The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination
Elizabeth Parker
2020. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan
ix+308 pages
ISBN 978-3-030-35153-3, 978-3-030-35154-0 (eBook)

The ecoGothic is an exciting new development within the field of ecocriticism. Whereas traditional ecocriticism tends to perceive the relationship between humans and Nature in idealised terms, an ecoGothic approach seeks to address the problematic aspects of this relationship. Elizabeth Parker’s 2020 monograph, The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination, is chronologically the third of four recent book-length examinations of the subject: it follows two edited collections – Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ EcoGothic (2013) and Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils’ Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2017) – and precedes a third one – Sue Edney’s EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers – which was published later in 2020. Parker’s monograph stands out among these by being the first volume to restrict the focus of its analysis to a single component of the natural world: the forest.

The forest has captured the imagination since time immemorial, featuring prominently in mythological and contemporary cultural production alike. This setting, as Parker notes, is frequently portrayed in our culture as “a site of trial, trepidation, and terror,” so a systematic investigation of it through the critical lens of the ecoGothic is both relevant and viable (2). The aim of Parker’s study, as outlined in the brief opening chapter titled “Introduction: Into the Woods,” is to explore the roots of our fears of the forest and to describe the ways in which this environment is constructed as a Gothic space in our stories. The corpus of primary texts consists of twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglophone literature and film, among which Parker focuses predominantly on American works.

Following this brief introductory chapter, the next, “Theorising the Forest: Approaching a Dark Ecology,” forms the theoretical backbone of the volume. Parker starts by highlighting the inconsistency in the scholarly usage of the term “ecoGothic” – some academic texts treat it as a literary genre, while others as a critical approach – before providing her own definition that seems to hint at her preference for the latter usage: “the ecoGothic is a flavoured mode through which we can examine our darker, more complicated cultural representations of the nonhuman world” (36). Nevertheless, Parker identifies an essential feature of all texts suitable for ecoGothic criticism, namely an “undeniable sense of Gothic ambience in the natural environments that they portray” (35). Parker also distinguishes the ecoGothic from ecohorror (the two terms being often confused, but rarely discussed together), which she defines as a genre proper that “deliberately seeks to raise environmental awareness” by conveying “a clear and immediate sense of Nature’s revenge on humankind” (34). Most importantly, Parker’s hypothesis is formulated at the end of this chapter, consisting of seven theses on why we fear the forest. According to these theses, the forest is “against civilisation,” “associated with the past,” “a landscape of trial,” “a setting in which we are lost,” “a consuming threat,” “a site of the human unconscious,” and “an antichristian space” (47).

The next three chapters provide the textual analysis of the primary material, each concentrating on one of the three main ways in which the forest is made Gothic. “‘What If It’s the Trees?’: The Living Forest,” the third chapter, focuses on stories that depict the forest as an animate and conscious entity, which goes against the conventional understanding of this setting as a static background to human activities, thus generating a sense of unease in the audience. First, Parker looks at four short stories by Algernon Blackwood (“The Willows,” “The Temptation of the Clay,” “The Transfer,” and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”), arguing that the author is an early paragon of this tendency. Parker then moves on to discuss more recent examples of the living forest: Mark Frost and David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks, and two films, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. Finally, Parker offers a few instances of a markedly feminised version of the Gothic forest where women and Nature are linked by a certain “dark sympathy” (114). These are Naomi Novik’s novel, Uprooted, and a trio of films, William Friedkin’s The Guardian, Rupert Sanders’s Snow White and the Huntsman, and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

Following the concept of the forest as “living,” the fourth chapter, “Where the Wild Things Are: Monsters in the Forest,” is dedicated to stories in which the forest becomes terrifying because it serves as the dwelling place of various monsters. Initially, Parker elaborates on works like Robert Holdstock’s novel Mythago Wood, T. E. D. Klein’s novel The Ceremonies, and Alex Garland’s film Annihilation, where the monstrosity concealed by the forest is vague and ambiguous but undoubtedly connected to this setting. Subsequently, Parker discusses two literary figures well-known from folklore and fairy tales – the witch and the wolf – and identifies them as archetypes of the “ecoGothic monster” closely associated with the forest. (164). The figure of the witch is then scrutinised in three contemporary films, The Blair Witch Project by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, its sequel titled Blair Witch by Adam Wingard, and The Witch (also known as The VVitch) by Robert Eggers; while that of the wolf is examined in Catherine Hardwicke’s film Red Riding Hood, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Little Star, and three short stories from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (“The Werewolf,” “Wolf Alice,” and “The Company of Wolves”).

The fifth chapter, “‘It Isn’t Right to Build So Close to the Woods’: Humans and the Forest,” evaluates stories in which the Gothic character of the forest results from the presence of humans. Parker divides these into two categories. The first category encompasses stories featuring “backwoods hillbillies,” that is, regressed (at times even savage) people who live in or near the forest (220). To illustrate how these characters endow the forest with a Gothic quality, Parker turns to Richard Layman’s novel The Woods Are Dark, and three films, Lucky McKee’s The Woman, Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are, and Chad Crawford Kinkle’s Jug Face. The common element of the stories that fall into the second category is that they are set in a forest environment where wilderness is revealed to be a human construct. This can be either a benevolent construction aimed at creating an artificial paradise, as in the case of the films Innocence by Lucile Hadžihalilović and The Village by M. Night Shyamalan, or a malevolent one aimed at gory entertainment, as portrayed in The Hunger Games series of novels by Suzanne Collins and The Cabin in the Woods directed by Drew Goddard.

Parker’s closing chapter is titled “Conclusion: What Is ‘That Awful Secret of the Wood’?” and the summary of the main arguments within does an adequate job of answering that question. Throughout the volume, Parker’s argumentation remains clear and convincing, and the seven theses are regularly referenced. The expertise of the author is beyond question, as she draws on a vast corpus of secondary literature and analyses a diverse array of primary texts. Furthermore, Parker is the founding editor of Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject (launched in 2019 and available in open access format from https://gothicnaturejournal.com). Parker also suggests directions for future research, such as studying other landscapes of fear, typologising ecoGothic monsters, and extending the enquiry to non-Western literature and film. These are all intriguing topics, and it is safe to say that there is still much to explore in the field. Regarding the trope of the forest in particular, Parker’s treatment proves completely satisfactory. While an exhaustive investigation would undoubtedly exceed the confines of a single volume, this monograph successfully achieves the purpose set forth by the author.

The Forest and the EcoGothic is an altogether accessible and fascinating book that should be considered invaluable to academics interested in the study of literature, culture, and the environment. Since Parker concisely reviews all the fundamental texts of ecoGothic criticism in the second chapter, this book is highly recommended as an ideal introductory reading for those who are eager to learn about the darker side of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Additionally, this work should appeal to researchers working in the field of Gothic and horror studies. Furthermore, given that most of the primary works discussed are American literature and film, Parker’s study might hold valuable information for scholars in American studies and media studies as well.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.