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

I nThe 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