jonathan. “Contemporary ecofiction [sic].” In The Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto, Claire Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss, 1122–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Medoro, Dana. “‘Looking into their Inmost Nature’: The Speculum and Sexual Selection in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 35.1 (Spring 2009): 70–86. Miller, John N. “Fideism vs. Allegory in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’” Nineteenth-­ Century Literature 46.2 (1991): 223–44. Mitchell, Thomas R. “Rappaccini’s Garden and Emerson’s Concord: Translating the Voice of Margaret Fuller.” In Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, edited by John L. Idol and Melinda M. Ponder, 75–91. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

“The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  133 Mogen, David. “Wilderness, Metamorphosis, and Millennium: Gothic Apocalypse from the Puritans to the Cyberpunks.” In Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders and Joanne B. Karpinski, 94–95. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Murphy, Jonathan W. “Thoughts for Nathaniel Hawthorne on Hearth and Altar.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 71.2 (Summer 2015): 31–60. New York Historical Society. “The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire.” N.d., n.p. www.nyhistory.org/exhibit/course-empire-consummationempire-0. Person, Leland S. Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Poe, Edgar A. “Marginalia.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 15 (November 1844): 484–94. www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar1144.htm. ———. “Marginalia.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 15 (December 1844): 580–94. www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar1244.htm. ———, ed., “The New York Gallery of the Fine Arts.” Broadway Journal 1 (15 February 1845): 102–103. ———. “Tale Writing—Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Review of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Godey’s Lady’s Book (November 1847): 252–56. www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/glb47hn1.htm. Reynolds, Larry J. “Hawthorne and Emerson in ‘The Old Manse.’” Studies in the Novel 23.1 (Spring 1991): 60–82. ———. “Hawthorne’s Labors in Concord.” In The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Richard H. Millington, 10–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Roger, Patricia M. “Taking a Perspective: Hawthorne’s Concept of Language and Nineteenth-Century Language Theory.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.4 (March 1997): 433–54. Rowlandson, Mary. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. 1682. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th ed., vol. A., edited by Nina Baym et al., 257–88. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Sivils, Matthew Wynn. “American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-­Present.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 121–31. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 1–14. ———, eds. EcoGothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Taylor, Matthew A. “The Nature of Fear: Edgar Allan Poe and Posthuman Ecology.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 84.2 (June 2012): 353–79. [Thoreau, Henry D.]. “Natural History of Massachusetts.” The Dial 3.1 (July 1842). In The Dial: Reprinted in Numbers for The Rowfant Club, edited by George Willis Cooke, 19–40. Canton, PA: Kirgate, 1901–1902. Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life, 1809–1847, Vol. 1. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

8 Ghoulish Hinterlands Ecogothic Confrontations in American Slave Narratives Jericho Williams

The contrast between literary representations of the natural world during the nineteenth century among American transcendentalists or nature writers and American slave narrators is startling. Even though many of their writings appeared during roughly the same thirty-year time span, they provide differing perspectives about nature. Indeed, the outdoor enthusiasm that transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses in “Nature” (1836) and that his disciple Henry David Thoreau conveys in Walden (1854) often serves as the pillar of early American environmentalism and American environmental literature. As a result, much of the way that Emerson and Thoreau write about the American landscape informs other conceptions of the natural world during this period, which also bears the influence of the nonfiction writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, and naturalists John Burroughs and John Muir. In recent years, however, environmental literature scholars have argued for the need to amend the strong initial emphasis on transcendentalism and nature writing to include other authors from prior historical eras and different backgrounds and with other beliefs who experienced and represented the American landscape in ways extending beyond wonder and reverence. Kevin Corstorphine, for example, notes that a too pronounced focus on American Transcendentalism and nature writing privileges peering backwards to “a pre-agricultural golden age” that tends to overlook the decimation of large animal populations and the violent relocation of Native Americans as consequences of American expansionism toward what would become the closing of the frontier.1 Separately, Tom Hillard contends that environmental criticism must also come to terms with symbolic understandings of the natural world that the Puritans initiated and that subsequently informed American environmental attitudes and shaped American culture. 2 This essay seeks to position American slave narratives as equally important interpretations of the natural world through the context of the American ecogothic. Because of the horrifying realities of slavery, slaves intuited the American environment from a completely different point of view than other nineteenth-century writers. Like the Puritans,

Ghoulish Hinterlands  135 they often represented their relationships to American geographies in harsh ways because of their circumstances. Imagining and then writing about the outdoors in the exploratory, grave, wondrous, or spiritual manners characteristic of Transcendentalism and nature writing became nearly impossible for millions of people held against their will in isolating and belittling conditions. Consequently, at its best, the wilderness recurrently appears as a temporary refuge throughout slave narratives. Because the outdoor environment more often functioned as a prison-like setting for long hours of grueling work, slave narratives more often evoke feelings of fear or terror about nature similar to those found throughout gothic literature. Because escape attempts or even temporary absences from work were often perilous choices, many slaves approached unknown plantations, fields, and wilderness areas with feelings of anxiety, fear, or hostility. Once many of them escaped to Northern states, they relied on literary elements from the gothic mode as a principal way to convey the terrors they felt to sympathetic audiences lacking firsthand understandings of slavery. The resulting combination of deep feelings of fear associated with the environment and quests for freedom represents what Andrew Smith and William Hughes describe as the ecogothic, a mode of writing that stems in part from English romanticism and that synthesizes and associates terror and fear with the outdoors. 3 Drawing from the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others, this essay explores four sources of ecogothic terror: the dense, non-cultivated land, encounters with wild animals, unpredictable and unforgiving weather conditions, and hunting dogs. In an effort to showcase a rare blueprint for how some slaves learned to counteract some of these fears, it also details how one former slave (Solomon Northup) confronted ecogothic elements through his belief in the power of outdoor education, creativity, and ingenuity. Although the gothic and ecogothic differ from the majority of American nature writing in regard to style, they intertwine with other narrative modes repeatedly throughout the evolution of a Southern literature. Matthew Sivils notes that Southern history offers “rich fodder for the Gothic, which often works to interrogate the anxieties that spring from abusive conventions and repressed transgressions”—especially in relation to landscape, where the fusion with gothic elements enables a “literature adept at exploiting a deep-seated fear of nature.”4 During the nineteenth century, slave narrators felt the terrors associated with the outdoors to a much greater extent than other Southern nonfiction and fiction writers, such as William Elliot or William Gilmore Simms, who characterized the outdoors as a place for recreation or leisure. Once free, some former slaves wrote and lectured about the horrors of slavery to primarily Northern audiences who lived at a great distance from the real-­life atrocities taking place in the South and whose familiarity with the gothic mode proved

136  Jericho Williams to be an asset. Many of their fears related directly to the isolation of plantations. For example, Frederick Douglass writes, Slavery dislikes a dense population, in which there is a majority of non-slaveholders. The general sense of decency that must pervade in a population, does much to check and prevent those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty, and those dark crimes without a name, almost openly perpetrated on the plantation. 5 From Douglass’s vantage point, the South’s vast open landscapes enable slavery’s heinous acts and widespread fears. Douglass points to Northern cities as friendlier places for slaves, and he credits these areas for fostering antislavery legislation that could help eliminate the misery of millions. Like some other slave narrators, Douglass privileges themes of literacy, advocacy, and networking to a greater extent than the use of any one literary mode. These forms of advocacy—the pivotal messages throughout the slave narrative genre—are one reason that it is easy to overlook and undervalue the function of the ecogothic within slave narratives.

Beneath, Ahead, Above, and Behind: The Contemporaneous Elements of the Southern Ecogothic The ecogothic helped slave narrators to convey the trials involved in fleeing slavery. Sold and transferred as property to plantation owners, trafficked to unfamiliar areas via a vast system of rivers and rural roads, and routinely separated from family or close acquaintances, slaves faced major obstacles when pursuing freedom. Unlike their white counterparts, for slaves to step foot beyond certain boundaries always meant that they were committing a crime because they were legally no more than an animate form of property. Those that successfully escaped to Northern states were among a small minority, and many of them knew the harsh punishments of getting caught firsthand from their prior escape attempts. Worse, slave narrators understood that both the torment of their fellow slaves and the near impossibility of fleeing safely would continue so long as slavery remained legal. In contrast to some slave narratives composed after the Civil War, which conveyed a “more hopeful sense of belonging,” pre-war slave narrators stressed the dark atrocities on the plantation and often cloaked the outlying, unknown environs in ecogothic terms.6 To a certain extent, this evolved as much from the realities of the escape as the utility of the gothic mode’s ability to capture the feelings of horror amidst captivity. Roads were the easiest place to get caught and, as Mark Twain later noted in Life on the Mississippi (1883), slaves could never legally travel via the Mississippi River or other waterways.7 Consequently, the quicker avenues towards freedom were

Ghoulish Hinterlands  137 all but prohibited while dense wilderness and unpopulated areas presented the best chances to elude capture. In the process of recounting their escape attempts, slave narrators characterized the “devilish resistance in the American landscape” to a greater degree than many other nineteenth-century writers in their descriptions of attempting to traverse overgrown and unfamiliar areas.8 In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass writes about the psychological dilemmas that many former slaves experienced in regard to the open fields, woodlands, and swamps. He describes how these areas served as major obstacles for runaway slaves. On the one hand, slaves had little or no access to maps and lacked knowledge about how they might subsist over the course of their journeys. Slaveholders, too, sought to convince them of the “boundlessness of slavery territory,” thereby amplifying fear of the wild geography outside the confines of manicured plantations.9 And when some slaveholders occasionally allowed slaves to explore nearby territories, they encouraged them to engage in sports or games that Douglass characterizes as unproductive entertainment to keep slaves under their control. Consequently, fears of lands beyond the plantation stemmed as much from unfamiliarity as from the real burdens that slave narrators often portrayed in ecogothic terms. Douglass also explains that once slaves ran from plantations, the natural world invoked painful feelings of loneliness and fear due to its unpredictability. Slaves often had to hide for lengthy periods of time, alone with little to no guarantee of basic necessities and with the constant possibility of losing their way. Douglass experiences these unsettling feelings when he escapes; during his most poignant reflection about the wilderness, he expresses his fears of capture or of a confrontation with Edward Covey, an intimidating man known for breaking the spirits of rebellious slaves. Douglass writes, Well, now I am clear of Covey, and of his wrathful lash, for the present. I am in the wood, buried in its somber gloom, and hushed in its solemn silence; hid from all human eyes; shut in with nature and nature’s God, and absent from all human contrivances. …Life, in Baltimore, when most oppressive, was a paradise to this.10 The wilderness’s absence of human co-conspirators or a network of supporters overwhelms Douglass, and he communicates two perhaps common beliefs among slaves about these areas: that conditions might be worse beyond the confines the plantation and that running may be a greater risk than remaining in captivity. In addition to prompting mental distress, the wilderness presented material barriers the moment that slaves decided to run. The combination of the unknown and fear helped to keep many slaves at work because many of them lacked wilderness survival skills.11 Learning from

138  Jericho Williams others’ failed escape attempts, slaves knew that they would likely have to hide themselves among the denser, more uncomfortable areas in order to remain unseen. Slave narrator John Thompson, for example, writes that there was “little chance of concealment” in forests with large timber as there was a lack of undergrowth that would offer the best places to hide.12 In an effort to avoid being caught, Thompson crawls under a fallen tree, and when he escapes notice, he realizes the necessity of “travel[ing] hereafter no more by day.”13 Thompson describes the better places to hide as those that also harbor the greatest navigational problems. This reality slowed the possibility of travel and made it even more arduous once slaves realized that their best chances of eluding captivity occurred at night when it also became more difficult for them to navigate the wilderness. Like many other slave narrators, Thompson relies on faith to guide him in the right direction, and he contrasts his faith with the way the wilderness resembles an uncontrollable tormentor. As he continues his journey, Thompson bemoans the fact of having to travel at night and, in one particular situation, reveals that he “lay all day concealed in a rye field” to elude hunters.14 Like many other slaves who successfully escape, Thompson never returns to the wilderness; he abhors slavery and fears the land and a potential return to slavery so much that he pursues work at sea, aboard whaling ships. In contrast to the way he deplores slavery as a curse upon the hearts of Americans that extends throughout the landscape, Thompson praises the sea, “where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.”15 Thompson later struggles with seasickness and racism aboard the whaling vessels, but unencumbered from the phantoms of slavery spread throughout the wilderness and landscape, he fully realizes his potential and fate as a free man. Thompson’s whaling experiences contrast with his struggles as a slave and a fugitive on the run, and they reveal just how enmeshed the co-conspirators of defenders of slavery and the wilderness could be in depriving African-Americans of their freedom. As the horrors of slavery permeated the land, Thompson and others pointed (and sometimes relocated) elsewhere to escape the recurring terrors of abuse that the landscape helped to conceal. Separate from the imagined and actual challenges of uncharted wilderness areas, the possibility of dangerous surprise encounters with other living creatures also haunted runaway slaves. The best slave narrative to depict these ecogothic situations is Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs. A central theme of Jacobs’s narrative is how slaves could feel trapped while both living inside and running beyond the confines of slavery, and she focuses repeatedly on the discomfort of concealment. Although her claim about hiding in a small attic for a period of seven years arguably remains the most memorable and powerful episode of her story, Jacobs also recreates the terrors of the swamp where she spent part of her time avoiding capture. William Tynes Cowan notes

Ghoulish Hinterlands  139 that slave narrators typically portray swamps in one of three ways: as “a point of resistance to white authority,” “a passage or temporary shelter,” or a “place of danger.”16 For Jacobs, the swamp embodied all three roles, and she wrote explicitly about ecogothic dangers in the swamp. Initially, Jacobs champions these watery, shadowy spaces as hideaways for women trying to avoid the violent rampages of white men, whom she characterizes as “a pack of hungry wolves.”17 Yet Jacobs later realizes that the swamp functions best as a very temporary space when she actually attempts her own escape. Just before deciding to run, she visits her parents’ burial sites, where she meditates about the courage she needs to attempt an escape. Jacobs writes, The graveyard was in the wood, and twilight was coming on. Nothing broke the death-like stillness except the occasional twitter of a bird. My spirit was overawed by the solemnity of the scene. For more than ten years I had frequented this spot, but never had it seemed to me so sacred as now.18 As she ponders the near future, Jacobs hears her father’s voice encouraging her to run. Here, she could have easily cast her father’s voice and the graveyard in coarser or darker terms, but she characterizes it as a resting place where “prisoners rest together,” finally free from the reign of slavery’s terror.19 Jacobs reflects that no matter how difficult the lives of the deceased slaves, they now rest together in peace, removed from present day fears. In seeking courage from the ghosts of the dead and in writing openly about the possibility of her father’s ghost communicating with her, Jacobs suggests that slaves may derive strength from the spirits of their ancestors amidst even the most difficult circumstances. Imagining that the dead rest together—and celebrating rather than fearing that belief—furnishes Jacobs just enough strength, in addition to her faith, to make what becomes an unimaginably arduous and lengthy flight toward freedom. Jacobs contrasts what could have been a traditional gothic scene in a graveyard with the ecogothic discomforts of the swamp. Snaky Swamp is the first place Jacobs hides while her uncle Phillip determines a better location, and she writes at length about the initial attractiveness and then the practical challenges of hiding in the swamp. Matthew Sivils notes that the swamp was a valuable location for runaway slaves because the “dense vegetation … coupled with its roadless, watery character made it easier for fugitives to disappear into its labyrinth of green and grey.”20 Yet, as Jacobs learns, dangerous nuisances infest these areas. In contrast to Henry David Thoreau, who would lecture in defense of the swamp throughout the 1850s and who likened the “most dismal swamp” to a “sacred place … the marrow, of nature” in “Walking,” one his more famous essays, Jacobs argues that

140  Jericho Williams human perceptions of the swamp differ when people find themselves alone, confined, and powerless to leave when they want. 21 At first, en route to the swamp, she appreciates moving beyond the plantation’s confines, but soon, her fear sets in. In contrast to the graveyard where Jacobs finds a tranquil, open setting and experiences the ghostly comfort of prior generations, she associates the swamp with the hordes of creatures that attack or seem to gravitate toward her. Of mosquitoes, she writes, “In an hour’s time they had so poisoned my flesh that I was a pitiful sight to behold.”22 Covered with welts, Jacobs must confront her greater fear of snakes. Throughout the course of the day and the evening, they appear everywhere, and she continually pushes them away with bamboo. By the time she is able to leave her spot, Jacobs has a fever, and her fear of what seems like a never-ending stream of snakes paralyzes her movements. Her account shows that slavery, which limits her to the swamp at this time, helps to foster a sense of entrapment beyond the physical plantation. As Jacobs and other slaves penetrated the swamps and woodlands and came face-to-face with wild creatures, they experienced these encounters as an extension of slavery’s influence. The landscape that enveloped them, in some ways, threatened their ability to exist comfortably free from terror. Yet even as she evokes ecogothic imagery to document the horror of the swarms of mosquitoes and terrifying snakes, Jacobs posits that even the worst that natural world offers pales in comparison to the misery slavery causes, writing, “But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.”23 Hence, the swamp and other overgrown areas home to millions of insects and other animals presented both a terrifying, nuisance-ridden place one step closer to the promise of freedom. If their encounters with insects and snakes at the ground level placed extra pressure upon slaves, they also had to worry about unpredictable weather patterns. James Pennington, for example, writes, “I also found myself entangled in a thick forest of undergrowth, which has been quite thoroughly wetted by the afternoon rain.”24 The wetness makes it more difficult for Pennington to travel, and it subtly chips at his confidence and mental strength as he continues moving further and further away from the plantation. After traversing roughly three miles through the forest at a slow pace, Pennington is “soaked through” and overcome with “a gloom and wretchedness [that] makes me shudder to this distant day.”25 He must continue moving throughout the night, but clouds become a menace when they prevent him from seeing the North Star, prompting his fear of becoming lost while navigating the coming terrain. Pennington writes, “How do I know what precipices may be within its [the woods’] bounds? … How shall I know I am on the right road again?”26 Storms or cloudy nights sometimes acted as specters, disorienting slaves from following already difficult avenues towards freedom,

Ghoulish Hinterlands  141 and as a result, some slaves either gave up hope of escaping or ventured further in wrong directions. Pennington’s briefness about the weather situation fails to capture the full extent of what it must have felt like to become lost while on the run, when one storm could derail safe travel for hours. Unlike Jacobs in her descriptions of creatures, Pennington does not dwell on weather as a haunting or terrifying presence, but his distress hints at what many other slaves must have felt when they were hidden in thickly wooded areas with the weather limiting their certainty in knowing where to move next. Together, Jacobs and Pennington show that nonhuman creatures and weather became imposing obstacles that prevented many slaves from risking running towards freedom. However, the sounds of hunting dogs gaining ground prompted the strongest fears among slaves, and recreations of these scenes in slave narratives convey two aims distinct to the ecogothic. First, David Del Principe notes that one of the ecogothic’s principal tenets, as separate from the gothic, is to articulate how bodies conceived in gothic terms can be better understood as “site[s] of articulation for environmental and species identity” beyond mere genre tropes. 27 The ecogothic also enables readings of slave narratives that extend and broaden conceptions of slavery beyond the master-slave human binary to reveal how insidious and all-encompassing slavery felt from an African-American perspective. Slave-owners employed hunters to track slaves with the assistance of dogs that were notoriously successful and a continual threat for fugitives. Describing one slave hunter, Thompson writes that he “kept well training dogs, who once having got our track, would follow for miles.”28 Dogs posed the greatest threat of detection and capture and made escapes very difficult. In his first autobiography, Douglass describes the difficulty that dogs added to the multiple hardships of navigating the wilderness and swamps: Now it was starvation, causing us to eat our own flesh;—now we were contending with the waves, and were drowned;—now we were overtaken, and torn to pieces by the fangs of the terrible bloodhound. We were stung by scorpions, chased by wild beasts, bitten by snakes, and finally, after having nearly reached the desired spot,—after swimming in rivers, encountering wild beasts, sleeping in the woods, suffering hunger and nakedness,—we were overtaken by our pursuers, and, in our resistance, we were shot dead upon the spot!29 Douglass pinpoints perhaps the greatest worry among slaves—that dogs would attack them and that the wilderness would immediately change from a temporary shelter to a place of violence. Depending on the situation, the tracker, the behavior of the dogs, and the mandate by the slaveowner, getting caught by dogs preceded a potentially deadly result as any sort of defense on the part of slaves justified their murder. Dogs were

142  Jericho Williams so terrifying that slave narrator William Wells Brown described them as central to the workings of the institution. In his narrative, Brown writes that the “very thought of leaving slavery, with its democratic whips, republican chains, and bloodhounds, caused the hearts of the weary fugitives to leap with joy.”30 He shows that slave-owners employed all means of power to keep slaves working under their control—from politics to force to the rearrangement and management of the natural world. The latter, however, impacted slaves directly because in order to escape, they needed guidance, luck, and mental fortitude to face the unforgiving natural world that existed beyond the illusion of temporary freedom.

Countering the Southern Ecogothic in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) It is more common to find the use of the ecogothic mode in slave narratives as a means to convey feelings of terror and depictions of real-life horror than as a vehicle to offer practical advice about how to confront and overcome these predicaments. While it became useful in rendering nonhuman menaces, the ecogothic appears as one element of texts that simultaneously privileged authenticity and sought to protect people and pathways that assisted slaves. Slave narrators who crafted their stories to be instructive in helping to abolish slavery also realized the limitations of relying too heavily on fictional tropes that could easily undercut or “dematerialize the horrors [of slavery] … by turning an historical reality into an imaginative effect.”31 With millions of African-Americans still living in captivity, these narrators crafted autobiographies grounded in realism that also sampled elements from a variety of literary modes, including the sentimental, gothic, and ecogothic, along with testaments of faith and biblical references, as part of the effort to undermine the legitimacy of the institution. Many slave narrators claimed that faith best helped them weather environmental horrors as well as plantation terrors; and in the process of stressing the power of faith and protecting the identities of their supporters, they typically do not describe additional methods for coping with the ecogothic fears. However, one narrative, Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, offers a counterexample to the norm in the way that it depicts one slave’s learning to constructively respond to the ecogothic unknown as a means to facilitate his flight toward freedom. Solomon Northup’s uncommon pathway to slavery enabled him to offer a different perspective regarding his escape. Born a free man in New York, Northup became a slave from 1841 to 1853 after he was drugged, abducted, and sold into slavery in Washington, D.C. Unlike the majority of slaves, Northup knew how to read, write, and play music long before becoming a slave, and his greater understanding of education and exposure to freedom informed the way he sought to escape slavery. Prior to his abduction, he writes that he was “conscious, moreover, of an

Ghoulish Hinterlands  143 intelligence equal to that of some men, at least, with fairer skin, I was too ignorant, perhaps too independent, to conceive how any one could be content to live in the abject condition of a slave.”32 Northup’s independence ultimately helps him come to terms with how to escape from central Louisiana. First and foremost, Northup realizes that he has to accumulate more knowledge about how to navigate the environment beyond the plantation’s boundaries. Although his father was a farmer, Solomon previously eschewed outdoor labor until slavery made it a necessity to learn. The narrative of his outdoor education shows that, as Dianna Glave notes, “southern wilderness had to be negotiated by the enslaved rather than possessed and conquered by them, in contrast to the experiences of many whites.”33 Northup realizes that he has little control over geography, landscape, and weather, which made it all the more necessary to formulate methods of responding to ecogothic encounters with wild animals and hunting dogs. As a result, Twelve Years a Slave suggests that unlike free Americans in the nineteenth century, slaves occupied a unique position as both hunted fugitives and potential hunters; for some slaves, such as Northup, learning to successfully approach these separate roles through activities such as hunting, fishing, and dog-training empowered them to overcome ecogothic terrors. Northup advocates learning how to hunt and fish as a means of education, hope, and empowerment in ecogothic situations. He first begins hunting by necessity in response to his objection to receiving a summer’s supply of worm-ridden bacon. Northup writes, I conceived a plan of providing myself with food, which, though simple, succeeded beyond expectation. It has been followed by many others in my condition, up and down the bayou, and of such benefit has it become that I am almost persuaded to look upon myself as a benefactor.34 Because raccoons and possums threaten the plantation’s finances, Northup’s master allows him and others to hunt at night alongside the plantation dogs. Whereas some other slaves viewed hunting as a means to supplement their poor rations, Northup envisions it as an avenue to help slaves build the confidence they need to survive in the wilderness. First, he offers a blueprint for escaping the reach of hunting dogs for the few slaves who interacted with them. While hunting, he deduces which dogs would trail him during a future escape attempt. Over the course of time, he trains those dogs to respect and to fear him while in the woods away from the plantation. Northup’s gradual success at hunting inspires him to continue to imagine methods for procuring food, and through trial and error, he invents a fish trap, which allows slaves access to “fish of large size and excellent quality.”35 More importantly though, Northup describes how his senses of resilience and ingenuity enable him and other slaves in the

144  Jericho Williams region to better understand the unknown abundance around them: “Thus a mine was opened—a new resource was developed, hitherto unthought of by the enslaved children of Africa, who toil and hunger along the shores of that sluggish, but prolific stream.”36 The contrasting juxtaposition of working men and women subsisting on poor quality meat next to snaking rivers plush with fish shows the degree to which slave-owners sought to keep slaves knowledgeable of only their tasks and provides a glimpse into understanding how environmental illiteracy also kept slaves fearful of running from their plantation. Legally unable to own anything that might aide his escape, Northup uses a combination of wit, intuition, and experimentation to develop a greater understanding of how to secure food and how to protect himself from ecogothic terrors. If the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War remain at the forefront of study and discussions about slavery in the nineteenth century, and if each played a pivotal role in initiating change, they also only skim the surface in regard to uncovering the brutality and mistreatment of African-Americans. Indeed, the majority of violent crimes during the American slavery era remain lost to history. Slave narratives, however, provide glimpses into the arduous pathways to freedom and, in their engagement with the ecogothic, reveal the true difficulty of attempting an escape. While Douglass, Jacobs, Northup, and others remain gracious to the supporters that assisted their escapes and supported publications of their accounts, each author remains realistic about the long odds of escape. Literacy and family ties kept many slaves on plantations, but difficult environmental conditions—embodied most readily in print when slave narrators characterize their concerns in conjunction with the ecogothic—also made many slaves hesitant to make an escape. To successfully overcome ecogothic threats required a great amount of courage and faith, and in some cases, as Northup shows, better environmental literacy about territories beyond the plantation. Slave narrators’ engagement with the ecogothic reminds us that such horrors were once real for millions of Americans who had no rights and who experienced the nineteenth-­century American hinterlands in a liminal space as humans who were denied human rights or citizenship. As a testament to the way that slave-owners successfully manipulated, controlled, and policed entire segments of the South, the ecogothic reveals the difficult literal and psychological journeys slaves faced in running from slavery, and it suggests that under such conditions, the environment remained as much a nightmarish force as a peaceful or meditative place. In this sense, amidst twenty-first century environmental legislation, the ecogothic in American slave narratives reminds readers that poverty, violence, and subjection still influence people’s perspectives on the environment throughout the world, and it asks them to reconsider the role of fear in relation to present day environmental horrors—the degradation of the Earth, the lives of the oppressed, and the disproportional distribution of consumptive pollution.

Ghoulish Hinterlands  145

Notes 1 Corstorphine, “‘The Blank Darkness Outside,’” 130. 2 Hillard, “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch,” 106. 3 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 5. 4 Sivils, “American Gothic,” 121, 130. 5 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 50. 6 Thomas, “Locating Slave Narratives,” 334. 7 Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 413. 8 Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 55. 9 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 205. 10 Ibid., 172. 11 Ibid., 129. 12 Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave, 65. 13 Ibid., 65. 14 Ibid., 68. 15 Ibid., 81. 16 Cowan, The Slave in the Swamp, 112. 17 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 810. 18 Ibid., 836. 19 Ibid., 836. 20 Sivils, “Gothic Landscapes of the South,” 82. 21 Thoreau, “Walking,” 242. 22 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 858. 23 Ibid., 859. 24 Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith, 229. 25 Ibid., 229. 26 Ibid., 229. 27 Del Principe, “Introduction,” 1. 28 Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, 71. 29 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 87–88. 30 Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 35. 31 Goddu, “The African-American Slave Narrative,” 73. 32 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 12. 33 Glave, Rooted in the Earth, 41. 34 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 131. 35 Ibid., 133. 36 Ibid.

