Abstract
The conclusion seeks to finally answer the questions set out at the beginning of The Forest and the EcoGothic and summarises the key revelations and lessons of the work. It muses on evolving trends in especially recent texts to feature the Gothic forest and explores the recontextualisation of ecophobia (our fears of Nature) in terms of environmental loss. Finally, it gestures towards future productive areas of related research.
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Notes
- 1.
The title deliberately evokes the error message (error 404) when a webpage is missing, but simultaneously evokes Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Bradbury’s work is named after the temperature at which paper burns, which of course is sourced from trees, and so the podcast’s title is subtly suggestive of woods burning out of existence.
- 2.
Talk 9: Love Letter to the Forest, Timothy X Atak, Forest 404. Podcast. 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06tqsg3.
- 3.
“Deforestation in a Civilized World: Ross Andersen Interviews Robert Pogue Harrison,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 7, 2012.
- 4.
Indeed, when I interviewed the series’ writer, Timothy X Atak, he said that he quickly connected with the idea of the forest as ‘a totem for ecological loss’, which he suspects will become an increasingly dominant twenty-first century trope. Elizabeth Parker, “Interview with Writer Timothy X Atak,” Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic 1: 321–330.
- 5.
It should be noted that in the very final and ambiguous moments of the series’ narrative, the positive possibilities of ecophilia are hinted at. The story ends with its protagonists seeking to broadcast sounds of the forest to the world in the hopes that not all who hear it will die, but that precious few will be ‘immune’ and able to live in harmony with the idea—and perhaps, eventually, the reality—of the forest.
- 6.
Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 1.
- 7.
Simon C. Estok, The Ecophobia Hypothesis (New York: Routledge, 2018), 78.
- 8.
The fact that these two numbers, seven and three, are famously the ‘magic’ numbers in fairy tales is simply (or seemingly) a mere ‘happy accident’.
- 9.
Simon C. Estok, “Theorising in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE 16 no. 4 (Spring 2009): 203.
- 10.
Chet Van Duzer, “Hic Sunt Dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Asa Simon Mitmann and Peter J. Dendle (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 433.
- 11.
Andrew Smith and William Hughes, “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic,” in EcoGothic, eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 2.
- 12.
Peter Hutchings, “Tearing Your Soul Apart: Horror’s New Monsters,” Modern Gothic: A Reader, eds. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd-Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 94.
- 13.
Sally J. Morgan, “Heritage Noire: Truth, History and Colonial Anxiety in The Blair Witch Project,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7 no. 2 (2001): 137.
- 14.
David Melbye, Landscape Allegory in Cinema: From Wilderness to Wasteland (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 2.
- 15.
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 133.
- 16.
Let us consider, for example, The Blair Witch Project, which undoubtedly struck the greatest chord in popular culture in terms of our fears of the forest. Here, the protagonists are removed from the rest of society, stranded in an environment that is certainly anathema to, or ‘against’ civilisation. They deliberately turn their backs on the ‘logos’ of civilisation, entering into the woods to flirt with the ‘mythos’ of older times as they seek to prove the validity of modern-day superstition. The past plays a key role as the mythologies of the Blair Witch herself are rooted in America’s origin stories and are unusually intricate. Themes of trial pervade as the students are repeatedly tasked to survive the night and to get out of the woods, whilst the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ dominates the narrative. The film’s raison d’êtreis is to exemplify the terrors of being lost in the woods—and its lasting influence is surely due in part to the fact that its surviving characters remain permanently lost in the woods when the credits roll. The fact that the witch is implicitly the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’, coupled with the fact that inner body parts of the protagonists are repeatedly found bundled within twigs and leaves, demonstrates our fears of being gobbled up in/by the woods. The forest’s effects on our unconscious are foregrounded through the film’s relationship to the Todorovian Fantastic: we never see the monster and we never quite know if these people have simply gone mad in the woods, or have truly been hunted. Finally, these woods are antichristian in the general sense that they are truly hellish, but more specifically we have touches of skewered religion in the backstories of humans who have followed and worshipped the Blair Witch as their ‘goddess’ (demonstrated by Rustin Parr in the original film and expanded in the remake with the character of Lane).
- 17.
Estok, The Ecophobia Hypothesis, 1.
- 18.
Sara Maitland, Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forest (London: Granta Books, 2012), 101.
- 19.
Zoe Gilbert, “Nature Writing Is Booming—But Must a Walk in the Woods Always Be Meaningful?’ The Guardian. Online. 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/15/nature-writing-is-booming-but-must-a-walk-in-the-woods-always-be-meaningful.
- 20.
Sara L. Crosby, “Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror,” ISLE 20 no. 2 (2013): 514.
- 21.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1854), 90.
- 22.
Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis (New York: Doubleday, 2002), ix; Sally McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (New York: SCM Press, 1997); and James A. Nash, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991, 68).
- 23.
Smith and Hughes, “Introduction,” EcoGothic, 1.
- 24.
Even in recent months, new titles have emerged which invite ecoGothic analysis, such as Stranger Things and Dark: two Netflix series which in addition to featuring the Gothic forest each interestingly include flashbacks to the 1980s. These flashbacks are significant because recent research, most notably Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change (2019), shows this era as the missed opportunity for return in terms of environmental crisis.
- 25.
Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2006), 106.
- 26.
Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” in Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (London: Macmillan, 1912), 40.
- 27.
Richard Hayman, Trees, Woodland and Civilisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1.
- 28.
Stephen Sondheim, ‘I Know Things Now’, Into the Woods. 1986. Musical.
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Parker, E. (2020). Conclusion: What Is ‘That Awful Secret of the Wood’?. In: The Forest and the EcoGothic. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35154-0_6
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