What Do Plants Want?

Abstract

One way of putting it: there is no sign of a triffid in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” or in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” (though, by and large, the botanical world is less secured in Plath than in Thomas). In between these 1945 and 1961 poems is a veritable eruption of plant horror, not the least of it, John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. The existence in nature of carnivorous plants, such as the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), has long given rise to fearful fascination regarding forms of vicious vegetation. But after World War II, the situation changed. As Stephanie Lim (2013) puts it, “World War II sparked concern regarding the physical effects the war had on the Earth’s natural resources,” and, as a result, the “latter part of the 1950s brought about a multitude of killer plant narratives.” These narratives serve as “a visual illustration and understanding of what nature would do and say to humans if they could react to our adverse actions” (pp. 215–216). Here, the story is about plants in history, rather than nature, and the difference it makes bears upon what plants might tell us about forms of social life. It is a case of what nature, as Lim puts it, “would do and say to humans” in this altered perspective. But if in Lim’s valuable account the life of plants is historicized, the second, related point, that the plants themselves are invested with the power of speech, is not pursued or investigated. As we shall see, in killer plant narratives from the 1950s and after it is precisely the fact of there being talking plants that is often the most frightening aspect of these narratives. Therefore, what follows is an investigation of this phenomenon of plants that not only talk to but also about humans; often it is most disturbingly this combination of traits that engenders the horror in plant horror itself.