Bibliography Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself. New York: Library of America, 2014. Corstorphine, Kevin. “‘The Blank Darkness Outside’: Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the End of Frontier.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 120–33. Cowan, William Tynes. The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative. New York: Routledge, 2006. Del Principe, David. “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 16.1 (May 2014): 1–8. Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-­ American Literature. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

146  Jericho Williams Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. New York: Modern Library, 2004. ———. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Penguin, 2003. Glave, Dianne. Rooted in the Earth. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill, 2010. Goddu, Teresa A. “The African-American Slave Narrative and the Gothic.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow. 71–84. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Hillard, Tom J. “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 103–19. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William L. Andrews, 743–948. New York: Library of America, 2000. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking, 1961. Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. New York: Penguin, 2012. Pennington, James. The Fugitive Blacksmith. In Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, edited by Arna Bontemps, 193–268. New York: Arno Press, 1968. Sivils, Matthew. “American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-Present.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 121–31. London: Routledge Press, 2013. ———. “Gothic Landscapes of the South.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. edited by Charles Crow and Susan Castillo Street, 83–93. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In Smith and Hughes, EcoGothic, 1–14. ———, eds. EcoGothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Thomas, Rhondda Robinson. “Locating Slave Narratives.” In The Oxford Handbook of African American Slave Narratives, edited by John Ernest, 328–343. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Thompson, John. The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave. New York: Penguin, 2011. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” In Collected Essays and Poems, 225–55. New York: Library of America, 2001. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Library of America, 1982.

9 Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees The Ecogothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice Cari M. Carpenter

Few natural forms would seem as unfeeling—as inhuman—as ice, that element defined by its rigidity, its inflexibility, its fortitude. Yet ice is a critical player in a text that has been considered a hallmark of human emotion: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Ice appears again in the 2013 documentary Chasing Ice, a story—with its own sentimental touch—of photographer James Balog’s mission to document climate change by filming the dramatic attrition of ice across the Arctic over several years. In each text, ice plays a central role, physically wounding the protagonist in a dramatic encounter that demonstrates the overlap of the human and inhuman. Despite the differences in their publication dates, these two texts construct a similar scene of beautiful terror. It is this haunting effect that I consider in this chapter, positioning it at the meeting ground of ecocriticism and gothic fiction. The similarities of the two narratives suggest the power and the limitations of the ecogothic narrative, offering an important story that we tell—and that we need to tell—about the constitutive relationship between humans and the natural world. Indeed, ice is the primary measure of our future: in its demise, we find, is our own. One critical aspect of the work of these two texts—and the ecogothic genre itself—is the interpenetration of the material world and the human, what Stacey Alaimo calls “trans-corporeality.” Alaimo critiques the tendency of theorists to see the human and the environment as neatly distinct. Rather, she argues that once we remember “a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions”—the materiality of nature and bodies, that is—we are better able to study possible alliances between disability activism and environmentalism, such as the real effects of toxins.1 Taking Alaimo’s work as a cue, I see the landscape that both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice portray as a place that has a relationship with the materiality of the human body. In Nancy Tuana’s terms, the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world that we are of and in is porous [sic]. While that porosity is what allows us to flourish—­as we breathe the oxygen we need to survive and

148  Cari M. Carpenter metabolize the nutrients out of which our flesh emerges—this porosity often does not distinguish against that which can kill us. 2 The question becomes, then, how we might see these texts as “dramatizing material agency and corporeal ways of knowing” and thus study the specific channels that connect humans in material ways to their surroundings. 3 The gothic has been described as more a strategy of reading (or viewing) than a mere text: “something that is done rather than something that simply is.”4 One of the things the gothic does most effectively is frighten or disturb the reader/viewer, sometimes for political effect. In ecocriticism, we find one form of politics that is particularly amenable to the gothic. Lawrence Buell’s essay “Toxic Discourse” demonstrates that ecocriticism has been defined by a tension between “preservationist” forces, which see nature in rather pastoral terms as a pristine (and discrete) landscape that is “ours by right,” and ecopopulists, who replace the term “nature” within a more inclusive analysis of the entire landscape, one to which humans are intimately linked. 5 Both approaches, Buell argues, are necessary in a world in which landscapes are differently determined by racism, classism, and other forms of systematic oppression. In defining the ecogothic, I combine Buell’s concept of toxic discourse with Justin Edwards’s sense of gothic discourse as encompassing “monstrous excesses,” arguing that this allows us to acknowledge the landscape we inhabit—whether urban or rural—as physically or morally polluted because of excessive and unsustainable human practices.6 Combined, these two concepts give us a sense of the importance of containing our excesses for the health of everyone (and everything); a sense of the need, in other words, to identify and rectify the “monstrosity” that we have created of ourselves and others. Like dark ecology, with its focus on black rather than a pristine green, the ecogothic is especially positioned to address the representation of a complex world to which humans have contributed—­a world marked by such atrocities as deforestation, carbon-­ induced climate change, and institutionalized racism. Such events, as Timothy Morton argues in Ecology Without Nature, require a new assessment of the environment in that humans are profoundly, and materially, linked to nonhuman entities, which do not exist solely as products of human perception. Given Morton’s stark critique of the romantic as the root of this “nature” that he finds so problematic, the inclusion of his theory in an essay on the ecogothic might seem ill-­advised. I would like to argue, however, that his theory remains useful for understanding the cultural work of Chasing Ice and indeed of Stowe’s novel. Combining “eco” and “gothic” gives us a way to think about the origins of the horrors that surround us, a step toward solutions, and, ultimately, an inquiry into the ethics of our response to these texts and to environmental destruction itself.

Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees  149 As numerous critics have demonstrated, the body is central to the gothic. Robert Miles writes, for instance, that this genre is in one sense a codified “representation of the fragmentation of human subjectivity.”7 It is, more corporeally, a meditation on the fragmentation of the body. For Michael Garner, the gothic is a site crossing the boundaries, it is a site that moves, and that must be defined in part by its ability to transplant itself across forms and media: from narrative and poetic modes, and from textual into visual and audial media.8 In Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice, I contend, ice is not the opposite of humanity but a part of its very substance. It is our failure to make this connection—our tendency to see ourselves as entirely distinct from the landscape—that allows us to deny human excesses like climate change or institutionalized racism. In showing the interpenetration of humans and their surroundings, these texts force us to acknowledge the intimate, material link between the two. Through the “ecogothic,” then, we are able to identify our own excesses, question binaries like “nature” and “culture” or “human” and “animal,” and explore the chaos that surrounds us in the hope of making healthier selves and, in turn, a healthier world.

1.  Bleeding Feet Uncle Tom’s Cabin is most often classified as a sentimental text. Critic Marianne Noble, however, has identified a link between its sentimentality and the gothic: “A core of perverse, gothic pleasures lies at the heart of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction.”9 One of the most famous scenes of Stowe’s sentimental classic is a slave woman’s desperate crossing of the Ohio River with her young son in an attempt to secure freedom, a scene that Alan Lloyd-Smith and other critics have described as gothic.10 I go a step further here in considering it an example of the ecogothic. Despite the critical role of ice in this scene, and the politics of the novel more generally, few have written about its significance. Here, ice serves as a literal, physical, and psychological barrier to Eliza’s freedom, forming a geographic border between a slave state and a free one: “the swollen current and the floundering masses of ice presented a hopeless barrier between her and her pursuer.”11 Ice is the concrete product of human excess with a troubling agency of its own: “the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters” (83). In what Lloyd-Smith calls a “perfect Gothic tableau,”12 the ice echoes Eliza’s movement as it “pitches” and “creaks,” wounding her with what seems to be a malevolent power: “With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still

150  Cari M. Carpenter another cake;—stumbling—leaping—slipping—springing upwards again! Her shoes are gone—her stockings cut from her feet—while blood marked every step” (94). Eliza’s blood, staining the ice, indicates the threat of this medium and also connects her in a physical way to the Earth. Stowe’s use of frequent dashes marks not only a dismemberment that is central to the gothic but also Frederick Douglass’s description of his grandmother in his Narrative (1845): “She stands—she sits—she staggers—she falls—she groans—she dies.”13 The ice floes, as both the wounding force and the material that ironically allows Eliza to cross the river, has momentous power here and throughout the novel. It is profoundly liminal: a kind of landscape that both forms slave territory and offers an escape from it. Indeed, despite its relatively condensed place in the novel, this scene is critical, Jessica Lang has argued, in part because it is retold throughout the novel by multiple narrators, thus creating an oral narrative evocative of both the slave and Christian-Judeo discourse of its time. By narrating her crossing, Lang argues, Eliza transforms from victimized slave to survivor.14 The ice reappears as the most vital component of the story: the slave Cudjoe recalls it as “all in broken-up blocks, a-swinging and a-tetering up and down in the water!” (126). Another slave, Sam, is delighted with this scene of resistance: “she gin sich a screech as I never hearn, and thar she went, a screeching and a jumpin’,—the ice went crack! c’wallop! cracking! chunk! And she a boundin’ like a buck” (112). As he later recalls, “Wal, Mas’r, I saw her, with my own eyes, a crossin’ on the floatin’ ice” (111). Many of these narrations emphasize the agency of the ice: it is “a sawin’ and a jiggling up and down” (111). This scene, a reenactment of the actual crossing of slaves, became one of the most famous illustrations in the novel. While Eliza’s appearance varies somewhat across editions, the ice is a constant presence (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2). In each, the ice looms large and glacial in its malevolence and, paradoxically, in its promise. This scene was key to the success of the Broadway version, and a song appeared, entitled “Eliza’s Flight,” in which ice again plays a central role.15 C.W. Taylor’s playlist of his 1852 performance at Purdy’s Theatre changes the protagonist’s name but maintains the emphasis on ice: “Ohio River Frozen over; Snow Storm; Flight of Morna and child; Pursuit of the Traders; Desperate Resolve and Escape of Morna on Floating Ice.”16 In 1853, the New York Times identified the river crossing as the most dramatic scene for the audience: “The boys are now wrought up to the highest pitch—when, finally, Eliza is seen with her child, sailing across a blue river on a piece of paste-board ice.”17 While on the one hand, ice represented a means of freedom for the slave in a time when the Fugitive Slave Act made escape all the more precarious, in other instances, it signified the disciplinary force of slavery. A Harper’s Weekly article from 1858 describes a slave tortured with ice

Figure 9.1   G eorge Cruikshank, ill. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853. In Morgan, “Chapter 7.”

Figure 9.2  H  ammatt Billings, ill. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853. In Morgan, “Chapter 7.”

152  Cari M. Carpenter water, indicating another case in which ice was a substance evocative of the brutal treatment of slaves: Like most negroes, he entertained a lively fear of cold. He knew that the water of the shower bath would be very cold indeed; and after vainly appealing to the feelings of his captors to release him, he broke away from them and fled—be it remarked—to the shop where he was in the habit of working. At the door of the shop a convict arrested him; a keeper and his assistants swiftly followed; he was dragged by main force, and after many violent struggles, to the shower-bath; all the water that was in the tank—amounting to from three to five barrels, the quantity is uncertain—was showered upon him in spite of his piteous cries; a few minutes after his release from the bath he fell prostrate, was carried to his cell, and died in five minutes.18 In the antebellum era, ice was, in other words, both a mark of human excess and its potential antithesis.

2.  Failing Knees Like the audial abundance of Stowe’s scene, with the cracks of ice that inspired a nineteenth-century song, Chasing Ice begins with a deafening combination of thunder bolts, police alarms, rain, and pundits arguing about climate change. Yet a central concern of the documentary is Balog’s more personal struggle with the bad knees that impede his life’s work. One of the first moments of dialogue involves Balog commenting that the worst that will happen to him is that he will get wet. His assistant responds, “No. You’d fall, you’d try to run, you’d bang your knee on a piece of ice, and you’d bust your knee.” A number of the scenes emphasize his disability: the fantastic sounds of the glacial waterfall match his assessment of the “curious crinkling and crunching effects” in his knees, “the audible chunks of gravel-­ like substances that I could feel rolling around.” The glacier, he claims, “is like this old decrepit man just falling into the earth and dying. Very evocative. Very emotional.” This, he announces from atop a particularly dangerous position on the glacier, “is not what the doctor ordered.” Much time is devoted to his own and his colleagues’ commentary on his condition, offering an oddly individualist account of a global phenomenon. One associate marvels that while most people approach surgery as a final cure, an end point, for Balog, it is simply a means of returning to the Arctic. The link between his condition and that of the glaciers is further evident after his latest surgery when he is told that hiking is not a form of exercise he should pursue. The glacier, we hear from him, has “deflated tremendously.” It is then that he meditates on his own mortality: When I saw that glacier dying it was like, ‘Wow!’ If a glacier that has been here for 30,000 years or 100,000 years is clearly dying before

Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees  153 my eyes, you’re very aware of the fact that… [chokes up] sometimes you go over the horizon and you don’t come back. As in Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality, the distance between human and nonhuman is here compressed. Alas, Balog goes boldly on, doing “exactly what doctors said he shouldn’t be doing.” The snow stakes he uses in a subsequent scene appear like crutches, emphasizing the way that the glacier has merged with his failing knees; the material that constitutes the glacier makes up—or at least supports—the human body. In case the connection isn’t clear, he reminds us, “We are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and we have a deep connection with nature. We can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.” And thus, what first appears as the story of a single individual is, in fact, about the glaciers and, in turn, about all of us. The shots that follow this scene illustrate human fragility within, and dependence upon, this natural space: a tiny helicopter gasps and shrieks with engine trouble in the midst of a mass Arctic expanse. Balog looks far below at the gorgeous green water, a color at once recognizable and on the other hand entirely unfamiliar, and renders the beauty deadly with the words, “We go in that, we’ll have five minutes of physical function, and in ten minutes we’re dead.” A small figure makes his way across an icy expanse, reminding us, perhaps, of the gothic scenes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). As he tells an audience of amazed spectators (in a comment that bears another striking resemblance to Shelley’s novel), “there’s such a strange, bizarre fascination in seeing things you don’t normally get to see come alive.” Throughout, another parallel between the supposed strength and fragility of the glaciers and humankind emerges: the very crash of the glacier points to its impending demise, despite its massive substance. Earlier in the film, this vulnerability is underscored by photos of severely diminished glaciers over just six months. Further, the ingenuity of the tiny cameras, which manage to capture such magnificent images, is complicated by their vulnerability in this harsh space. Balog himself remarks on the similarity between human and nature, comparing the beauty of the facial portraits of the photographer Irving Penn with the glaciers: “This tension between this huge enduring power of these glaciers and their fragility. They came from a great and passive place and now they are crumbling into these tiny little blocks of ice going off into the ice. It’s crazy.” The most memorable part of the documentary is the moment when the Jakobshavn Glacier (also called the Ilulissat Glacier) of Greenland releases tons of ice in the largest calving event ever captured on film. The camera sits in place for several minutes, allowing us to witness a rolling, horrifying, spectacular event in which things that shouldn’t be dislodged—like the cartilage of Balog’s knees—crash theatrically into the water below. As Scott MacDonald has written, ecocinema is frequently characterized by this kind of “extended duration,” which marks

154  Cari M. Carpenter the significance of the landscape.19 The music that accompanies many of the other scenes is absent, so that the only sound we hear is the tremendous thunder of what sounds like the world breaking apart. To bring a bit of perspective to the scene, Balog shows images of the largest buildings of Manhattan disintegrating—pictures disturbing in part because they recall in many viewers the Armageddon feel of 9/11. To make the comparison realistic, he notes, the buildings would need to be 2–2 ½ times higher than they appear. “That’s a magnificent, miraculous, horrible, scary thing. I don’t know if anybody has really seen the magic and horror of that.” Here, recalling Sigmund Freud, the familiar is made horrifying. The calving scene is the height of terrible beauty that defines the gothic: it is beautiful despite—or perhaps because—it is so scary. A review from the Business Insider calls it “Awe-inspiring and terrifying.”20 The sounds of rushing wind and rolling, “broiling” ice (as the dubbing suggests) indicate a horrifying motion of that which is supposed to be immobile. Given the staggering implications of such calving, it is striking that this is the moment the filmmakers want to capture and that we want to watch: the money shot that is terrifying and seductive for the way it seems to transgress the possible. Indeed, it is this moment that has earned the documentary the most kudos: Roger Ebert calls it “heart-stopping,” whether you believe in climate change or not, and TimeOut UK refers to its “jaw-dropping time-lapse footage.”21 The generally enthusiastic reviews of Chasing Ice also comment on its gothic sensibility. As one reviewer on IMDb writes of the main calving event, “it’s a spectacular break off of ice like you’ve never seen before—I was horrifically captivated.” Trevor Johnston’s review in Time Out describes the documentary as “awe-inspiring, terrifying, transcendentally beautiful,” and a review by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe notes how the film creates in the viewer a “lucid dread about where we’re probably heading.”22 There is, it seems, a certain satisfaction (if not entertainment) in this scene, both because of its implications and because it affirms what the already converted viewer believes: that climate change is real and devastating. And yet, in starting the narrative with a “common man” who doesn’t believe in climate change (as opposed to Al Gore, the enemy of the climate-change deniers), the film also reaches out to those who aren’t convinced. Part of the “awe-inspiring, terrifying, transcendently beautiful” in this film is its construction of ice. Drawing from work by Morton and Bruno Latour, as well as post-human theory, Lowell Duckert argues that despite its conventional treatment, ice is a live entity that mingles with us, ever-moving, with a voice that we attempt to silence. As Latour has argued, in the age of the Anthropocene, when we are daily met with the staggering facts that the Earth has already warmed beyond the point at which most scientists warn is irreparable, we must develop new ways of understanding the planet. In the words of Bronislaw Szerszynski, who

Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees  155 offers a commentary on Latour’s argument about the Earth as Gaia, “we need a concept of agency that is adequate to this new or newly apparent situation—one in which we act because the Earth acts, and the Earth acts because we act.”23 In other words, we need a way to acknowledge the agency of entities that were once dismissed as inanimate. Returning to the roots of the word “agency,” Latour reminds us of its meaning: “it is moving.”24 If we acknowledge the ambiguity of phrases like “‘the control of nature,’” Szerszynski argues, we can then realize the complex interplay between our surroundings and ourselves. Or, as Metís scholar Zoe Todd notes, Latour’s and Szerszynski’s Gaia might just as well be the Inuit concept of Sila, which, as described by Inuk author Rachel Qitsualik, “became associated with incorporeal power.” Sila not only conveys “the energy that drives life” but also “manifests itself as tangible weather phenomena, such as the slightest touch of breeze, or as the flesh-stripping power of a storm.” For Inuit, Sila became “a raw life force that lay over the entire Land; that could be felt as air, seen as the sky, and lived as breath.”25 Duckert uses David Macauley’s words to note that science already allows glaciers the status of life for their movement, their ability to sustain other life forms, their transformation: “a glacier is a natural body of ice, originating on land, and undergoing movement that transports ice from an area of accumulation to an area of disposal… Glaciers are dynamic entities engaged in accumulating, transporting, and disposing of ice.”26 Yet, in analyzing early human encounters with Arctic ice in literature, Duckert demonstrates that the life of ice extends beyond scare quotes. He seeks to examine ice’s indecipherable and extra-linguistic noise and the literary ways they were marked in pictures and words, straining for the cryptoof the cryo-, even if it presages illegibility: a chattering Arctic admixture I like to call ‘icespeak,’ a raw rhizomatic and Latourian ‘articulation’ of non/human assemblages undergoing translation. 27 In other words, Duckert’s understanding of ice borrows from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s understanding of the rhizome as a contrast to trees or roots: a structure that lacks a beginning or end and is both multiple and unified. Ice functions as an assemblage, a constellation of multiple, unstable parts that together create a territory. The ice Duckert envisions resembles that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a heterogeneous, territorializing mass that is at once “human” and “nonhuman,” an entity that both conforms to and recreates landscape. Duckert is not the first to see a kind of sentience in ice; as Julie Cruikshank argues, glaciers are “sentient landscapes in perpetual motion” that “engage all the senses.”28 The glaciers of Chasing Ice possess the kind of agency these scholars imagine. As Balog comments,

156  Cari M. Carpenter “The air that we live in, the air that sustains us… the basic physics is changing.” And as he balances cautiously on an icy ledge, he acknowledges his assumption that it won’t collapse—granting the possibility that it might and that he is entirely dependent on its will. Artist Margrethe Iren Pettersen, as part of the Morton-inspired European project, Dark Ecology, developed her own example of icespeak, a soundwalk entitled “Living Land: Below as Above.” This installation records the sounds of an Arctic landscape with a hidden world below where a number of species exist. Ice as an example of the enmeshment of the “natural” and “human” is evident in Balog’s discussion of cryonite holes, which consist of a black mix of dust, algae, and carbon emissions. Because they are black, they absorb heat and melt more quickly through “Swisscheese like holes.” Such holes epitomize the sense that the “human” and “nonhuman” worlds overlap. In a classic example of the uncanny, Swiss cheese moves from a familiar, comforting reference to a horrifying reminder of the interpenetration of the “human” and “natural” worlds. 29 Contemporary literature is often haunted by such portraits of living ice. As Catherine Lanone has examined in her analysis of narratives of the doomed nineteenth-century Arctic Sea exploration of John Franklin, the past in such literature becomes a “spectral event warning” that predicts the horrors of climate change.30 Dan Simmons’s novel The Terror describes the protagonist climbing masts, swinging from iced rope to iced rope, throwing himself to clutch the rigging instinctively in the dark, feeling himself and tons of rigging impossibly drawn upwards, ripped by claws; Blanky lurches madly, falls and runs to the shelter of a small ice tunnel, thus reenacting the horrors of the original journey, in which an entire crew vanished when they misjudged their Arctic route. 31 Although less suspenseful than Franklin’s voyage or Simmons’s novel, Balog’s precarious balancing on the edge of an icy cavern that plunges thousands of feet below invokes a similar meditation on this simultaneous vulnerability in, and of, an Arctic landscape. Although it was written long before climate change was a real threat, the scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents ice in a similar way: a beautiful, terrifying manifestation of human excess, a “spectral event warning” of its own kind.

3.  The Story is in the Ice In both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice, then, ice occupies a complicated position as both a threat to humans and a kind of protector. It is, quite literally, slippery; it seems to form a firm footing but always threatens to break apart. It has sharp edges but is also smooth; it is a gorgeous refraction of light but also a canvas of blood. In turn, these texts offer a

Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees  157 complicated response to ice: in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is at once menace and savior to the escaping slave, and in Chasing Ice, it is the wounding agent and the spectacular medium that must be preserved in order to ensure human survival. As such, ice becomes the epitome of the relationship between what we’ve called human and the nonhuman: a dangerous entity with its own agency that we vitally need for our own sustenance. Perhaps it is this paradox that explains the ecogothic: the text that is both terrifying and, somehow, entertaining. In Stowe’s novel, that pleasurable horror was presumably enjoyable only to the white spectator, who was immune from the actual threat of slavery. Indeed, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, we should be cognizant of the implications of such entertainment; it is with disturbing ease that we recirculate images of racist horror, even with the best of intentions: At whatever cost, nature and condition were to be made compatible, and innocent amusements, in concert with combined forms of torture, punishment, and discipline, were to affect this union. Indeed, the slave would be made to appear as if born to dance in chains.32 A number of critics have faulted Uncle Tom’s Cabin for exploiting precisely this kind of morbid fascination with the disciplinary function of slavery. This reminds us, then, of the degree to which certain texts may be designed for particular audiences. In Monstrous Nature, for example, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann consider that even with the success of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, only 10 percent of adults in the US saw the film and few of those were motivated to see it by an interest in climate change but rather by its teaser and its genre.33 The entertainment factor of Chasing Ice is perhaps most evident when Balog’s assistants capture, after months of waiting, the largest glacial calving ever recorded. Their pleasure in this horrifically beautiful event stems, at least in part, from their success in recording it. The film is made in those moments, and they know it; indeed, the film won the Sundance Film Festival award for Best Cinematography. Yet this is more than pride in individual achievement; it is also an awe in the event itself—a kind of pleasure shared by the viewers in the face of this destruction. It is, in a sense, as if a collective “I told you so” were expressed by both the scientists and the like-minded viewer. It is not unlike the satisfaction one feels when imagining the water lapping the heels of the latest climate change naysayer years from now. Part of what is celebrated here is the horrifying mortality that the crumbling glacier represents—our shared, if not admitted, sense that “sometimes you go over the horizon and you don’t come back.” So, although it might seem contrary to its politics, part of the satisfaction—the entertainment—of Chasing Ice is its display of the very destruction it aims to prevent. Alternatively, Murray and Heumann

158  Cari M. Carpenter warn that “cli-fi” films might “obscure that message [of climate change] with spectacular beauty.”34 The beauty of the film, in other words, may get in the way of the political horror that the setting is meant to evoke. We are left to wonder whether, as with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, some spectators may find this story too horrifying or whether its enjoyment, in fact, encourages a detachment from those horrifying politics. In Balog’s words, “The story is in the ice. Somehow.”

Notes 1 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 2 Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” 198. 3 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 128. 4 Jones, The Gothic, 26. 5 Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” 642–43. 6 Edwards, Gothic Passages, xx. 7 Miles, Gothic Writing, 3. 8 Qtd. in Wright, Gothic Fiction, 4. 9 Noble, “An Ecstasy of Apprehension,” 163. 10 Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic, 56. 11 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 97. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 12 Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic, 56. 13 Douglass, The Narrative of the Life, 4. 14 Lang, “Retelling the Retold,” 35–39. 15 Morgan, “Chapter 7.” 16 Hughes, Spectacles of Reform, 90. 17 Ibid., 91. 18 “Torture and Homicide,” 808. 19 MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience,” 21. 20 Harvey, “Watch a Mile.” 21 Ebert, “Chasing Ice”; Johnston, “Chasing Ice.” 22 Mario64, “Gorgeously Disturbing.” IMDb, 21 March 2014. http://www. imdb.com/title/tt1579361/reviews-25; Johnston, “Chasing Ice”; Burr, “‘Chasing Ice.’” 23 Szerszynski, “A Response,” 4. 24 Latour, “Agency,” 3. 25 Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take,” 5. 26 Qtd. in Duckert, For All Waters, 108. 27 Ibid., 102. 28 Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? 243, 8. 29 A number of ecocritics have recently considered specific instances of enmeshment between human and nonhuman entities. See, for example, Caitlin Berrigan’s “Life Cycle of a Common Weed.” Berrigan uses her blood, which carries the Hepatitis C virus, to nourish dandelions, which, in turn, treat her Hepatitis C symptoms. See also Miriam Simun’s “Human Cheese,” in which she describes using human breast milk to create cheese. 30 Lanone, “Monsters on the Ice,” 28. 31 Ibid., 37. 32 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 47. 33 Murray and Heumann, Monstrous Nature, 206. 34 Ibid., 192.

Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees  159

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Berrigan, Caitlin. “Life Cycle of a Common Weed.” In Kirksey, The Multispecies Salon, 164–80. Buell, Lawrence. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 639–65. Burr, Ty. “‘Chasing Ice’ against Melting Reality.” Boston Globe, 15 November 2012. www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2012/11/15/chasing-ice-against-­ reality-melting-glaciers/QnvwHYcjWkgbHyRrFbfLfO/story.html. Chasing Ice. Dir. Jeff Orlowski. New Video Group, 2012. Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Douglass, Frederick. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849. Duckert, Lowell. For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Ebert, Roger. “Chasing Ice.” RogerEbert.com, 14 November 2012. www. rogerebert.com/reviews/chasing-ice-2012. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Harvey, Chelsea. “Watch A Mile of 3, 000-Foot-High Ice Fall Into the Ocean.” Business Insider. 14 October 2014. www.businessinsider.com/ chasing-ice-glacier-calving-climate-change-2014-10. Hughes, Amy E. Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-­ Century America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Johnston, Trevor. “Chasing Ice.” TimeOut UK. 11 December 2012. www. timeout.com/london/film/chasing-ice. Jones, Timothy. The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Kirksey, Eben, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Lang, Jessica. “Retelling the Retold: Race and Orality in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 66.2 (2009): 35–58. Lanone, Catherine. “Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming: From Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 28–43. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45.1 (2014): 1 18. Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. MacDonald, Scott. “The Ecocinema Experience.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 17–41. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

160  Cari M. Carpenter Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy. New York: Routledge, 1993. Morgan, Jo-Ann. “Chapter 7: Comment.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The National Era. https://nationalera.wordpress.com/further-reading/chapter-7-comment-byjo-ann-morgan/. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Murray, Robin L., and Joseph K. Heumann. Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Noble, Marianne. “An Ecstasy of Apprehension: The Gothic Pleasures of Sentimental Fiction.” In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, 163–82. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Pettersen, Margrethe Iren. “Living Land—Below as Above.” Dark Ecology. 4 March 2016. www.darkecology.net/friday-milk-talkshow/margrethe-iren-pettersen. Simun, Miriam. “Human Cheese.” In Kirksey, The Multispecies Salon, 135–44. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. Charlottesville, VA: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, 1998. utc.iath.virginia.edu. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. “A Response to Bruno Latour’s Lecture ‘Gaia: the New Body Politic.’” Holberg Prize Symposium 2013: From Economics to Ecology. Bergen. 4 June 2013. www.academia.edu/4960799/A_response_to_ Bruno_Latour_s_lecture_Gaia_the_new_body_politic_. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4–22. “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Harper’s Weekly, 18 December 1858, 808–10. Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction. A Readers’ Guide to Essential Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

10 Vegetal Haunting The Gothic Plant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Matthew Wynn Sivils

Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray, and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses …. And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy ….1 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

This dream sequence from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 novella serves as just one of countless examples of what remains a relatively understudied element of American gothic fiction: the gothic plant. Given, however, the increased interest in ontological questions related to nonhuman Others, particularly animals, theorists have begun to address plants as something more than merely green scenery upon an otherwise human stage. With this interest in the implications of plants within the humanistic sphere, it is especially productive to consider the plants represented in one of America’s most popular literary modes, the gothic. And plants emerge repeatedly in American gothic literature, from its most obscure to its most canonical texts. For example, laboring to convey the stricken mind of his ill friend, the unnamed narrator of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” remarks that, among a host of other peculiarities, Roderick Usher remained convinced “of the sentience of all vegetable things.”2 This belief, he claims, spread beyond the realm of scientific conjecture and “trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization” even extending to the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been there, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around…. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, … in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls.

