Introduction

This Element analyses representations of vegetarianism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the First World War writings of Arthur Machen (including short fiction and non-fiction), and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007). These texts from different eras and nations are united in their representation of vegetarians as potentially radical, dissident figures. In all, however, the vegetarian is unable to achieve their full radical status because that is suppressed by a Gothic language which respectively designates them as monstrous, war-like, and mentally unstable. The central argument of this Element is that an analysis of the vegetarian provides a unique example of how the Gothic both engages with, and subverts, radical ideas. All of these texts indicate that a certain type of vegetarianism is, on its own, not enough to transform models of society, even while they insist on the need for social transformation.Footnote ¹ This impulse for change is tied to the different social and political contexts of each of our writers. Frankenstein can be read as a reflection upon a post-Napoleonic Europe, which appears, at least to radicals of the time, to have lost its way. Machen’s wartime writings reflect on the terrifying destruction caused by World War I and argue for a new type of society. Kang’s novel obliquely reflects on the legacy of the Vietnam War whilst her later novel The Human Acts (2014), which also references vegetarianism, engages with the Gwangju uprising of 1980, which nearly led to civil war in South Korea. All these writers are grappling with issues of national importance which prompts these reflections on how to inhabit the world in a different, more peaceable, way. The issue of belonging to a new post-war world is key to understanding how and why vegetarianism appears to herald the possibility of change, but ultimately fails to help transform society.

All of these texts employ vegetarianism as a way of addressing political issues in symbolic terms. This is to acknowledge that these literary texts do not always specifically refer to extra-textual vegetarian issues (although sometimes they do), as they explore how vegetarianism can be used to explore ideas about identity and belonging within clearly identifiable dystopian Gothic worlds.Footnote ² These political narratives generate a form of vegetarianism that is not obviously founded on any clear concern for animal welfare, even while they draw upon contemporaneous ideas about science (Shelley), spirituality (Machen), and identity politics (Kang), which are reflected in vegetarian ideas and ideals. The Gothic recasting of these vegetarian concerns into symbolic forms can, as we shall see, be related to the traumas of the periods themselves.

All of our Gothic texts are grappling with political conflict. The conflict between utopian ideals and dystopian realities, for example, characterises Frankenstein and the war writings of Machen. The Vegetarian reverses this by attempting to assert a utopian identity against the horror of a dystopian reality associated with an abusive family network. That utopian vision is, however, at the cost of the subject, who can only enthusiastically embrace an immersive version of nature by, in the end, refusing to eat any food at all. Ultimately, in Kang’s novel, the creation of an ostensibly utopian world based on positive ideas of belonging results in death. All these texts reflect on the importance of belonging in a world that has erased hostility and otherness. This assertion of utopia is one in which animals and humans, and humans and plants, are brought into a peaceable alliance. These texts reflect on possible utopian worlds which have much in common with the idea of belonging associated with object-oriented ontology (OOO). Object-oriented ontology asserts the importance of developing a new type of ontology that challenges the binary opposition between human and animal. This challenge has significant implications for the representations of vegetarianism in our Gothic texts, because such texts also employ a language of othering which OOO seeks to challenge. While the type of utopian world mapped in OOO is both tacitly developed and disavowed by our Gothic narratives, which ultimately explore dystopian realities, OOO provides a crucial context for understanding the type of environmental world-building that occurs across these Gothic texts. On historical and theoretical grounds, we will see why our vegetarians become marginalised by alternative radical possibilities of belonging, rather than incorporated within them. It is the wrong type of Gothic vegetarianism, one tainted by dystopia, which cannot be accommodated within OOO.

Object-oriented ontology provides the chief critical paradigm employed in this Element because it establishes a utopian model of the environment which our texts engage with, before they deviate towards troubling Gothic dystopias. There exists a body of work which has explored the links between the Gothic and OOO and the important approach developed by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in Gothic Things (Reference Weinstock2023), is discussed in the following. It is also necessary to consider philosophical accounts of ecology which question the idea of subject/object boundaries, which has been developed by Timothy Morton, Henry Bartholomew, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo. Object-oriented ontology helpfully establishes a theory of environmentalism that challenges hierarchical binary oppositions that typically assert the primacy of human dominance. By erasing the boundaries between subject/object, natural/unnatural, human/animal, a more capacious version of subjectivity emerges within a model of environmental belonging. Crucially, this is a version of the environment that we find in the Gothic texts discussed here. This also explains why vegetarianism becomes disavowed when it is implicated, for quite specific political reasons, in tacitly supporting a human/animal binary. Morton’s assessment of agricultural development is the historical starting point for a consideration of how these binaries appeared and how they can be challenged. His position provides an important context for the forms of vegetarianism discussed in this Element.

