Pernicious Plants: Imitation and Uncanny Ecocritical Thought in Gustav Meyrink's “Die Pflanzen des Dr. Cinderella”

Abstract

This article examines Gustav Meyrink's “Die Pflanzen des Dr. Cinderella” (1905), a fantastical tale about plant‐animal‐human hybrids born of experimental human intervention. I argue that this short story translates scientific hypotheses from the nineteenth century—Charles Darwin's botanical and zoological writings, for example—into the genre of the grotesque. Given the historical and geographic contexts in which Meyrink was writing, it is safe to say that his literature responds to an environmentally charged fear ubiquitous among industrialized or technologically advanced societies. “Die Pflanzen des Dr. Cinderella” demonstrates that Meyrink was concerned with the potential sentient nature of all living things and also with the agency of objects that many would consider dead matter. Thus, I will take an anachronistic leap to consider how this text can be brought into dialogue with twenty‐first‐century theories on political ecology and posthuman perspectives.