Title
Deadly Gardens: The 'Gothic Green' in Goethe and Eichendorff
Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
11-2020
Abstract
Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1819 romantic fairy tale, The Marble Statue, with its enchanted yet threatening garden of Venus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famously enigmatic novel from 1809, Elective Affinities with its transformation of the baron’s lands into a vast English garden that results in four deaths, both portray idyllic gardens so lush and blooming as to seem almost mystical. And yet these gardens take on an ominously Gothic tone when their grounds or plant life are revealed to have startling power. If the traditional Gothic typically has gloomy castles and landscapes associated with a dark, possibly supernatural and definitely historical destiny from which we cannot escape, the ecoGothic tends in contrast to trap human beings in an uncertain status dominated by natural or ancient, physical forces. When these forces are vegetal, we can speak of the ‘Gothic green’, as we see in the narratives from Eichendorff and Goethe, who uncomfortably reintegrate the fate of human beings into natural processes and botanical energies beyond human control.
DOI
10.7765/9781526145697.00008
Publisher
Manchester University Press
ISBN
9781526145697, 9781526145680
Repository Citation
Sullivan, H. I. (2020). Deadly gardens: The 'Gothic green' in Goethe and Eichendorff. In S. Edney (Ed.), EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century: Phantoms, fantasy and uncanny flowers. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526145697.00008
Publication Information
EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers