Victorian fantasy literature has a subgenre of botanical horror which depicts plants as angry, manipulative, parasitic, murderous, and indifferent to human survival. >'Daisy Butcher suggests that this literary phenomenon emerged due to a variety of specific nineteenth-century colonial anxieties.' - Elvia Wilk [[Wilk, Elvia (2022) Death By Landscape]] This also reminds me of descriptions of the landscape by such authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who described the autumn countryside is these terms: > 'The rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foul haze. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before- scarlet and mauve and liver and black.' - Arthur Conan Doyle Colonial anxieties abound from plants who might seek revenge being an echo of the fears surrounding colonial subjects revolting or the fears of foreign environments. Let us not forget the history also of [[Botanical Gardens]] and their colonial fingerprints. >'What if they imported horrors in their very cellular structure? What if the naturalized, backgrounded other should turn out to have a will of its own, a desire to harm? What if the plants ("plants") should be actively working in their own interest - formenting revolt?' - Elvia Wilk [[Botanical Gardens]] >'Instead, plants are obvious stand-ins for the other in the broadest sense, and the fearful attitude toward plants motives is evidence of a deep, if sublimated, awareness of the violence of empire. In retrospect, it is clear that the evil root is empire itself, the brutal exploitation of the colonial project, which wrought environmental devastation as it decimated societies, and which produced the other that it villainized and feared.' - Elvia Wilk [[Wilk, Elvia (2022) Death By Landscape]] Again we see the colonial fear of what might happen if those it controls rise up against it. It reminds me of white supremacy and the fears that control both those benefitting and those being held down by it. Both are caught in a web of enclosure. #enclosure #whitesupremacy #colonialism >'...people have long been inflecting the landscape with any number of fears and desires, but... [It has] never been a real mystery about who colonized and devastated the wilderness.' - Elvia Wilk [[Wilk, Elvia (2022) Death By Landscape]] ## Sources: [[Western Literary Forms]] [[Love Stories in Western Literature]] [[The Weird]] [[Eco-horror]]