162  Matthew Wynn Sivils The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family…. (116) Poe leaves us to conjecture whether Roderick is correct in his assertion that this sentient miasma had played a role in the demise of the once proud Usher line. Nevertheless, given the description of the ancient house, it seems clear that the “rank sedges,” “ghastly tree-stems,” and (non-vegetal but equally non-animal) fungi bear a shadowy role in—and even a form of uncanny kinship with—the fate of the doomed, incestuous Usher line whose “stem…had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch” (111). Such references to both literal and metaphorical plants appear in American fiction as far back as Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) in which a so-called haunted Elm both becomes the site of a terrible and mysterious murder and functions as something of an axis mundi, drawing characters together and revealing their disturbing secrets. Brown returns to the trope of the disturbing tree in his later short story “Somnambulism: A Fragment” (1805), and John Neal would further propagate this tree in his 1822 frontier gothic novel, Logan; A Family History, in which he presents what amounts to an undead tree that despite “all the principles of decay—had stood there, like an indestructible shadow, undiminished, unshaken, unsubdued!”3 Later writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and Charles Chesnutt in “Po’ Sandy,” likewise present readers with uncanny and symbolically charged trees. “Curiously enough,” writes Michael Marder, “the absolute familiarity of plants coincides with their sheer strangeness, the incapacity of humans to recognize elements of ourselves in their forms of vegetal being, and, hence, the uncanny—strangely familiar—nature of our relation to them.”4 This push to reconsider the agency, iconography, and being of plants is especially relevant to works of nineteenth-century American gothic fiction, which so actively problematizes the human understanding of the universe, calling into question our comfortable partitions between the living and the dead, the body and the soul, the devourer and the devoured. As Charles Crow argues, gothic literature offers “a skeptical, ambiguous view of human nature and of history. The Gothic exposes the repressed, what is hidden, unspoken, deliberately forgotten, in the lives of individuals and of cultures.”5 So, it is perhaps no coincidence that plants, so often “hidden, unspoken, deliberately forgotten,” figure prominently in many influential nineteenth-century gothic texts. In this chapter, I examine how select exemplars of nineteenth-­century American gothic fiction imagine instances of what I term vegetal haunting: a condition in which plants, through their uncanny, alien,

Vegetal Haunting  163 and seemingly transparent presence, serve as disturbing spatiotemporal markers of human and environmental trauma. Ultimately, I argue that plants—through their extreme longevity, blood-fed roots, and at times uncannily human-like traits—function as the haunted and the haunting, doubling for, or even incorporating, victims of trauma.

“A Physical Curse” A good example of how vegetal haunting emerges in early American gothic fiction is Hawthorne’s “Alice Doan’s Appeal” (1835). In fact, few antebellum works of American gothic fiction so fully employ the trope of vegetal haunting as this story linking American cultural dread with the bloodstains of its Puritan past. “Alice Doan’s Appeal” is really two stories in one in that its narrator relates his failed attempt to impress two young women with a gothic tale set in Puritan-era Salem. Walking the two women to the top of Gallows Hill, which has since become a cow pasture, the narrator becomes frustrated when they laugh at his overwrought first attempt at a story. Irritated by their mirth, the narrator then succeeds in horrifying his companions with a second tale: the true story of how, on August 19, 1692, five accused witches were executed on the spot where they stood. The young women, who had laughed at his first attempt, begin to tremble and cry. Satisfied that his account has “reached the seldom trodden places of their hearts” and that “the past had done all that it could,” 6 the narrator quits his story and they descend Gallows Hill, noting that no memorial exists there to honor those who were killed in the tragedy of the witch trials. One of the most effective aspects of Hawthorne’s frame narrative is its reliance upon the physical connection between the land and its tainted human past. As became increasingly common in later works of American gothic fiction, that connection—that haunting—is made tangible through uncanny forms of plant life. The narrator’s concluding remark bemoaning the lack of a memorial on Gallows Hill subtly recalls the opening of the story in which Hawthorne actually does present us with a memorial of sorts, albeit a far different and far more suggestive marker than a mere statue or plaque. The narrator sets the scene in the story’s first paragraph, describing their destination as “a hill, which at a distance by its dark slope and the even line of its summit, resembled a green rampart along the road” (110). As they approach the ominous hill, it appears to be merely an elevated point in a cow pasture. Upon closer inspection, however, the narrator notes something disturbing about the vegetation on Gallow’s Hill: though the whole slope and summit were of a peculiarly deep green, scarce a blade of grass was visible from the base upward. This deceitful verdure was occasioned by a plentiful crop of “wood-wax,”

164  Matthew Wynn Sivils which wears the same dark and glossy green throughout the summer, except at one short period, when it puts forth a profusion of yellow blossoms. At that season to a distant spectator, the hill appears absolutely overlaid with gold, or covered with a glory of sunshine…. But the curious wanderer on the hill will perceive that all the grass, and every thing that should nourish man or beast, has been destroyed by this vile and ineradicable weed: its tufted roots make the soil their own, and permit nothing else to vegetate among them; so that a physical curse may be said to have blasted the spot, where guilt and phrenzy consummated the most execrable scene, that our history blushes to record… (110–111) The wood-wax, in Hawthorne’s hands, becomes a powerful metaphor for the historical stain of the Puritan era. The infamous hill, tainted in human memory as the landscape upon which the seeds of Puritan superstition took hold and gave rise to the murder of innocents, likewise plays host to a “vile and ineradicable weed,” an invasive and deceptive plant that, like the poisoned justice of the witch trials, reveals itself upon closer inspection to be a suffocating blight, one that makes impossible the cultivation of “every thing that should nourish man or beast.” As Kevin Corstorphine contends, “If the story of the expanding frontier articulates a simple dichotomy of civilization against the wilderness, then the end of the frontier marks a more subtle Gothicism, marked by the haunting presence of the past.”7 In Hawthorne’s tale, the marker of this haunting past manifests as a vegetal blight upon the land, and the narrator wastes no time connecting the wood-wax infestation with the shame of the witch trials; they are to him “a physical curse” upon the very spot where the innocents met the hangman’s noose. Throughout the story, Hawthorne re-invokes the specter of the woodwax as well as that of another gothic plant made conspicuous by its absence: to so-called death-tree that may have served as the gallows for the witches (113). The narrator follows his description of the wood-wax with the observation that “all traces of the precise spot of the executions” has been lost to time and that there are few “prominent marks, except the decayed stumps of two trees” (112). The narrator and his companions more than make up for the barrenness of the scene. Gazing down upon Salem, they imagine how the town must have looked so many years before, and trees are one of the key components of this fanciful reconstruction of old Salem. “[W]e threw, in imagination, a veil of deep forest over the land, and pictured a few scattered villages, and this old town itself a village, as when the prince of hell bore sway there” (112). With this imagined scene before them, the narrator then bids his two companions “sit down on a moss-grown rock, close by the spot where we chose to believe that the death-tree had stood” (113).

Vegetal Haunting  165 While he relies upon a selection of descriptive conceits to make his point about the desolate and haunted character of Gallows Hill, Hawthorne employs two forms of vegetal haunting to set the scene. For both the frame story and for the narrator’s initial, failed ghost story, Hawthorne takes advantage of how plants serve as ways of knowing both place and time. The grass-choking infestation of wood-wax implies that the land itself has been ruined by the horrors of its past, and the narrator overtly makes that claim in case any readers miss the connection. Yet it is the loss of another type of plant, trees, that helps drive home the point that while so much has changed in Salem in the century and a half since the witch trials, the specter of the death-tree remains long after its physical form, and even its location, has been lost. Indeed, spooky trees seem much on the narrator’s mind. In his first story, he relates how an unsettling glaze of ice encased Salem after The rain of the preceding night had frozen as it fell, and, by that simple magic, had wrought wonders. The trees were hung with diamonds and many colored gems; the houses were overlaid with silver … a frigid glory was flung over all familiar things. … a man might shudder at the ghostly shape of his old beloved dwelling, and the shadow of a ghostly tree before his door. (117–118) The specter of the “ghostly tree” recalls Charles Brocken Brown’s invention of similarly spectral trees in Edgar Huntly and “Somnambulism: A Fragment.” Hawthorne’s haunting trees differ from Brown’s, however, in that they are not necessarily sign posts of an immediate danger but instead serve as reminders of how the place itself is rooted in a disturbing past, one that at times rises up from a figurative grave. Hawthorne’s uncanny trees—whether ostensibly real or merely fanciful—are more about the fear of a horrific past revisiting the present than about the horrors of the present alone. Hawthorne’s trees are, in short, more ghostly than ghastly. He does, however, meld these forms of vegetal haunting in the metaphorical wood-wax that has overtaken Gallows Hill, and Hawthorne’s portrayal of the result of this combination argues for an aesthetic limit to this particular vegetative conceit. His second mention of the wood-wax appears at the end of the narrator’s first story. As the narrator concludes his admittedly cumbersome and derivative tale (in which it turns out that “all the incidents were results of the machinations of a wizard, who had cunningly devised that Walter Brome should tempt his unknown sister to guilt and shame, and himself perish by the hand of his twin-brother” [120]), he calls upon his two female companions to imagine Alice and Leonard in a graveyard pleading for forgiveness from the ghost of Walter Brome. But he overplays his hand. The narrator ends his tale and then,

166  Matthew Wynn Sivils hoping to elicit a frightened response from his companions, adds that “the wizard’s grave was close beside us, and that the wood-wax had sprouted originally from his unhallowed bones” (121). The women begin to laugh, and then the narrator, irritated by their reaction, does his best to horrify them with the true tale of the executions that occurred on that hill so long before. The women laugh at the narrator’s first story not only because of the clumsy incorporation of the wood-wax but also because that actual weed cannot plausibly connect to the overtly fanciful world of the story. As the narrator’s true story demonstrates, there is more than enough horror in history’s atrocities to eliminate the need for supernatural fictions. The power of the wood-wax that covers Gallows Hill dwells in a subtle grotesque that accompanies the reality of plant biology. These weeds are literally rooted in a soil spread with “The dust of martyrs” where “those who died so wrongfully and without a coffin or a prayer, were buried” (111). Unlike the poor conclusion to the narrator’s tall tale, in which the wood-wax implausibly sprang from the bones of a wizard, Hawthorne’s true story employs the wood-wax as both an obvious metaphor and as a literal botanical entity, one that has benefitted from the blood of innocents in its soil. In the end, Hawthorne argues in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” that vegetal haunting must have a basis in the real to fully satisfy its disturbing potential. His story embodies the idea that a grotesque truth, subtly told, trumps even the most well-spun yarn.

“Unpruned Luxuriance” However, as Charles Chesnutt—the highly influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American writer—proved, some facts are just too horrifying to tell directly. The author risks alienating readers with uncomfortable truths, perhaps losing the very audience most in need of the message. Thus, the implausible story, which follows a more circuitous path through the subject, often represents the best way to package information too ugly to face without a veil. One of Chestnutt’s most effective ways of veiling the truth of racial oppression was with “conjure tales.” Often packaged as something akin to plantation ghost stories, Chesnutt’s tales take the form of frame narratives told by the relatively stock characters of the Northern carpetbagger John and his servant, the elderly former-slave, Uncle Julius, who relates in dialect sensational stories of antebellum life in rural North Carolina. These stories also often include the trope of the haunting or haunted plant. These plants appear in various forms with some regularity, from Chestnutt’s first published efforts in the late 1890s to his 1924 return to the conjure tale form in “The Marked Tree,” a story that portrays a white family ostensibly cursed by its association with a once glorious oak tree that—even when reduced to a plantation stump— serves as a “tree of death” with a fatal influence upon the doomed family.8

Vegetal Haunting  167 In some ways, the “Marked Tree” recalls Chesnutt’s first published, and probably most canonical, conjure tale, “The Goophered Grapevine.” This story, which appeared in 1887 in the Atlantic Monthly, introduces us to the characters of John and Uncle Julius and also to the conjure story formula in which a sometimes humorous tall tale, set against the terrible backdrop of life in the slave-holding South, ultimately becomes a complicated form of racial resistance. This and later examples of Chesnutt’s conjure tale formula hijacked the racist stereotypes common to works of Old Southwest humor that were popularized by white writers like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page. Indeed, the nineteenth-century audience who read Chesnutt’s stories in the Atlantic Monthly would have assumed he was just another of these white humorists. This assumption appears to be part of Chesnutt’s literary strategy, in which he adopts the trappings of such racist stories to subtly redirect them. “One of the most moving features of Chesnutt’s work,” writes Richard H. Brodhead, “lies in his suggestion that the oppressed are never absolutely oppressed, and their domination is never total.”9 The figure of Uncle Julius, the former slave turned storyteller, embodies the subtle resistance of the oppressed in the reconstruction South. The elderly and kindhearted Julius seems, especially to the culturally naïve John and Annie, a harmless, if mildly self-serving, relic of a man, whose ability to entertain them with his stories (coupled with a certain noblesse oblige and/or racism on their parts) makes Julius an amusing, and therefore, welcome presence. Despite this view by John and Annie (and ostensibly by the white readership of the late-nineteenth century Atlantic Monthly), Julius is far from a quaint and powerless figure. Like the conjure women who populate some of his tales, Julius is something of a conjurer himself. As Brodhead argues, Like the conjure woman working her roots, or distributing her gopher mixtries Julius’s storytelling creates a zone of reality under his imaginative control …. Casting his own kind of spell, the persuasion of his telling relocates his hearers’ imaginations within the mind-managed world, where he can subject them to the counterforce of his different understanding.10 And, like a conjurer with her roots, Julius, too, relies upon various plants, which prove essential to casting his narrative spell. Chesnutt’s first two conjure stories, “The Goophered Grapevine” in 1887 and “Po’ Sandy,” which was also published in the Atlantic Monthly the following year, display a reliance upon vegetal haunting as a vector for the grotesque. In “The Goophered Grapevine” (the term goophered being local vernacular for cursed), Julius first meets John and Annie, a relatively affluent couple from Ohio, who, upon the advice of Annie’s doctor, hope to move to a climate more agreeable to her health. John also wants to buy a

168  Matthew Wynn Sivils farm where he can continue his grape-culture business. North Carolina seems a good bet because, as John relates, “the climate was perfect for health, and, in conjunction with the soil, ideal for grape culture; labor was cheap, and land could be bought for a mere song.”11 The run-down old McAdoo plantation, where Julius has lived his entire life, seems just about right. It even has its own Southern gothic vineyard: The vines—here partly supported by decayed and broken-down trellises, there twining themselves among the branches of the slender saplings which had sprung up among them—grew in wild and unpruned luxuriance, and the few scattered grapes they bore were the undisputed prey of the first comer. (33) When John and Annie visit the old McAdoo farm, they find Uncle Julius sitting on a log next to this untended vineyard, enjoying a feast of grapes. In characteristically racist fashion, John—who narrates the frame portion of each conjure tale—notes that the color of the elderly Julius’s skin and his hair seem “not entirely black” and that “There was a shrewdness in his eyes, too, which was not altogether African, and which, as we afterwards learned from experience, was indicative of a corresponding shrewdness in his character” (34). John’s reading of Julius’s body actually tells us more about John than anything else, and we learn that he is quick to assign an identity to Julius based merely upon an established racial type. In short, John is given to typical racist ways of thinking, even if he is draped in a self-conscious brand of Northern superiority. For John, Uncle Julius is, like the vineyard itself, a neglected relic of a more prosperous time at the old McAdoo farm. As a result, John (who Chesnutt probably modeled after many white Northerners at the time) goes about life blinded by a combination of racist and romanticized thinking, and part of Julius’s so-called shrewdness resides in his ability to take advantage of this fact. Thus, John subconsciously associates former slaves with the other elements of the run-down plantation. Julius, who upon their first meeting is conveniently placed beside the vineyard, becomes intimately connected to it. To John, both the former slave and the vineyard occupy a state of wasteful idleness: they have literally and figuratively taken on an unkempt state in the absence of a white man’s control. This linking of Julius to the vineyard is carried to the point that John’s portrayal of Julius subtly mirrors the vines themselves, as when he describes Julius’s hair as “about six inches long and very bushy” (34). Julius, who—sitting on a log, eating the grapes—seems fairly content with the status quo, does his best to dissuade John and Annie from buying the old farm. He tells them “‘f I ‘uz in yo’ place, I wouldn’ buy dis vimya’d” (35). Pressed for an explanation, Julius proclaims, “dis yer ole vimya’d is goophered.”

Vegetal Haunting  169 After explaining that the term means “cunju’d, bewitch,’” Julius spins a tale of how Dugal McAdoo, to keep his slaves from eating the grapes, hires Aunt Peggy, a powerful conjure woman, to curse the vine so that anyone who eats its grapes will die within a year. In the following months, a couple of slaves apparently die from the curse. But when Henry, a slave from a neighboring plantation, unknowingly eats grapes from the cursed vine, Aunt Peggy does what she can to save him. She gives Henry some medicine but warns him that “w’en de sap begin ter rise in de grapevimes he ha’ ter come en see her ag’in” (38). When Henry returns, Aunt Peggy tells him to anoint his bald head each year with the sap of the newly pruned grapevine and the goopher will not kill him. He follows her instructions, and it seems to work, but as a result of this partial remedy, Henry’s body comes to mirror the state of the grapevine itself. Henry—who was not a young man—begins to grow a vigorous head of hair, which curls into little ball-like shapes when the vine produces grapes. He also enjoys something of a new youth in that over the summer, he loses the stiffness in his joints and becomes as spry as a young man (38–39). With the onset of fall, Henry’s vitality declines in tandem with that of the grapevine until he is again elderly. The cycle repeats the next year, and McAdoo realizes he can make money by selling Henry in the spring while at the height of his seasonal vigor and repurchasing him in the fall when the duped party fears a declining Henry is dying. In the end, McAdoo himself falls prey to a “Yankee” conman who promises he can make the vineyard produce twice as many grapes. In actuality, the conman’s actions result in the near destruction of the vine, and Julius relates, “when de big vime whar he [Henry] got de sap ter ‘n’int his head withered en turned yaller en died, Henry died too” (42). John closes the frame tale by stating that he bought the farm anyway, that his grape business was a great success, and that Julius, who had previously lived on the farm in an old cabin and made a living selling grapes, was now employed as his coachman. Chesnutt employs this bizarre story of how the life of a cursed plant becomes intimately linked with the life of a slave to illustrate how chattel slavery worked as a system of oppression that dehumanized the slaves while also contributing to the demise of the slave owners themselves. As Brodhead argues, Julius crafts a tale that “shows this believer in the naturalness of private property the process by which naturally growing things (grapes and men) get made over into private property, and their vitality made into the source of someone else’s profit.”12 Chesnutt finds this vegetative trope so instructive that he repeats it in what is probably his second most canonical tale, “Po’ Sandy,” in which the slave, Sandy, has his lover, the conjure woman Tenie, change him into a tree so that he will be able to stay close to her while also escaping the horrors of slavery.13 Another hint of a plant-human hybrid emerges in “The Dumb Witness” in the slave called Viney who, in addition to her obviously

170  Matthew Wynn Sivils botanical name, betrays something of a vegetal-like character in that she becomes a silent figure, refusing to speak for years as a form of vengeance against her oppressors.14 In each of these stories, plant imagery functions as a way of highlighting how slavery and racism pervert personhood and freedom while also haunting the present day as a reminder—rooted in the very soil—of how oppression remains a dehumanizing curse. Addressing the nuanced cultural implications of the rootedness of plants, Michael Marder writes, On the one hand, both colloquial and philosophical discourses associate the rooted mode of being with immobility and captivity, but, on the other, the perceived indifference of plants interlaces their freedom with human liberty in the domains of ethics, aesthetics, and religion. Despite their undeniable embeddedness in the environment, plants embody the kind of detachment human beings dream of in their own transcendent aspiration to the other, Beauty, or divinity.15 Marder’s take on the “embeddedness” of plants explains how these living but decidedly nonhuman entities evoke a form of transcendent liberty. It also illuminates how plants work as emblems of and vectors for freedom, which provides insight into how they function in another late nineteenth-century literary moment: the flowering of the “Female Gothic.”

“A Knitted Wall of Stem and Leaf” By the end of the nineteenth century, American literary culture had interwoven the Romantic gothic threads, exemplified by the works of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, with an emergent realism. Rather than entirely sloughing off the familiar Romantic concerns about the threats inherent in an ambiguously haunted, spiritualized natural world, these later works melded the concept of dark nature with a no less disturbing amoral natural world. It is in the writings of American women at this time that we find a pronounced attention to the ways that the world of plants intersects with and informs a range of social ills that darken the human realm. In examining how the concept of personhood applies to plants across a variety of human cultures, Matthew Hall writes, “Stories of transformation and metamorphosis recognize plants (and other beings) as volitional, communicative subjects.”16 This recognition is central to Hall’s larger argument that Western culture’s dualistic view of nature, separating it into us versus them, along with the attendant hierarchy of being that places humanity at the top and plants and other socalled lower life-forms at the bottom, is intrinsically flawed and to blame for many of our present-day environmental crises. Hall argues

Vegetal Haunting  171 that recognizing plants as persons serves as a step toward remedying this dysfunctional environmental view. Drawing together a variety of Buddhist and indigenous concepts, Hall arrives at a holistic environmental conception of the inter-­relatedness of all life, one that sheds socially constructed hierarchies for a more ecologically nuanced view: “From a basis that all beings are related, many Indigenous peoples regard plants as beings that possess awareness, intelligence, volition, and communication. Plants are recognized as beings that are capable of flourishing and of being harmed.”17 While Hall does not have ecogothic literature in mind, his argument for the connections between personhood and plant life is especially instructive when applied to the flourishing of women’s gothic fiction that occurred as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Texts such as Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1900 story “The Foreigner” (“She taught me a sight o’ things about herbs … she was well acquainted with the virtues of plants”) and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s 1909 tale “Old Woman Magoun” (“Lily picked some of the deadly nightshade berries and ate them. ‘Why they are real sweet,’ she said”) represent a claiming of the gothic by women writers who viewed the mode as a powerful vector for potent social and feminist criticism.18 One work of plant-infused female ecogothic that almost certainly had an impact upon those early twentieth-century women writers in particular was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Giant Wisteria.” Published in 1891, a year before her more famous “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman’s story opens with what is actually a flashback to the tragedy of a young unwed mother. This young woman’s Puritan family (who have also brought a small wisteria plant over from England) intends to punish her for her infidelities by forcing her to abandon her child and wed an abusive cousin back in England. With the fate of the mother and her child unresolved, Gilman fast-forwards over a century later to a trio of young, upper-class couples who decide it will be fun to spend their summer renting the now decaying house where the long-forgotten young mother from the opening of the tale overheard her family’s sinister plans. What ensues is a story of how the oppression of women has become thoroughly entangled with and incorporated into the American social structure, and key to this lesson is the wisteria plant itself, a transplant from England that has entwined and rooted itself firmly into the figurative late nineteenth-century American home. The wisteria plant, in ways similar to the yellow wallpaper of Gilman’s more famous story, becomes a complex metaphor for the oppression of women and the ways that oppression has become so common, so internalized, that it becomes essentially invisible. In the story, the wisteria vine has, over the years, become omnipresent. This symbol of the sexist oppression that came over the Atlantic with the Puritan colonists and that began as merely a small transplanted vine has—by the time of the

172  Matthew Wynn Sivils story proper—grown into “A huge Wisteria vine [that] covered the whole front of the house” and “fenced in all the upper story of the porch with a knitted wall of stem and leaf.”19 The young couples hire men to renovate some portions of the house practically held up by the vines of the wisteria and—with the aid of some eerie dreams in which they encounter a ghost who leads them to a well—uncover the ancient bones of a baby in the well bucket. At virtually the same moment, the workmen uncover the skeletal remains of the child’s mother entwined in the roots of the massive wisteria (392). In a way, the wisteria of this story represents a stage in Gilman’s development of a tangled imagery of feminine oppression that factors more subtly into “The Yellow Wall-Paper” where the titular wall-covering takes on “a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus,” and the increasingly unhinged narrator contends that the wallpaper takes on the appearance of “a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions.”20 The wallpaper, like its wisteria vine predecessor, comes alive for the narrator. who sees within it a maddening scene in which “strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!”21 Like the shrieking fungi of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman’s vine functions both as an emblem of an oppressive past and as reminder that the present is still inextricably bound within that oppressive structure. Marder writes, “If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of our conceptualities.”22 He goes on to argue that humanity needs to pay attention to plants, to consider these marginalized organisms, and to grant them the same ontological considerations as animals, including humans. Of course, this approach challenges the conventional Western practice of essentially ignoring vegetal beings. Indeed, we have so thoroughly reduced our considerations of plants that we find it difficult to think of them except in terms of how they serve our physical or aesthetic needs. In humanity’s post-agrarian calculus, plants are either useful or weeds. This conjoined simplification and marginalization of vegetal beings helps explain why Marder’s concept of “plant-thinking” subtly conveys a portrait of the plant as an entity made uncanny by a combination of commonality and extreme Otherness. In defining “plant-thinking,” Marder argues that in addition to the “non-cognitive, non-­intentional, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants” and the act of “human thinking about plants,” the term also denotes “how human thinking is, to some extent, de-humanized and rendered plant-like, altered by its encounter with the vegetal world.” These ways of plant-thinking meld to create “the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants.” The idea of the plant then affects our thinking to the degree that “reproducing or recreating the plant in imagination…

Vegetal Haunting  173 [partakes] of the reproductive potential of vegetation itself.”23 This concept of vegetal ontology applies particularly well to the literary portrayal of plants, especially in the gothic mode, because it invokes the plant’s uncanny character as exceedingly familiar while also inaccessibly Other. The result is a vegetal uncanny that, once recognized, emerges repeatedly and with rich implications throughout the American gothic tradition. Gothic plants of all kinds emerge throughout nineteenth-century American fiction, and when we look at them, when we focus on the darkness within the green, we find that these literary plants are far more than just inanimate scenery—they are sites of trauma, markers of oppression, uncanny organisms, spectral figures. Often, they haunt our imagination in ways that reveal fears that emerge not only from cultural anxieties but also from unsettling biological realities, such as the inevitability of our eventual decomposition into the very soil and from there into the plants themselves. Thus, for too long, we have underestimated the literary importance of the imagined plant. With the rise of animal studies, it is now a good time to begin a reappraisal of the vegetal beings in early American gothic fiction, which, over the last two centuries, has done so much to influence our culture.

Notes 1 Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 27–28. 2 Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” 116. Further references to this text are cited parenthetically. 3 Neal, Logan, I.157. Further references to this text are cited parenthetically. 4 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 4. 5 Crow, History of the Gothic, 2. 6 Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches, 123. All subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically. 7 Corstorphine, “‘The Blank Darkness Outside,’” 125. 8 Chesnutt, “The Marked Tree,” 196. 9 Brodhead, “Introduction,” 9. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine,” 31. All subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically. 12 Brodhead, “Introduction,” 10. 13 Chesnutt, “Po’ Sandy,” 44–54. 14 Chesnutt, “The Dumb Witness,” 158–171. 15 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 12. 16 Hall, Plants as Persons, 107. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Jewett, “The Foreigner,” 319; Freeman, “Old Woman Magoun,” 342. 19 Gilman, “The Giant Wisteria,” 389. All subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically. 20 Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” 398. 21 Ibid., 402. 22 Marder, Plant-Thinking, 2. 23 Ibid., 10, 10, 5.

