"It was said she believed in evolution": Ecogothic Time and Space in Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake"

Abstract

In recent years, the field of ecogothic criticism has provided new and generative ways of thinking about interactions between nature and the Gothic within literary works. Though scholars have frequently analyzed elements of the Gothic and depictions of nature within Welty's work, the field of ecogothic criticism provides a new way for approaching the intersection of these elements. In this essay, I draw upon ecogothic understandings of time and space to offer a new reading of Welty's "Moon Lake." Ecogothic space refers primarily to human enmeshment in the environment and inseparability from the rest of nature; ecogothic time refers to humanity's long past, connecting us through evolution to animals and plants. In "Moon Lake," Welty depicts the campers' evolutionary relationship to the world around them by drawing attention to her characters' animal- and plant-like qualities and challenging their understandings of the human/nonhuman boundary. This reading has consequences beyond the human/nonhuman relationship: by placing all her characters—White and Black, wealthy and poor—within the long history of evolutionary time and the encroaching space of inescapable nature, Welty reveals the artificiality of human-constructed hierarchies and binaries based on class and race.