Lisa M. Vetere

What are the landscapes of the Anthropocene? An investigation into the etymology of the word landscape itself reveals the entanglement of human and nonhuman. In nearly every sense of the word, landscape signals a process and not a thing—the process of framing and rendering the “natural,” whether in pictures, scenes, points of view, perspectives, or sketches.1 In eleven out of its fourteen definitions for landscape, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word’s first usages to the years between 1599 and 1725, not coincidentally an era of large land seizures on a global scale, whether enclosures in England or the colonization of the Americas. The claiming, clearing, and cultivation of these lands in the pursuit of profit have created enormous devastation—on an unimaginable scale for peoples, places, animals, plants, and the ecosystems that encompass and sustain them. Such destruction has firm roots in the eighteenth century, when the mechanization of the Industrial Age, driven by Enlightenment notions of scientific mastery, allowed for mass production in both factories and plantations. We in the twenty-first century still bear witness to the magnitude of this legacy: the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Deepwater Horizon’s horrific 2011 oil spill, monstrous heaps of plastics menacing increasingly acidified oceans, species on the brink of extinction, CO₂ pollution at irreversible levels, and, here in 2020, swarms of killer hornets and the lethal Covid-19 disease, all spreading horror and terror throughout the globe. The temporalities and scale of such events unsettle; enormous quantities of space and time separate cause from effect. As Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer declare, “our anthropogenic present has scrambled the narrative templates and historical logics previously available for organizing experience.”2 Hensley and Steer suggest that literary logics could foster a better understanding of the Anthropocene. With its haunted castles, tortured bodies, menacing monsters, and supernatural powers, the gothic mode provides just such a coherent form with which to make sense of a senseless reality.

In this essay, I will examine what is known as the “first American gothic novel,” Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, for the ways it helps to make sense of the Anthropocene. Published in 1798—a key historic moment in the unfolding of the Anthropocene—the novel tells the story of the Wieland family in the years between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution (1763–76) as the Pennsylvania family haunted by disembodied voices and then afflicted by the tragedy of the murder of a family by its patriarch. Wieland recounts an invasive presence in the family’s Pennsylvania plantation who contaminates its landscape and buildings with his unruly behavior, behavior that may (or may not) have incited the grotesque murder. I argue that the plantation’s ornamental landscape—and the horticultural logics that shape it—plays a major role in the horrors of the novel. The logic of ornamental gardens banishes unwanted plants and people; it seeks control and order, the violation of which evokes fear and dread—surely the territory of gothic narrative and an explanation of the power of Anthropocene texts ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) to films such as Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and Swamp Thing (1982). “Plant horror” capitalizes on the terrors of human encounters with the vegetal being that characterizes so many a multispecies assemblage.3 Hence the surprise that critics have not investigated the first American gothic, Wieland, for its horticultural horrors. When considering the role of land in the gothic tale, scholars recognize Brown’s novel as agrarian or frontier gothic,4 but the horticultural dimension of Brown’s tale has thus far gone unexplored.

In my reading, Wieland registers the logic of what Anna Tsing terms the “Patchy Anthropocene,” or the “uneven conditions of more-than-human livability in landscapes increasingly dominated by industrial forms.”5 “Patches” are “landscape structures, that is, morphological patterns in which humans and nonhumans are arranged,”6 and their analysis begins with attention to the multispecies history of specific landscapes. With that concept, Tsing seeks to reconcile universality and particularity to pair “systems” thinking with an acknowledgment of the heterogeneity insisted upon by critics of the homogenizing effects of the term “Anthropocene.” Tsing argues that “the plantation landscape” was the very “avatar” of Enlightenment Man (Tsing’s capitalization is intentional—designed to implicate and particularize the “Anthropo” of the Anthropocene). His plantations, she claims, “spread everywhere; they are modern proliferation. As machines of replication they manufacture proliferation.”7 Man as Planter declared his plantation an agricultural “improvement,” serving the purpose not only of enhanced productivity but also of signaling his claim to its legitimate ownership. Part of the claiming involved representing the land as Nature with a capital N, a tabula rasa without a trace of prior peoples and plants—hence the drive to empty the land before establishing the landscape structure. Only when emptied could Enlightened Man then transport both human and nonhuman from other places to stake his claim in this “New” World. He regarded both as mere matter—the bodies that performed the work organized for them by the owners—and so His abduction, enslavement, and torture of Africans left His conscience clear.8 Reduced to the cultivation of single crops at the expense of all others, plantations thus become, as Tsing explains, “ecological simplifications in which living things are transformed into resources—future assets—by removing them from their life worlds. Plantations are machines of replication, ecologies devoted to the production of the same.”9