In Dark Ecology (2016), Morton identifies the agricultural cultivation of nature as the starting point for nature’s objectification. This objectification supports a destructive human mastery of nature, or as Morton puts it, ‘Agrilogistics is the smoking gun behind the smoking chimneys responsible for the Sixth Mass Extinction Event’.Footnote ³ This control of the environment is, for Morton, highly unenvironmental because it relies upon a binary opposition of humans versus nature that undoes the possibility of holistic notions of belonging (which is, following Heidegger, the central feature of an environment).Footnote ⁴ For Morton, within this schema, nature, seen as a type of ‘thing’, nevertheless resists this objectification because it retains a vestigial otherness that frustrates attempts to absolutely control it. This otherness manifests itself in Gothic forms, so that ‘Things become misty, shifty, nebulous, uncanny. The spectral strangeness that haunts being applies not only to single lifeforms …but also to meadows, ecosystems, biomes, and the biosphere’.Footnote ⁵ Outlined here is a version of the ecoGothic that challenges the idea of human dominance. This type of haunting inhabits lifeforms as much as it does environments. The process of objectification means that the subject becomes detached from a wider understanding of their place in the world and so experiences mastery as a type of lack, because the objectification of nature leads to alienation from it. It is an idea which, as we shall see in Section 1, is reflected in Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to dominate nature, which results in a loss of control because he cannot restrain, or master, the creature. Nature resists and confronts the subject with this lack of control. Morton addresses this idea of lack in what appears to be paradoxical terms when he argues, ‘What we have lost, if anything, is a sense of ourselves exactly as objects’.Footnote ⁶ For Morton, humans take their place within a broad conceptualisation of environmentality which consists of places, creatures, and objects, which are only seen as separate from humans because of ‘an anthropocentric illusion that must be agrilogistic’.Footnote ⁷ We will see this type of agrilogistic thinking challenged in Section 2 in a discussion of Machen’s The Terror (Reference Machen1917), in which the forces of war (as forces of human dominance) become challenged by animals, with Royal Flying Corps planes brought down by pigeons, the Navy attacked by porpoises, and the Army attacked by horses. Nature fights back at this moment of extreme objectification in which nature is turned into territory to be invaded and subject to wholesale destruction. For Machen, the binary between human and animal is eroded because the animals see humans as animals to compete with in order to challenge the human wartime destruction of nature. This seemingly radical position becomes undermined by Machen’s representation of vegetarianism as a misplaced hunger for mock meat, in which the ontological status of nut cutlets otherwise undoes Machen’s attempt to embrace a meat-free spiritual utopia.

Morton’s point about humans as objects places them within the theoretical framework of OOO in which objects gain a type of life and the human becomes an object within an environment. Morton notes previously that nature refuses to be fully mastered and that this appears in forms that are ‘misty, shifty, nebulous, uncanny’. While Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) has proved to be a fertile critical paradigm when considering Gothic doubling, it retains a more problematic status in OOO, because the uncanny appears to relate more clearly to psychology, or aesthetics, than to models of ontology. Henry Bartholomew has explored how the uncanny can be related to OOO through an analysis of the importance of doubt, which has links to Morton’s misty uncanniness. Bartholomew’s article helpfully relocates a key Gothic term into the theoretical ambit of OOO and, in doing so, enables further consideration of the relationship between the Gothic and the environmentalism championed by OOO. In a reading of Ernst Jentsch’s ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906), which Freud grapples with in ‘The Uncanny’, Bartholomew notes that for Jentsch, ‘The uncanny …is the experience of an unfamiliarity which cannot be intellectually/psychically mastered. As soon as mastery or familiarity is restored, the object or event ceases to be uncanny’.Footnote ⁸ For Freud this radical indeterminacy is frustrating, but his ‘The Uncanny’ inherits, rather than resolves this as he struggles to locate the precise grounds on which uncanniness occurs. For Bartholomew, what is crucial about Jentsch is the argument ‘that familiarity – the homely – is only possible as a psychical structure built atop a more foundational unfamiliarity caused by a gap between an entity and one’s experience of that entity’; it is in this gap, between reality and experience, that we witness ‘a shift in register from the psychological to the ontological’.Footnote ⁹ This is not an epistemological difficulty, because to know the uncanny is to undo the uncanny. Rather, this position allows for a state of experience which is radically beyond forms of mastery (as forms of knowing). It is this type of world that our Gothic narratives have in mind.

