The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden

Abstract

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his arabesque vegetality travels into the work of later writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Poe’s foregrounding of the eighteenth-century notion of “the sentience of all vegetable things” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) both responds to and undermines Romantic ideas about human affinities with plants. In “Usher,” Poe follows the Enlightenment analogy of human to plant to its logical conclusion in order to expose its aporias; for him, vegetal sentience cannot be contained within any hierarchy of being. At the same time, Poe destroys the Romantic fusional model—in which humans and plants commune within a shared physical world—by focusing on the destructive and rapacious qualities of the vegetal. The transcendental ideas of beauty and the sublime give way in Poe to a vegetality that invades the human consciousness. He suggests that humans might be horrified, rather than delighted, by the calamity that a vegetal modernity represents, even though (and perhaps because) they have no alternative to it.