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• The Vanishing South: Race and the Ecogothic in Ambrose Bierce and Charles Chesnutt
• Kevin Corstorphine (bio)

Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914), known in his lifetime as an acerbic journalist and author of short stories, can easily be seen as a singular figure. His work is sometimes read for its vivid and brutal portrayal of the Civil War (in which he fought for the Union army) and sometimes through its deserved place in the canon of American “weird” fiction. It bridges the gap between Poe and Lovecraft in its blend of the gothic, the supernatural, and science fiction. Bierce’s disappearance, seemingly after traveling into Mexico at the age of 71, is prefigured in his fiction by strange tales of mysterious vanishings. Similarly, the story of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) is overshadowed by his crucial place in African American literary history as a writer who offered both fantastical and realist portrayals of Black life in the Reconstruction era. Here, I argue that both authors, specifically in Bierce’s “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field” (1888) and Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899), engage in their fiction with an ecological perspective that simultaneously decenters and reasserts the specificity of racial experience in their time.

I contend that the racial truths within gothic fiction have been neglected due to their narrative displacement onto the environment, highlighting the crucial need for further attention to race within ecocriticism. Social constructions of race are irrelevant in the context of the natural world, but manage to produce separate spheres of experience that might seem fantastical were their consequences not so real. Despite their overlapping careers, the authors are not usually considered in terms of their shared concerns. In doing so, I argue that they provide an important insight into the relationship between “nature” and racial categorization at the crucial juncture in American social and political life at which they wrote. It is appropriate, given the fantastical nature of how we have divided humans into races and how we have constructed the notion of a definable nature, that [End Page 55] supernatural fiction is the means by which this insight is achieved. Here, I examine the intersection of ‘nature’ and race through a comparative analysis of Bierce’s short story and several of Chesnutt’s, focusing on “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” “Po’ Sandy,” and “The Goophered Grapevine.”

Race, the Supernatural, and the Gothic

Bierce’s “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888, consists of fewer than eight hundred words and recounts one bizarre incident, without explanation and with barely any context. A plantation owner called Williamson gets up to walk across to a nearby field in order to relay a message to his overseer, Andrew. In crossing the unoccupied field between his own house and garden and the field where Andrew and a team of enslaved people are working, he vanishes. The closest witnesses are a neighbor called Armour Wren and his son James, together with the coach driver and an enslaved man called Sam. They are all momentarily distracted when the horses pulling their carriage stumble, causing them to lose sight of Williamson, who never reappears. The first part of the story is told in the third person, while the second shifts to a first-person legal testimony from Wren’s perspective. It then concludes by stating that “the courts decided that Williamson was dead, and his estate was distributed according to law.”¹ The structure is not unlike that of many of Bierce’s other short stories, including “The Damned Thing” (1893), which likewise takes the form of a legal inquiry, although in this case the corpse of a dead man is present, and it is the creature that killed him that has disappeared, seemingly invisible from the start. Bierce shows a fascination with the past: there is a sense of a lost era that has passed almost into myth, lending itself (as European gothic did with its settings in the medieval past) to supernatural fiction. In “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” the antebellum South performs a similar function as a simultaneously exotic and familiar period setting, with clear parallels to Chesnutt’s local color style...

中文翻译：

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消失的南方：安布罗斯·比尔斯和查尔斯·切斯纳特的种族与生态哥特式

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• 消失的南方：安布罗斯·比尔斯和查尔斯·切斯纳特的种族与生态哥特式
• 凯文·科斯托菲恩（简介）

姆布罗斯·比尔斯（mbrose Bierce，1842 年 - 约 1914 年）生前以尖刻的记者和短篇小说作家而闻名，很容易被视为一个独特的人物。他的作品有时因其对内战（他为联邦军队而战）的生动而残酷的描绘而被阅读，有时则因其在美国“怪异”小说经典中应有的地位而被阅读。它融合了哥特式、超自然和科幻小说，弥合了爱伦·坡和洛夫克拉夫特之间的差距。比尔斯的失踪似乎是在 71 岁时前往墨西哥旅行后发生的，他的小说中以神秘失踪的奇怪故事为预兆。同样，查尔斯·W·切斯纳特（Charles W. Chesnutt，1858-1932 年）的故事也因他在非裔美国文学史上的重要地位而黯然失色。作为一名作家，他对重建时期的黑人生活进行了奇幻和现实主义的描绘。在这里，我认为两位作者，特别是比尔斯的《穿越田野的困难》（1888年）和切斯纳特的《招魂女人》（1899年），都以生态视角来创作他们的小说，这种视角同时去中心化并重申了种族经历的特殊性。他们的时间。

我认为哥特式小说中的种族真相由于其叙事转移到环境中而被忽视，这凸显了生态批评中进一步关注种族的迫切需要。种族的社会建构与自然世界的背景无关，但设法产生不同的经验领域，如果其后果不那么真实的话，这些经验领域可能看起来很梦幻。尽管作者的职业生涯有重叠，但他们通常不会考虑到他们共同关心的问题。我认为，在他们写作的美国社会和政治生活的关键时刻，他们为“自然”与种族分类之间的关系提供了重要的见解。考虑到我们如何将人类划分为种族以及我们如何构建可定义的自然概念的奇幻本质，[结束第55页]超自然小说是实现这种洞察力的手段，这是适当的。在这里，我通过对比尔斯的短篇小说和切斯纳特的几篇短篇小说的比较分析来审视“自然”与种族的交叉点，重点关注《火星吉姆斯的噩梦》、《波桑迪》和《粘人的小道消息》。

种族、超自然现象和哥特式

比尔斯于 1888 年在《旧金山观察报》上发表的《跨越领域的困难》只有不到八百字，讲述了一件离奇的事件，没有任何解释，也几乎没有任何背景。一位名叫威廉姆森的种植园主起身走到附近的一块田地，向他的监督者安德鲁传达消息。在穿过他自己的房子和花园之间的空旷田地以及安德鲁和一群奴隶正在工作的田地时，他消失了。最近的目击者是一位名叫阿莫·雷恩的邻居和他的儿子詹姆斯，还有长途汽车司机和一个名叫萨姆的奴隶。当拉车的马匹绊倒时，他们都一时分心，导致他们看不见威廉姆森，而威廉姆森再也没有出现。故事的第一部分以第三人称讲述，而第二部分则从雷恩的角度转向第一人称法律证词。最后写道：“法院裁定威廉姆森死亡，他的遗产依法分配。” ¹这个结构与比尔斯的许多其他短篇小说没有什么不同，包括《该死的东西》（1893），它同样采取了法律调查的形式，尽管在这个例子中存在一具死者的尸体，并且它也采用了法律调查的形式。杀死他的生物已经消失了，从一开始就似乎看不见。比尔斯表现出对过去的迷恋：有一种失落时代的感觉，这种感觉几乎已经进入神话，适合超自然小说（就像欧洲哥特式小说对中世纪过去的背景一样）。在《穿越田野的困难》中，战前的南方扮演着类似的角色，既充满异国情调又熟悉的时代背景，与切斯纳特的当地色彩风格有着明显的相似之处……