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ABSTRACT (en)
Victorian poet Eliza Cook (1812-1889) once wished to be a “bird, or boat, or any thing” to inhabit the seascape she loved. Achieving this elision of human, object, and environment poetically, if not practically, Cook produced several anthropomorphising and animating it-narratives which adopted nonhuman perspectives as her own. This article examines the creation of plant voices in two such poems, “Song of the Hempseed” (1843) and “Song of the Seaweed” (1844), which offer contrasting yet intertwined negotiations of human–environment relationships. To foreground and theorise these texts’ plant/algal protagonists, I adopt an EcoGothic lens which pays particular attention to Cook’s use of key nonhuman EcoGothic tropes in “Song of the Seaweed,” namely her evocation of uncanny vegetal agency, multi-species monstrosity, and transcorporeal and sympathetic entanglements. Through these means, I argue that Cook’s “Seaweed” offers an education in shedding plant indifference, an opportunity to imaginatively identify with the nonhuman, and an encapsulation of the struggles of animating plants without erasing their alterity. An EcoGothic approach to Cook thus allows “Seaweed” to afford a poetic route through concepts key to current environmental thought and points to as yet uncharted territories which may prove fruitful in the expanding field of ecocriticism.
KEYWORDS (en)
Eliza Cook, EcoGothic, ecocriticism, plant-thinking, anthropomorphism
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.66.3
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