Weeds in the EcoGothic Gardens in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Transfer” and Walter de la Mare’s “The Tree”
Keywords:
weeds; ecoGothic; plant horror; Algernon Blackwood; Walter de la MareAbstract
Images of monstrous, carnivorous plants have often dominated Gothic fiction that explores the precarious relationship between humans and nature. Very few works have created horror from plants in their normalcy. Among these are Blackwood’s “The Transfer” (1912) and de la Mare’s “The Tree” (1922). The two short stories neither present weird species nor animate plants to appear like monsters that capture, kill and devour humans. Instead, they portray plants that naturally grow and die but also have a strong tendency to thrive by drawing lives from other organisms. Relying on ecocritical concepts of inter-relatedness and trans-corporeality, this paper examines such a property of plants found in representations of weeds in the gardens of Blackwood’s and de la Mare’s stories. While the garden is a space where humans cultivate and tend flowers and other kinds of plant, the tenacious and indelible weeds in the gardens in both stories show that humans are merely a component of and subject to their environmental surroundings. As bodies can decompose and lives can be transferred to circumjacent entities, weeds represent the power of nature that proves unrelenting and ecologically fitter to survive than humans.
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