Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray, and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses .... And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy .... --Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

This dream sequence from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 novella serves as just one of countless examples of what remains a relatively understudied element of American gothic fiction: the gothic plant. Given, however, the increased interest in ontological questions related to nonhuman Others, particularly animals, theorists have begun to address plants as something more than merely green scenery upon an otherwise human stage. With this interest in the implications of plants within the humanistic sphere, it is especially productive to consider the plants represented in one of America’s most popular literary modes, the gothic. And plants emerge repeatedly in American gothic literature, from its most obscure to its most canonical texts. For example, laboring to convey the stricken mind of his ill friend, the unnamed narrator of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” remarks that, among a host of other peculiarities, Roderick Usher remained convinced “of the sentience of all vegetable things.”

Trapper, ecologist, and nature writer Paul Errington dedicated his life to the understanding and preservation of wetland environments and to the rich diversity of wildlife that calls tl1em home. Through his technical research as well as in his popular writing, Errington challenged us to change the way we think about and value marshlands. He was one of tl1e most innovative, forward-thinking, and influential ecologists of his day, and his lifetime of exploring and working in midwestern glacial marshes culminated in his natural history classic, Of Men and Marshes.

Surveying the development of the Southern Gothic landscape, Sivils locates its origins in seventeenth-century captivity narratives by figures such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Captain John Smith. He then traces the cultural evolution of the Southern Gothic landscape through a selection of texts by Henry Clay Lewis, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and others. Referencing critics such as María del Pilar Blanco and Yi-Fu Tuan—and placing emphasis upon the portrayal of the swamp as related to issues of racial oppression—Sivils ultimately argues that these landscapes function as much more than just passive settings. They are, rather, dynamic sites of haunting that reflect, and at times participate in, the South’s legacy of human and environmental abuse.

Dickinson wrote this enigmatic, single-sentence letter without commentary, but while she did not elaborate on her assertion, she seems conscious of how the idea of haunting emerges in artistic endeavors as well as in general perceptions of the nonhuman environment-here conceived of as a haunted house. To be sure, many of the American literary works that preceded Dickinson fall under the category of those that try "to be haunted." And these texts that strive to house the ethereal and uncanny comment on the ftrst part of her statement by presenting an imagined environment inhabited by spectral entities and marred by violence.