At one level, the Gothic texts discussed here undoubtedly explore psychological issues centring on doubling, projection, and anxiety (all of which can be found in typical readings of the uncanny). They also, however, ponder questions about existence which address ideas concerning creativity, life, and spirituality, which are more broadly conceived of in ontological terms. They are also texts which consider how these issues relate to environmental ideas of belonging. The key questions raise concerns about how these conflicted subjects in Gothic texts attempt to fight off an ‘otherness’ which sees them as non-human. How can these entities find a way of belonging that overcomes their sense of alienation? These questions are not just raised by the creature in Frankenstein, they are also addressed in the later texts. To be part of another wider world, is to be accepted as belonging to it, which in these texts repeatedly means challenging the prevailing model of nature, which is defined by excluding the ‘other’ that our protagonists have become. The issue of uncanniness is reframed here as an ontological query which asks not only whether subjects may be objects, but also whether objects might be subjects. That is, do objects have some type of life which is specific to them which, as Bartholomew notes, is the question addressed by Jentsch in his account of automata (which also underpins Freud’s reading of E.T.A Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1817)). One could apply these considerations to the creature in Frankenstein if he were read as a type of automata, but the novel also raises questions about the manner of his creation and where he fits within the human scheme of things, which again raises the issue of ontology. His identification as a vegetarian also poses questions about what type of animal or human he may be, as it is an association which appears to undo Victor’s perception of him as a monstrous predator. The creature’s very existence thus raises ontological questions which reflect ideas from Bartholomew’s reading of the uncanny, as the creature struggles against attempts to define him as a monstrous thing. As an object he has a life, but it is the nature of that life (is he human or animal?) which addresses the ontological vitality of things. This Element will briefly address this issue before discussing the specifics of vegetarianism.

Jane Bennett’s exploration of the life of objects seeks to move beyond considerations of automata as a type of faux existence in order to develop a more inter-related and inter-subjective (and inter-objective) model of an environment that blends animal, vegetable, and human in which:

This challenges anthropocentric models of nature. Her version of a more immersive holistic world is not far removed from the type of spirit world envisaged by Machen. It is not thereby necessarily a harmonious world, and Bennett does allow for competition within it, as seen in Machen, whose spirit entities are often dangerous and their intentions obscure. With Machen the human world is, however, never enough, and the idea that the subject bears the type of lack identified by Morton, generates this ambivalent view of what compensates for this lack. Machen’s human protagonists frequently find themselves caught between a socially and economically circumscribed world and a troubling spiritual world, which seems to promise transcendence but is tinged with menace. For Bennett, the environment brings together objects and subjects in part by erasing their difference while also acknowledging that this ‘is not a uniform or flat topography’, although its chief characteristics and energies are difficult to pin down as it consists of an ‘always … ontologically diverse assemblage of energies and bodies, of simple and complex bodies, of the physical and the physiological’.Footnote ¹¹ This may sound esoteric, but is in fact the opposite, as it asserts the presence of an inter-related world which gains its vitality from the relationship between its constituent parts. Otherness, which comes from duality, has been erased and replaced with a more immersive view of the world. As we shall see in Section 3, this is a strategy employed by Kang in The Vegetarian as a counterpoint to the victimisation suffered by her chief protagonist, Yeong-hye, whose otherness is initially associated with their vegetarianism. The issue of overcoming the duality between subject and object is key to OOO thinking in which the radical uncanniness, identified by Bartholomew, of not knowing is maintained.

