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"Dark Nature" examines literary representations of fears of nature in American literature, from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Critiquing some dominant trends in ecocriticism, this project fills a gap in the field by studying texts that represent nature as a threatening force. By calling attention to such representations, I identify many of the cultural sources of those anxieties about nature at different historical moments. In the process, this project reveals that there has always been a Gothic subtext in the long history of literature about nature in the United States. "Dark Nature" begins by examining representations of Puritan fears of nature in New England, looking at authors such as William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Mary Rowlandson to show how the Puritan worldview established a "pre-Gothic" way of envisioning nature. It then moves to the post-Revolutionary era, using Charles Brockden Brown's "Edgar Huntly" to describe national anxieties about American wilderness and the ways those anxieties undermined contemporary Enlightenment ideals. The third chapter looks at the "darkness" within the work of that most canonical of nature writers, Henry David Thoreau. Despite the optimism of his Transcendental view of nature, I reveal that Thoreau's writing is often pervaded by moments of anxiety and even fear of the natural world. A further chapter about slave narratives shows how Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs present nature as darker than anything their romantic contemporaries produced, often consciously employing Gothic nature imagery as a rhetorical tool of resistance against their white oppressors. Finally, this study concludes with by exploring how some of Herman Melville's writing exemplifies a changing worldview in light of Charles Darwin's theories about natural selection and survival of the fittest. After the mid-nineteenth century, Gothic representations of nature tend to signal different types of fears based no longer on Puritan conceptions of nature, but rather on a post-Darwinian view. In calling attention to this overlooked lineage of writing, "Dark Nature" helps widen the discourse of ecocritical studies, arguing that there is much to be learned from studying representations of nature that are not only un-Romantic, but outright dangerous, violent, and terrifying.

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This thesis examines the way in which four women writers of the 1790s appropriated the architectural metaphors of the Revolution debate in their Gothic novels. By transforming the political metaphor of the Gothic building into a material environment in their writing, this thesis argues that Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, and Jane Austen staked their own variant positions in contemporary debates regarding revolution and reform. In the 1790s, the more general struggle for political and social improvement was linked by writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft to the need for reform of sexual inequality in society. By closely examining the Gothic building – typically a hostile environment for its female inhabitants – this thesis argues that the Gothic house or castle functions in these novels as a critique of domestic, as well as state, politics. Chapter one begins by exploring the synergies between architecture, politics, and the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. In this way, this thesis contributes to a neglected yet emerging area of Gothic scholarship: the complex and symbiotic relationship between architecture and the Gothic novel. Chapter two considers the way in which Charlotte Smith exploits contemporary associations of Gothic architecture in The Old Manor House (1793) to subvert the political ideology embedded in the architectural metaphors of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In chapters three and four, the architectural descriptions of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Robinson are read in dialogue with those of Edmund Burke, Hannah More, John Thelwall, and Mary Wollstonecraft: in Radcliffe and Robinson's novels, this thesis argues, the simple structure of revolutionary reform is favoured over the ancient castle of counter-revolutionary custom. Finally, chapter five challenges the critical conception of Jane Austen as a political reactionary by examining the way in which her depiction of architecture in Northanger Abbey (1817) destabilises the most perniciously gendered aspects of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.