Plantation landscapes function with their headquarters in the metropole—their land dedicated to production managed from afar and their products shipped back to the metropole for consumption. This division of the globe into separate production and consumption zones replicated and accelerated the scale and logic of industrial mass production. Like European (and eventually North American) factories, plantations separated their intense monocultural production from all other activity, both rigidly and geographically. Planters functioned as the plantation’s “Mind,” governing and maintaining discipline over the bodies in a global division of labor that cultivated interdependencies but also deeply entrenched and devastating inequalities enduring for generations. Tsing considers the plantation so impactful a machine that she, along with Donna Haraway, supplements (rather than replaces) the contested term of Anthropocene by identifying the geological epoch as the “Plantationocene.”10 The Plantationocene’s “simplifying” of ecologies has had insidious unintended consequences, as so often happens with so many practices throughout the Anthropocene. Complex ecosystems cannot be simplified and instead produce cycles of resistance and increasing violence against that resistance. Resistance inevitably emerges because peoples, plants, soil, and animals do not remain inert; they do not stand still or stop growing. When “disentangled” from their “life world,” to use Tsing’s terms, beings act unpredictably; they become what she calls “feral proliferations” that proliferate precisely because of “the affordances of specific landscape forms,” in this case, the plantation.11 Because humans cannot function as mere matter, displaced and enslaved peoples resist, run away, and rebel. “Cleared” land does not remain so, despite the demarcation of surveyor lines. Plants may be removed, but they leave their roots behind. Birds and other “wild” animals may spread seeds from other plants and drop them into the fields, where they root and grow once again.

The transplants, both human and nonhuman, brought into the fields fail to behave as expected. Unruly plants interfere with monocultural production and are labeled pests or “weeds” that must be removed, thus tasking agricultural workers to weed as well as sow and reap. Weeding seeks, by definition, to reduce biodiverse ecosystems and thus, by necessity, continually disentangles multispecies ecologies. Yet its goals are also continually foiled, as such land disturbances transform the soil into an even more appealing place for even more weeds. According to Clinton Evans, eighteenth-century agricultural texts characterized weedy plants as demons, their language growing increasingly hostile as the century wore on: “enemies,” “spurious Kindred,” robbers and rapists even. Evans quotes eighteenth-century writer William Ellis, who “used terms such as ‘abominable,’ ‘stinking,’ ‘venomous,’ and ‘rampant’ to describe some of the more troublesome weeds.”12 This invective, not surprisingly, led to even harsher responses to the weed: a “war,” says Evans, that expends “more human energy” than “any other single human task.”13 Weeds became plants to exterminate rather than to tolerate. This war of extermination was fought on the fields of the plantation and led the weeds to grow physiologically stronger and more lethal. This ever-escalating cycle creates the kind of horrific ecological feedback loop described by Timothy Morton in Dark Ecology (2018) and is characteristic of the horrors of the Anthropocene. To return to the Anthropocene as gothic, this loop itself is what turns plants into monsters. The more planters try to purge fields of unwanted plants, the stronger and more resistant those plants become. The more virulent the invasives become, the more toxic the treatment. Tsing calls plantations “breeding grounds for virulence.”14 With monsters created through such a loop, it becomes difficult to locate the blame.