Bartholomew’s account of an uncanny sublime, which may be made compatible with OOO, emphasises the difficulty of knowing what the uncanny entails. At a Gothic level, it means that this uncanny is defined by its inaccessibility to understanding. It raises ontological questions but defies them. This is the type of world which underpins the ostensible utopian environments in some of our Gothic texts. The precise grounds on which these utopian worlds could appear are political (Shelley) or spiritual (Machen), but their failure to manifest is posed as one of the problems confronted by our authors, who attempt to make sense of this failure through fantastical forms (‘monsters’, malevolent animals), which indicates that these projected utopian worlds resist any sustainable rationalisation. They are, uncannily, dead, undead worlds in which the pursuit of frustrated meaning (as in the creature’s search for an account of his origins) raises yet more questions (as the creature misreads Paradise Lost [1674] as a true history of human infamy). This ontological question of where you belong in the world is explored by all of our Gothic authors. In these moments of failed understanding, ontological questions become aligned with epistemological ones. This position is explored by Elizabeth Grosz in her discussion of OOO and quantum science:

The world retains its ineffability in which forms of interpretation are characterised by an epistemic lag because the dynamic relationship between things eludes our attempt to grasp them in the present. This is not just about quantum science, it more broadly applies to OOO notions of belonging to a world in which the subject is unclear about how to reside within it. Nature might seem to be the bedrock for understanding this world but it is, in Morton’s terms, lost within the Frankensteinian desire to master it. If forms of understanding are repeatedly confounded, then, for Grosz, this is replaced by an ethical understanding of how elements of the world (both human and non-human) are related. For Grosz ‘An ethics does not spring directly from our understanding of the world … it comes from our affective bonds to and connections with other things in the world, relations that enable us to enhance or diminish forms of life’.Footnote ¹³ The immersive possibilities of the world thus enable the subject to understand their ethical place within it, which is why Grosz asserts the importance of the Stoics (along with Spinoza and Nietzsche), because they do not promote the duality associated with a post-Socratic environmental mastery. The ethical subject, who knows their place in the world without attempting to master it, is key because from their perspective, ‘there is no definitive break between animals and humans or between animals, plants, and inanimate objects’.Footnote ¹⁴ This position echoes that of Stacy Alamio, who has challenged the complicity of gender and racial narratives in articulating a version of nature that is often hostile to women, and queer and black cultures. Like Grosz, Alamio’s position on the environment stresses the importance of the ethical ties which bind together different communities because ‘Potent ethical and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature’.Footnote ¹⁵ From here it becomes possible to imagine ‘human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world’ because this ‘underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment”’.Footnote ¹⁶ How these worlds relate to the Gothic needs further elaboration.

Bartholomew is the only one of our critics to explicitly address the issue of the Gothic, which is implicit, as this overview has emphasised, to models of OOO which challenge the type of othering, and associated objectification, that the Gothic typically trades in. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, however, has explored how the Gothic more generally provides a counterpoint to the type of optimism that characterises OOO. He argues that whereas Jane Bennett ‘sees Vibrant Materialism as elevation of matter, Gothic materialism imagines it instead as debasement: the body made a thing, meat to be confined, tortured, manipulated, investigated, consumed, disposed of’.Footnote ¹⁷ In this scenario, the Gothic provides the dystopian counterpoint to OOO’s utopianism. For our Gothic texts, much of this depends on the type of vegetarianism embraced.

