Seeing in flowers: Eco-Feminism and the Victorian Gothic.

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How can Gothic language, infused with the vocabulary of fear (Punter, 1996 p. 18), be used to explore human perceptions of the climate crisis? Representations of nature in the Gothic have immediate relevance to understanding human attitudes about the environment. Drawing on the Victorian cultural phenomenon of flower anthologies, my thesis asks how the language of flowers is articulated in Gothic fiction. Distinguishable from the metaphor of 'plant horror' my project investigates how floral symbolism disrupts Gothic narratives to inspire reflection on selfhood and nature. Through ecofeminist and ecoGothic critical frameworks, I am working to show how these fictions produce culturally constructed definitions of nature and the self. If the industrial revolution is culpable in the production of the geological epoch termed the Anthropocene, it is vital to see how Victorian attitudes towards the natural world were embedded in the arts to challenge androcentric and anthropocentric attitudes.