But the Plantationocene created monstrous plants not only through its agricultural but also through its horticultural practices; colonial plantations, that is, grew ornamental plants as well as crops. Ornamental gardens and cultivated plantation fields may seem like absolute opposites: one exists purely as aesthetic spectacle—plants to look at—and the other as monocultural production zone, or plants to eat. In his study of “the country and the city,” however, Raymond Williams discerns a foundational link between farms and pleasure gardens. Landscape gardening of the eighteenth century may have emerged as a benign aesthetic, a “high point of agrarian bourgeois art,”15 but Williams insists on its economic impacts and its necessary entanglement with the materiality of agricultural production:

And we cannot then separate their decorative from their productive arts; this new self-conscious observer was very specifically the self-conscious owner. The clearing of parks as ‘Arcadian’ prospects depended on the completed system of exploitation of the agricultural and genuinely pastoral lands beyond the park boundaries. There, too, an order was being imposed: social and economic but also physical. The mathematical grids of the enclosure awards, with their straight hedges and straight roads, are contemporary with the natural curves and scatterings of the park scenery.16

Williams goes on to observe that the mandate to banish “the facts of production”17 determines the very purpose of landscape design: to create a view of “Nature” without laborers or the traces of their work. To naturalize the landowner’s rightful and moral claim to the property, landscape gardens presented (and constructed) both a “commanding prospect” and an “unspoiled nature.”18 Hence an emotional need to deny production motivated the art. Jill Casid’s work on the plantations of the West Indies goes a step further and traces their presence in the gardens constructed by owners for their European country homes. In fact, Casid calls the picturesque gardens created by the arrangement of such aesthetic plants a “displaced referent”19 of the colonial plantation. Paintings, narratives, poems, or landscapers’ designs all inscribe this use of ornamental plants to mark land enclosures and, at the same time, to deny their dependence on productive labor. Transplanted majestic oaks lined the entrance to the master’s manor, and imported shrubs and flowers marked the boundaries of his property. Such plants performed similarly to the hedges and lines enclosing the English (and Irish) countryside. Casid extends Williams’s analysis by noting the “hybridity” crafted by such views, arguing that they further indexed the “natural” basis of such command: “the discourse of picturesque intermixture endeavored to ‘make a landscape’ that would appear as a spectacle of variety rather than monoculture, an oasis of harmony and repose rather than violence and deadline labor.”20 Additionally, and unmentioned by both Williams and Casid, both plantations and garden landscapes also share the mandate to “banish” plants serving as bodily nourishment as well as the evidence of production. The plantation system’s vegetation, whether growing in an ornamental garden or throughout a sugarcane field, provides only “empty” calories for both cultivator and consumer.

Charles Brockden Brown specifically identifies the patriarch of Wieland’s eponymous family, Theodore Wieland, as an avid practitioner of horticulture. In her epistolary account of the family history, his sister Clara Wieland alludes to the nature of her brother Theodore’s work with cultivars on Mettingen, the family estate on the banks of the Schuylkill River, just miles north of Philadelphia: “The ground which receded from the river was scooped into valleys and dales. Its beauties were enhanced by the horticultural skill of my brother.”21 While Clara’s use of passive voice effaces the agent of the “scooping” of dirt, she does tell us that her brother’s work included “bedecking” the constructed slopes “with every species of vegetable ornament, from the giant arms of the oak to the cluttering tendrils of the honey-suckle.” Furthermore, the novel classifies Theodore’s work as “skill,” driven by his mental capacity, rather than as menial labor, performed only by his body. As an ornamental gardener with book learning, the patriarch of Mettingen exploits the aesthetic pleasure and symbolic meaning of the plants rather than their power to nourish life—to feed his family. In Williams’s terms, Theodore “banishes” the “facts of production” and instead imposes the design of Mind.

Theodore the horticulturalist crafts this landscape precisely as prescribed by English garden theorists like Thomas Whately and William Shenstone—writers of botanical tomes studied by plantation owner Thomas Jefferson and emulated by the owners of English country homes, such as Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole, the latter known as the author of the first gothic novel, Castle of Otranto (1764). Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening identifies four essential elements of landscaping, which endow the first four chapters of his book with their titles: “Of Ground,” “Of Wood,” “Of Water,” and “Of Rocks.” To achieve picturesque gardens, he advises that the ground be varied in elevation, its shapes creating the most beauty through curves, both concave and convex; unevenness; irregularities; hollows; swells; and other irregularities.22 Whately recommends that its outline be “advanced sometimes boldly forward, sometimes retired into deep recesses; broke all the sides into parts, and marked even the plain itself with irregularities.”23 Theodore meticulously follows this expert’s instructions in his design of Mettingen’s landscaping; he includes rocky cliffs, dangerous precipices, rollicking water, and grounds both convex and concave. Clara, Theodore, and their families wander serpentine pathways through the shade of orchards and down “declivities” to their summerhouse and temple. The novel describes the location of the Wieland property: “The eastern verge of this precipice was sixty feet above the river which flowed at this foot. The view before it consisted of a transparent current, fluctuating and rippling in a rocky channel, and bounded by a rising scene of cornfields and orchards” (12). Like her father’s estate, Clara’s house borders a “river bank [that] is . . . so rugged and steep as not to be easily descended” (71). All this is designed only to evoke emotion, whether pleasure or admiration of its owner’s governing prowess.