174  Matthew Wynn Sivils

Bibliography Brodhead, Richard H. “Introduction.” In The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited and with an introduction by Richard H. Brodhead. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-walker. Edited by Sydney J. Krause and S.W. Reid. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1984. Chesnutt, Charles. “The Dumb Witness.” In The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited and with an introduction by Richard H. Brodhead, 158–71. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. “The Goophered Grapevine.” In The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited and with an introduction by Richard H. Brodhead, 31–43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. “The Marked Tree.” In The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited and with an introduction by Richard H. Brodhead, 194–207. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. “Po’ Sandy.” In The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited and with an introduction by Richard H. Brodhead, 44–54. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Corstorphine, Kevin. “‘The Blank Darkness Outside’: Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the End of the Frontier.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 120–33. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Crow, Charles. History of the Gothic: American Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. “Old Woman Magoun.” In American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft, An Anthology, edited by Charles L. Crow, 333–44. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Giant Wisteria.” In American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft, An Anthology, edited by Charles L. Crow, 387–92. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. ———. “The Yellow Wall-paper.” In American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft, An Anthology, edited by Charles L. Crow, 392–402. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” In Selected Tales and Sketches, selected and with an Introduction by Michael J. Colacurcio, 110–123. New York: Penguin, 1987. Hillard, Tom J. “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 103–19. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “The Foreigner.” In American Gothic: From Salem Witchcraft to H.P. Lovecraft, An Anthology, edited by Charles L. Crow, 312–27. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Neal, John. Logan, a Family History. 2 vols. Philadelphia, PA: Carey and Lea, 1822. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, 317–36. New York: The Library of America, 1996.

11 Ecogothic Extinction Fiction The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth Jennifer Schell

When a Dutch farmer from Claverack, New York discovered fossilized mastodon teeth in his fields in 1705, he launched a prehistoric proboscidean craze that consumed such famous eighteenth-century Americans as Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Willson Peale. Because they had cusps like human molars, Mather believed these teeth to be the remains of antediluvian biblical giants. Jefferson, meanwhile, was convinced that they belonged to an extant elephantine creature that roamed the hinterlands of the American West. So strong was his belief that he instructed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to look out for these animals as they journeyed to the Pacific. For his part, Peale exhumed a mastodon skeleton in Newburgh, New York and put it on display in his Philadelphia museum. In so doing, he brought widespread attention to bear on the American mastodon and its northern descendant, the woolly mammoth.1 Although interest in ancient pachyderms waned with the settling of North America and the onset of the Civil War, it revived in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1901, Americans produced a wealth of mastodon and mammoth literature, including scientific treatises, religious texts, periodical articles, novels, short stories, and poems. 2 Although most scholars have neglected these artifacts of print culture, some historians, such as Claudine Cohen and Keith Thomson, have used them to reveal the development—or lack thereof—of postbellum American paleontological thought. While Cohen’s and Thomson’s research is compelling, I would argue that these mammoth texts are important for another reason. They demonstrate that late nineteenth-­ century Americans regarded species extinction, both that which was naturally occurring and that which was anthropogenic, with a complex mixture of sadness, horror, and guilt. Not insignificantly, these emotional attitudes tend to manifest themselves more intensely and pervasively in fiction than they do in nonfiction. American proboscidean fiction first emerged in the 1860s and 1870s in the form of hoaxes about the discovery of frozen mammoth carcasses in the high Arctic. By the 1880s and 1890s, Americans began publishing reports of live mammoth sightings in Alaskan newspapers. Popular

176  Jennifer Schell novels and short stories proliferated, including Willis Boyd Allen’s The Mammoth Hunters (1895) and Henry Tukeman’s “The Killing of the Mammoth” (1899). Aimed at young readers, Allen’s novel recounts the exploits of a group of adventuresome American boys who travel to Alaska where they discover frozen mammoth remains. More fantastic than its predecessors, Tukeman’s story describes the narrator’s search for a solitary mammoth living in the Alaskan interior. Employing a combination of skill and wit, he successfully slaughters his quarry, thereby rendering prehistoric pachyderms extinct once and for all. Insofar as they represent mammoths and their remains as frightening freaks of nature found only in the remote Alaskan wilderness, these texts could be categorized as early examples of science fiction and animal horror. I prefer to describe them as ecogothic, however, because they employ some of the familiar tropes of gothic writing—its preoccupation with death, fear, excess, and monstrosity—to illuminate the devastating aspects of a particularly problematic ecological issue confronting late nineteenth-century Americans, namely, anthropogenic species extinction.

1.  The Ecogothic and Extinction Writing For scholars working in the environmental humanities, the ecogothic is still a fairly new concept. Chronologically speaking, its emergence dates to the 2009 publication of Simon Estok’s essay “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” which urged ecocritics to “talk about how contempt for the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse” that Estok dubbed “ecophobia.” This suggestion inspired a flurry of scholarly publications, including special editions of the academic journals Gothic Studies and ISLE as well as Tom Hillard’s article, “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature” (2009), Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s EcoGothic (2013), and Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Höglund, and Nicklas Hållén’s Animal Horror Cinema (2015). Significantly, most of these scholars reject Estok’s concept of ecophobia: an “irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”3 Instead, they employ the term ecogothic, which enables them to avoid the problematic conflation of fear and hatred inherent in Estok’s definition of ecophobia and to draw on the substantial, already existing archive of research on gothic literature. Perhaps not surprisingly, definitions of the ecogothic vary. For example, Smith and Hughes describe it as “an ecologically aware Gothic,” while Susan Tyburski regards it as a mode of writing that “merges Gothic tropes with an ecocritical sensibility to create a tale in which the natural world plays a crucial role.”4 Though valuable for their explanations of

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  177 the origins of the term, these definitions of the ecogothic do not necessarily articulate its thematic import and emotional complexity. To better conceptualize these features of the genre, I would posit that a hefty amount of ecogothic writing—including late nineteenth-century American mammoth fiction—is dedicated to exploring the horrifying implications of various ecological events and natural disasters, some of which are anthropogenic and some of which are not. I would add that, although it often expresses a certain amount of ambivalence toward its subject matter, ecogothic literature is often very critical of human beings and their destructive attitudes toward the natural world. As a result, it tends to regard environmental problems with a complicated mixture of anxiety, horror, terror, anger, sadness, nostalgia, and guilt. Throughout the waning decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were confronted with a number of important ecological issues, such as deforestation, desertification, and pollution, among others. They were especially preoccupied with species extinction, however, and they published hundreds, perhaps thousands, of texts describing the problem, grieving for lost species, and expressing fears for the future. Why did so many authors feel compelled to address this issue? During the last half of the nineteenth century, North America experienced an acute extinction crisis. After decades of over-hunting and habitat loss, many animal species—the buffalo, sea otter, fur seal, beaver, passenger pigeon, and Carolina parakeet—hovered on the brink of extermination. Some, such as Stellar’s sea cow and the great auk, had already plunged over the edge. Highlighting the severity of the crisis, Forest and Stream’s “A Century of Extermination” (1886) warned, “this Nineteenth century may be unpleasantly memorable in centuries to come as that in which many species of animate and inanimate nature became extinct.” Roughly seven years later, G. T. Ferris lamented, “the complete disappearance of the beaver, the most ingenious of our four-footed architects and engineers, from the wide range of his former habitat,” and shortly thereafter, L. H. Smith mourned the loss of the passenger pigeon, that “fine bird, which once swarmed in countless millions in the eastern part of this continent.”5 Much of American extinction literature—mammoth fiction included—­ tends to describe the death of a species as a terribly sorrowful and horrifying event. I am not the first to notice the peculiar mixture of intense emotions inherent in extinction writing for, as paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and his writing partner Roger Lewin observe, “Many of the attitudes that govern discussion on extinction reflect emotional as well as scientific viewpoints.” By way of an explanation, Leakey and Lewin suggest that these feelings stem from narcissistic fears about the future of humanity: It is surely true that extinction holds a certain horrific fascination for us, because if species or groups of species that have been successful

178  Jennifer Schell for millions of years, such as the dinosaurs, can slip into evolutionary oblivion, what about Homo sapiens?6 Although Leakey and Lewin’s claim has merit, I would suggest that scholarship on gothic literature provides a better explanation as to why extinction is so fraught with emotion for postbellum American writers. It also helps to explain why these authors so often invoke the category of the supernatural, referring to extinct species as spectral figures or monstrous creatures. According to literary critic Fred Botting, gothic writing presents death as the absolute limit, a finitude which denies any possibility of imaginative transcendence into an awesome and infinite space. It is the moment of the negative sublime, a moment of freezing, contraction and horror which signals a temporality that cannot be recuperated by the mortal subject. Horror marks the response to an excess that cannot be transcended.7 Extrapolating from this statement, I would argue that extinction is particularly horrifying because it is an excessive, extreme, and irrevocable form of death, involving the demise of an entire species as opposed to an individual organism. It is also frightening because it disrupts entire ecosystems, vacating certain niches and ensuring they will never again be filled in quite the same way. Not all forms of extinction are created equal, however, for different kinds of extinction tend to generate different kinds and intensities of emotion. Because of their scale, mass extinction events—like those that destroyed Cretaceous-era dinosaurs and Pleistocene-era mammoths— are infinitely more horrifying than those involving a single species. Because they are caused by humans, anthropogenic extinction events—like those that resulted in the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the Tasmanian thylacine—often inspire anger and guilt in addition to sadness and horror. Ecogothically speaking, these various emotions manifest themselves in late nineteenth-century extinction writing in representations of the supernatural aspects of extinct or endangered animals. Thus, in “The Slaughter of the Innocents” (1875), Mary Thacher Higginson refers to the rare feathers decorating women’s hats as “ghosts of birds,” and in “The Last of the Buffalo” (1892), George Bird Grinnell conjures dreamy visions of immense buffalo herds roaming the Great Plains of the American West.8 For these authors and others like them, the specters of extinct and endangered animals serve, much like the ghosts of more traditional gothic fiction, as haunting indicators of the unredeemed vanity, avarice, and wastefulness of humanity. Much like Higginson and Grinnell, authors of American mammoth fiction adopt the language of the supernatural, describing Alaska’s prehistoric pachyderms as monstrous creatures, capable of defying the natural

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  179 laws governing death, decay, extinction, and evolution. As Botting explains, monstrosity is a popular trope in gothic literature because “Monsters combine negative features that oppose (and define) norms, conventions and values; they suggest an excess or absence beyond those structures and bear the weight of projections and emotions (revulsion, horror, disgust) that result.”9 What makes Alaskan mammoths, both the alive and frozen variants, so monstrous and so horrifying is that they confuse the distinctions between the realms of the living and the dead. In this respect, they resemble the ghosts, vampires, mummies, and animated corpses that populate more traditional gothic fiction. For their part, frozen mammoths represent preternaturally preserved reminders of extinction and all its excesses. As prehistoric anachronisms, long lost relics of another era, live mammoths transgress the boundary between extant and extinct species, thereby flouting the natural process of the evolution of life on Earth, which requires the extinction of some species in order to make way for the evolution of new ones. Importantly, American mammoth fiction, like much other gothic writing, displays deep ambivalence toward its subject matter; thus, its stance on species extinction is difficult to determine. On the one hand, it represents mammoths as boundary-crossing monstrosities that do not belong in the nineteenth century, and it indicates that the way to restore order to the natural world is to exterminate them. On the other hand, it regards mammoths as exciting curiosities, and it indulges the comforting fantasy that extinction does not necessarily represent the demise of a species. Although this ambivalence is hard to unravel, I would suggest that almost all American mammoth texts—even those that promote the killing of their central animals—endorse anti-extinction views. By the end of most of these novels and stories, mammoths exist only as artifacts in museum display cases where they serve as symbolic reminders of the vulnerability of all those species threatened by anthropogenic extinction at the close of the nineteenth century. The fact that some of these mammoths were killed by men only underscores the grave threat that humankind poses to the biodiversity of the natural world.

2.  Fledgling Mammoth Fiction As a whole, late nineteenth-century American mammoth fiction tends to increase in narrative and thematic complexity across time. Published between 1859 and 1873, some of the earliest examples include books and periodical articles that launched hoaxes about the incredible discoveries of Arctic explorers, such as (the fictional) Benkendorf and Octave Pavy. Later examples include the reports of live mammoth sightings that proliferated in American newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s, first in Alaska and then across the entire country. Generally speaking, these texts consist of sensationalized sketches of northern wilderness landscapes, augmented with spectacular descriptions of

180  Jennifer Schell mammoths or their frozen remains. While they tend not to contain complex characters, satisfying narrative arcs, or nuanced discussions of anthropogenic extinction, they employ some important ecogothic tropes, especially with respect to the monstrosity of mammoths and the horrors of extinction. As such, they powerfully influenced the novels and short stories that succeeded them. One of the earliest fictions involves a frozen mammoth purportedly discovered in 1846 in the floodwaters of the Indigirka River by Benkendorf, a Russian engineer in charge of completing a government survey of the Siberian coastline. According to historian B. A. Tikhomirov, the find was first reported by German author Philip Körber, who published evidence of it—in the form of a letter allegedly written by Benkendorf—in his book Kosmos für die Jugend (1859).10 English translations of this letter appeared in various scientific publications during the nineteenth century, including W. Boyd Dawkins’s “On the Range of the Mammoth” (1868) and Henry Neville Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life (1893). Popular with British and American audiences, these texts spread the hoax across the Atlantic, inspiring a great deal of debate and a plethora of imitations. What made Benkendorf’s letter—as translated and reproduced by Dawkins—so influential was its vivid depictions of the monstrous qualities of the frozen mammoth, the “black, horrible, giant-like mass” that emerged from the raging torrent of the Indigirka River. Anthropomorphizing the animated corpse, Benkendorf describes “a colossal elephant’s head, armed with mighty tusks, with its long trunk moving in the water in an unearthly manner, as though seeking for something lost therein.” Then, he explains, “Breathless with astonishment, I beheld the monster hardly twelve feet from me, with his half open eyes showing the whites,” adding, “I could not divest myself of a feeling of fear as I approached the head; the broken, widely-open eyes, gave the animal an appearance of life, as though it might move in a moment and destroy us with a roar.”11 For Benkendorf, this mammoth is horrifying precisely because it defies the boundary between life and death, behaving as though it is alive by waving its trunk and opening its eyes. Note that although he has no real reason to do so—mammoths were herbivores, after all—he characterizes these actions as malevolent. Once Benkendorf realizes that he has discovered a frozen, and therefore deceased, mammoth, his fear dissipates, and he turns to the tasks of examining and dissecting his find. Adopting a more logical, rational tone, he determines the animal’s cause of death: The soft peat or marsh land on which he stepped thousands of years ago, gave way under the weight of the giant, and he sank as he stood on it, feet foremost, incapable of saving himself; and a severe frost came and turned him into ice, and the moor which had buried him.

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  181 Next, he measures the remains and removes the stomach, which he claims is filled with the “young shoots of the fir and pine” and a “quantity of young fir cones.”12 Here, ecogothic imagery—the description of the horrific death and subsequent preservation of an extinct, prehistoric monster—coexists with more scientific language, the inclusion of which lends the letter a veneer of plausibility. As a striking example of early mammoth fiction, Benkendorf’s letter had a decided impact on several later authors, including the San Francisco reporter who orchestrated a hoax involving Pavy’s proposed 1872 expedition to the North Pole via the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. Though Pavy never left California, dispatches supposedly written by the explorer appeared in several nineteenth-century periodicals, including the Courrier des États-Unis, the Public Ledger (Philadelphia), and the Friend. The latter reported that, by 1873, Pavy had reached Wrangel’s Land, an island located off the coast of northern Siberia, where he discovered an “enormous [mastodon] body, in a perfect state of preservation.” Employing language similar to that used by Benkendorf’s letter, the Friend article notes, The fore legs were bent, resting on the knees, and the posterior parts were deeply sunk in the snow, in a posture indicating that the animal had died while trying to extricate itself from a watery or snowy slough…. From its stomach were taken pieces of bark and grasses, the nature of which could not be analyzed on the spot. Shortly thereafter, it ups the ante on its predecessor, observing, “Over an area of many miles, the plain was covered with the remains of mastodons—­indicating that a numerous herd of those gigantic animals must have perished there through some convulsion of nature.”13 To explain the extinction of the mammoths, this statement endorses the popular nineteenth-century geological theory of catastrophism: the idea that certain sudden, violent ecological catastrophes, such as floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, had the capacity to alter dramatically the trajectory of life on Earth. Here, the ecogothic horror stems from both the frozen remains themselves and the massively destructive events leading to the extermination of the mastodons in the first place. Sometime between 1873 and 1887, a time period that coincided with the arrival of numerous whale fishermen, fur trappers, and gold miners in Alaska, American mammoth fiction made an imaginative leap, shifting its focus away from frozen animals and toward live ones. On September 19, 1887, the editors of the Alaska Free Press published an article entitled, “Wonders of the Yukon,” which announced “the existence of living mastodons near the headwaters of the White river.” As evidence, they cited a 5-year-old hunting story in which a “Stick Indian” encounters and flees from an ancient proboscidean living deep

182  Jennifer Schell in the Alaskan wilderness. According to the eye witness, the animal was “larger than Harper’s (the post trader’s) store, with great shining yellowish tusks and a mouth large enough to swallow him at a single gulp.”14 Its formidable size, gaping maw, and prominent tusks notwithstanding, this mastodon is monstrous because it represents a supposedly extinct relic of another era that has somehow managed to survive into the nineteenth century. Over time, numerous American periodicals embellished and elaborated on the story, sometimes in strangely humorous ways. Published in the Alaskan on April 4, 1883, “A Rival to the Sea Serpent: Mastodons Roaming in Alaskan Fields” diffuses the frightening aspects of extinction with irony, asserting, “the following is copied from an exchange received by the last mail from the Juneau Free Press, which paper passed out of existence some two years ago.” To add to the ridiculousness, it concludes by equating prehistoric pachyderms to domestic swine, maintaining, “I believe that the mule footed hog still exists; also, that live mastodons play tag with the aurora every night over on Forty Mile Creek in Alaska.”15 Particularly popular, this piece appeared in papers as various as the Kansas City (MO) Times, the Bismarck (ND) Tribune, the Wilkes-Barre (PA) Times, and the Marietta (GA) Journal throughout the early 1890s. Perhaps not surprisingly, new mammoth sightings followed on the heels of these initial reports. Sometime in 1889, the Philadelphia Press published an interview with Cola Fowler, an employee of the Alaska Fur and Commercial Company who claimed to have purchased the tusks of a freshly killed mammoth from indigenous hunters living in interior Alaska. Curious about the origins of the ivory, Fowler interrogates the men, who explain that they were searching a dry stream bed for fossilized ivory “when their ears were suddenly saluted by a chorus of loud, shrill, trumpet-like calls, and an enormous creature came crashing towards them through the thicket, the ground fairly trembling beneath its ponderous footfalls.” Tellingly, in their description of the mammoth, the hunters emphasize its unnatural, grotesque characteristics: In general shape it was not unlike an elephant, but its ears were smaller, its eyes bigger, and its trunk longer and more slender. Its tusks were yellowish white in color and six in number. Four of these tusks were placed like those of a boar, one on either side in each jaw; they were about four feet long and came to a sharp point.16 Though frightened by this monstrous porcine-pachyderm hybrid, the men find it relatively easy to kill for with one well-placed shot, they eradicate it from the Earth and restore order to the natural world. Not insignificantly, they also confess to killing this animal’s mate, thereby preventing, or at least, inhibiting, the reproduction of the species.

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  183 After its initial publication, Fowler’s interview was reprinted in numerous American periodicals, including the Chicago Tribune and the Portland (ME) Daily Press. Meanwhile, his claims about live mammoths were cited in at least two popular guidebooks: Maturin Ballou’s The New Eldorado: A Summer Journey to Alaska (1889) and Alexander Badlam’s The Wonders of Alaska (1890). What prompted the widespread popularity of Fowler’s tale? I would suggest that it was the way in which it elaborated certain elements of earlier prehistoric pachyderm writing. Instead of describing frozen corpses or random sightings, Fowler provided readers with an ecogothic hunting story, rife with action and adventure, in which intrepid humans apparently rid the Alaskan wilderness of a monstrous, transgressive relic of the Pleistocene era. In so doing, he highlighted humankind’s terrifying talent for exterminating entire species from the face of the Earth. He also helped to inspire numerous other nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction writers, including Allen and Tukeman.

3.  Willis Boyd Allen’s The Mammoth Hunters Born in Kittery Point, Maine in 1855, Allen was a Harvard- and Boston University-educated lawyer who resigned his practice after just seven years in order to become a writer. He published in some of the late nineteenth century’s most prominent periodicals, including Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, and he produced a good deal of popular serial fiction for young adult readers, including the Camp and Tramp books and the Pine Cone stories.17 While many of these novels demonstrate Allen’s affinity for wilderness travel and outdoor adventure, The Mammoth Hunters also reflects his fascination with ancient proboscideans for it records the exploits of three boys—Nat Dutton, Rodney Winter, and Malcolm MacDonald—who travel to Alaska and discover a frozen mammoth carcass. As it does so, the novel relies on contemporary newspaper articles and popular science books to make its representations of the reality of species extinction more spectacularly horrifying. In the first chapter, Allen creates narrative tension and foreshadows the events surrounding the climactic discovery by raising the possibility that the boys might encounter live mammoths deep in the Alaskan wilderness. Thus, Nat cautions his companions that, on a previous trip to the Far North, he and his father heard “pretty clear reports among the natives, of immense hairy animals almost as big as our log hut, with long teeth sticking out in front of them.” Providing evidence for his friend’s claims, Rodney mentions that he noticed an article—­presumably “Wonders of the Yukon”—about live mammoths “in the Journal not long ago. It was copied from the Alaskan Free Press.”18 A bit later in the novel, he reads aloud passages from Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters, delivers a long lecture about the history of the Siberian ivory trade, and speculates some more about the existence of live mammoths in Alaska.

184  Jennifer Schell All this rumor and rumination sets the stage for the eventual discovery of the frozen mammoth in the banks of the Kooak (Kobuk) River. To compose this scene, Allen borrows heavily from the version of the Benkendorf letter included in Dawkins’s “On the Range of the Mammoth” and Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters, adapting the prose to highlight the more sensational and horrifying aspects of the find. Shortly after the boys reach the headwaters of the Kooak, a rainstorm causes the river to rise, revealing “an animal of gigantic dimensions, his head and shoulders covered with long, coarse, brown hair, a mighty pair of gleaming tusks advanced, and one dripping foot, as large as a hogshead, already planted on the bank.” Horrified at the sight of this apparently alive prehistoric creature, Solomon, Rodney, and Malcolm flee the scene. Tellingly, as they plan their next move, the boys adopt the language of the ecogothic, describing the mammoth in supernatural terms as an “apparition,” a “nightmare,” an “awful Leviathan,” and an “antediluvian monster.” Even after they recognize their mistake, they cannot “shake off their dread, as the eyes of the mammoth, showing the whites as they were upturned, seemed fastened on them, and the massive trunk swayed to and fro in the water” (115–26). Here, the ecogothic horror stems from the fact that the mammoth carcass interferes with natural cycles of life and death and confuses the boundary between the living and the dead. Instead of decaying like normal remains, the corpse survives into the nineteenth century, emerging from the riverbank completely unaltered by the ravages of time and seemingly capable of both movement and sight. Once they recover from the shock of the discovery, the boys speculate about the animal’s cause of death: it was evident, from the position in which the mammoth was found, that he had not succumbed to death without a struggle. He was standing, not lying on his side. Clearly he had endeavored to cross the river, had found himself suddenly in a morass, and sinking deeper and deeper in his efforts to extricate himself, had been literally buried alive. Then came severe weather, the borders of the stream turned to ice, and the huge pachyderm, freezing with the rest of the tundra, stood carefully preserved in this natural refrigerator for ages, until a convulsion of the elements released him. (123) In this passage too, Allen draws heavily on the Benkendorf letter, but he transforms the mammoth’s death into a Poe-esque horror story by emphasizing the creature’s struggle against being “buried alive.” I would add that his use of the phrase “convulsion of the elements” incorporates another element of ecogothic because it evokes scientific theories about geological catastrophes and mass extinction. In this case, some of the fear stems from the events, themselves—insofar as their scale and

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  185 unpredictability are concerned—and some of it stems from what they reveal about humankind’s relationship with the natural world—insofar as control or lack thereof is concerned. Perhaps not surprisingly, this mammoth suffers the same fate as the one purportedly discovered by Benkendorf. After taking some measurements and securing the tusks, Rodney, Nat, Malcolm, and Solomon camp for the night, leaving the mammoth to be washed away by the still raging floodwaters of the Kooak. Somehow, the boys manage to raft the tusks to the coast, and Nat ships them to San Francisco, where he donates them to a museum. As the novel concludes, Allen connects the world of fiction to the world of reality, directly addressing his audience: “Those of my boy readers who visited the great World’s Fair at Chicago will doubtless remember the gigantic ‘restored’ mammoth in the Anthropological Building. It is whispered that it was modelled from the specimen which Nat discovered” (141). This strategy of referring readers to an actually existing mammoth exhibit adds an air of authenticity to the events of the novel and reminds readers of the horrifying reality of species extinction. Not coincidentally, Allen’s mammoth-fiction-writing successor, Tukeman, would also employ this approach, effectively launching the last live mammoth hoax of the nineteenth century.

4.  Henry Tukeman’s “The Killing of the Mammoth” Although little is known about Tukeman, his short story, “The Killing of the Mammoth” created a sensation when it was published in McClure’s Magazine in October 1899.19 Narrated by the author, the piece describes Tukeman’s thrilling encounter with a live bull mammoth deep in the Alaskan wilderness. In the story, Tukeman matches wits with the giant prehistoric proboscidean—portrayed as an intelligent, yet horrifying monster—and slays it, exporting its carcass to the Smithsonian in Washington, D. C. For some reason, many late nineteenth-­century readers regarded the story as nonfiction, and they besieged both the magazine and the museum with inquiries about the mammoth and its remains. Frustrated by the overwhelming public interest in the story, McClure’s editors commissioned Frederic Lucas, the Smithsonian’s Curator of Comparative Anatomy, to debunk the story. Published in February 1900, Lucas’s essay, “The Truth about the Mammoth,” provides a brief paleontological history of the animal and assures readers that “long ages ago the last one perished off the face of the earth.”20 What made Tukeman’s ecogothic monster-hunting story so compelling and believable? I would suggest that it was a complex combination of factors, stemming from the context in which it was published and the style in which it was written. Certainly, the live mammoth reports circulating in the American popular press made the tale seem somewhat credible. But so did the fact that, in writing the story, Tukeman adopted

186  Jennifer Schell several popular tropes of nonfictional travel narratives, positioning himself as both the author and narrator of the tale, recording with precise detail the chronology of his adventures, and furnishing realistic descriptions of the Alaskan landscapes he traverses. As the story begins, Tukeman draws attention to his dual role, announcing that “It was I then, Henry Tukeman, who secured … the ‘Conradi Mammoth.’” Shortly thereafter, he explains that he first heard about the mammoth from Joe, an “ancient head-man” of the indigenous people of Fort Yukon, Alaska, who caught sight of it in a mysterious, wilderness valley that Tukeman describes in ecogothic terms as the “devil’s country.” Significantly, he goes on to admit that “this prehistoric giant must be the last of his race,” but he still cannot forgo the opportunity to pursue such rare game, so he hires a guide and sets out to slaughter the mammoth. Here, it is important to emphasize that, at this point in the story, Tukeman does not recognize the potentially devastating emotional ramifications of single-handedly rendering an entire species extinct. 21 After leaving Fort Yukon, Tukeman and his guide spend several weeks traveling up the Porcupine River and one of its tributaries, and then they begin an arduous portage, climbing a steep, crumbling cliff and passing through a long, dark tunnel before finally emerging into the valley of the mammoth. As he describes these travails, Tukeman lingers on the rough and wild but beautiful terrain he traverses, observing that a high range of snow-clad mountains to the northeast stood out so distinctly that they seemed to be but a few miles away. They were very rugged and precipitous, and dark patches of perpendicular cliffs assumed fantastic shapes against the intensely white background…. I knew the Noyukuk River must rise in these ranges. (509) Taken together, these geographical references—which could be verified in contemporary Alaskan atlases and tour guides—help render the improbable story of the journey somewhat more plausible. 22 Not insignificantly, Tukeman also highlights some of the weird, eerie aspects of the landscape, especially its capacity to distort distances and inspire imaginative fancies. Once they arrive in the valley, Tukeman and his companion dedicate themselves to locating their quarry and planning its demise. Throughout these portions of the story, he refers to the mammoth as “great beast,” “lonely giant,” and “king of the primeval forest,” thereby emphasizing its grandeur and nobility as well as its monstrosity. While Tukeman provides a fairly detailed sketch of the animal, highlighting his “immense tusks” and “long, thick hair” as well as the “smallness of the eye” and the “absence of any tail,” he also employs a steady stream of elephant

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  187 metaphors, noting that the mammoth feeds “as an elephant feeds” and comparing the trunk sizes of the two animals (510–12). In addition to helping readers visualize the mammoth, this strategy underscores its transgressive status as a prehistoric anachronism with no true contemporary analog in the animal kingdom. As the mammoth hunt unfolds, it turns into a pitched battle of wits between the hunter and his strange elephantine prey. To test a theory, Tukeman lights a small wildfire and watches while the mammoth quickly tramples the blaze to smother it. Triumphantly, he explains, “my chance conjecture had evidently hit the mark: the mammoth, with the instinct born when volcanoes were active and fire was the only foe to be dreaded by these mighty beasts, had hastened to stamp out the threatened conflagration” (512). Here, Tukeman characterizes the mammoth’s natural instinct and intelligence as a product of its Pleistocene-era origins. In so doing, he makes it clear that this firefighting proboscidean is a monstrous, boundary-crossing freak of nature, a living member of an extinct species that belongs to and in the ancient past. Not coincidentally, Tukeman takes advantage of the mammoth’s prehistoric aversion to fire to orchestrate its demise. Inspired by the success of his small scale experiment, he lays a trap for the ancient animal, setting ablaze a giant pile of logs to draw it into the range of his Lee Metford rifle. According to Tukeman, the mammoth responds with a spectacular display of ferocity: Rushing forth from the forest, and charging up to the wood-pile with an ear-splitting cry, the king of the primeval forests stood beneath us in all his pride of strength. He was evidently puzzled for a moment by the huge log-pile confronting him, through which the smoke was now rolling in a thick volume. But with the crack of our rifles came the most appalling scream of rage I have ever heard, and the vast brute, apparently unaffected by our shots, attacked the wood-pile with incredible fury … he seized a top timber, a solid green log twenty-five feet long and over a foot in diameter, and threw it clear behind him. (512) By emphasizing the mammoth’s immense strength and innate intelligence as well as its initial imperviousness to bullets, Tukeman casts the creature as both a formidable foe and an otherworldly adversary. Though disoriented by the heavy smoke and the deafening screams, he stands his ground, repeatedly firing his rifle at the mammoth until it eventually expires. As the scene concludes, Tukeman seems to have restored order to the Alaskan wilderness, ridding it of a monstrous abomination of nature more suited to living in Pleistocene-era Beringia than Holocene-­ era Alaska.

