New England's Nineteenth-Century Ecogothic Nightmares: Bees and Rivers as Metaphors and Harbingers

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• New England’s Nineteenth-Century Ecogothic Nightmares: Bees and Rivers as Metaphors and Harbingers
• Bridget M. Marshall¹ (bio)

In The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Frances Trollope describes an emerging industrial city in the U.S. as a “battleground” where the “demon of machinery” fought “the peaceful realms of nature” and where “as fast as half a dozen trees were cut down, a factory was raised up; stumps still contest the ground with pillars, and porticos are seen to struggle with rocks.”² By her account, even as the signs of industrial ventures spread, the ground was still contested in an ongoing struggle between the earth and human industrial interventions. Such literary portrayals of industrialization as a battle waged between an innocent, doomed natural environment and a relentless human drive for progress are filled with imagery and metaphors that reveal an essentially gothic relationship between humans and the natural world; further, such portrayals anticipate gothic nightmares of ecological collapse. Gothic criticism has long understood the importance of the environment to gothic texts; Allan Lloyd-Smith has identified a key theme in American gothic literature as the “terror of the land itself, its emptiness, its implacability; simply a sense of its vast, lonely, and possibly hostile space.”³ Particularly over the past fifteen years, scholars have been using a specifically ecogothic lens to draw our attention to the importance of such depictions in light of the increasingly grim reality of climate change’s impacts on the planet and human life. Lloyd-Smith argues that “landscapes in the Gothic . . . dwelt on the exposed, inhuman and pitiless nature of mountains, crags, and wastelands,”⁴ but an ecogothic approach reveals that what is “exposed, inhuman and pitiless” is not so much the natural world, but its destruction by human undertakings.

The landscape of America’s New England region in particular has long been a source of gothic terrors, including mysterious flora, fauna, and forests, and horrifying [End Page 31] histories, such as the extirpation of Indigenous Peoples and the persecution of so-called “witches.”⁵ There certainly were (and are still) plenty of dark tales that emerged from or were buried in the soil of New England. But in the nineteenth century, a new fear surfaced in New England as the region became the site of industrial ventures that would consume endless natural resources and devastate local ecosystems.⁶ Many works by both well-known and now unknown nineteenth-century writers portray anxieties about once pristine New England landscapes that were obliterated by factories and mills. As cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Saco, Maine sprung up with seemingly supernatural speed, observers described newly industrialized landscapes using evocative gothic imagery, often painting nature as an innocent victim of predatory industrial development, but also at times suggesting that it was a serious threat to human industrial advances, fully capable of fighting back against the predations of capital. In literary depictions of these nineteenth-century industrial transformations of the landscape, we can see the environment as not merely a setting where things happen, but as a character with striking similarities to a gothic heroine in danger, being stalked by human predators and their “demonic” machines. This article traces representations of the conflict between the horrors of industrial ventures and the terrors of nature by considering examples from some relatively well-known industrial fiction, such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) and Margret Howth (1862), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), and Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Gray Mills of Farley” (1898), alongside writing by lesser-known authors, including the working people (especially women) who contributed to the Lowell Offering and other periodicals. Together, these examples demonstrate how a variety of writers in the period deployed what we might now call the ecogothic to consider industrialization’s disruption of an already haunted New England landscape. Collectively, these texts reveal a troubling ambivalence about the conflict between nature and industrialization, suggesting that our contemporary responses to concerns about climate change are not new, but merely another instance of human failure to fully comprehend the complexities of our world and the consequences of our own actions...