The novel reinforces horticulture’s association of plants with mind rather than body by totally erasing any trace of actual food being eaten; quite the contrary, thought, not food, most often nourishes the characters. In fact, Brown often uses words associated with eating to describe thought. For example, Clara’s description of her brother reveals that while agriculture is practiced at Mettingen, the estate nonetheless is devoid of food; Clara has no buttermilk to give Carwin when he first appears at her home, only water (58). Indeed, the novel defines Theodore by the way that he chews the cud of thought: “what distinguished him was a propensity to ruminate on these truths” (25). He “ruminates” (38) first hearing Carwin’s voice. Clara also “ruminates” after first hearing the voices in her bedroom (68). The siblings, alas, come by their habits honestly, as their father “entertained no relish for books” until he discovered the “book written by one of the teachers of the Albigenses, or French Protestants” (8), which satisfied a “craving which had haunted him” (9). Clara further describes her father as having imbibed his opinions on missionary work on the frontier (10). When the Wielands actually do encounter meals, they are only mentioned because the characters do not eat them: Clara “could taste no food, nor apply to any task” while waiting for Pleyel to arrive at Mettingen for a dramatic reading of a German play (91). Clara’s brother is similarly averse to nourishing his body. Catherine describes how Theodore “scarcely ate a morsel, and immediately after breakfast went out again” after Pleyel informed him of Clara’s supposed intrigues with Carwin (122). It’s as if the Mettingen plantation seems to cultivate “thought” as its single crop, feeding mind alone. As landscape paintings elide the facts of production, Wieland banishes any trace of food and sustenance, turning the necessary biological process into an abjected other that, as all gothic scholars know, will certainly return to haunt someone or something.

Yet while the novel represents Theodore Wieland as the model gentleman landowner of the eighteenth century, seeking to sow the seeds of his disembodied universalized intellect throughout the globe, it nonetheless roots its story in a very particular place. For Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, that particular place is his villa, Mettingen, on the “suburban” outskirts of Philadelphia: a very particular urban landscape and heir to the specific environmental history of its construction. Philadelphia provided nourishing ground for a tale of horticultural horror. The settlement itself was practically founded on the notion of the affective power of gardens. When planning his Pennsylvania colony, William Penn expressed his intention to ornament Philadelphia with garden cultivation on all original city lots, and the city is still known as “a greene Country Towne.” Early maps, such as A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia, drawn by Penn’s surveyor general, Thomas Holme, in 1683, imagined the future city as a grid of streets interspersed with green spaces ornamented with fictional trees. Thus, as Elizabeth Milroy declares in The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876, “Philadelphia was a picture before it was a city.”24 Perhaps this sense of Philadelphia as fertile ground on which to build art also lured someone like Ben Franklin, a young artisan from Boston, who disciplined—or “managed”—himself there into an international legend.

As Philadelphia grew and prospered, the wealthier families built “country homes” adorned by picturesque English gardens in the Schuylkill River Valley. Scull and Heap’s maps encode the increasing popularity of this “country” life during the 1750s, depicting hundreds of houses within ten miles of the city limits. Such “villas” functioned as leisure, or “pleasure,” grounds for those who worked primarily in the city. As Philadelphia’s grid of streets named after trees became a prototype for cities growing throughout the colonies (e.g., Nightmare on Elm Street), so too did these villas provide a blueprint for suburban development throughout North America. An essential element of this blueprint was that those country homes be not of the country but easily accessible from the city—of the city, but not in it. These villas were, perhaps not incidentally, known as “plantations,” an association to which Wieland calls attention when it exposes the family estate’s reliance on slave labor: “The cheapness of land, and the service of African slaves, which were then in general use, gave him who was poor in Europe all the advantages of wealth” (11). Brown indirectly references Philadelphia’s role in the slave trade, as merchants, sailors, and consumers in the seaport city purchased commodities like rum from the West Indies. For many of the owners of these Schuylkill plantations, like Wieland’s father, the capital to dedicate themselves to the design of ornamental gardens attached to the villa derived from such commerce.