188  Jennifer Schell Just before the mammoth dies though, Tukeman experiences a twinge of remorse: A feeling of pity and shame crept over me as I watched the failing strength of this mighty prehistoric monarch whom I had outwitted and despoiled of a thousand peaceful years of harmless existence. It was as though I were robbing nature, and old Mother Earth herself of a child born to her younger days, in the dawn of Time. (513) While this admission might seem odd, especially given Tukeman’s enthusiasm for the hunt, it serves an important purpose insofar as it gestures toward the story’s anti-extinction theme. Here, Tukeman realizes—a little too late—that in killing this mammoth, he has reenacted its extinction and committed a crime against nature. Note that in this passage, the mammoth is no longer a monstrous relic of another era; rather, it has become a part of the seamless order of life on Earth. This passage also emphasizes the incredibly powerful emotions Tukeman experiences as a result of causing the extinction of an entire animal species. To assuage his shame and guilt, he salvages the mammoth’s remains and transports them to the Smithsonian, where they are put on display as a permanent, public reminder of humankind’s rapacious desire to destroy other organisms.

5.  A Lasting Legacy Although they were too late for the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, Americans eventually began to enact conservation measures to save what remained of the nation’s endangered plants and animals. As various populations of buffalo, beaver, fur seals, and sea otters began to recover, the acuteness of North America’s extinction crisis began to fade, and so did interest in prehistoric proboscidean fiction. During the 2000s and 2010s, however, American authors and filmmakers—and their European and Canadian counterparts—began to produce a steady stream of new woolly mammoth literature, reflecting the ecological fears of the new millennium. Print culture examples include Stephen Baxter’s Silverhair (1999), John Varley’s Mammoth (2005), and Colin Dewar’s Mammoth (2016), while visual culture examples include Mammoth (2006), The Thaw (2009), and Fortitude (2015–present). Although some of these texts differ markedly from their nineteenth-­century predecessors—­Baxter’s novel is written from the mammoth’s point of view—most of them are similar in that they employ gothic tropes, adapting them to environmental contexts in order to represent the horrifying aspects of pressing ecological problems, most of which stem from one source, namely, anthropogenic climate change. As such, they add to the vast archive of cultural artifacts attesting to the enduring and frightening impact of humankind on planet Earth.

Ecogothic Extinction Fiction  189

Notes 1 Many scholars have discussed this phase of American mastodon and mammoth literature. See Sayre, “Mammoth,” 63–87; Cohen, Fate of the Mammoth, 85–104; Thomson, Legacy of the Mastodon, 3–54; Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 15–39. 2 Although the animals are different, many authors use the names “mastodon” and “mammoth” interchangeably. According to E. C. Pielou, “Mastodons had shorter, thicker limb bones than mammoths; they were hairy, but probably lacked the woolly undercoat of mammoths. They had straighter tusks, and the tops of their skulls were flat rather than crested.” After the Ice Age, 110. 3 Estok, “Theorizing in a Space,” 204, 208. 4 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 1; Tyburski, “Seduced by the Wild,” 133. 5 “Century of Extermination,” 282; Ferris, “Devastation of Animal Life,” 166; Smith, “Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon,” 304. 6 Leakey and Lewin, Sixth Extinction, 48. 7 Botting, Gothic, 69. 8 Higginson, “Slaughter of the Innocents,” 338; Grinnell, “Last of the Buffalo,” 268. 9 Botting, Gothic, 10. 10 Tikhomirov, “An Expedition that Never Was,” 443. 11 Dawkins, “On the Range of the Mammoth,” 1244–45. 12 Ibid., 1245. 13 “Pavy Expedition,” 163. 14 “The Wonders of the Yukon,” Alaska Free Press, 19 September 1897. Nineteenth-­century Americans referred to the Nahane people as “Stickeen” or “Stick Indians.” 15 “A Rival to the Sea Serpent: Mastodons Roaming over Alaskan Fields,” Alaskan, 4 April 1893. I have not been able to confirm the existence of the original article from the Juneau Free Press. 16 “Live Mastodons,” Portland (ME) Daily Press, 28 November 1896. I was unable to locate the original interview. 17 “Willis Boyd Allen, Author and Editor,” New York Times, 12 September 1938. 18 Allen, Mammoth Hunters, 11. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 19 I have searched several different online archives of nineteenth-century periodicals, and I have not found any other pieces authored by Tukeman. Likely, this name is a pseudonym. 20 Lucas, “Truth about the Mammoth,” 353. 21 Tukeman, “Killing of the Mammoth,” 505–8. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 22 Fort Yukon is a rural Alaskan village, located at the junction of the Porcupine and Yukon Rivers. Noyukuk is probably an alternate spelling—or misspelling—­of Koyukon or Koyukuk, a major tributary of the Yukon River in northern Alaska.

Bibliography Allen, Willis Boyd. The Mammoth Hunters. Boston, MA: Lothrop Publishing, 1895. Barrow, Mark V. Jr., Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

190  Jennifer Schell Botting, Fred. Gothic. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014. “A Century of Extermination.” Forest and Stream 26 (1886): 282. Cohen, Claudine. The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. Translated by William Rodarmor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Dawkins, W. Boyd. “On the Range of the Mammoth.” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 8.4 (1868): 1241–47. Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2 (2009): 203–25. Ferris, G. T. “The Devastation of Animal Life.” The Friend 67.21 (1893): 166. Grinnell, George Bird. “The Last of the Buffalo.” Scribner’s Magazine 12.3 (1892): 267–86. Higginson, Mary Thacher. “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” Harper’s Bazar 8.21 (1875): 338. Hillard, Tom J. “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.4 (Autumn 2009): 685–95. Hutchinson, Henry Neville. Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life. London: Chapman and Hall, 1893. Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin. The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996. Lucas, Frederic. “The Truth about the Mammoth.” McClure’s Magazine 14.4 (1900): 349–55. “The Pavy Expedition.” The Friend 46.21 (1872): 163. Pielou, E. C. After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Sayre, Gordon. “The Mammoth: Endangered Species or Vanishing Race?” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 1.1 (2001): 63–87. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Smith, L. H. “The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon.” Forest and Stream 16 (1898): 304. Thomson, Keith. The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Tikhomirov, B. A. “An Expedition that Never Was: Benkendorf’s Expedition to the River Indigirka.” Geographical Journal 128.4 (1962): 443–46. Tukeman, Henry. “The Killing of the Mammoth.” McClure’s Magazine 13.6 (1899): 505–14. Tyburski, Susan J. “Seduced by the Wild: Audrey Schulman’s EcoGothic Romance.” In Gothic Transgressions: Extension and Commercialization of a Cultural Mode, edited by Ellen Redling and Christian Schneider, 133–45. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2015.

12 Hyperobjects and the End of the World Elemental Antagonists of American Naturalism Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock The first chapter of Annalee Newitz’s insightful study of contemporary gothic culture, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, focuses on serial killers, and it starts in a rather unexpected place—with Stephen Crane’s American naturalist work The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which Newitz reads as an “aesthetic template for later stories about serial killers.” Similarly, her second chapter on “mad doctors” foregrounds the gothic element of American naturalism by beginning with Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), which she characterizes as a “foundational narrative for the mad doctor genre.” In a study primarily focused on contemporary popular culture, Newitz surprisingly turns to late nineteenth-century narrative as a means to trace the evolution of what she refers to as the “capitalist monster genre”: stories in which human beings are transformed by capital into monsters. For Newitz, late nineteenth-century American naturalism offers the “first glimpse of certain thematic and spectacular obsessions that come to dominate the capitalist monster genre.”1 The roots of what seem to be particularly contemporary gothic preoccupations thus stretch back in time at least to the nineteenth century. However, what Donald Pizer refers to in The Theory and Practice of Literary Naturalism as the “melodramatic sensationalism and moral ‘confusion’”2 of the naturalist tale arguably also offers us the first glimpses of another gothic subgenre that has increasingly come to dominate the contemporary pop culture mediascape: narratives about the end of the world. In naturalist works, such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908), Norris’s McTeague, and Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897), elemental forces including cold, heat, and ocean waves function as what Timothy Morton describes as “hyperobjects”: things “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” with which we are entangled and that force upon us the awareness of our own insignificance. According to Morton, hyperobjects, which range from the biosphere to the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, “bring about the end of the world” in the sense of forcing us to rethink not only the world but also our relationship to it.3

192  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock In this chapter, I will use Morton’s concept of hyperobjects and their role in bringing about the end of the world as a lens through which to consider the gothicized elemental forces represented in American naturalism. What these works and the naturalist philosophy of “pessimistic determinism”4 that undergirds them convey is what we could refer to as the disinterested hostility of natural forces. In some cases, the world literally ends for the stories’ protagonists. More broadly, however, these late nineteenth-century tales force upon us what American horror author H. P. Lovecraft later characterizes in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) as “cosmic dread”—or, as Morton puts it in relation to hyperobjects, the gothic realization that “nonhuman entities exist that are incomparably more vast and powerful than we are, and that our reality is caught in them.” In keeping with Morton’s explanation of hyperobjects, nature in the fictions of London, Norris, and Crane compels us into what Morton describes as an “intimacy with” others, the future, and our own deaths. 5 Nineteenth-century American naturalist tales thus introduce and develop a specific variant of the ecogothic that has become increasingly prominent in a contemporary world sensitized, by the awareness of climate change, to the threats nature can pose to human survival: the end of the world. These works, congruent with Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s understanding of ecogothic, present nature as a “semiotic problem” that “questions, compromises and challenges the way in which the world has been understood.”6 In the end, human beings are, as Morton puts it, “brought low” 7 by the realizations of human fragility and the incompleteness of our knowledge “of others and ourselves.”8

1.  Hyperobjects and the End of the World The place to start here is with Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, an idea he introduced in his 2012 study The Ecological Thought and then developed at length in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Because Morton takes a whole book to develop the idea, this overview will be necessarily reductive, particularly because Morton’s study ranges broadly from quantum theory and relativity to art and philosophy. What is important for Morton, as for my purposes here, is that hyperobjects and their properties—their sticky viscosity, their non-locality, their temporal undulation and phasing, their inter-­ objectivity—bring about the end of the world.9 Morton certainly doesn’t mean this in any kind of eschatological biblical sense nor does he intend it in the Star Wars sense of some Death Star annihilation of a planet; the planet will still be here, even if people are not. Rather, as Ursula K. Heise puts it, hyperobjects are “tools for doing away with a romantic notion of nature that [Morton] attributes to environmentalism, as well as with

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  193 any idea of a Heideggerian ‘world’ in which humans might find a home if they overcome the alienations of modernity.” Heise adds that, By insisting on the ‘weirdness,’ ‘uncanniness,’ ‘monstrosity,’ and ‘strange strangeness’ of natural as well as human-made objects and environments, Morton seeks to unsettle any aspirations toward harmony or balance with a nature construed as ‘over there’ or ‘over yonder,’ separate from humans.10 Or, as Stephen Muecke puts it in the LA Review of Books, hyperobjects “challenge our assumptions of human mastery over things.” Muecke continues, later, that the ‘world,’ in the old sense, is over because the weather—like Nature—­is no longer the neutral backdrop we can rely on to stay put, while we play out our little human dramas in front of it…. that old world of human foreground and natural background is gone.11 Hyperobjects undo any lingering vestiges of the idea that the world exists for us and that we can know it with any certainty. Indeed, the concept of hyperobjects as real things, independent of human thought, whose essence cannot be completely grasped undoes the notion of “world” as a discrete concept altogether. “Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves on the insides of a number of hyperobjects,”12 writes Morton. These include Earth, global warming, capitalism, and evolution. “The concept of world,” Morton puts it bluntly, “is no longer operational”— and it is the human recognition of the existence of hyperobjects that has brought about its demise.13 So just what are hyperobjects? Hyperobjects, according to Morton, are things that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”14 For Morton, this description encompasses many things, ranging from black holes, nuclear radiation, and the Florida Everglades to human creations with greatly extended life spans, such as Styrofoam and plastic bags that will still be around long after any humans living today have turned to dust. In his discussion, Morton pays particular attention to global warming, which serves as his prime example of a hyperobject: global warming isn’t anything we can see and touch directly, but it can be thought and graphed. As Morton puts it elsewhere, we know it exists and that we’re part of it. It affects us all and we should care about it.15 What’s important for Morton is that these hyperobjects “smash almost all of the coordinates by which we think we know a ‘world’ or the ‘Earth’: matter, time and space.”16 Their extensiveness, complexity, and duration “humiliate” the human.17 Hyperobjects, as developed by Morton, share certain properties. They are, to begin with, “viscous.” They are hard to shake, they “‘stick’ to

194  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock beings that are involved with them.” We don’t access them from a distance, but instead (and note the already gothicized language), Morton writes of them that, “Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces.”18 As Morton explains elsewhere, hyperobjects “stick to us and penetrate us, thus abolishing concepts of distance and norms concerning meaning and propriety.”19 Despite being unable to see or touch climate change, for example, it nevertheless affects us directly and is all around us, manifesting as weather, as melting icecaps, as rising sea levels. This sticky nearness is also a part of hyperobjects’ uncanniness: our becoming aware of them is unsettling and makes us feel not at home in the world anymore. 20 Despite their sticky nearness, however, hyperobjects are also described by Morton as “nonlocal.” Put differently, “any ‘local manifestation’ of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject.”21 Ocean waves are not the ocean, and an unusually warm day in winter is not itself global warming. “Massively distributed in time and space,”22 hyperobjects “do not manifest at a specific time and place but rather are stretched out in such a way as to challenge the idea that a thing must occupy a specific place and time.”23 We do not experience climate change itself; instead, as noted, we experience a symptom of it: weather. We do not experience evolution itself but rather the expression of particular genes. We do not experience capitalism itself but rather a set of specific economic interactions and transactions. Part of the non-locality of the hyperobject is also its inhuman timescale. Hyperobjects, explains Morton, have a temporality so different from that with which we are familiar that they “force us to drop the idea of time as a neutral container.”24 Styrofoam cups will outlive us by 400 years. The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,100 years. Oil “is the result of some dark, secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past.”25 These are immense timescales (Morton divides them up into “the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying” respectively) that chasten human aspirations. 26 Our asymmetric interactions with hyperobjects thus catch us up in what Morton calls “intersecting phases of time,” as “entities that are massively distributed in time exert downward causal pressure on shorter-lived entities.”27 In a paradoxical sense then, hyperobjects come from the future as they define our present. Lastly, hyperobjects manifest their effects “interobjectively.” They catch us up in a “mesh” of relationships in which we never experience things directly but rather as “mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space.”28 As Morton puts it on his blog Ecology Without Nature, hyperobjects “consist of, yet are not reducible to, interactions between a large number of entities.”29 For object-oriented ontologists like Morton, this is indeed the case for all objects as the “real qualities” of objects—as opposed to the sensual qualities perceived by human beings

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  195 and the meanings imposed by people on things—­forever withdraw into the shadows of being. Hyperobjects, however, are exemplary in this respect because of their scale. They make us aware of what Morton, following Heidegger, refers to as “the Rift” between a thing and its “appearance-for another thing, or things.” The mesh of relations is on one side of the Rift, while on the other is the “strange stranger,”30 the ontologically unknowable essence of the thing. Hyperobjects, as “real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans … give us a platform for thinking what [object-oriented ontologist Graham] Harman calls objects in general.”31 Before using this notion of the hyperobject to consider how gothicized natural forces bring about the end of the world in the works of American naturalists, it’s worth pausing a moment to consider how insistently gothic Morton’s rhetoric already is in Hyperobjects—indeed, with its overarching emphasis on global warming and environmental awareness, Hyperobjects itself reads at times like an ecogothic tale. As I mentioned above, Heise points out that Morton frequently refers to the “‘weirdness,’ ‘uncanniness,’ ‘monstrosity,’ and ‘strange strangeness’ of natural as well as human-made objects and environments.”32 The timescales counterpoised against human time are, as noted earlier, “the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying”—and these timescales are “a Medusa that turns us to stone.” The ways in which objects withdraw from knowing, moreover, is likened, referencing Harman’s example, to a “subterranean creature.”33 And in drawing analogies, Morton invokes David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, and Chris Carter’s The X-Files— as well as Lovecraft’s monstrous creation Cthulhu.34 Morton’s rhetoric indeed gets more insistently gothic in register as Hyperobjects develops. Consider this meditation on the implications of doing away with the concept of world: Without a world, there is no Nature. Without a world, there is no life. What exists outside the charmed circles of Nature and life is a charnel ground, a place of life and death, of death-in-life and lifein-death, an undead place of zombies, viroids, junk DNA, ghosts, silicates, cyanide, radiation, demonic forces, and pollution. “Haunting a charnel ground,” continues Morton, seemingly channeling Stephen King, “is a much better analogy for ecological coexistence than inhabiting a world.”35 Or, summoning the specter of Lovecraft, Morton writes of hyperobjects, “We realize that nonhuman entities exist that are incomparably more vast and powerful than we are, and that our reality is caught in them.” The “aesthetic experience of the hyperobject” is one that can only be detected as a “ghostly spectrality”; something about being is “inherently spooky,” and art “becomes an attunement to the demonic.”36 Again and again, Morton has recourse to the language

196  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock of the gothic as he attempts to explain the functioning of hyperobjects and the ways in which they “humiliate” human pretensions to grandeur. And perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising—after all, what he is addressing are phenomena that are extraordinarily threatening from the human perspective. They prompt the “realization by humans that they are not running the show.”37 From the human perspective, awareness of hyperobjects thrusts us into the center of an ecogothic tale. Morton’s gothic tale of human decentering, however, isn’t a twenty-first century development. My argument here is that the same insights about what Morton refers to as hyperobjects are clearly evident in nineteenth-­ century naturalist works. Taking war and weather, evolution and energy, climate and capitalism as their subject, naturalist works showcase how these hyperobjects bring about the end of the “world”—directly and sometimes literally for their protagonists, implicitly for readers. And attentiveness to the roles of hyperobjects in naturalist works highlights the gothic undercurrent that sweeps the reader along in such works. In the wake of the notion of “world,” as Morton suggests, the idea of the “charnel ground” seems an apt descriptor for naturalist environments. Setting the stage for twentieth-century weird literature and Lovecraftian cosmic horror, the pessimistic determinism of nineteenth-century naturalist works, asserting that human beings are controlled and conditioned by forces beyond their awareness and control, foregrounds hyperobjects as a key source of ecogothic horror. Recognizing the role of hyperobjects in nineteenth-century naturalist works thus not only helps us trace the genealogy of contemporary apocalyptic thinking but provides a productive conceptual framework for thinking through the gothic affect conveyed by these works. Not least, the gothic qualities of naturalist works correlate perfectly with the humiliation of the human by hyperobjects.

2.  One Hundred and Seven Below: Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” An obvious starting point for this consideration of hyperobjects and apocalypse in nineteenth-century American naturalist works is Jack London’s oft-anthologized short story “To Build a Fire” (1908), in which the author strips the plot down to the bare bones: inexperienced Yukon adventurer hubristically contends with Mother Nature and comes up short. In the story, the unnamed male protagonist and his equally generic dog make an ill-advised trek across frozen terrain in extreme cold against the advice of more experienced “old-timers” of the region who assert that a traveling companion is a necessity when the temperature is colder than fifty below. The situation takes the anticipated dark turn when the man gets his feet wet, and all hope is extinguished with his poorly situated fire, which gets snuffed out by falling snow from a tree. In the end, the man freezes to death, and the dog runs off to seek shelter.

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  197 The clear antagonist in this gothic tale of human folly in the face of the severity of nature is the hyperobject climate, which manifests in the form of inhospitable cold—uncanny cold that undoes the world, rendering it unhomely. The man, quite simply, does not belong in the Yukon. This is first because he is a “chechaquo,” a greenhorn, a newcomer to the region who doesn’t know the rules.38 More to the point, however, he doesn’t belong in the Yukon because human beings in general don’t belong there: the narrator tells us that, “This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point” (543). This kind of cold is otherworldly. It is cold not of world but of space—in London’s framing, it is literally cosmic cold that humiliates humanity’s pretensions to grandeur. “The cold of space,” writes London, “smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow” (544). Not an environment for humans, this is an antagonistic situation in which the hyperobject climate, manifesting as extreme cold, exerts itself in an uncanny way as it renders porous the boundary between planet and space, undoing the notion of a discrete, bounded “world.” Unfortunately, the man lacks both the instincts and the imagination to appreciate this lesson in human insufficiency. London repeatedly makes clear that the man’s nonhuman companion, the dog, acts on instinct and has evolved the necessary physiology and survival strategies to contend with extreme cold. The dog belongs—and, in belonging, recognizes that what the man is attempting is stupid. “The animal,” writes London, “was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment” (540). “The dog did not know anything about thermometers,” continues London. “Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct” (540). While the man—and generations of his ancestry— are ignorant of extreme cold, “the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge” (543). The dog is at home in the extreme cold—able to appreciate on an instinctive level that such cold is dangerous. Its instincts then direct it to act accordingly: to want to turn back, to seek fire, to want to curl up and bury itself beneath the snow. The man, in contrast, does not know cold—and the danger of this ignorance is amplified by his unreflective and unimaginative nature. Crucially for London—and for the man’s fate in the story—the extreme cold did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of temperature; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe. (539)

198  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock Were this a Lovecraft story (say, At the Mountains of Madness [1936], which is set in the Antarctic rather than the Yukon), the man might gradually arrive at the realization that the universe is a forbidding and inhospitable place for human beings, filled with powers and forces—­ hyperobjects—that greatly exceed man’s capacity for understanding. But this is not a Lovecraft story, and London’s protagonist is unable to imagine the fragility of human existence: Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head. (539) Even in the end, when it becomes clear to the man that he isn’t going to survive, his last thoughts are that there are worse ways to die than freezing to death and that the old-timer who warned him about the dangers of traveling alone in extreme cold was right (550–51). The non-­ local but nevertheless “sticky” hyperobject “climate” has surrounded and “entangled” him. 39 The extreme cold has, in a sense, come from the man’s future, circumscribing his possibilities and forcing upon him an intimate relationship with his own death. In “To Build a Fire,” the hyperobject climate literally results in the end of the world for the man, who freezes to death. But more to the point, the world essentially ended for him from the moment he set off on his journey into the sticky, viscous cold. The cold enveloped him and penetrated him everywhere and nowhere all at once. It was something that became known to him inter-objectively through its effects on other things: the icy chewing tobacco that hung like a kind of stalactite beard, the spit that froze with a crack before hitting the ground, his frozen cheeks, his wet socks and shoes, and finally his increasingly sluggish body. And entering into the cold for the man meant entering into a kind of “temporal undulation”40 as he traversed a frozen space defined by its nonhuman temporality. The idea of world faded for him, although he lacked the awareness to observe it as he was caught up in the inhuman embrace of the hyperobject. This is ecogothic at its most stark: human beings humiliated by cosmic forces that undo the world.

3.  Visible Layers of Heat: Frank Norris’s McTeague In some respects, the unreflective and unimaginative protagonist of London’s “To Build a Fire,” who freezes to death in the Yukon, finds his mirror reflection in McTeague, the dim-witted brutish dentist in Norris’s naturalist novel, who, driven by need and fueled by whiskey, beats his wife to death

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  199 and then ends up stranded without water and handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of California’s Death Valley. McTeague is central among the novels that literary critic Pizer uses to define naturalism in his foundational work, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1966). For Pizer, naturalism is defined by two tensions: the first is between the “extraordinary and excessive in human nature” that the naturalist author locates within the “commonplace and unheroic” aspects of human existence; the second is between acknowledging the contingency of human existence while nevertheless seeking to validate it as meaningful: The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life.41 With this in mind, Pizer reads McTeague as illustrating the ways in which “beneath the surface placidity of life” lurk “atavistic and destructive” qualities against which human beings must contend. Poor, stupid McTeague, according to Pizer, bears witness to the fact that “tragedy is inherent in the human situation given man’s animal past and the possibility that he will be dominated by that past in particular circumstances.”42 Shaped by both genes and circumstances, McTeague’s heroism, such as it is, inheres in attempting to contend against impersonal forces that he can’t control: heredity, genetics, weather, capitalism, social conditioning, and what Pizer calls “atavistic brutality.”43 Put differently, the character McTeague in a sense dissolves within a nexus of hyperobjects that both surround and penetrate him—he is inside them, and they are inside him. Like the protagonist in “To Build a Fire,” who is the most recent scion of generations of ancestry ignorant of real cold, McTeague’s inheritance consists of specific family genes (including a sensitivity to alcohol) as well as “the emotions and instincts of man’s animal past.”44 His identity has been determined by millennia of genetic combination and evolution. Early in the novel, when McTeague finds himself powerfully attracted to the pretty young woman, Trina Sieppe, who sits unconscious in his dentist’s chair, Norris writes of the brutish lust McTeague experiences, Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of his father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins.45 Norris reveals McTeague—and, by extension, human beings in general—­to be inherently what Stacy Alaimo refers to as “trans-­corporeal,” always

200  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock “intermeshed with the more-than-human world” just as we are subject to what Morton would refer to as the “downward causal pressure” of hyperobjects, including evolution and the inheritance and expression of particular genes that have evolved and been transferred across millennia.46 In the same way that he is shaped by the hyperobject evolution on the most basic cellular level, McTeague is also conditioned by two other significant hyperobjects: capitalism and weather. Like Morton’s other examples of hyperobjects, notably climate change, capitalism is something viscous: whatever we do, it sticks to us. It is non-local: its effects “are globally distributed through a huge tract of time.” It is phased—we experience only a part of it at any one time—and it is inter-objective: it “consists of all kinds of other entities but isn’t reducible to them.”47 Newitz importantly foregrounds the gothic qualities of capitalism in McTeague when she addresses the novel in Pretend We’re Dead as a “foundational narrative for the mad doctor genre” in which “doctors go mad in the pursuit of professional class status.”48 At the start of the novel, McTeague is a dentist who has learned his trade by apprenticing for a traveling dentist, “more or less of a charlatan,” who came to his small mining town (6). Complications ensue in the novel when McTeague receives notification from San Francisco City Hall that he is barred from practicing dentistry because he never received a diploma from a dental college. As summarized by Newitz, “Driven into manual labor jobs, deprived of the prosperity he has enjoyed for many years, and increasingly more ‘brutish,’ McTeague becomes an unemployed alcoholic who beats, abandons, and ultimately murders his wife.” McTeague, for Newitz, demonstrates the ways in which the pursuit of class status within a capitalist society strips people of their humanity and turns them into brutes.49 Newitz’s analysis of the downward causal pressure of the hyperobject capitalism in McTeague, however, can be greatly expanded to encompass the other characters and the mesh of their relations. Part of what infuriates the evermore frantic McTeague, leading him to murder his wife, Trina, is her increasingly Scrooge-like fetishizing of money. Trina wins five thousand dollars in a lottery but becomes more and more reluctant to part with a penny of it, even as circumstances become desperate. Rather than use the money she has won, She polished the gold pieces with a mixture of soap and ashes until they shone, wiping them carefully on her apron. Or, again, she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth and jingled them there. She loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly express. (238)

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  201 Trina’s parsimony is matched by the avarice of the Jewish junk dealer, Zerkow, who becomes obsessed to such an extent with the story told by his wife, Maria, of gold plates once owned by her family that it drives him mad and he murders her. And then there is Marcus, Trina’s cousin, who had been courting Trina and feels that McTeague therefore cheated him out of his share of her lottery winnings. The hyperobject capitalism, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the novel, exerts its downward pressure on the characters, conditioning and circumscribing their responses and propelling the action from San Francisco to Death Valley, where another central hyperobject, climate, moves to the fore. Having killed Trina, McTeague goes on the lam with her five thousand dollars in gold pieces in a canvas sack. Pursued by the aggrieved Marcus, McTeague moves further and further away from civilization and into Death Valley, where the heat “became a thing of terror” (327), and the world transforms into “one gigantic blinding glare, silent, motionless” (323). As with the protagonist in London’s “To Build a Fire,” the contest becomes an unequal one as a man squares off against natural forces that vastly exceed his capacity to resist. It is in the midst of the desert wastes that Marcus catches up with McTeague, intent on recovering the gold. They fight and McTeague prevails, but it is only as the dust settles (literally!) that McTeague realizes that something is strapped to his wrist. With no water left, McTeague stands handcuffed to a dead man in the middle of Death Valley. The concept of world dissolves for him into “visible layers of heat” and miles upon miles of desert, “white, naked, inhospitable, palpitating and shimmering under the sun, unbroken by so much as a rock or cactus stump” (303, 322). Forced into an intimate relationship with his own mortality by the hyperobject climate manifesting as extreme heat, McTeague is, in a sense, already dead.

