EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney

Abstract

Reviewed by: EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers ed. by Sue Edney Lindsay Wells (bio) EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney; pp. xviii + 217. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, £85.00. EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers begins its analysis of horticulture, literature, and environmental thought by questioning the apparent incompatibility of its objects of study: the orderly garden and the chaotic Gothic. As editor Sue Edney observes in her introduction to the volume, the “human dominance” that seemingly defines horticultural space starts to dissipate when viewed through the lens of the Gothic—an expressive mode that “allows us to question human ability to control events, people or even places.” The essays that comprise this collection explore this process from a diverse range of perspectives, from landscape studies and history of science to new materialism and the plant humanities. Each chapter brings fresh attention to the ecological and Gothic undercurrents of nineteenth-century gardens, resulting in a compelling exposition of not only the term ecoGothic, but also the “uncanny deeds and presences” that haunt the archives of horticultural history (1). As its title suggests, this volume connects recent ecocritical readings of Gothic narrative to both real and imaginary gardens of the nineteenth century. While the book features essays on German and American literature, the majority of its chapters concentrate on British texts, with a particular emphasis on Victorian fiction. The project builds on Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s edited collection Ecogothic (2013), as well as the 2014 special issue of Gothic Studies (1999–present) on the same subject. The contributors to Edney’s volume take these earlier studies in new directions by identifying the garden as a vital component of the ecoGothic paradigm, which interprets monstrosity, repression, and other Gothic motifs from an environmental angle. The prominence of uncanny plants and landscapes in British culture comes into clear focus throughout this collection, with each author demonstrating the ways in which nineteenth-century gardens afford thought-provoking explorations of the natural world. One of the key contributions that EcoGothic Gardens makes to Victorian studies is the link it forges between new materialism and critical plant studies—two schools of thought with a shared interest in the nonhuman. The impact of new materialism and material ecocriticism on recent analyses of Victorian culture has been significant, and many of the contributors to EcoGothic Gardens engage with this discourse. Shelley Saguaro, for instance, reads the gardens in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) alongside Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene. In a similar respect, Teresa Fitzpatrick connects Stacy Alaimo’s work on trans-corporeality to carnivorous plant fiction from the fin de siècle. Other chapters, meanwhile, draw on insights from Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Serenella Iovino, and Serpil Oppermann. EcoGothic Gardens sustains the ongoing exchange between new materialism and Victorian studies, yet it also embraces related scholarship on the animacy of plants. Several of the book’s contributors engage with Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s work on plant horror, Monica Gagliano’s research on vegetal communication, and Michael Marder’s theories on plants and philosophy. EcoGothic Gardens demonstrates the ways in which reinterpretations of material and vegetal vibrancy might be brought into productive dialogue with one another, especially when dealing with Victorian horticulture. [End Page 720] Even the most regimented of gardens examined in this book threaten to undermine the will of their human caretakers with a vegetal vitality that exceeds all control. In her essay on the early-nineteenth-century fiction of Joseph von Eichendorff and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heather I. Sullivan refines the concept of the ecoGothic into what she terms “the ‘Gothic green,’” or instances when “the human is, in some way, subsumed by vegetal forces” (17). The collaboration (and confrontation) between human and vegetal agents in gardens continually resurfaces throughout this book, including Edney’s chapter on Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830) and Maud (1855). “In gardens,” Edney writes, “nature and culture are conspirators as well as co-workers” (168). This observation lies at the conceptual...