Pleasure gardens continued to shape Philadelphia’s history for the second half of the eighteenth century. In the 1770s, Philadelphians gathered at public gardens along the banks of the Schuylkill to celebrate colonial victory in the American Revolution; locations such as Bush Hill and Gray’s Gardens hosted patriotic fetes staged on “greens” conveniently cleared by the British army during its 1778 occupation. As Milroy observes, such deforestation gave spectators a clear prospect for these influential performances of nationalism. The private gardens of the Schuylkill villas also drew many tourists to consume these views, as the area grew into a popular tourist site and, at the same time, a “formative site within the early Republic’s literary and artistic canon: some of the earliest landscape painting and prints produced in the new United States were views of the Schuylkill and Wisshickon.”25 Misrepresented as pristine forests, the prospects featured in this body of artistic work sent the message that estate owners were the natural “stewards of these picturesque landscapes.”26

One of the best-known owners of these landscapes, William Hamilton, fashioned his estate, the Woodlands, along the west bank of the Schuylkill—the same side of the river where Theodore Wieland Sr. built his Mettingen plantation. Grandson of the famous lawyer who successfully defended Peter Zenger’s freedom of the press, William Hamilton frequently corresponded with founders such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as they modeled their own landscapes on Hamilton’s Woodlands.27 An amateur botanist himself, Hamilton worked with the prominent traders John Bartram and his son William, who collected and exchanged seeds (mostly of ornamentals) throughout the globe. His commerce was driven in part by the demand for ornamentals from the owners of the Schuylkill villas. Bartram’s exchanges with European naturalists, such as Linnaeus and Hans Sloane, helped make Philadelphia a hub of the international horticultural movement. Hamilton brought many an ornamental to his Philadelphia grounds, a habit that also earned him the dubious honor of introducing several invasive botanicals that still trouble North American landscapes: the tree of heaven and the lombardy poplar.28

Charles Brockden Brown exploits the horror that such invasive species evoke by having his novel’s villain, Carwin, also first emerge as an uninvited guest on the lawns of the fictional Schuylkill estate. Similar to a noxious weed, Carwin’s invasion of the Wieland estate precipitates (if not causes) a chain of events leading to the murder of the Wieland family. Clara, in fact, first sees Carwin in places that weeds typically inhabit: the edges of riverbanks, “the road, and in the harvest field” (57). She further describes the weedy invasive as “rustic and aukward,” with “a careless and lingering” pace. Carwin moves out of Clara’s view and enters into “a copse at a small distance” (58). Carwin’s presence on a lawn that customarily “was only traversed by men whose views were directed to the pleasures of the walk or the grandeur of the scenery” (58) surprises and bewilders her. The intruder’s presence on her picturesque lawn unsettles her emotions so intensely that she spends hours afterward trying to capture his image in a portrait. She can’t sleep: “half the night passed in wakefulness and in contemplation of this picture” (61), her mind turned into a rapidly proliferating field of entangled, weedy thoughts.

Weedy thought, feral proliferations—vining, growing without restraint or competitors—then infect the plantation of Wieland and all of its residents as Carwin’s mischievous biloquism entwines them in circuitous thought and unresolved confusion. It is on this picturesque property—not only its lawn but its serpentine paths, its orchards, copses, rugged precipices, and hidden recesses—where Carwin performs much of his early ventriloquists magic, the magic that begins to confound the minds and then ruin the lives of the Wielands. They hear mysterious voices in Theodore Wieland’s meticulously landscaped backyard, up the hill on the way to the temple; and not much later, the voices are heard at Clara’s—when she falls asleep in her summerhouse and nearly kills herself sleepwalking into a chasm (dreaming of such chasms even, showing how they have seeped into her unconscious)—and then when Pleyel thinks that he hears Clara and Carwin together in the “recess,” another word that repeatedly appears. Carwin is able to throw his voice and deceive these suburban denizens because the very winding paths and crevices and recesses in the rocks characteristic of the English landscape garden disguise and distract their ability to link sight and sound and thus make sense of the sensory input that should produce reasoned thinking.