4.  Silent Black Waves: Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” Crane’s 1897 short story “The Open Boat” arguably renders most vividly the cosmic dread inherent in the elemental antagonists of American naturalism. In this story, the hyperobject with which the protagonists must contend is the sea. After a shipwreck, four men find themselves adrift in a ten-foot dingy, battling “barbarously abrupt and tall” waves as they attempt to reach shore.50 The famous opening lines of the story foreground the stripped-down plot of the narrative: None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The

202  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. (466) Like the protagonist in London’s “To Build a Fire” and McTeague in Norris’s novel, the men in Crane’s “The Open Boat” find themselves adrift in inhospitable territory, confronted by forces of nature beyond their control. Buffeted by the waves, constantly in danger of drowning, the men attempt to find meaning in their situation. They question why they have been spared from the sinking ship if only to be drowned close to shore; they try to make sense of cryptic waving from people on the beach in the distance; they regard the presence of a bird flying parallel to the boat as “somehow grewsome [sic] and ominous” (469). But the conclusion toward which the narrative leads us is vastly more unsettling: the world is not made for human beings and resists our attempts to impose meaning and order. The narrator first expresses this realization of humanity’s impotence as follows: When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. (480) There is a telling incoherence to this statement that exemplifies the human desire to impose meaning on an experience that will always exceed and resist that imposition. Nature here is simultaneously personified as an uncaring woman and dematerialized into an impersonal force. Bricks are used to build temples to gods, but there are no bricks or temples to nature because nature is not a person or a thing but rather a force— or, more properly, the intermeshing of hyperobjects: gravity, radiation, climate, the ocean, and so on. As hyperobjects interact with other hyperobjects, the notion of a discrete, bounded “world” dissolves. This realization of the humiliation of the human by hyperobjects is developed more fully by the narrator in one of the story’s most famous passages. As one of the men on the boat, the correspondent, contemplates a tall “wind-tower” on the shore, the narrator explains, This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. (483)

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  203 This is the essence of what Lovecraft refers to as cosmic dread: the realization that human beings are as ants in an indifferent universe. At the end of the story, three of the men make it safely to the shore while one drowns. There is no rhyme or reason as to why the man drowns: it is not the animosity of a personified nature nor is it fate; it is simply the way events unfold as the men interact with the overwhelming force of the hyperobject ocean.

5.  There is No World, Only Hyperobjects The elemental antagonists of American naturalism and the means through which they humiliate human pretensions offer proleptic portraits of what Morton calls hyperobjects: things “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”51 that “smash almost all of the coordinates by which we think we know a ‘world’ or the ‘Earth’: matter, time and space.”52 These hyperobjects—including climate, genetics, capitalism, and the ocean—end the world for the protagonists; this is sometimes in the literal sense of overwhelming them and forcing them into an intimate relationship with their own mortality and other times in the sense of undoing the notion of “world” as a coherent, unified concept. Naturalist works with elemental antagonists show us that there is no “world,” only the intermeshing of hyperobjects. From the human perspective, while this realization might in some ways be liberating, it is nevertheless the source of Lovecraftian cosmic dread as humans are shown not to matter in the larger scheme of things. Even as human beings seek to render experience meaningful and to look for purpose in the events that transpire, notions of deep time and the ungraspable complexity of hyperobjects humiliate human aspirations and undercut anthropocentrism. This is ecogothic at perhaps its most stark: we are as ants before an indifferent tower with no one inside it. Well in advance of contemporary realizations of global warming and the anxiety associated with it, it turns out that American naturalist texts were already at work, showing us the end of the world.

Notes 1 Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead, 16, 55, 7. 2 Pizer, The Theory and Practice, 87. 3 Morton, Hyperobjects, 1, 76. 4 Pizer, The Theory and Practice, 85. 5 Morton, Hyperobjects, 130, 139. 6 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” 4. 7 Morton, Hyperobjects, 17. 8 Szilak, “Review: Hyperobjects.” 9 Morton, Hyperobjects, 1, 6. 10 Heise, “Ursula K. Heise Reviews Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects.” 11 Muecke, “Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects.” 12 Morton, “What Does Hyperobjects Say?” 13 Morton, Hyperobjects, 118, 6.

204  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 14 Ibid., 1. 15 Morton, “Introducing.” 16 Daggett, “Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton.” 17 Morton, Hyperobjects, 17. 18 Ibid., 1, 27. 19 Morton, “What Does Hyperobjects Say?” 20 Morton, Hyperobjects, 28. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Ibid., 48. 23 Morton, “What Does Hyperobjects Say?” 24 Ibid. 25 Morton, Hyperobjects, 60, 59, 58. 26 Ibid., 59. 27 Ibid., 68, 67. 28 Ibid., 1, 86. 29 Morton, “What Does Hyperobjects Say?” 30 Morton, Hyperobjects, 78. 31 Ibid., 15. 32 Heise, “Ursula K. Heise Reviews Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects.” 33 Morton, Hyperobjects, 60, 44. 34 Ibid., 29, 32–33, 106, 64. 35 Ibid., 126. 36 Ibid., 130, 169, 175. 37 Ibid., 164. 38 London, “To Build a Fire,” 539. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 39 Morton, Hyperobjects, 42. 40 Ibid., 67. 41 Pizer, Realism and Naturalism, 13. 42 Ibid., 16, 19. 43 Ibid., 16. 4 4 Ibid. 45 Norris, McTeague, 29. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 46 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2; Morton, Hyperobjects, 67. 47 Morton, “Introducing.” 48 Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead, 55, 58. 49 Ibid., 56, 58. 50 Crane, “The Open Boat,” 466–67. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 51 Morton, Hyperobjects, 1. 52 Daggett, “Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton.”

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” In Nagel and Quirk, The Portable American Realism Reader, 466–87. Daggett, Cara. “Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton.” Society & Space, 5 September 2014. http://societyandspace.org/2014/09/05/hyperobjectsphilosophy-and-ecology-after-the-end-of-the-world-by-timothy-mortonreviewed-by-cara-daggett/.

Hyperobjects and the End of the World  205 Heise, Ursula K. “Ursula K. Heise Reviews Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects.” Critical Inquiry, 2016. http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/ursula_k._heise_ reviews_timothy_morton. London, Jack. “To Build a Fire.” In Nagel and Quirk, The Portable American Realism Reader, 537–51. Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover, 1973. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. ———. “Introducing the Idea of ‘Hyperobjects.’” High Country News, 19 January 2015. www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/introducing-the-idea-of-hyperobjects. ———. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ———. “Introducing the Idea of ‘Hyperobjects.’” High Country News, 19 January 2015. http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/introducing-the-idea-of-hyperobjects. ———. “What Does Hyperobjects Say?” Ecology without Nature, 28 December 2012. https://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/search?q=hyperobjects. Muecke, Stephen. “Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 February 2014. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ hyperobjects/#! Nagel, James, and Tom Quirk, eds. The Portable American Realism Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Newitz, Annalee. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966. ———. The Theory and Practice of Literary Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Szilak, Illya. “Review: Hyperobjects—Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.” Huffington Post, 17 December 2014. www.huffingtonpost.com/ illya-szilak/review-hyperobjectsphilos_b_5975484.html.

13 “Two Distinct Worlds”? Maintaining and Transgressing the Boundaries of the HumAnimal in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon Michael Fuchs Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern historical novel Mason & Dixon (1997) may not be the first book that comes to mind when discussing the ecogothic in the long nineteenth century. Its main narrative centers on Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon’s westward journey to solve the boundary dispute between William Penn and Lord Baltimore and is primarily set between 1763 and 1767 (albeit filled with anachronisms). This tale is narrated by Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke from a Philadelphia house in 1786. Cherrycoke’s spatiotemporal displacement, his positioning after the American Revolution (in Philadelphia, no less), allows him to reflect on Mason and Dixon’s assignment after the “War [had been] settl’d and the Nation [was] bickering itself into Fragments.”1 At this point in time, the Mason–Dixon Line seemed to have lost much of its symbolic power as an emblem of British colonialism for merely “eight years” after the Line had been drawn, it was “nullified by the War for Independence” (8). However, the Line was to become the symbol of division in the newly born US over the issue of slavery only a few decades later. As the “mystic Chinaman” (543) Captain Zhang tellingly prophesizes, “Nothing will produce Bad History more directly… than drawing a Line… through the midst of a People” because this will lead to “War and Devastation” (615). Published at the end of what Henry Luce famously called the “American Century,” Mason & Dixon looks into the historical rearview mirror and discovers one of the founding moments of the American nation. In so doing, the novel suggests that the drawing of the Mason–Dixon Line was a “Zero-Point of history” (152) signposting the “beginning of the West” (445) as Pynchon transforms the Line into an emblem of the many fault lines haunting American culture at the end of the twentieth century. Christy L. Burns has called Pynchon’s superimposing of eighteenthand twentieth-century themes in Mason & Dixon a “parallactic method” that produces “a full and yet contentiously dialectical representation of ‘America’ as it was in the mid- to late eighteenth century and as it is now” by “synchroniz[ing]… the past with the present.”2 This interplay between different temporal layers, Burns argues, allows

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  207 readers to “interpret history as a dialogue between the differences and the uncanny similarities of that time’s ‘angle’ and their own.”3 The convergence of these two temporally remote points generates an uncanny moment and unearths a (counter-)historical narrative that has been “massively blocked off,” even though the entire nation “ought to normally have access” to it.4 Pynchon thus uncovers veiled histories and the consequences of suppressing them. As Mason understands, “a Ghost” is “nothing more… than a wrong unrighted” (68). Thus, a “Collective Ghost” arises from the “Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves, petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm’d invisible to history” (68). In the American context in particular, the specters of slavery and the ghostly presences of Native Americans highlight “America as a haunted space troubled by revenants from its history of repression and dispossession.”5 Whereas scholars have acknowledged the interconnections between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries that Mason & Dixon explores, I would like to point out here that the century sandwiched between these also proves significant as the novel chronicles a social, economic, and technological development that transformed America into an “Engine of Destruction” (11) that started to operate at full capacity in the nineteenth century. The boundary line the astronomer and surveyor draw plays a key role in this context for the “powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny” exploited the “dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural” (backed by scientific discourse) in order to brush aside the implications of the white man’s displacement and extermination of nonhuman and purportedly subhuman Others in the nineteenth century.6 Accordingly, my essay will suggest that the Mason–Dixon Line harbingers the Westward Movement of the nineteenth century and prophesizes the resultant dark spots on the purportedly clean record that is the forward progress of the American nation. While the expansion toward the (mythical) West had, of course, started when the New World was “discovered” (or even earlier, for that matter), it took full force in the nineteenth century, spurred by technological as well as scientific progress and the attendant hardening of the dividing lines between culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman. Indeed, by highlighting that the group surrounding Mason and Dixon left behind a “slain Forest” (172), Mason & Dixon suggests that although its narrative may be (loosely) based on historical reality, the novel weaves a much more expansive symbolic web as Mason and Dixon’s progress toward the West becomes a symbolic microcosm of events that would unfold “unto the year 1900, and beyond” (324). Dominick LaCapra has explained that “attempts to work out ‘dialogical’ connections between the past and present” allow us to interrelate “historical understanding” and “ethicopolitical concerns.”7

208  Michael Fuchs Following this idea, I will argue that the apparently senseless project of drawing the Line functions as an ecological allegory because it “inflict[s] upon [the Earth] a long, perfect scar” (526). This scar serves as a metaphor for the radical division between the human animal and its surrounding environment.8 In one of the earliest ecocritical readings of Pynchon’s works (written more than a decade before Mason & Dixon was published), Douglas Keesey notes that Pynchon is not merely concerned to promote an understanding of ecology, but also wants to attack the barriers to that understanding—­ for what distorts his characters’ vision of their necessary dependence on others in this world is an ideology promoting division, a view of the whole earth as something to be divided up and devoured for the self’s own gain.9 A result of the intricate classifying systems developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that allowed humankind to rationalize the world’s complexities, the Line initially demarcates humanity from nature, suggesting that “[t]he place where we are is the place where nature is not.”10 However, Pynchon wouldn’t be a “good” postmodernist unless he rejected binary thinking entirely. And, indeed, if not earlier, then once the Line metaphorically transforms into a “tree-slaughtering Animal” with “teeth of Steel” whose “Life’s Blood” is “Disbursement” (678), readers should come to understand that rather than simply obliterating the clear opposition between humanity and nature, Mason & Dixon advocates an awareness of human beings’ “entangle[ment]” in “a maze of unexpected associations between heterogeneous elements.”11

1.  Slain Nature—Haunted Humanity Already, in his classic novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Pynchon touches on ecological questions when the character Frans ponders the extermination of the dodo. As a member of a Dutch hunting expedition on Mauritius, Frans wonders whether the feathered beasts don’t deserve a fighting chance—“don’t I deserve a clumsy weapon for such a clumsy prey?” However, because his fellow countrymen believe “the stumbling birds ill-made to the point of Satanic intervention,” they consider the killing of the bird that lacks “a capacity for flight” and “details of Design” a “devotional act… whose symbolism they underst[an]d,” Frans joins the party and ends up killing hundreds of dodoes. After having committed this crime against nature, Frans begins hearing “voices” that “ma[k]e no waking sense,” “warning him” of the interconnections between the natural and human worlds—though this is a warning he fails to understand.12

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  209 In Mason & Dixon, ecological issues are introduced early and remain a constant throughout the book, garnished with short but illustrative episodes. For example, in their first collaborative project, Mason and Dixon are tasked to observe the transit of Venus on the island of Sumatra. On their way, they spend some time in Cape Town. Their host in southern Africa is Cornelius Vroom, “an Admirer of the legendary Botha brothers,… whose great Joy and accomplishment lay in the hunting and slaughter of animals much larger than they” (60). Vroom’s fascination with these “gin-drinking, pipe-smoking Nimrods” (60) is part and parcel of his masculine performance, which also involves an appreciation of the “manly” act of killing animals. Of course, “[t]he killing of animals… reflects human power over animals at its most extreme.”13 However, the “holocaust of immense proportions” that is the killing of animals is not only a problem in itself14 as the extermination of any species has effects on their ecosystem, if not the biosphere at large. While the large-scale effects of human intervention in the environment are merely adumbrated at this early point of the novel, this idea is taken up again toward the end of Mason and Dixon’s journey in America when they hear the tale of a young lord who goes fishing and “pulls in a small snakelike thing” (588). When the young lord’s friend comes along, he tells the lord to “[t]hrow it back in,” but the lord wonders whether “the River’s quite the place for it” (588) because he fears it may prey on the fish in the water (which are the lord’s to kill). After some back and forth, he “tosses the Worm into [a] Well” (589) rather than back into the river. In the well, the animal quickly starts to grow: “Soon, the water has acquir’d an unpleasant taste, metallic, sour, heavy with reptilian Musk” (589). The beast quickly outgrows the well and begins to feed on “sheep and swine,” while “careless dogs, cats, and humans are but light snacks to it” (589). Consequently, “a circle of Devastation appears” around the animal, “pale and soil’d, which no one enters” (589). This episode illustrates the ways in which human intervention in the environment, spurred by the utter disregard for the interrelated networks driving an ecosystem, may not only go awry but, in fact, may even negatively impact humans (who are, of course, part of the environment). The young lord, significantly a crusader (i.e. the personification of an imperialist colonizer) who ends up in Transylvania (i.e. symbolically becomes a vampire who sucks the life blood out of his victims), is oblivious to the large-scale effects of his seemingly minor crime against nature, which, however, initiates a chain reaction that results in the emergence of a “Zone of emptiness” (590) devoid of life (other than the giant worm). In addition, the episode presents an exemplary cautionary tale that demonstrates how humanity breeds the monsters it consequently tries to eradicate. “Monsters,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has tellingly argued, “are our children…. And when they come back, they… bear self-knowledge, human knowledge.”15 Whereas Cohen here highlights that all monsters

210  Michael Fuchs are human creations, some monsters’ human origins are more easily traced than others. Indeed, irrespective of the question of what would have happened if the young lord had not tossed the worm into the well, the tale is “meant to convey by Symbols certain secret teachings” (594). One of the men concludes that the worm must represent “a much older magic, and certainly one the Christians wanted to eradicate” (595). In a sense, this is true. While the young lord goes on to slay the worm, arguably re-­ asserting humanity’s claim to the top spot in the worldly Chain of Being, the fruit of the young lord’s loins and the following eight generations all die prematurely. While, in the tale, this unfortunate development is rationalized by curses laid upon the lord, one may also argue that the worm’s toxic presence close to the castle literally poisoned the lord to the point that it resulted in genetic damages. In this way, mankind’s interventions in the environment, fueled by an ignorance of ecology, are shown to have unwanted long-term effects on humanity. Mason and Dixon’s line presents a similar human intervention in nature. As “Geomancer” Zang explains, Ev’rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,—coastlines, ridge-tops, river-banks,—so honoring the Dragon… within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash,… impossible for any who live out here the year ‘round to see as other than hateful Assault. (542) In this utterance, Zhang highlights the ways in which “humanity lays claim… to the… establishment of order where all before was without form and void.”16 However, he implies that it is a “futile attempt to subordinate a world that is sublimely insubordinate.”17 The phrase “hateful Assault” implies that humanity’s actions are bound to provoke a counter-attack by Gaia, who it is assumed—mankind cannot resist (suggesting that humankind is haunted by the abstract specter of Nature’s wrath). However, Mason & Dixon suggests that the reality of life on planet Earth provides sufficient tactical weaponry to shake the rationalist worldview to its very foundations.

2.  The (Not-Quite) Animal (Not-Quite) Other Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds has outlined Mason & Dixon’s relation to classifying schemes in the late eighteenth century, explaining that one of the driving forces behind the systematization of the world was to “taxonomize hybridity out of official existence.”18 Before humankind became enlightened, “folks… believed… all kinds of things had been

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  211 possible” because “[t]he laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then.”19 The rational(ized) human, however, “engaged in… the description of a static, hierarchic nature.”20 Mankind thus introduced “a gulf between mind and Nature” and consequently “relegated hybridity to the popular sphere of ‘monstrosity.’”21 Accordingly, the monsters Mason and Dixon come across during their journeys are not wolves, bears, or other predators because these animals are easy to classify in the Linnaean system; rather, the truly monstrous beings they chance upon are creatures that defy categorization. For example, when Mason and Dixon (and readers) encounter a talking dog at the Cape of Good Hope, Mason remarks, “[t]his dog… is causing me ap-pre-hen-sion” because talking dogs are “creatures of miracle” that ought not exist in material reality (20). 22 While, for readers, the appearance of the Learnéd Dog primarily has a comical effect, for Mason, quite the opposite is the case. By verbalizing his uneasiness with confronting the dog displaying human qualities, the British astronomer (relayed via Cherrycoke, relayed via Pynchon) conjures up the Freudian notion of the uncanny in two ways: on the one hand, Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established.”23 On the other hand, he explains, “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”24 Apparently, man’s best friend falls into the established and unambiguous category of “dog,” while talking dogs belong to the fantastic. But this particular canine is different as his ability to use human language moves him ever closer to the category of “human,” while his existence in the material reality of the fictional world further questions existing ontologies. To top it off, the Learnéd Dog does not parrot; he cannot just repeat words without comprehending them—he has acquired the ability to reason: ‘Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog—Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns. What there are, however, are Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick. […] Once, the only reason Men kept Dogs was for food. Noting that among Men no crime was quite so abhorr’d as eating the flesh of another human, Dog quickly learn’d to act as human as possible,—and to pass this Ability on from Parents to Pups. (22) Pynchon evidently pokes fun at the enlightened worldview here for the dog’s explanation is nearly too rational: he, as a talking dog, should only exist in the realm of fantasy, like “Dragons and Unicorns.” However, according to the Learnéd D., dogs at some point in history began to

212  Michael Fuchs understand that to mimic human actions would bring them (categorically, but also emotionally) closer to humans. Accordingly, they have passed down this knowledge from generation to generation. At some point, some canine fellows concluded that the closest they could get to human beings was by acquiring human language and the ability to reason—all for the sake of survival. In other words, the Learnéd Dog’s monstrous liminality—inhabiting a twilight zone between man and dog—results from the biological drive to survive in the everlasting struggle for life that is the survival of the fittest. Interestingly, Charles Darwin noted that as a result of the struggle for life, variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. 25 Hence, the Learnéd Dog introduces a slant of nineteenth-century evolutionism into the mid-eighteenth century, questioning the clear divisions Mason and Dixon’s journey seeks to establish. Yet the canine does not simply reiterate Darwinian evolutionism either. After all, he stresses that puppies do not just inherit the ability to act human; dogs “pass this Ability on,” which implies canine history and thus culture. Accordingly, by being nearly too human-like, the talking dog emblematizes the anxiety that the Other may not be so different from the Self after all and that consequently, the line separating nature from culture, human from nonhuman, may be random too. The novel further develops the entanglement of human and nonhuman, nature and culture, the semiotic system and material reality—all interrelated in ways more intricate than simple binaries would suggest—­ when Mason and Dixon come across an incarnation of Vaucanson’s Canard Digérateur, the infamous mechanical duck, built in 1739, that simulated the process of digestion. A French chef named Armand Allegre narrates that Vaucanson decided to afford “his Automaton a Digestionary Process” so that the “end result could not be distinguish’d from that found in Nature” (372). Eventually, the chef explains, the duck underwent a “strange Metamorphosis” that “sent it out the Gates of the Inanimate… into the given World” (372). Because Allegre became famous for his duck dishes, the feathered beast approached “the terrible Bluebeard of the Kitchen, whose celebrity [was] purchas’d with the lives of [its] race” one day (375). If the chef wanted to “deflect” the duck’s “Wrath” (376), he would have to bring her the “other Duck,

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  213 which Vaucanson has kept ever on hand” (376), the duck suggested. When the chef failed to do so, the duck “began paying regular visits” (378). The mechanical duck started to, quite literally, haunt the French cook. While the duck is “artificial and deathless” (380), it simultaneously lives, seeking a man-made mate, clearly evoking the brief episode on the monster’s bride in Frankenstein (1818). Like the Learnéd Dog, the mechanical duck exists beyond strict binaries. As Wolfgang Kayser notes in his seminal book The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957), “The mechanical object is alienated by being brought to life.”26 After all, “[t]he best… technology” generally exists “in opposition to the traditional image of what is… living.”27 Yet by interweaving technology and the animal, Mason & Dixon invites its readers to recognize the ways in which animals became embedded in the emerging industrial environment. As Akira Mizuta Lippit explains in Electric Animal (2000), [T]he idioms and histories of numerous technological innovations from the steam engine to quantum mechanics bear the traces of an incorporated animality. James Watt and later Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney, and Erwin Schrödinger… found uses for animal spirits in developing their respective machines, creating in the process a series of fantastic hybrids. 28 On the other hand, the duck introduces a different ontology, an alternative way of conceiving of the ways in which the world operates. Indeed, at some point, even “Time… no longer matters to her” (637) as Allegre becomes haunted by thoughts of the duck, yet its mechanized body is absent. By transcending the iron grip of (mechanized) time, the mechanical duck ascends to the spectral sphere. In Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida famously explains that the “spectral moment… no longer belongs to time”29 before elaborating on the specter: “[T]his non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge.”30 But whereas for Derrida, the specter is caught in a never-ending play of signification, Mason & Dixon points toward the possibility of a deeper understanding outside the semiotic domain that Mason and Dixon may reach if they embrace the unknown: an ancient knowledge out there in the uncivilized world, barely accessible to human beings.

3.  The Innocence of Animals Mason & Dixon’s constant establishment and concomitant transgression of boundaries creates “a continual impression of instability and

214  Michael Fuchs uncertainty” about the borderlines between the civilized and controlled (white) man-made environment and chaotic nature inhabited by animals and “lower” forms of human beings. 31 This deconstructive (for the lack of a better term) gesture culminates when Mason and Dixon’s party reaches the Allegheny Crest. “Across it,” the surveyors are warned, “things are not so civiliz’d” (467). With the barbaric threat and the growing awareness that their scientific knowledge cannot help them comprehend the world looming large, the two scientists come to understand that they have, in fact, produced “two boundary lines, one ‘straight,’ and one, about a thousandth of a Mile longer, ‘curv’d’” (468). These two lines symbolize a problem inherent to Mason and Dixon’s project. As Gábor Tamás Molnár has explained, while “[t]he Line… looks straight when viewed from the surface of the Earth or on a two-­ dimensional map,” when looked at “[f]rom a geometrical” perspective, it becomes a “parabolic curve.” “The difference between the two,” Molnár continues, symbolizes “the difference between a human point of view and a superhuman one.” In other words, while the Line was meant to settle the score once and for all to represent an objective Truth, there was never merely one line to begin with. Thus, the novel’s “geometrical metaphor… connotes the cosmic insignificance of human existence, the negligible restrictiveness of human perspective for the broader claims of scientific truth.”32 Here, Mason and Dixon’s problems with accurately drawing the Line symbolically converge with the line’s separating colonized and civilized America from its barbarian Other, which, the novel suggests, is also hard to maintain. Tellingly, the farther the expedition moves westward, the more Mason and Dixon come to understand that there is “too much, out here… to mark the Boundaries between Reality and Representation” (429). While this quotation may be considered the quintessential slogan of postmodernism, the blurring of two ontologies that should be clearly kept apart underlines the central problem faced by the two scientists: where to draw the line? Or, as one of the Mohawks whom the British meet toward the end of their journey wonders, “Why are you doing this?” (641). In hindsight, Cherrycoke diagnoses that “what [they] were doing out in that Country… was… ultimately meaningless” (8). Historically speaking, this is certainly the case. “Americans are familiar with [Mason and Dixon] only by a quirk of history: the line that they drew happened to become a symbolic marker that divided slave states from free states.”33 As a result, outside of Pynchon scholarship, “only a few dated articles have been written” about the two British explorers. 34 However, it is exactly this concurrence of historical circumstances that allows Pynchon to extrapolate on the trajectory of the American nation from this historical moment: “Going west” was “all Futurity” in the 1760s (499), but during their journey toward the future, the British exploration leaves

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  215 behind “a clear sign of Human Presence upon the Planet” (219), heralding the advent of the Anthropocene. Commenting on The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Tony Tanner has observed that “[t]he great subjunctive premise underlying Pynchon’s work is… had America taken a different path.”35 Mason and Dixon’s exploration emerges as possibly the final moment in American history when the nation could have taken the road eventually not taken. During the latter part of the journey, a member of Mason and Dixon’s party tellingly points out, This Age sees a corruption and disabling of the ancient Magick. Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks—these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a Knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed. (487–88) Faced with the coming of global capitalism, the British explorers come across a number of forking paths at which history, emblematized by their journey, could have taken different paths. For example, at one point, “Dixon is sent out into Darkness variable as Moon, thick with predators bestial and human, Indians upon missions forever secret from European eyes, all moving easily among this Community of the Night, interrupted only by the odd unschedul’d Idiot” (468). In this brief episode, Dixon symbolically becomes the Other, invading what Zofia Kolbuszewska has called the “pre-lapsarian” American wilderness, which “precedes any signification.”36 In this way, Mason & Dixon makes explicit how processes of Othering always rely on one’s perspective and how the Other must be inscribed into the Self in order for the Self to define itself. The Self results from the interplay between the Other and the Self as much as the Other only emerges in relation to the Self. Everything is “invisibly connected” (429). As Mason nearly gains a deeper understanding of the world, he also anticipates transcendentalist thinking. After all, about eighty years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would proclaim that “every part and particle is equally connected.”37 Dixon has a similar moment of near-clarity after having returned to the Old World. Sick and seemingly floating in a twilight zone between life and death, he recounts his trip to “Terra Concava,” where he encountered a civilization “who live underground and possess… magickal powers” (740). One of the gnome-like creatures told Dixon, Once the solar parallax is known,… once the necessary Degrees are measur’d, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last, all this will vanish. We will have to

216  Michael Fuchs seek another Space…. Perhaps some of us will try living upon thy own Surface. I am not sure that everyone can adjust from a concave space to a convex one. Here have we been sheltered, nearly everywhere we look is no Sky, but only more Earth.—How many of us, I wonder could live the other way, the way you People do, so exposed to the Outer Darkness? Those terrible Lights, great and small? And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice. Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,—ev’rybody’s axes converge,—forc’d at least thus to acknowledge one another,—an entirely different set of rules for how to behave. (741) The inhabitant of the underworld suggests not simply an alternative way of living but a different kind of thinking about life. Because “ev’rybody’s axes converge,” life in the hollow earth is defined by connections; because “everyone is pointed at everyone else,” the civilization down below emerges as a kind of organism, an assemblage of individual bodies that are, on their end, assemblages of connections on the molecular level. Each body is, effectively and affectively, part of the next, part of the environment. However, their marginal status (and their belief in the rationalist dogmas of the day) keeps Mason and Dixon from embracing the knowledge potentials they uncover during their journey, thus setting the path for history to come. Tellingly, Claire Jean King concludes her recent book Dangerous Crossings (2015) by stressing, “In ecological terms, time is indeed short. But there is still a chance to open ourselves to each other, to see each other. There is still time to become and act together,”38 which uncannily resembles the gnome’s words. Yet despite such brief modicums of hope, “[t]he story of America that Pynchon tells… is inevitably the story of exponentially increasing exploitation undertaken in the name of progress.”39 Indeed, as King underlines, “neoliberal policies, language, and values have pervaded American culture and society” to the point that the “growing environmental awareness notwithstanding, the commodification and instrumentalization of animals and the earth intensifies.”40 This continuing exploitation of Earth’s natural resources is rooted in humankind’s unwillingness to see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world.41

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  217 “[S]upposing Progress Westward were a journey, returning unto Innocence,” Mason muses at one point, then the journey’s “Limit” would be “the innocence of the Animals with whom [Native Americans] must inter-act upon a daily basis” (427). This aside, which promises a much deeper insight into the actual workings of our entangled world, is, however, quickly brushed aside as Mason goes on to speculate that due to constant threat posed by nature, a “Torpedo may hold for [Native Americans] greater appeal than [one] may guess” (427). Here, a (romanticized) life in harmony with nature becomes replaced by the introduction of tools in order to enforce human dominance of and control over the nonhuman world. This, Mason & Dixon suggests, is the road America decided to take in the eighteenth century and has diligently followed ever since.

