• New England’s Nineteenth-Century Ecogothic Nightmares: Bees and Rivers as Metaphors and Harbingers
• Bridget M. Marshall¹ (bio)

In The 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 [End Page 31] histories, such as the extirpation of Indigenous Peoples and the persecution of so-called “witches.”⁵ There certainly were (and are still) plenty of dark tales that emerged from or were buried in the soil of New England. But in the nineteenth century, a new fear surfaced in New England as the region became the site of industrial ventures that would consume endless natural resources and devastate local ecosystems.⁶ Many works by both well-known and now unknown nineteenth-century writers portray anxieties about once pristine New England landscapes that were obliterated by factories and mills. As cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Saco, Maine sprung up with seemingly supernatural speed, observers described newly industrialized landscapes using evocative gothic imagery, often painting nature as an innocent victim of predatory industrial development, but also at times suggesting that it was a serious threat to human industrial advances, fully capable of fighting back against the predations of capital. In literary depictions of these nineteenth-century industrial transformations of the landscape, we can see the environment as not merely a setting where things happen, but as a character with striking similarities to a gothic heroine in danger, being stalked by human predators and their “demonic” machines. This article traces representations of the conflict between the horrors of industrial ventures and the terrors of nature by considering examples from some relatively well-known industrial fiction, such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) and Margret Howth (1862), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), and Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Gray Mills of Farley” (1898), alongside writing by lesser-known authors, including the working people (especially women) who contributed to the Lowell Offering and other periodicals. Together, these examples demonstrate how a variety of writers in the period deployed what we might now call the ecogothic to consider industrialization’s disruption of an already haunted New England landscape. Collectively, these texts reveal a troubling ambivalence about the conflict between nature and industrialization, suggesting that our contemporary responses to concerns about climate change are not new, but merely another instance of human failure to fully comprehend the complexities of our world and the consequences of our own actions...

• 新英格兰十九世纪的生态哥特式噩梦：蜜蜂和河流作为隐喻和预兆
• 布里奇特·M·马歇尔¹（简介）

弗朗西斯·特罗洛普在《美国人的家庭礼仪》 （1832）一书中将美国的一个新兴工业城市描述为一个“战场”，“机械恶魔”在这里与“和平的自然领域”作战，“以半速的速度”。十几棵树被砍倒，一座工厂拔地而起；树桩仍然与柱子对抗地面，门廊与岩石搏斗。” ²根据她的说法，即使工业企业的迹象不断蔓延，地球与人类工业干预之间的持续斗争仍然存在争议。这种将工业化描述为无辜的、注定要失败的自然环境与人类不懈的进步动力之间展开的战斗的文学描述充满了意象和隐喻，揭示了人类与自然世界之间本质上哥特式的关系；此外，这样的描述预示着生态崩溃的哥特式噩梦。哥特式批评很早就认识到环境对哥特式文本的重要性。艾伦·劳埃德·史密斯（Allan Lloyd-Smith）将美国哥特式文学的一个关键主题确定为“土地本身的恐怖，它的空虚，它的无情；只是一种对其广阔、孤独、甚至可能充满敌意的空间的感觉。” ³特别是在过去的十五年里，鉴于气候变化对地球和人类生活的影响日益严峻，学者们一直在使用一种特殊的生态哥特式镜头来提请我们注意此类描述的重要性。劳埃德·史密斯认为“哥特式的风景…… 。 。着眼于山脉、峭壁和荒地的裸露、不人道和无情的本质” ⁴，但生态主义的方法表明，“裸露的、不人道和无情的”与其说是自然世界，不如说是人类活动对它的破坏。

特别是美国新英格兰地区的景观长期以来一直是哥特式恐怖的根源，包括神秘的动植物和森林，以及可怕的[完第 31 页]历史，例如土著人民的灭绝和所谓的迫害。 “女巫。” ⁵当然，过去（现在仍然）有大量的黑暗故事从新英格兰的土壤中浮现出来，或者埋藏在新英格兰的土壤中。但在十九世纪，新英格兰出现了一种新的恐惧，因为该地区成为工业企业的所在地，这些企业将消耗无尽的自然资源并破坏当地的生态系统。⁶十九世纪著名作家和现在不知名的作家的许多作品都描绘了对曾经原始的新英格兰风景被工厂和磨坊摧毁的焦虑。随着马萨诸塞州洛厄尔、新罕布什尔州曼彻斯特和缅因州萨科等城市以超自然的速度崛起，观察者们用令人回味的哥特式意象描述新工业化的景观，经常将自然描绘成掠夺性工业发展的无辜受害者，但有时也暗示它是对人类工业进步的严重威胁，完全有能力反击资本的掠夺。在对这些十九世纪工业景观转变的文学描述中，我们不仅可以将环境视为事物发生的环境，而且视为与处于危险中的哥特式女主人公惊人相似的角色，被人类掠食者及其“恶魔般的”机器。本文通过考虑一些相对知名的工业小说中的例子，例如丽贝卡·哈丁·戴维斯的《钢铁厂的生活》（1861年）和玛格丽特·霍斯（1862年），追溯了工业冒险的恐怖与自然的恐怖之间的冲突。 ）、伊丽莎白·斯图尔特·菲尔普斯（Elizabeth Stuart Phelps）的《沉默的伙伴》（The Silent Partner，1871 年）和莎拉·奥恩·朱厄特（Sarah Orne Jewett）的《法利的格雷磨坊》（The Gray Mills of Farley，1898 年），以及一些不太知名的作家的作品，其中包括为洛厄尔祭做出贡献的劳动人民（尤其是妇女）和其他期刊。这些例子共同展示了这一时期的各种作家如何利用我们现在所说的生态哥特式来考虑工业化对已经闹鬼的新英格兰景观的破坏。总的来说，这些文本揭示了关于自然与工业化之间冲突的令人不安的矛盾心理，表明我们当代对气候变化问题的反应并不新鲜，而只是人类未能充分理解我们世界的复杂性和我们的后果的另一个例子。自己的行动...