"We live below sea level": Layered Ecologies and Regional Gothic in Karen Russell's Swamplandia!

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• “We live below sea level”: Layered Ecologies and Regional Gothic in Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!
• Patrick Whitmarsh (bio)

The swamp is like the true uncanny. It’s neither land nor water. You can’t get your bearings there.

—Karen Russell, in conversation with David Naimon¹

“This whole swamp is haunted”: Reading the Ecogothic in Swamplandia!

In Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011), the underworld is not a distant realm of myth but a spectral world emerging in the wetlands of South Florida. The novel depicts the trials and tribulations of the gator-wrestling Bigtree family after the death of their matriarch, Hilola. Through the experiences of the family’s youngest member, Ava Bigtree, Russell gives her readers a mesmerizing, enchanting, and often deeply unsettling tour through southwest Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, located in Collier and Monroe Counties (rendered as the fictional Loomis County in the novel). Swamplandia! can comprehensively be described as a bildungsroman, exploring the ruination of childhood fantasies as the Bigtree siblings struggle to find meaning and mooring after their mother’s death and father’s subsequent abandonment; yet this categorization is also slightly reductive. Although she deploys components of the bildungsroman, Russell complicates the novel’s coming-of-age narrative with flourishes of less realist storytelling modes: environmental weirdness, wisps of magical realism, and a feverish, sticky swamp-gothic in which the landscape conceals treacherous histories and nonhuman dangers. Drawing together details of a specific locale with a dark inflection, Swamplandia! undercuts the linearity of [End Page 143] the traditional bildungsroman, muddying the stream of human growth with eddies of ecological complexity in the recalcitrant depths of the Florida swamp.

The presence of subsurface worlds is a theme that recurs in much of Russell’s fiction. In “Bog Girl: A Romance” (2016), protagonist Cillian Eddowis unearths and falls in love with a woman preserved in a peat bog on an island in Europe. In “The Bad Graft” (2014), a couple treks into Joshua Tree National Park, witnessing mirages of “evaporated civilizations, dissolved castles that lay buried under the desert.”² And in “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” (2010), a group of teenagers who meet in a New Jersey park toss an uncanny scarecrow into an eroded ravine, perplexed as its limbs begin to disappear mysteriously. In Russell’s distinctly twenty-first-century brand of gothic fiction, in which characters are beset or otherwise affected by the repercussions of twentieth-century industrialization, the earth below our feet mobilizes an ecological perspective. It directs readers toward the often unnoticed dynamics that dissolve the boundaries between the surface world of social interactions and institutions and the disorienting, subterranean gulf of planetary time.

I refer to this dynamic between the surface and the submerged as a layered ecology, embodied in the figure of Florida’s expansive marshlands. Swamplandia!’s distinctive gothic quality derives from its treatment of this figure, which appears, as Eric Gary Anderson writes in his description of gothic undeadness, “crosshatched by deep intercultural histories, and propelled by the departures and returns of specters, memories, and stories.”³ In the novel, the swamp acts as a tissue between the human and nonhuman worlds, a mediator by which the surface seems to slip precariously into the invisible depths. It is a space of overlaid ambiguity in which reforged landscapes and layered temporalities find new textures. The swamp offers a formal complement to Russell’s novel, mirroring the accumulation of literary layers that comprise Swamplandia!’s Gothic genealogy. Like the dark tarn of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), or the Shimmering Sands of Wilkie Collins’s detective-gothic classic, The Moonstone (1868), Russell’s swamp intimates that it may hold secrets of a largely forgotten past, both human and nonhuman. These nineteenth-century touchstones offer glimpses of an ecological perspective that emerges full-blown in Swamplandia!’s boggy environs, highlighted as much by its author’s prose as by its place in a post-World War II literary tradition that includes Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy (1941–1955) and Silent Spring (1962), Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and...