Notes 1 Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 6. Subsequent references to Mason & Dixon will appear parenthetically in the text. Capitalization and italics adopted from the original text unless noted otherwise. 2 Burns, “Postmodern Historiography,” par. 1. 3 Ibid., par. 3. 4 Sedgwick, Coherence, 12. 5 Benea, “Native American Ghostliness,” 162. 6 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 17; Cohen, “Monster Theory,” 8. Jody Emel has illustrated the parallels between the displacement of Native Americans and wolves as a result of the bison’s decimation in the nineteenth century. As she notes, “Reading the military journals of officers tracking the last small groups of free Comanches along the canyons of the Llano Estacado in West Texas is remarkably like reading the accounts of government hunters tracking the last remaining southwestern wolves” (98–99). 7 LaCapra, History, 9–10. 8 Upon meeting Dixon prior to his journey to America, another character remarks, “tis said tha’ll be going to America, to build them a Visto of an Hundred Leagues or more…?” Dixon replies, “Sort of a long Property-Line…. Both sides want the Trees out of the way” (234). Tellingly, the border between the US and Canada, likewise, consists of a twenty-foot “no touching zone” in which all trees have been removed. Due to limited growing season, the trees in the AlaskaYukon border area are cut every fifteen years; however, farther east, trees are cut every five to six years in order to ensure that the border remains visible. 9 Keesey, “Nature and the Supernatural,” 85. 10 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 17. 11 Latour, “Re-Modernization,” 36. 12 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 109–10. 13 Animal Studies Group, “Introduction,” 4. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 20. 16 Cowart, Dark Passages, 6. 17 Millard, “Delineations of Madness and Science,” 114. 18 Hinds, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” 180. 19 Pynchon, “Luddite,” 40.

218  Michael Fuchs 20 Christie, “Ideology and Representation,” 3. 21 Iser, Fictive & Imaginary, 94; Hinds, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” 180. 22 Tellingly, when Mason first sees a Native American moving into the unconquered wilderness, “it ma[kes] him dizzy” (647). As Mason explains, “[T]hey put me in a State of Anxiety Unnatural” for they are “out of all Measure” (647). 23 Freud, “Uncanny,” 241. 24 Ibid., 244. 25 Darwin, Origin, 77. 26 Kayser, The Grotesque, 183. 27 Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, 6. 28 Lippit, Electric Animal, Ch. 6. 29 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 Rodriguez, “Historiographic Metafiction,” 77. 32 Molnár, “Science/Fiction,” 447. 33 Parrish, Civil War to the Apocalypse, 165. 34 Clerk, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon, 1. 35 Tanner, American Mystery, 224. 36 Kolbuszewska, Poetics, 131. 37 Emerson, “Over-Soul,” 207. 38 Kim, Dangerous Crossings, 287. 39 Parrish, Civil War to the Apocalypse, 153. 40 Kim, Dangerous Crossings, 7. 41 Sewall, “Beauty and the Brain,” 265.

Bibliography Animal Studies Group, The. “Introduction.” In Killing Animals, edited by the Animal Studies Group, 1–9. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Benea, Diana. “Spaces of Native American Ghostliness in Thomas Pynchon’s ­Mason & Dixon.” In Placing America: American Culture and Its Spaces, edited by Michael Fuchs and Maria-Theresia Holub, 161–71. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Burns, Cindy L. “Postmodern Historiography: Politics and the Parallactic Method in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” Postmodern Culture 14.1 (2003): n.p. Christie, John R. R. “Ideology and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” Oxford Art Journal 13.1 (1990): 3–10. Clerc, Charles. Mason & Dixon & Pynchon. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Copestake, Ian D., ed. American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1.1 (1996): 7–28. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species 1859. 6th ed., 1872. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909.

“Two Distinct Worlds”?  219 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International 1993. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, 1994. New York: Routledge, 2006. Emel, Jody. “Are You Man Enough, Big Bad Enough? Wolf Eradication in the US.” In Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in Nature-­C ulture Borderlands, edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, 91–116. London: Verso, 1998. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Over-Soul.” 1841. In Nature and Selected Essays, 205–24. New York: Penguin, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” 1919. Translated by James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. 1958. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, 217–56. London: Vintage, 2001. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: The Play of Species in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” In Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-­ Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, edited by Frank Palmeri, 179–99. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature 1957. Translated by Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Keesey, Douglas. “Nature and the Supernatural: Pynchon’s Ecological Ghost Stories.” Pynchon Notes 18–19 (1986): 84–95. Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kolbuszewska, Zofia. The Poetics of Chronotope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Lublin: Learned Society of the Catholic University of Lublin, 2000. LaCapra, Dominick. History, Politics, and the Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Latour, Bruno. “Is Re-Modernization Occurring—And If So, How to Prove It? A Commentary on Ulrich Beck.” Theory, Culture & Society 20.2 (2003): 35–48. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Kindle edition. Millard, William B. “Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction.” In Copestake, American Postmodernity, 83–127. Molnár, Gábor Tamás. “Science/Fiction: Institutions of Knowledge in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” In Ereignis Literatur, edited by Csongor Lőrincz, 437–65. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Parrish, Timothy. From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow 1973. New York: Penguin, 2012. ———. “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, 1; 40–41. ———. Mason & Dixon 1997. London: Vintage, 1998. Rodriguez, Francisco Collado. “Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction, and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites.” In Copestake, American Postmodernity, 71–81.

220  Michael Fuchs Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen, 1986. Sewall, Laura. “Beauty and the Brain.” In Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species, edited by Peter H. Kahn, Jr. and Patricia H. Hasbach, 265–84. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Tanner, Tony. The American Mystery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Notes on Contributors

Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. is an associate professor of history at Lamar University. He is the author of The American Elsewhere: Adventure and Manliness in the Age of Expansion (2017) and More Zeal than Discretion: The Westward Adventures of Walter P. Lane (2008). He is also the editor of The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare (2013). Cari M. Carpenter is associate professor of English at West Virginia University, where she is also Interim Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and a core member of the Native American Studies Committee. She has published three books: The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Public Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891 (co-edited with Carolyn Sorisio, University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics (University of Nebraska Press, 2010); and Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (The Ohio State University Press, 2008). She has published numerous essays in journals like Wicazo-Sa, Legacy, American Indian Quarterly, and Studies in American Indian Literature. Michael Fuchs is an assistant professor in American Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. He has co-edited three books and authored or co-authored more than two dozen published and forthcoming journal articles and book chapters on American television, horror and adult cinema, video games, transmedia storytelling and media convergence, and contemporary American literature. He is currently working on three monographs (one of which focuses on monstrous animals) and co-editing three book, and a special issue of the European Journal of American Studies on animals in American TV. Lesley Ginsberg is associate professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her essays on the Gothic have appeared in the collection American Gothic and in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Her work on Hawthorne may also be found in American Literature and in Studies in American Fiction. With Monika M. Elbert, she has

222  Notes on Contributors co-edited Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts (Routledge, 2015). Tom J. Hillard is associate professor of English at Boise State University, where he directs the MA in English program and teaches courses on early American literature, environmental literary studies, and gothic literature. He is Book Review Editor for the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. His scholarly research focuses on the intersections between fear, writing about nature, and the literary gothic in American literature and culture. He co-edited Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on Pre-1800 Literature of the American Frontiers (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and he is currently working on several projects related to ­ecocriticism and the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Kate Huber is assistant professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, where she specializes in American literature to 1865. She received her PhD from Temple University in 2013. She has recently presented papers at C19 and the annual conferences for the American Literature Association and the Western Literature Association. Her current research includes the representation of linguistic difference in nineteenth-century American travel writing and James Fenimore Cooper in the Anthropocene. Liz Hutter earned her doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and she is currently a visiting assistant professor in the English department at Valparaiso University. Her research interests include oceanic studies, environmental studies, nineteenth-century American literature and culture, and technical/ professional communication. Her current project examines the phenomenon of dying at sea and its related discourses of grief, rescue, and resuscitation in the daily lives of early Americans. Her work on the early American and European humane societies has been published in the journal Configurations. Dawn Keetley is professor of English at Lehigh University. Her research interests include the gothic and horror in literature, film, and television, from the nineteenth century to the present. She has published most recently in Gothic Studies (2013), The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (2014), and the Journal of Popular Television (2015). She is the editor of “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and the Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014), the co-­editor (with Angela Tenga) of Plant Horror: The Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). She is working on a book on uncanny horror in the 2010s and an edited collection on Jordan

Notes on Contributors  223 Peele’s Get Out. She also runs a horror website with two equally avid horror fans: www.horrorhomeroom.com. Jennifer Schell is associate professor of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her specialties include American literature, Alaskan/Arctic writing, print and visual culture, animal studies, and environmental humanities. She is the author of “A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), and she has published essays on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Owen Wister’s Yellowstone stories, and the History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers. She is currently working on a book manuscript on ecogothic extinction writing. Matthew Wynn Sivils, Professor of English at Iowa State University, teaches courses on the environmental humanities, pre-1900 American literary culture, and the American gothic. He is the author or editor of seven books, most recently the monograph, American Environmental Fiction, 1782–1847 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014) and a critical edition of Paul L. Errington’s Of Wilderness and Wolves (University of Iowa Press, 2015). He has also published numerous articles on American gothic and the natural world, most recently “American Gothic and the Environment, 1800–Present” (in The Gothic World, Routledge, 2013) and “Gothic Landscapes of the South” (in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Amanda Stuckey is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include hemispheric American studies, disability theory, early American literature, and the history of the book, and her dissertation, entitled “Disciplining Deviance: Reading Bodies in American Literary History, 1789–1881,” synthesizes these interests by analyzing the relationship between unconventional bodies, books, and reading practices. Her essay “Fictions of Wholeness: Claiming the Land in Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie” is part of a collection entitled Disability and the Environment in American Literature: Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm,” forthcoming in 2016 from Rowman and Littlefield Press. Lisa M. Vetere is an associate professor of English at Monmouth University, where she teaches courses in American literature, theory and criticism, and writing. Her research focuses on the relationship between early nineteenth-century narratives and historical crises, such as the Salem witch trials, though recently, her focus has shifted to the horrors of environmental history. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History and JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory; the latter was recognized by American Literary Scholarship as a 2012 “noteworthy period study” in early nineteenth-century literature.

224  Notes on Contributors Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University and the author or editor of nineteen books. These include The Age of Lovecraft (co-edited with Carl Sederholm, University of Minnesota Press), Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture (co-­ authored with Isabella van Elferen, Routledge), Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory & Genre on Television (co-edited with Catherine Spooner, Palgrave), and The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (Columbia University Press). At present, he is editing the Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic and completing a monograph on new materialism and the gothic. He is also an associate editor for The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Jericho Williams received his PhD in English from West Virginia University. He is an independent scholar in San Francisco, where he researches American literature, environmental literature, and education. His essay “Trigger Warning: Thoreau, ‘Chesuncook,’ and the Complications of Hunting” appeared in The Thoreau Society Bulletin (2014), and his essay “Hectic Rhythms: Unseen and Unappreciated Knowledge in Harlem Renaissance Fiction” is featured in Critical Insights: The Harlem Renaissance (Salem Press, 2015). He is preparing forthcoming essays about Toni Morrison, Edith Wharton, and women’s hunting memoirs.

Index

Note: An ‘f’ or ‘n’ following a page number indicates a figure or endnote, respectively. abjection 32–33, 115 abolitionism 55, 62n10, 62n17, 78n3 Abram, David 110 “A. Bronson Alcott’s Works” (Lane), 123 Adams-Campbell, Melissa 43 air and fire 106, 107–108, 107–110, 123, 147–148, 155, 156, 187 Alaimo, Stacy 6, 9, 12–13, 23–24, 108, 147. see also transcorporality Alaska Free Press (newspaper) 181–182, 183 Alaskan (periodical) 182 Alcott, Bronson 119, 123–126, 127, 129 “Alice Doan’s Appeal” (Hawthorne) 163–166 Allen, Valerie 98, 100–101, 102, 103 Allen, Willis Boyd 176, 183–185 Allewaert, Monique 38, 42, 43 American Buffaloe (Peale) 71 American Naturalism 191–203 American Notebooks (Hawthorne) 114 American Writers and the Picturesque Tour (Lueck) 33n13 Animal Horror Cinema (Gregersdotter, Höglund, and Hållen) 176 animals and animality. see also extinctions; the humanimal; the monstrous; the nonhuman; predators and prey; taming (domesticity); wild men; climate change and 68; displacement of 217n6; Edgar Huntly and 26–27,

30–32; Hawthorne and 115; Mason & Dixon and 211–217; Native Americans and 30; “Open Boat” and 202; Poe and 91, 92, 92n7; Pynchon and 208, 209; slave narratives and 135, 140, 141–142, 143–144; “A Struggle for Life” and 9–11; technology and 212–213; “To Build a Fire” and 197; uncanniness and 83–92 Animal That Therefore I Am, The (Derrida) 83, 85 anthropomorphism 83, 84, 85–86, 89, 91, 92, 99, 180. see also the humanimal Ashley, William H. 75 At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft) 198 Badlam, Alexander 183 Baldick, Chris 4, 5–6 Ballou, Maturin 183 Balog, James 147, 148, 149, 152–158 Banner, Rachel 55–56 Barrow Jr., Mark V. 77 Baumgartner, Barbara 59 Baver, Sherrie 40, 47 Bavidge, Jenny 17n2 Baxter, Stephen 188 Beckford, William 62n10 Bell, Alexander Graham 213 Benito Cereno (Melville) 42 Benkendorf (fictional Russian engineer) 180–181, 184 Bennett, Jane 5, 6–7 Bennett, Michael 52, 53 Bermuda Royal Gazette 51–52, 52–53, 62n11 Berrigan, Caitlin 158n29 Berthold, Dennis 33n13

226 Index Beville, Maria 74 “The Birth-mark” (Hawthorne) 114, 122–130 Bismarck Tribune (newspaper) 182 the Black Atlantic 54 “The Black Cat” (Poe) 14, 18n43, 83, 85–88, 89, 91, 93nn17, 19, 22 the body. see also edibility; the humanimal; matter; transcorporality; autonomy of 14; Chasing Ice and 152–153; Chesnutt and 168, 169; climate and 198; Del Principe on 3–4, 10–11, 24, 37, 141; the ecogothic and 37–38; Edgar Huntly and 23–24, 26, 31, 32; fear and 16, 103–104; the gothic and 3, 5, 6, 24, 59, 149; identity and 10–11, 18n12, 38; landscapes and 147–148; Mary Prince and 54, 58–61; “A Night in the Woods” and 66; the nonhuman and 4; Poe’s stories and 108; slavery and 8; the transnational and 62n13 Bodziock, Joseph 6 borders. see boundaries Boston Book, The (Tuckerman, ed.) 67, 78n4 Boston Globe (newspaper) 154 Botting, Fred 5, 99, 178, 179 boundaries (borders). see also dualisms (binaries); entanglement; the humanimal; hybridity; Edgar Huntly and 26; the gothic and 149; mammoth fiction and 179, 180, 184, 187; Mason & Dixon and 213–214, 217n8; matter and 24, 99; Poe and 83, 99; Pynchon and 206–217; slavery and 54, 136; “To Build a Fire” and 197; vortices and 101–102 Bradford, William 1 Brickhouse, Anna 119, 130n11 broadsides 96–97 Broadway Journal, The (New York) 116–117, 118 Brodhead, Richard H. 167 Brown, Charles Brockden 33nn3, 6, 13, 69, 162, 165. see also Edgar Huntly Brown, David L. 70 Brown, William Wells 142 Bryant, John 93n27 Buddhist concepts 171 Buell, Lawrence 2, 52, 61n5, 148

Buffalo Chase, Bulls Making Battle with Men and Horses (Catlin) 72 buffalo extinction 65–78, 188 Buffalo Hunt, Chasing Back (Catlin) 71, 72 the built environment 5–6, 7, 56, 57–58, 98, 161–162. see also the castle; homes, failed Burke, Edmund 25 Burnham, Michelle 43 Burns, Christy L. 206 Burns, Sarah 116 Burr, Ty 154 Burroughs, John 134 Business Insider (periodical) 154 California and Oregon Trail, The (Parkman, Jr.) 70 Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction 62n14 Cambridge History of the American Novel, The 115 Cantalupo, Barbara 116 Cape François 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48n40 capitalism/consumption/market economies; buffalo extinction and 74–76, 77–78; capitalist monster genre 191; environment and 69; hyperobjects and 194, 203; Mason & Dixon and 215, 216; McTeague and 200–201; the monstrous and 66–67; pollution and 144; Pynchon and 208 Carr, Revell 97 Carroll, Lewis 89–90 Carroll, Noël 79n11 Carson, Rachel 2, 17n6 the castle 6, 7, 21, 106, 210 catastrophism 181 Catlin, George 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79n20 “Century of Extermination, A” (Forest and Stream) 177 Channing, William Henry 125 “Charles Brockden Brown” (Berthold) 33n13 Chasing Ice (2013 documentary) 147, 148, 149, 152–158 Chen, Cecilia 99 Chesnutt, Charles 162, 166–170 Chicago Tribune (newspaper) 183 “Circumstance” (Spofford) 9

Index  227 civilization 116, 118, 119, 140, 152, 214, 215–216 Clark, William 175 Clavin, Matt 37 climate change (global warming) 17n2, 68, 188, 192, 193, 194, 195, 200. see also Chasing Ice; crises, environmental Cohen, Claudine 175 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 74, 77, 98–99, 101, 209–210 Cole, Thomas 116–117, 117–118, 125 colonialism 5, 39, 47, 52, 53, 54, 206, 209, 214. see also slavery and slaves Columbus, Christopher 38 conjure tales 166–167 Connolly, Brian 62n13 conservation 76–77, 78, 80n30, 148, 188 control, human. see also determinism and freedom; power relations; versus agency of nature 7; American wilderness and 17n8, 9; “Black Cat” and 87–88; the body and 14, 26; ecophilia and 85; ecophobia and 2–3; Edgar Huntly and 23, 27–28, 32; Enlightenment and 41; Hawthorne and 128, 129; hyperobjects and 193, 195; mammoth fiction and 185; Mason & Dixon and 209–210, 217; meaning of nature and 3; Mt. Soufrière eruption and 51–52; “Open Boat” and 202–203; Poe and 92, 92n7, 93n14; Secret History and 43–44, 44–45, 46–47; slaves and 137, 138, 144 Conversations with Children on the Gospels (Alcott) 129 Cooper, James Fenimore 23 Cooper, Susan Fenimore 134 Corstorphine, Kevin 17nn8, 9, 134, 164 Courrier des États-Unis (periodical), 181 Course of Empire, The (Cole) 116–117, 117–118, 128 “The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire” (New York Historical Society) 130n15 Cowan, William Tynes 138–139 Cowper, William 60, 61 Crane, Stephen 191, 192, 201–203 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de 8–9

Crews, Frederick 5 “Crime and Automatism” (Holmes, Sr.) 15–16, 18n44 crises, environmental 170–171. see also climate change (global warming); deforestation; desertification Crosby, Sara L. 84, 102–103 Crow, Charles 162 Cruikshank, Julie 155 Crying of Lot, The 49 (Tanner) 215 cryonite holes 156 curiosity 103, 104 “Custom House, The” (Hawthorne), 124 Cuvier, George 67 Cyclopaedia (Rees) 108 Dancing with Disaster (Rigby) 104 Dangerous Crossings (King) 216 Dark Ecology (art installation) 156 Daut, Marlene L. 43 Davies, J. 39 Dawkins, W. Boyd 180, 184 Day After Tomorrow, The (film) 157 Dayan, Joan 43 death (mortality). see also extinctions; Chasing Ice and 152–153, 157; the gothic and 85; Hawthorne and 115, 128; hyperobjects and 192; mammoth fiction and 184; Mason & Dixon and 210; McTeague and 201; “Open Boat” and 203; plant horror and 166–167, 169; Poe and 99, 108; slave narratives and 139; “To Build a Fire” and 198 “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’” (Hillard) 17n1, 176; deforestation 39–41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 148, 177, 217n8 Deforesting the Earth (Williams) 38–39 De Laurentiis, Dino 77 de la Vega, Garcilaso 1 Del Principe, David. on the body 3–4, 10–11, 24, 37, 141; on the ecogothic 3, 22, 130n10, 141; on ecophobia 17n2, 33; on evolutionary history 5; on industrialization 69 dependence/independence 54. see also determinism and freedom; liberation (freedom)

228 Index Derrida, Jacques 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93n16, 213 “A Descent into the Maelström” (Poe) 98, 99, 100–104, 105, 111n22 Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique, Et Historique de la Partie Française de L’Isle Saint-Domingue (Moreau de Saint-Méry), 40 desertification 177 Desolation (Cole) 118 determinism and freedom (autonomy) 4, 14, 15–16, 18n44, 129, 192. see also control, human; entrapment Dewar, Colin 188 Dial, The (periodical) 120, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130 Diderot, Denis 41 Dillon, Elizabeth 38, 43 disasters, environmental. see ecocatastrophes Disney, Walt 213 Douglass, Frederick 62n8, 135, 136, 137, 141, 144, 150 “Dreadful Fate of ‘the Buffalo Destroyer’” (Pensyl) 72 Drexler, Michael 43 dualisms (binaries) 24, 54, 105, 162, 207, 213. see also boundaries (borders) Duckert, Lowell 98–99, 110, 154, 155 “The Dumb Witness” (Chesnutt) 169–170 Dun, James Alexander 37 dwelling 99–100, 103. see also homes, failed Dying Buffalo paintings (Catlin) 73f–74f Ebert, Roger 154 ecocatastrophes 96–110, 104, 110n1, 177. see also climate change (global warming); deforestation; desertification ecocinema 153–154. see also Chasing Ice ecocriticism; characterized 1, 2, 51; the ecogothic and 3, 37; ecopopulists versus preservationists and 148; Mary Prince and 61; “material turn” and 23–24; the pastoral and 62n6; Puritanism and 122; slavery and 53–54, 56

EcoGothic (A. Smith and Hughes) 3, 22, 85, 114–115 the ecogothic. see also the body; ecophobia; nature; the nonhuman; the perverse; predators and prey; slavery and slaves; time and space; American 16–17, 17n6; characterized 1–4, 22–23, 33n7, 98, 148, 157, 176–177, 198; colonialism and 54; Del Principe on 3, 22, 130n10, 141; female 170–173; the gothic and 1–2, 23; spelling of 33n7 Ecological Thought, The (Morton) 192 Ecology Without Nature (Morton) 148, 194 ecophilia 84, 85–86, 92, 115, 124. see also romanticism; sentimentalism ecophobia. see also fear (anxiety) (dread); animality and 84; control and 2–3; Del Principe on 17n2, 33; the ecogothic versus 176; Elsie Venner and 13; Estok and 38, 84, 176; Hawthorne and 115; Mt. Soufrière eruption and 51, 52; Poe and 84, 85, 86, 88–89, 92, 92n7, 98; slave narratives and 135; Southern literature and 135 ecopopulists 148 Edgar Huntly (Brown) 33nn3, 9, 162; animality and 26–27, 30–32; ecocriticism and 23–24, 33n9; the ecogothic and 22–23, 33; landscapes and 21–22, 24–26, 32; predators and prey and 28–29; wild men and 26–28 edibility 7–9, 141, 211. see also predators and prey; slavery and 8–9 Edison, Thomas 213 Edmundson, Mark 5, 7 Edwards, Justin 148 Electric Animal (Lippit) 213 elemental antagonists 191–203 “Eliza’s Flight” (song) 150 Elliot, William 135 Ellis, Kate 18n21 Elsie Venner (Holmes, Sr.) 12–16, 18n44, 19n45 Emel, Jody 217n6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 114, 119, 121, 124, 127, 129, 134, 215 end of the world 191–192, 192–196, 198, 203

Index  229 Enlightenment, European 24–25, 31, 41, 79n11 entanglement 208, 212–213, 217. see also hybridity entrapment; buffalo and 78n2; built environment and 5, 6; the gothic and 4, 6–7; Hawthorne and 122–123; Mary Prince and 59, 60, 61; “A Night in the Woods” and 66; Poe and 98; Secret History and 38; slave narratives and 135, 138–139, 140 Estok, Simon C. on control, human 3; the ecogothic and 176; on ecophobia 2–3, 6, 17n2, 37, 84, 97, 176; Secret History and 38 evil 12–13, 14, 65, 66, 92, 118–119 evolution 5, 14, 34n21, 194, 199, 200, 212. see also predators and prey exterminations 13, 72. see also deforestation extinctions 67, 68, 73, 175–179. see also mammoths; buffalo 75, 76–77, 79n20, 175–188, 177, 178, 217n6 Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life (Hutchinson) 180, 183, 184 “Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe) 12, 98, 161–162 fear (anxiety) (dread). see also ecophobia; American literature and 2; the body and 16, 103–104; buffalo and 71, 72, 74–75, 76, 78; Chasing Ice and 154; colonialism and 53; cosmic 192; the ecogothic and 3, 17nn1, 6, 33; extinctions and 178; of humans 188; Leakey and Lewin on 177–178; mammoth fiction and 180, 184; matter and 110; modernity and 69; natural agency and 2, 6; “A Night in the Woods” and 72; nonhuman world and 1; “Open Boat” and 202–203; oppression of nature and 11; plant horror and 163, 173; slave narratives and 135, 137; the swamp and 10; twenty-first-century 144; the vortex and 100 “Female Gothic,” 170–173 Ferris, G. T. 177 Ferris, Warren A. 75–76 Fiedler, Leslie 21

