The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness

Abstract

[...]we see a surge of horror films including The Birds (1963), Jaws (1975), and lesser-known titles such as Night of the Lepus (1972) and Frogs (1972), which portray animals violently attacking humans, usually due to hubristic human attempts to control or otherwise interfere with the environment. Cannibalistic appetite itself (often necessary for survival in the harsh conditions of early settlement, notably Jamestown) is related to Manifest Destiny and the ceaseless consumption characteristic of the capitalist system, which has led to the decimation of the environment. The scope of the book is so ambitious that it is difficult to boil down to one core thesis, but if such a unifying argument exists, it is based around the idea, as Murphy states in the introduction, that 'the Rural Gothic is characterised by negative encounters between individuals who have permanently settled in one place, and those who are defined by their mobility and lack of permanent relationship with the environment' (p. 10).

Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013)

The English poet Michael Drayton, in his 'Ode to the Virginian Voyage', urged the people of Britain to travel westwards to the New World. He writes of

Virginia,

Earth's only paradise!

Where nature hath in store

Fowl, venison, and fish,

And the fruitful'st soil,

Without your toil,

Three harvests more,

All greater than your wish.

Drayton's Edenic vision of America, set out in 1606, would be followed only three years later by the 'starving time' suffered by the Jamestown colony, when the population of around five hundred people would be reduced to sixty by starvation, disease, and even cannibalism. This tension between optimism and darkness comes to characterise the American experience for Leslie Fiedler, who has described the United States as 'a world which had left behind the terror of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people'.1 Fiedler's 1966 thesis has since been taken up by critics including Teresa Goddu, Allan Lloyd Smith, and Charles L. Crow, who identify a distinctly 'American Gothic' tradition, and expand upon the colonial and ecological implications of such a perspective. Recent studies, including EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013) and a special edition of Gothic Studies on 'The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century', edited by David Del Principe (May 2014), have specifically turned to nature as a focal point.

Bernice M. Murphy's monograph The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture is, then, a timely intervention into a burgeoning area within gothic criticism. Murphy combines a historicised approach with a close analysis of texts viewed through the lens of genre. As with much current scholarship in the field of gothic studies, this takes a broad sweep from early colonial narratives to novels, films, and recent television shows. The five chapters presented here offer all of the topics that the reader might expect. The importance of the frontier in the formation of American society is a major touchstone for the study, as is the Puritan encounter with the wilderness. In keeping with the ecocritical focus of the current wave of criticism,2 much attention is given to the idea that, as Murphy states, 'the natural world will justifiably rise up against humanity' (p. 194). This theme, here discussed particularly in relation to film, is positioned as stemming from a sense of guilt or anxiety surrounding our relationship with nature. Thus we see a surge of horror films including The Birds (1963), Jaws (1975), and lesser-known titles such as Night of the Lepus (1972) and Frogs (1972), which portray animals violently attacking humans, usually due to hubristic human attempts to control or otherwise interfere with the environment. In the post-2000 era, the disaster portrayed on screen is more apocalyptic in tone, and is embodied not only in films such as The Last Winter (2006), The Happening (2008), and The Book of Eli (2010), but also in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which serves as a touchstone for a wave of narratives that suggest that 'the devastating effects predicted by Gore are not only underway, but unstoppable' (p. 194). It is perhaps unsurprising, in this context, that the idea of nature's revenge on humanity comes to be such a powerful wellspring of horror.

Nature itself is not the sole focus of the discussion, as human horrors also appear. In what may be the book's most interesting argument, Murphy discusses the demonised figure of the 'hillbilly'. Seen everywhere from H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Picture in the House' (1924) to Deliverance (1972), the backwoods hillbilly serves as a representation of all that is rejected, or repressed, by 'normal' society. The imperative to construct strict, yet artificial, boundaries between whiteness and blackness (and the attendant civilisation/savagery binary) during slavery, Murphy argues, had the effect of creating a new racial category of 'white trash' associated with the 'backwards' past. The extremity of rural poverty in areas such as the southern Appalachian Mountains is exploited by 'hillbilly horror', which 'depict[s] attractive, wholesome, middle-class outsiders who fall victim to clannish, insular, psychotic, and physically repellent backwoods/rural inhabitants' (p. 147). The simultaneous idealisation of some backwoods residents as remnants of self-sufficient early settlers, who live a familyorientated and God-fearing lifestyle, allows Murphy to use a structuralist approach, in that she categorises a broad range of these narratives within genre and cultural contexts. The supposed cannibalistic tendencies of hillbillies are explored, with this trope also being read as a displacement of mainstream anxieties. Cannibalistic appetite itself (often necessary for survival in the harsh conditions of early settlement, notably Jamestown) is related to Manifest Destiny and the ceaseless consumption characteristic of the capitalist system, which has led to the decimation of the environment. In this context, the mythical figure of the wendigo appears as a metaphor for this hunger, as seen in films such as Ravenous (1999). Overall, then, Murphy's approach to the material allows illuminating connections to be made between texts, while themes and character types that tend to be taken for granted by the reader or viewer are put solidly into context.

This approach can be seen throughout the book, where Murphy grapples with familiar archetypes from the world of literature, film, and television, and relates them convincingly to singular contexts from the formation and continuing development of American society. Nowhere is this offhand or general, but rather the comparative readings are rooted firmly in history and relevant references to contemporary documents, biblical narrative (particularly the Puritan interpretation), and mythology. At times this makes bedfellows of seemingly disparate topics, but always manages to convince. A notable example is Murphy's connection of 'captivity narratives' such as that by Mary Rowlandson (1682) with the figure of the 'Final Girl' as memorably described by Carol J. Clover in her influential critique of horror film, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992). Both figures are seemingly vulnerable young women who are separated from their home and family, and thrust into unknown dangers, yet survive due to their resourcefulness and strength of character. Murphy herself points out the dangers of making too direct a link for 'reasons of historical and cultural accuracy' (p. 39), yet it is exactly these bold connections that make this book feel fresh and exciting, while the depth and accuracy of its scholarship is self-evident.

The scope of the book is so ambitious that it is difficult to boil down to one core thesis, but if such a unifying argument exists, it is based around the idea, as Murphy states in the introduction, that 'the Rural Gothic is characterised by negative encounters between individuals who have permanently settled in one place, and those who are defined by their mobility and lack of permanent relationship with the environment' (p. 10). This dichotomy allows the author to make connections between colonial fears connected to the dispossession of native peoples (bringing to mind Hawthorne's eponymous Young Goodman Brown (1835), who fears that 'there may be a devilish Indian behind every tree!'3) and apocalyptic visions of complete social breakdown seen in so many contemporary narratives from Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) to the ubiquitous zombie movie. Rural Gothic makes meaningful connections between all of the texts under consideration, offering fresh readings of familiar works, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) and Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' (1948), and welcome reappraisals of those which have seen less scholarly attention than their cultural impact deserves, such as Thomas Tryron's Harvest Home (1973), and T. E. D. Klein's The Ceremonies (1984). It stands as a welcome contribution to an emerging field and as an informed, witty, and readable guide to texts that are often as unsettling and strange as their backwoods subject matter.

Kevin Corstorphine

Footnote

1 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Champaign, IL.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), p. 31.

2 See also Tom J. Hillard, '"Deep Into That Darkness Peering": An Essay on Gothic Nature', Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 16:4 (Autumn 2009), 686-95.

3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'Young Goodman Brown', in The Scarlet Letter and Selected Tales, ed. by Thomas E. Connolly (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 315-30 (p. 316).