With the venomous rage against weeds of an eighteenth-century agricultural writer, Clara Wieland never ceases to blame Carwin for the madness of her brother, the murder of her family, and the destruction of her home and idyllic lifestyle, despite witnessing firsthand her brother’s attempt to kill her. No doubt the murder of the Wielands is a brutal and horrific act. Yet the novel resists an easy explanation of the cause for such abhorrent violence. Thinking the novel through the Plantationocene, one might reconsider the virulence of its homicide. What causes a weed to become monstrous vegetation? In Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803–5), Brown’s sequel to Wieland, he provides a glimpse into the transplanted Carwin’s functioning in his original “life world,” a family farm in the “western district” (281) of Pennsylvania. On his family farm, Carwin’s father discouraged his son from book learning and even physically punished him for the ambitions that it fostered. Yet Carwin nonetheless manages to learn something very important, and very useful: to observe and contemplate the prospect of a landscape—the very skill that owners of Schuylkill estates used to demonstrate their particular kind of Enlightenment authority.

Carwin recounts an event in his fourteenth year that began when his father insisted that his son perform some pastoral labor—fetching cattle from their pastures. Fear of his father’s wrath, in fact, pervades the scene and propels Carwin’s behavior and thought. When arriving at the meadow to satisfy his father’s demands, Carwin discovers that it’s not as easy as he’d expected: a cow has escaped. In contemplating the broken fence that seems to have allowed it, Carwin succumbs to the deep pleasure of contemplation, wondering about its causality. Panic once again erupts and disrupts his wastrel ways, forcing Carwin to figure out a way to get back home quickly. The “beaten road” (283) is too long and circuitous, as it winds around rather than through a high rocky precipice overlooking a stream “agitated by an eddy” (283).

But the terrified son decides to risk taking the shorter but more perilous route. He stumbles through “abrupt points and gloomy hollows,” “entangled in a maze” (284), until happening upon a concealed “narrow pass” that could bring him home more safely than the stream yet more quickly than the beaten road. This “hollow,” however, is dark and steep. Carwin becomes fearful of its shade, imagining “goblins and spectres” (284), as he admits, and then starts to sing to fight off the fear. That’s when he hears the first echo, though it’s indistinct at first. He repeats his “ditty” to the lost cow, “in the shrill tones of a Mohock savage” (284), and wonders at hearing his voice repeated at least five times. “My terrors were quickly supplanted by delight,” Carwin observes, and his amusement with his experiment delays him yet another hour. Hurrying home, Carwin arrives to find his father only mildly reproachful, and so he finds himself eager to return to the “recess,” a “glen” “which overlooked a wide extent of this romantic country, [and] gave himself up to contemplation and the perusal of Milton’s Comus” (287). He practices more, tries something else—a “notion of sound, similar to these, but produced by other means than reverberation” (287). His “experimenting” (287) initially fails, but then through sheer will and repetition, he manages to master his skill.

This origin story demonstrates several significant things about Carwin’s power. First of all, he coproduced it with a very intricate and picturesque landscape. Here in Carwin’s lifeworld, such geological structures function not as setting and background but as actants and figures. Without the material properties of its rocks, serpentine paths, recesses, streams, precipices, mazes, and uneven elevations, Carwin could not have learned the biloquism that brought the horrors to the Wieland’s estate. The hollow literally sang to him; the stream and the precipice guided his way; the fence and the rocks dictated the rhythm and movement of his thoughts. Though acting in an ecology nearly identical to Mettingen’s, though performing nearly exactly the same act, Carwin here is kept in check, his powers failing to result in lethal consequences. Although Clara tries to represent Carwin as a force of ungovernable nature invading the temple of art and intellect, Brown’s backstory for Carwin reveals that his toxic effects on the plantation derive not just from an untrammeled nature but from art and nature interwoven over generations. His history shows that Carwin developed his art in a natural theater (itself probably a product of deforestation happening in the area of Carwin’s small family farm for at least fifty years prior) and that his art at that time did not foster a murderous virulence. In the agricultural fields of his birth, Carwin was mischievous, but not homicidal. Among other factors, Carwin’s father and brother acted as “natural competitors” in that ecosystem and constrained him. Only when removed from this “lifeworld” does Carwin become a catalyst of unimaginable horror. But the murder does happen at Mettingen, a plantation designed to cultivate a pure mind disentangled from its material roots, a place whose monoculture is vigilantly bounded by ornamental plants and the affective power of horticulture.

