Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic

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• Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic
• Matthew Wynn Sivils (bio)

The ecogothic probes the dark and earthy unknowns of the literary landscape, upending creekside stones and dipping dirty fingernails into feculent pools—ever reaching for some mysterious, quivering thing. As the name implies, this still-nascent critical approach explores the interpretive possibilities found at the junction between traditional gothic literary study and the array of methodologies and concerns that comprise the environmental humanities.

Indeed, gothic anxieties haunt some of our most environmentally focused works of literature, and conversely, non-human elements emerge, often in disturbing ways, in texts more conventionally placed under the label of the gothic. Once we start looking, the ecogothic seems to sprout up everywhere, proliferating across texts like mushrooms after a spring rain, an ever-present literary lifeform hidden just beneath the surface. It glows in the eyes of Edgar Huntly’s panthers; it joins in the din of “waddling fungus growths [that] shriek with derision!” from “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; and it rises into the tree-shaped whip scar upon Sethe’s back.¹ Possessed of an uncanny, fragmented omnipresence, the ecogothic looks back at us from across the page, “Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.”²

Early stirrings of ecogothic criticism appear in the work of scholars such as Jonathan Bate, Leslie Fiedler, and Yi-Fu Tuan, but for the most part this critical approach began to take shape in the mid-to-late 2000s. Critics such as Stacy Alaimo, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Simon C. Estok, Tom J. Hillard, Timothy Morton, Lee Rozelle, and others began to variously connect ecocriticism with the gothic, a literary mode that had, to that point, taken a back seat to more bucolic works of nature writing. Estok’s 2009 article “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” proved especially influential in redirecting our focus toward the more terrifying aspects of the environmental [End Page 1] imagination. Defining ecophobia as “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world,” Estok argues it is “as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”³ In this formulation, ecophobia is, at its core, about the human struggle for control over the non-human world and the terror and dread that arises when we fail to maintain that control. In an article from later that same year, Tom J. Hillard, building upon Estok’s ideas, further sets the stage when he contends, “Because Gothic literature is so obsessed with fears of all types, the Gothic provides a useful lens for understanding the ways that many authors—regardless of when they are writing—represented fears and anxieties about the natural world.”⁴

Over the last decade or so, critics have worked to more precisely define this approach, which has since come to be called the ecogothic. In the introduction to their 2013 critical anthology, EcoGothic (the first book-length study on the subject), Andrew Smith and William Hughes write, “The Gothic . . . provides a culturally significant point of contact between literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process.” While underscoring the ecogothic’s origins in Romanticism, Smith and Hughes argue that contemporary texts are informed by environmental concerns that the Romantics could never have imagined, such as climate change and the “political urgency of ecological issues.”⁵ In the introduction to the 2014 special issue of Gothic Studies on “The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth-Century,” David Del Principe writes, “the EcoGothic serves to give voice to ingrained biases and a mounting ecophobia—fears stemming from humans’ precarious relationship with all that is nonhuman.”⁶ Dawn Keetley and I, in our introduction to the 2017 critical anthology Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, write that since “ecocriticism has devoted itself to studying the literary and cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world” that “adopting a specifically gothic ecocritical lens illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade those relationships.”⁷ And in her 2020 book The Forest and the EcoGothic, Elizabeth Parker writes that “the ecoGothic is a flavoured mode through which we can examine our darker, more complicated cultural representations of the nonhuman world—which are all the...