Field, Matthew 68, 69, 72, 75–76 fire and air 106, 107–110, 123, 147–148, 155, 156, 187 fire and water 96–110, 106 Fisher, Benjamin F. 111n33 Flores, Dan 76 Ford, Henry 213 “The Foreigner” (Jewett) 171 Forest and Stream (periodical) 177 forgetfulness 9, 27, 46, 48n14, 153, 162. see also repression Fortitude (TV series) 188 Fort Yukon 186, 189n22 Foster, Francis Smith 55 Fowler, Cola 182–183 Francis, Richard 124, 125 Frank, Frederick 100, 111n22 Frank, Lawrence 93n28 Frankenstein (Shelley) 3, 85, 153, 213 Franklin, John 156 freedom. see determinism and freedom; liberation Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins 171 Frémont, John C. 75 French Encyclopedia (Diderot) 41, 43 Freud, Sigmund 4–5, 41, 84–85, 154, 211 Friend (periodical) 181 the frontier 21, 115, 134, 164 Fruitlands 123, 124–125, 127 Fugitive Slave Act 150 Fuller, Margaret 134 fur trade 75–76 gardens 114, 120, 124–127 Gardner, Jared 21 Garrard, Greg 2, 52 “Giant Wisteria, The” (Gilman) 171–172 Gifford, Terry 62n6 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 171–172 Gilpin, William 25 Gilroy, Paul 54 Glave, Diana 143 Goddu, Teresa A. 5, 18n25, 23, 62nn10, 14 Godwin, William 62n10 Goode, Abby L. 38, 43, 62n14 “Goophered Grapevine, The” (Chesnutt) 167–168 the gothic. see also colonialism; the ecogothic; entrapment; fear; the nonhuman; plant horror; slavery;

230 Index time and space; American versus British 5–6, 62n14; characterized 4, 22–23, 69, 100, 148, 149, 162, 179; ecocatastrophes and 97 “Gothic body,” 3 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) 208 greed 74–76, 178, 215 Gregersdotter, Katarina 176 Gregg, Josiah 66, 69, 70, 75 Griffin, Farah Jasmine 8 Grinnell, George Bird 178 Grusin, Richard 11–12, 14 Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48n14 Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America (Hunt) 42 Hall, Matthew 170–171 Hållén, Nicklas 176 Harman, Graham 195 Harper’s Weekly 150–151 Harris, Anne 105, 109 Harris, Joel Chandler 167 Harrison, Robert Pogue 41 Hartman, Saidiya 157 haunting, vegetal 162–163 Hawthorne, Nathaniel. see also “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and other works; the gothic and 69, 170; buildings and 6; history (the past) and 5, 121, 122–123, 165; nature and 114, 123; plant horror and 162, 163–166; Poe and 117, 118, 129–130 Hawthorne, Sophia 121, 122, 126–127 Hawthorne, Una 126 Healthian (journal) 125 Heidegger, Martin 192, 195 Heise, Ursula K. 79n11, 192–193, 195 Heumann, Joseph K. 74, 157–158 Higginson, Mary Thacher 178 Hillard, Tom J. 17n1, 37, 97, 98, 122, 134, 176 Hinds, Elizabeth Jae Wall 210–211 history (the past). see also evolution; forgetfulness; memory; repression; time and space; Gilman and 172; the gothic and 18n25, 162; Hawthorne and 121, 122–123, 165; landscapes and 163–164;

Mason & Dixon and 215, 216; Mason-Dixon line and 206; McTeague and 199; of nature 38–39, 47; psychologized 18n25 History of Mary Prince, The (Prince); the body and 54, 56–61; the gothic and 54–55, 59, 61; landscape and 56–57; liberation and 60–61; overviews 54, 61; “true” voice of 55–56, 57 History of the Caribby Islands, The (Davies) 39 Hogle, Jerrold 5, 6, 22–23 Höglund, Johan 176 Holmes Sr., Oliver Wendell 12–16, 18n44, 19n45 homes, failed 18n21, 93n12, 194, 197. see also taming (domesticity) “Hop Frog” (Poe) 9 Hornaday, William T. 76 horror. see fear; the monstrous House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne) 5, 6 Hughes, William. see Smith, Andrew and Hughes, William the human. see also the body; civilization; control, human; determinism and freedom; the humanimal; identity; the nonhuman; the rational; transcorporality; wild men; buffalo and 74; buffalo extinction and 70–71; capitalism and 200; the ecogothic and 11–12, 177; extraordinary and excessive/ commonplace and unheroic 199; the gothic and 11–12; ice and 149; “natural state” of 116; “A Night in the Woods” and 72; Poe on 117–118 “Human Cheese” (Simun) 158n29 the humanimal. see also animals and animality; anthropomorphism; Mason & Dixon (Pynchon); Edgar Huntly and 26, 28–29; evolution and 34n21; Poe and 83–85, 92, 98, 106, 107–109; scholarship on 111n33 Hunt, Alfred 42 Hurley, Kelly 3, 18n12 Hutchinson, Henry Neville 180, 183, 184

Index  231 hybridity 210–213. see also entanglement hyperobjects 191–203 Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Morton) 192–193, 195 Iannini, Christopher 62n11 ice 149, 150–151, 165, 194. see also Chasing Ice (2013 documentary); Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) identity. see also personhood; self; the body and 4, 10–11, 18n12, 38; Edgar Huntly and 28, 31, 33n3; Gothic body and 24; McTeague and 199; Poe and 109; wild men and 27 (im)mortality tales (Poe) 97–110 “The Imp of the Perverse” (Poe) 18n43 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 5, 6, 138–139 independence/dependence 54, 216. see also liberation “Indians Hunting the Buffalo” (Field), 68 Indigenous peoples 39, 171. see also Native Americans industrialization 69, 75, 79n11, 213 instincts 197, 199 “Instinct vs Reason – A Black Cat” (Poe) 83, 84, 90, 91–92 Inuit people 155 Iovino, Serenella 24, 32, 33n11, 99; on matter 100 Irving, Washington 66, 69, 70, 74, 75 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells) 34n21 Jacobs, Harriet 5, 6, 135, 138–140, 144 James, Edwin 68, 78n2 Jefferson, Thomas 175 Jewett, Sarah Orne 171 Johnston, Trevor 154 Jones, Buford 127 Juneau Free Press (newspaper) 182, 189n15 Kansas City (newspaper) 182 Kayser, Wolfgang 213 Keating, William H. 68 Keesey, Douglas 208 Keetley, Dawn 122

“Killing of the Mammoth, The” (Tukeman) 176, 185–188 King, Claire Jean 216 King, Stephen 195 Kolbuszewska, Zofia 215 Kopelson, Heather Miyano 63n29 Kopley, Richard 93n22 Körber, Philip 180–181 Kosmos für die Jugend (Körber) 180–181 Kristeva, Julia 32–33 Kröger, Lisa 6 Lacan, Jacques 93nn16, 24 LaCapra, Dominick 207–208 landscapes. see also ecocatastrophes; gardens; ice; mountains; nature; paintings; seas; swamps; wilderness; the body and 147–148; ecopopulists versus preservationists and 148; Edgar Huntly and 33n6; the gothic and 6; history and 163–164; mammoth fiction and 180, 186; Mary Prince and 56–57, 58, 61; Mt. Soufrière eruption and 51–52, 53; “A Night in the Woods” and 73; power relations and 58; Saint Domingue planters and 41; Secret History and 38, 42–43, 45; slavery and 63n29, 134–144; time and 153–154; Transcendentalism and 134; the transnational and 63n25; violence and 42, 58; The White Buffalo and 77 Lane, Charles 123, 124, 126, 127 Lang, Jessica 150 language, human 89–90, 93n26, 150, 211–212 Lanone, Catherine 156 “Last of the Buffalo, The” (Grinnell), 178 Latour, Bruno 154, 155 Lawson-Peebles, Robert 28–29 Leakey, Richard 177–178 Lee, Maurice 106 LeRoy, Charles 41 Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians (Catlin) 76 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecoeur) 8–9 Lewin, Roger 177–178

232 Index Lewis, Henry Clay 9–11 Lewis, Meriwether 175 Lewis, Monk 62n10 liberation (freedom) 24, 43, 60–61, 111n22, 136–137, 138, 142, 149, 170, 203. see also independence/ dependence “Life Cycle of a Common Weed” (Berrigan) 158n29 Life on the Mississippi (Twain) 136 Lindskog, D. Per 40 Lippit, Akira Mizuta 213 Liu, Tessie 43 “Living Land: Below as Above” (art installation) 156 Lloyd-Smith, Allan 5, 69, 149 Logan; A Family History (Neal) 162 London, Jack 191, 192, 196–198 Long, Stephen H. 68 Lorrain, Claude 25 Love and Death in the American Novel (Fiedler) 21 Lovecraft, H. P. 192, 195, 196, 198, 203 Lucas, Frederic 185 Luce, Henry 206 Lueck, Beth 25, 33n13 Lynch, David 195 Macauley, David 99, 108, 109, 155 MacDonald, Scott 153–154 MacLeod, Janine 99 madness 47, 87, 88, 90, 92, 99, 191, 200. see also the rational Mammoth (Dewar) 188 Mammoth (film) 188 Mammoth (Varley) 188 Mammoth Hunters, The (W. B. Allen) 176, 183–185 mammoths 67, 68, 175–188, 189n2 Manifest Destiny 115, 123, 130n11, 207 Marder, Michael 162, 170, 172–173 “Marginalia” (Poe) 116, 117 Marietta Journal (newspaper) 182 “The Marked Tree” (Chesnutt) 166–167 Marshall, Ian 21, 33n6 Mason & Dixon (Pynchon) 206–217, 217n6 Material Ecocriticism (Iovina and Oppermann) 32

Mather, Cotton 175 matter. see also the body; nature (ecology) (environment); nature, agency of agentic nature and 3, 12, 33n11; borders (boundaries) and 24, 99, 101; control, human, and 41; ecocatastrophe and 96, 109–110; Edgar Huntly and 32; Mary Prince and 58, 61; Mason & Dixon and 212–213; “material turn” and 23–24, 57–58; Poe and 96–110; Secret History and 43; transcorporality and 147 McBride, Dwight 56, 62n17 McTeague (Norris) 191, 198–201 Medoro, Dana 126 Melville, Herman 3, 9, 42 metempsychosis 107–108 “Metzengerstein” (Poe) 98, 99, 104–110, 111n33 Miles, Robert 149 Miller, Jacob 71 Moby-Dick (Melville) 3, 9 Mogen, David 122–123 Molnár, Gábor Tamás 214 monstrous, the. see also animals and animality; “Black Cat” and 86; buffaloes as 73–75, 77, 78; capitalism and 191; the ecogothic and 148; Elsie Venner and 12–13; extermination of 13; flowers and 126; the gothic and 24, 178; landscape as 38; mammoth fiction and 178–179, 180, 181–182, 184, 186–187; Mason & Dixon and 209–210, 211–212; Morton and 193, 195; “Night in the Woods” and 66, 70–71; Secret History and 46–47; “Struggle for Life” and 9 Monstrous Nature (Murray and Heumann) 157 Montgomery, Travis 106 Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E. 40 Morris, David B. 84–85 Morton, Timothy 39, 41, 148, 154, 156, 191–203 Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne) 114, 119, 121, 127, 129 mountains 45–46, 186 Mt. Soufrière eruption 51–52, 55, 58 Muecke, Stephen 193 Muir, John 134

Index  233 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe) 83, 88–89, 90, 93nn24, 25, 26 Murray, Robin L. 74, 157–158 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass) 137 Nahane people 189n14 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, The (Poe) 3, 9, 53, 83, 161 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 141, 150 Nash, Roderick 17n9, 27 Native Americans. see also Indigenous peoples; agentic nature and 155; buffalo and 68, 71, 75, 78n2; Catlin and 79n20, 80n30; displacement of 217n6; Edgar Huntly and 21, 30–31, 33nn3, 6; fur trade and 75–76; Hawthorne and 119–120, 122; mammoth fiction and 181–182, 183, 189n14; Mason & Dixon and 207, 214, 215, 217; “A Night in the Woods” and 66, 67, 75; violence upon 134; The White Buffalo and 77 naturalism, American 191–203 nature (ecology) (environment). see also animals and animality; conservation; gardens; landscapes; matter; nature, agency of; the nonhuman; paintings; the pastoral; plant horror; romanticism; weather; “worlds”; civilization and 116, 152; Edgar Huntly and 24–25; Elsie Venner and 12–13; Hawthorne and 115–116, 119, 124; history of 38–39, 47; human divide and 23; as hyperobject 202–203; “A Night in the Woods” and 65–66; perverse 21–33; Poe and 116, 118; representation and 3, 4, 85; utopianism and 123–124 Nature (Emerson) 114, 119, 121, 122, 124, 128, 134 nature, agency of. see also the body; control, human; evolution; ecocriticism and 23–24; the ecogothic and 6–7; ecophobia and 2–3; Edgar Huntly and 26–27, 29–30, 33; ice and 149–150, 155–156, 157; Iovino and Oppermann on 33n11; liberation and 24; Mary Prince and 59–60; Mt. Soufrière eruption and

52–53; the nonhuman and 12; Secret History and 46; Szerszynski on 155; Uncle Tom’s Cabin/Chasing Ice and 148 Neal, John 162 Neimanis, Astrida 99 New Eldorado: A Summer Journey to Alaska, The (Ballou) 183 Newitz, Annalee 191, 200 Newman, Robert 31 New Monthly Magazine (Sargent) 119–120 New-York Mirror, The (newspaper) 67, 78n4 New York Times 150 “A Night in the Woods” (Snelling) 65–78, 78n4 9/11, 154 Noble, Marianne 149 the nonhuman. see also animals and animality; boundaries (borders); edibility; the human; hyperobjects; matter; the monstrous; nature; the Other; plant horror; transcorporality; wild men; Chasing Ice and 157; determinism and 7; the ecogothic and 3–4, 5, 11–17; ecophobia and 2; Elsie Venner and 12–14; the gothic and 3–4; Hawthorne and 115–116; the human and 4, 11–13, 47, 97–98, 110, 128–129, 147, 148, 149, 153, 155, 207; hyperobjects and 192; “Living Land: Below as Above” and 156; McTeague and 199; as person 170–171; slavery and 41; specific instances and 158n29; Thoreau and 120 Norris, Frank 191, 192, 198–201 North Pole expedition 181 Northup, Solomon 135, 142–144 Noyukuk 186, 189n22 Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor (Lewis) 9 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford) 1 Old Manse Tales (Hawthorne). see “The Birth-mark”; “Rappaccini’s Daughter” “Old Woman Magoun” (Freeman) 171 “On the Range of the Mammoth” (Dawkins) 180, 184

234 Index “Open Boat, The” (Crane) 191, 201–203 Oppermann, Serpil 24, 32, 33n11, 99; on matter 100 oppression (tyranny) 6, 11, 45, 46, 144, 167, 170, 171–172, 173. see also slavery Ortiz, Juan 1 the Other. see also the nonhuman; bison-as-monster and 74; “Black Cat” and 87; Derrida and 84; the gothic and 11; Manifest Destiny and 207; Mary Prince and 60; Mason & Dixon and 212, 214, 215; plant horror and 172, 173; scientific rationality and 88 Otter, Samuel 55–56, 57 Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, The (Baldick) 4 Page, Thomas Nelson 167 paintings of buffalo 71, 71f 72, 73f–74f 79n20 Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in NineteenthCentury America (S. Burns) 116 Palmer, Thomas 13 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth 53, 55, 63n20 Parkman Jr., Francis 70, 75–76 passenger pigeons 177, 178 past, the. see history pastoral, the 52, 53, 61n5, 62n6, 124, 148 Patterson, Orlando 57–58 Pavy expedition 181 Peale, Charles Willson 175 Peale, Titian R. 71 Penn, Irving 153 Pennington, James 140–141 Perry, J. Douglas 100 personhood 170–171. see also the human; identity the perverse 13, 14, 18n43, 31, 32, 75, 86 Peters, John 105 Pettersen, Margrethe Iren 156 Philadelphia Press (newspaper) 182–183 “Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe) 90–91 the picturesque 24, 25, 26, 33n13 Pieouw, E. C. 189n2

Pierre and the Buffalo (Miller) 71, 71f Pizer, Donald 191, 199 plant horror 161–173 Plumwood, Val 7 Poe, Edgar Allen. see also “The Black Cat” and other works; the agentic nonhuman and 12; on control, human 17n9, 92n7, 93n14; The Course of Empire and 130n15; ecocatastrophes and 96–110; the gothic and 69, 100; gothic plants and 161–162; on Hawthorne 117, 129–130; the human and 116, 117–118; on the humanimal 83–84, 85; mammoth fiction and 184; matter and 96–110; nature and 116, 118; on the perverse 13, 18n43, 86; racism stories and 9; the rational and 88–89, 90, 93n27, 118–119; signification and 3, 86–88, 90, 91, 92, 97; taming (domesticity) and 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93nn15, 25; the uncanny animal others and 83–92; vegetal haunting and 161–173 pollution 144, 177 Portland Daily Press (newspaper) 183 “Po’ Sandy” (Chesnutt) 162, 167, 169 post-human theory 154 postmodernism 206, 208, 214 power relations 9, 57–58, 105–106, 107, 115, 142 predators and prey. see also animals and animality; edibility; extinction, buffalo; the ecogothic and 7–8; Edgar Huntly and 27, 28–29; Elsie Venner and 12; mammoth fiction and 182–183, 186–188; Pynchon and 208, 209; slave narratives and 143 Present, The (periodical) 125 Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Newitz) 191, 200 Prince, Mary 51–61 Pringle, Thomas 55, 56, 57, 61 Public Ledger (periodical) 181 Puritanism 122, 123, 128, 129, 134–135, 164, 171 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe) 85 “Purveyor of Truth, The” (Derrida) 85 Pynchon, Thomas 5, 206–217 Pyne, Stephen 105

Index  235 Qitsualik, Rachel 155 race and racism 121, 138, 148, 149, 157, 167, 168, 170. see also slavery and slaves Radcliffe, Ann 1, 6 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne) 114–130, 130n11 rational, the (reason) (intelligence). see also madness; reality and truth; boundaries and 208; Emerson on 124; hybridity and 210–211; mammoth fiction and 185, 187; Mason & Dixon and 210, 211–212, 216; plant 172–173; Poe and 88–89, 90, 93n27, 111n22, 116, 118–119; “To Build a Fire” and 197–198 “Raven, The” (Poe) 83, 88, 89–91, 93n26 realism 55, 170. see also reality and truth Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Pizer) 199 reality and truth. see also matter; realism; representation (signification); science; time and space; Chasing Ice and 154; Chesnutt and 166, 167; control, human and 3; Edgar Huntly and 22, 34n23; Hawthorne and 120, 121, 163, 165, 166; hyperobjects and 192, 193, 194–196; “Killing of the Mammoth” and 185; London and 197; mammoth fiction and 185–186; Mary Prince and 55, 61; Mason & Dixon and 207, 210, 211, 212, 214; Poe and 86, 99, 103, 107; slave narratives and 142, 144; the uncanny and 211 Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane), 191 Rees, Abraham 108 representation (signification). see also matter; water and fire; animality and 85; the ecogothic and 3, 4; literal and metaphorical 162; Mary Prince and 55–56; Mason & Dixon and 213, 214, 215; “Metzengerstein” and 107, 109; Poe and 85, 86–88, 90, 91, 92, 97, 111n22

repression 4–5, 11, 24, 43, 47, 53, 135, 207. see also forgetfulness; the unconscious Reynolds, Larry 114, 127 Rigby, Kate 104, 110n1 “A Rival to the Sea Serpent: Mastodons Roaming in Alaskan Fields” (Alaskan) 182 Roberts, Siȃn Silyn 6 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (Hawthorne) 114, 119, 162 romanticism. see also ecophilia; sentimentalism; Caitlin and 76; the ecogothic and 115, 135, 148; Edgar Huntly and 24, 25, 32; the gothic and 115; Hawthorne versus 119, 121, 122, 123; hyperobjects and 192; Mason & Dixon and 217; Morton and 192; Poe versus 116; racism and 168; realism and 170 Rosa, Salvatore 25 Ryden, Kent 63n27 Sage, Rufus 70 Saint Domingue 38–41, 43, 48n12 Sale, Richard 77 salvation 100, 111n22 Sansay, Leonora 37–47 Sargent, Epes 119–120 Savoy, Eric 11 Schrödinger, Erwin 213 science. see also Enlightenment, European; the rational; the body and 4; “Descent into the Maelström” and 103; dualism and 207; the forest and 41; Hawthorne and 114, 118–119, 121, 128; ice, life of, and 155; mammoths and 175, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185; Mason & Dixon and 214; Poe and 88, 90–91, 93n28; Thoreau and 120–121 seas (oceans) 138, 191, 194, 201–203 Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo, The (Sansay) 37–47 self 32–33, 215. see also identity; the Other semiotics 192, 212–213 sentimentalism 149. see also romanticism Shelley, Mary 3, 85 Shyamalan, M. Night 195 signification. see representation

236 Index Sila (Inuit concept) 155 Silencing the Past (Trouillot) 48n14 Silent Spring (Carson) 2 Silverhair (Baxter) 188 Silverman, Kenneth 93n25 Simmons, Dan 156 Simms, William Gilmore 135 Simun, Miriam 158n29 Sins of the Fathers (Crews) 5 Sivils, Matthew Wynn 17n6, 23, 30, 32, 33, 124, 135, 139 Sixth Sense, The (Shyamalan) 195 “The Slaughter of the Innocents” (Higginson) 178 slavery and slaves. see also abolitionism; The History of Mary Prince; Mason & Dixon (Pynchon); oppression; race and racism; The Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo (Sansay); Chesnutt and 168–170; Crèvecoeur on 8–9; Douglass on 62n8; ecocriticism and 53–54, 56; the ecogothic and 7–11, 134–144; England and 60, 61; the gothic and 53–54, 54–55, 56, 62n10, 63n20, 135–136; ice and 150–151, 157; landscape and 63n29; Mary Prince and 56, 57–58, 61; Mason & Dixon and 207; Mason-Dixon line and 206; Mt. Soufrière eruption and 51, 52–53; narratives of 134–144, 166; as nonhumans 41; Poe’s stories and 106; predators and prey and 7–11; Saint Domingue and 40, 42; Secret History and 42, 43; Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 157 Slotkin, Richard 27, 28 Smith, Andrew and Hughes, William; on the ecogothic 1, 3, 114–115, 135, 192; ecophobia and 176; on the ethogothic 176; on Frankenstein 85, 88; on the gothic 17n2; on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 92n3; Smith, John 1 Smith, L. H. 177 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 43 snakes 13–16, 140 Snelling, William J. 65–78, 66–68, 78nn2, 3 social/cultural factors 11, 12, 23, 53, 171, 207, 212–213. see also boundaries (borders); language, human; power; slavery

Somerset case (England) (1772) 60 “Somnambulism” (C.B. Brown) 162, 165 space. see time and space Specters of Marx (Derrida) 213 Spirit of the Times (magazine) 72 Spofford, Harriet Prescott 9 Stark, Joseph 93n28 Stevenson, Robert Louis 34n21 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 5, 6, 147–157 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson) 34n21 Strickland, Susanna 55 “Struggle for Life, A” (Lewis) 9–11 St. Vincent island 51 sugar plantations 39–41, 47 Supernatural Horror in Literature (Lovecraft) 192 surface/interior 56–57, 58, 61, 199 swamps 6, 9–10, 137, 138–140, 141 Szerszynski, Bronislaw 154–155 Tales of the Northwest (Snelling) 67 Tally Jr., Robert T. 93n12 taming (domesticity) 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93nn15, 25. see also homes, failed Tanner, Tony 215 Task, The (Cowper) 60 Taylor, C.W. 150 Taylor, Matthew A. 84, 92n7, 105 “Tell-Tale Heart, The” (Poe) 14 Terror, The (Simmons) 156 Thaw, The (film) 188 “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness” (Estok) 2–3 Theory and Practice of Literary Naturalism, The (Pizer) 191 Thompson, John 138, 141 Thomson, Keith 175 Thoreau, Henry David 114, 119–120, 120–121, 124, 127, 129, 134, 139 Through the Looking-Glass (L. Carroll) 89–90 Tikhomirov, B. A. 180 time and space. see also boundaries (borders); the built environment; evolution; history; hyperobjects; landscapes; nature; Alaimo on 13; capitalism and 200; ecocinema and 153–154; the ecogothic and 4–7; Elsie Venner and 15; the gothic and 4, 5–7, 18n21, 178; Hawthorne and 165; hyperobjects and 192,

Index  237 193, 194, 195, 203; LaCapra on 207–208; mammoth fiction and 186, 187, 188; Mason & Dixon and 206, 214–215, 216; Poe and 89; Secret History and 38; “To Build a Fire” and 198; the uncanny and 207; vortices and 103 TimeOut UK (periodical) 154 “To Build a Fire” (London) 191, 196–198, 199 Todd, Zoe 155 Toles, George 29, 34n23 Tomlinson, Niles 93n19 Tour on the Prairies, A (Irving) 74 “Toxic Discourse” (Buell) 148 Transcendentalism. see also Emerson, Ralph Waldo and other transcendentalists; Hawthorne and 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–126, 127, 128–129; Mason & Dixon and 215; slave narratives and 134–135 transcorporality (Alaimo) 6–7, 13, 23–24, 147, 153, 199–200 the transnational 62nn13, 15, 63n25 trauma 6, 11, 17, 23, 28, 30, 31, 38, 162–163, 173 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 48n14 truth. see reality and truth “Truth about the Mammoth, The” (Lucas) 185 “Truth; A News Year’s Gift to Scribblers” (Snelling) 78n3 Tuana, Nancy 147–148 Tuckerman, Henry T. 67 Tukeman, Henry 176, 185–188, 189n19 Twain, Mark 136 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup) 142–144 Twin Peaks (Lynch) 195 Tyburski, Susan 176 uncanny, the; the agentic nonhuman and 12; Edgar Huntly and 29; Freud on 4–5, 84; the gothic and 84–85; hyperobjects and 194; “Living Land” and 156; Mason & Dixon and 211, 216; Morton and 193, 195; plants and 162–163, 172, 173; Poe and 85, 88, 89–90, 92, 93n12, 162; Saint Domingue landscape and 41; Secret History and 43, 44, 46, 47; time and 207; weather and 197

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 5, 6, 151f 156–158 unconscious, the 41, 47. see also Freud, Sigmund; repression United States Magazine and Democratic Review 115, 130n11 utopianism. see Fruitlands Van Leer, David 93n27 Varley, John 188 violence. see also colonialism; Haitian Revolution (1791–1804); animal gaze and 86; buffalo and 69, 71, 72; Edgar Huntly and 30–31, 32; Mary Prince and 58–59; McTeague and 200; representation and 55–56; Secret History and 41, 42–43; slavery and 57, 63n20, 136, 144, 157 “Violent Storm” (broadside) 96; vortices 100–104, 110, 111n22 Walden (Thoreau) 134 Walpole, Horace 1 Warner, Michael 62n11 water and fire 96–110, 99, 105 Watt, James 213 Watts, David 39, 40 weather and climate. see also “To Build a Fire” (London); climate change and 194; as hyperobjects 191, 193, 194, 198, 203; mammoths and 184; McTeague and 199, 200, 201; Sila and 155; slave narratives and 58, 135, 140–141, 142, 143 Weinstock, Jeffrey 33n10 Wells, H.G. 34n21 West Indies 39. see also The Secret History or The Horrors of St. Domingo (Sansay) White, Hayden 27 White Buffalo, The (film) 77 wilderness. see also the swamp; wild men; control of 17n8, 9; the ecogothic and 4; Edgar Huntly and 21–22, 23, 25–26, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 34n23; the gothic and 6, 33n10; Hawthorne and 119; Irving on 74; mammoth fiction and 179; Mason & Dixon and 215; Of Plymouth Plantation and 1; Puritanism and 123; slave narratives and 135,

238 Index 137–138, 141, 143; wild men and 27 Wilderness and the American Mind (Nash) 17n9 wild men 26–29, 27. see also animals and animality; taming (domesticity) Wilkes-Barre Times (newspaper) 182 Williams, Michael 38–39 “William Wilson” (Poe) 14 Winks, Robin 55, 63n20 witch trials 164–165 Woertendyke, Gretchen 43 Wollstonecraft, Mary 62n10

women 6, 7, 11, 114, 121–122, 129, 139. see also “Female Gothic” Wonders of Alaska, The (Badlam) 183 “Wonders of the Yukon” (Alaska Free Press) 181–182, 183 wood-wax 164–165, 165–166 X-Files, The (Carter) 195 “Yellow Wall Paper, The” (Gilman) 171, 172 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne) 119 Ziser, Michael 93n26