But what is at stake in the recounting of a single fictional incident of a virulent homicide? To return to the horrors of the Plantationocene and its geological temporalities, the node that is this novel operates in a much wider network, on a much grander scale. The kind of horticulture that Charles Brockden Brown represents in Wieland has grown exponentially since his gothic novel was first published in 1798. Throughout the nineteenth century, expert agricultural writers relentlessly promoted gardening of ornamental plants as a means to “improve” (in both moral and aesthetic terms) American private properties. In his “Editor’s Preface” to his edition of William Darlington’s 1865 American Weeds and Useful Plants, botanist George Thurber explains one of the purposes of his revisions: to urge nineteenth-century Americans to grow more ornamentals on their properties. He cites his decision to add descriptions of both weeds and ornamentals to his botanical catalog, even though “these latter may not strictly come within the class of ‘useful,’” as being driven by emotion:

The hope of inducing farmers to render the exterior of their homes more attractive by surrounding them with beautiful shrubbery, which, once planted, will be a permanent source of gratification not only to the possessors, but to travelers who pass them. The yards of our country dwellings generally present a forlorn appearance, which the attempt often made to cultivate a few coarse flowering plants, rather increases than removes.29

With the belief in the moral and intellectual value of landscape improvement growing in strength throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, upper-middle-class professionals of the antebellum era described this horticultural reform movement as one to induce “the right feeling” or affect within those who grew ornamentals. Thurber, for instance, talks of the “gratitude” that could be felt by farmers if they would only surround themselves with beautiful shrubbery. In her study of “The Moral Dimensions of Horticulture in Antebellum America,” Tamara Plakins Thornton asserts that horticultural societies and journals started to emerge in the 1830s.30 Such periodicals as the Horticultural Register and the Magazine of Horticulture published many an article meant to popularize and democratize horticulture in America, their chief method being affective—or to inspire.31

During the Anthropocene’s “Great Acceleration,” the democratization of gardening proliferated the virulent cycle of pest extermination. As the mandatory setting for the American dream, the monocultural lawn became the ornamental plant for the masses, its care and cultivation becoming the obsession of millions of humans, especially in the United States—designed all for affect and not at all for sustenance. The affect associated with lawns is intense and obsessive, institutionalized in many ways. For example, zoning laws in many municipalities throughout the United States criminalize the growing of plants for sustenance on front lawns. Twenty-first-century gardeners, farmers, and agribusinesses invest billions of dollars to exterminate ever more resilient species of invasive pests from these affective machines, status symbols, and miniature plantations. The health and environmental costs of the desire to control these monstrous plants are staggering. Newsweek’s Douglas Main reported on a 2016 study published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, revealing that Americans have applied 1.8 million tons of the herbicide, or weed killer, glyphosate since its introduction in 1974. “Worldwide, 9.4 million tons of the chemical have been sprayed onto fields. For comparison, that’s equivalent to the weight of water in more than 2300 Olympic–size swimming pools. It’s also enough to spray nearly half a pound of Roundup on every cultivated acre of land in the world.”32 The report adds that in March 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer unanimously determined that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Research has also shown that herbicides have become part of many human (and likely nonhuman) bodies, as “glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor, meaning that it interferes with the proper functioning and production of hormones.”33 The same Newsweek article recounts the response of weedy plants to this assault: they develop resistance to the herbicides, to which companies like Monsanto and Dow have responded by producing, selling, and spraying even more toxic herbicides. The weeds become monstrous, in other words. How did this happen? Who made these monsters? Perhaps beginning to understand them as uncanny and gothic materializations of Morton’s notion of the “strange loops” of the Anthropocene might be a start.