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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Carroll, L. (1999). Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Mineola, NY: Dover (Original published 1872).
Falik, O., Mordoch, Y., Quansah, L., Fait, A., & Novoplansky, A. (2011). Rumor Has It: Relay Communication of Stress Cues in Plants. Public Library of Science: One [Online] 6 (11). Accessed April 11, 2015, from http://journals.plos.org/
Hall, M. (2011). Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Jensen, M. (2008). “Feed Me!”: Power Struggles and the Portrayal of Race in Little Shop of Horrors. Cinema Journal, 48(1), 51–67.
Lacan, J. (2006). The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious. In B. Fink, H. Fink & R. Grigg (Trans.). Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton.
Langford, B. (2001). Introduction. The Day of the Triffids. London: Penguin Modern Classics.
Lim, S. (2013). A Return to Transcendentalism in the Twentieth Century: Emerging Plant-Sympathy in The Little Shop of Horrors. In R. Laist (Ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. Critical Plant Studies 1. New York: Rodopi Press.
Marder, M. (2013). Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Marder, M., & Roussel, M. (ill.). (2014). The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press.
Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
Wyndham, J. (2008). The Day of the Triffids. London: Penguin (Original published 1951).
Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Filmography
Little Shop of Horrors. (1986). Film. Directed by Frank Oz. [DVD]. USA: Warner Home Video.
Little Shop of Horrors: The Director’s Cut (2012). Film. Directed by Frank Oz. [DVD]. USA: Warner Home Video.
The Happening. (2008). Film. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. [DVD] USA: Twentieth Century Fox.
The Little Shop of Horrors. (1960). Film. Directed by Roger Corman. [DVD] USA: The Filmgroup.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Farnell, G. (2016). What Do Plants Want?. In: Keetley, D., Tenga, A. (eds) Plant Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57063-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57063-5_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57062-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57063-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)