On 2 November, the North West Long Nineteenth Century Research Network hosted a special seasonal event: ‘Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Horror’. Three speakers explored diverse ways of thinking about horror in nineteenth-century narratives, drawing on ecocritical, postcolonial, and theological approaches. The speakers considered ways of representing horror and/ or haunting in relation to slavery, monstrosity and sustainability in both non-fiction and fiction from across the nineteenth century. The event was a hybrid one, as is becoming more popular in a post-pandemic landscape. The organisers successfully managed to cater for both in-person participation and the wider audience joining online who were positioned perfectly with a front-row seat, and with one of the speakers also connecting in virtually from the U.S., it felt very inclusive.
Following a welcome and introductions from Dr. Emma Liggins, Professor Katey Castellano presented a paper exploring abolitionist narratives through the lens of postcolonial geographies. Focusing on The History of Mary Prince (1831) and Robert Wedderburn’s Horrors of Slavery (1824), Castellano argues how Wedderburn, the mixed-race son of an enslaved mother and plantation owner, champions his enslaved mother’s disruptiveness as a member of the higgler community as demonstrating the advocacy of Black freedom. The higgler knowledge of island routes and plantation geographies that established an underground trade amongst enslaved plantation communities offered a sense of emancipation ahead of abolition. This knowledge underlined the sense of liberty in communal practices amid Black families of the West Indies. Linked to sites of obeah practice, the knowledge of plantation island landscape through higgler trade opens the possibility to re-map ideas of Black freedom and community. Both narratives challenge white abolitionist notions of post-plantation freedoms, as emancipated Black plantation communities already had recourse to established local, communal ecologies and economies.
Dr Emily Alder’s re-reading of the nineteenth-century ghost story through an ecogothic lens highlighted issues of sustainability and the failure of intergenerational justice. It also opened the avenue for a more ecocritical appraisal of Victorian gothic narratives and the spectre of the Industrial Revolution in the concept of the Anthropocene. While many ecogothic explorations of Victorian fiction have tended to focus on landscape or place in relation to the monstrous, Alder argued the ghost in Charlotte Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’ (1882) represented the social structure that uses unsustainable practices through the misdeeds of inheritance, resource mismanagement and the consequences of urban sprawl, underscored by the environmental degradation that marks the failure of intergenerational justice. While the gothic often registers marginal awareness of contemporary ecological concerns, the story’s emphasis on intergenerational injustice in the figure of the ghost-child mirrors the legacy of environmental justice that haunts current failings of sustainable development models.
Exploring how corporeality in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) allows the eponymous protagonist to be read as the first theological monster, Dr Madeleine Potter draws on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theses to argue how Melmoth’s physicality in his Faustian monstrosity presents Maturin’s character as a mirror reflecting the demons lurking in those he meets. Here too, Maturin’s views of the dangers of materiality are not just entangled with the human body, but landscape and the environment enhance the interpretations of a corporeally materialised wickedness and interiorised Satan at the heart of his Lutherian beliefs.
The Q&A session that followed invited speakers to expand on their main points, for example, the role of the higgler and obeah practice in post-plantation enslaved communities, the spectral role of environment in ghost stories beyond Riddell’s tale, and the human-nonhuman monstrous kinship within Melmoth’s corporeal mirror.
Overall, the event’s focus on horror/gothic aspects for exploring new avenues of re-reading nineteenth century texts showcased some fascinating new research in fields of growing interdisciplinary interest: human geography, environmental humanities, and the human body through a theological lens.
Teresa Fitzpatrick
Teresa Fitzpatrick has recently been awarded her PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University, which explored the intersectionality of plants and gender in speculative fiction from 1890s to 2015 through a material ecofeminist Gothic.