Weinstock’s account of the presence of a specifically Gothic version of OOO provides a helpful context for exploring why our vegetarians are represented in a Gothic way. He argues that since its inception, the Gothic has raised questions about the relationship between humans and non-humans. The Gothic subject’s relationship to the non-human has, Weinstock argues, always been a fraught one as the world of objects appears to take on horrifying lives of their own, which threaten the human subject (and Weinstock notes that Conrad is crushed by a giant helmet at the beginning of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto [1764], a foundational text of the Gothic tradition). What is embraced in OOO is here identified as a source of danger. This is not simply because of objects coming to uncanny life (as Freud would have it in his reading of ‘The Sandman’), but because of the nexus of relationships which the subject finds themselves immersed in. For Morton, Bennett, and Alaimo, this nexus consists of potentially radical relationships that exist between subjects and objects, which revitalises a model of the environment that challenges the duality of self and other. For Weinstock, in the Gothic, these positive relationships are replaced by a sense of dread because they generate a horrifying sense of defamiliarisation, meaning that ‘[t]he Gothic … amplifies that sense of dread by reassembling the objects present into a mesh of meaning tending towards a tragic outcome – a renarrativization of experience conditioned by the chilling glimpse of the out-side’.Footnote ¹⁸ This process is inherent to the Gothic as it employs ideas about otherness as part of its central ontological mission, because ‘[a]t its core, the Gothic is about what happens when things acquire uncanny animacy, what happens when humans are numbered as things among other things, and how the human relates to the nonhuman’.Footnote ¹⁹ The objectification of humans is thus a source of dehumanising terror in the Gothic. Weinstock also notes that the dread registered in the Gothic ‘is an important obstacle to be confronted when attempting to think how best to negotiate the challenges of the Anthropocene’, even if in these instances ‘the Gothic genre lets us contemplate a world in which the human holds no privileged place’, even though this is frequently represented in horrifying terms.Footnote ²⁰

The Gothic thus turns the utopian ambitions of OOO into troubling dystopian visions. It is important to consider how far our Gothic narratives relate to this dystopian context. All of our Gothic texts address the issue of how the subject can belong within a wider environment populated with non-human forms. The horror that is ostensibly registered by the presence of these forms is, to a degree, undone by the type of ethical questioning that we see in each of our texts; all of which ask questions about the damage that has been done to nature by humans (through science, war, and the patriarchy). To a degree, all of these narratives focus on forms of revenge generated by social neglect, war, and sexual and familial abuse. The reason why this revenge narrative is associated with vegetarianism is the central issue addressed in this Element. As we shall see, the putative radicalism of the vegetarian becomes challenged in part because their vegetarianism is not as pure as it initially appears. The vegetarian becomes thing-like in narratives which are, ultimately, unable to cast off the entropic energies of their dystopian settings. These are also quite specific, politically symbolic, formations of vegetarianism, and some consideration of extra-textual vegetarianism helps to clarify why this might produce the wrong kind of vegetarian.

Accounts of vegetarianism often stress a way of living that implies a notion of belonging that we find in theories of OOO. This is particularly true for vegetarians who identify as ethical vegetarians, rather than those who are solely motivated by the health benefits of a meat-free diet.Footnote ²¹ This is reflected in the title of Kenneth Joel Shapiro’s article on a phenomenological approach to understanding the life experiences of ethical vegetarians, ‘“I am a Vegetarian”: Reflections on a Way of Being’. As the title suggests, Shapiro argues that ‘the psychology of vegetarianism involves a particular way of experiencing the world’.Footnote ²² In this experience, the relationship between humans and animals is fundamentally reshaped as one of peaceful co-existence, as the links between ‘nonhuman animals and the natural world, and to other humans’ are renegotiated.Footnote ²³ This might seem like a quotidian conclusion, but what is important to note is how Shapiro develops these ideas via a phenomenological approach which addresses, in both psychological and ontological terms, the frameworks of connection found in OOO. Within this context, Shapiro asserts the presence of what can be identified as a vegetarian uncanny (although he does not use this term), which haunts the dinner table.

Shapiro argues that:

The animals haunt the vegetarian table as the lives which are not taken constitute an absent presence. They are also rendered absent by the meat eater, who is reluctant to contemplate the life that they are consuming. This acknowledges the importance of an unconscious level at which these identifications are made, but they are no less important for that. The vegetarian position here celebrates the life of the animal that is absent from the table, whereas the meat eater works to deny the reality of the life that they are complicit in taking. This is also to acknowledge that vegetarianism should not be seen in isolation from meat-eating, but as a specific counter to it. Shapiro also acknowledges that this can prompt wider ethical engagements made by the vegetarian, including support for animal welfare and other forms of social and political activism. At heart, this is to argue for the importance of an ethical engagement which enables humans to reach out to non-humans, and it has much in common with the ethical positions held by Grosz and Alaimo in their account of the environmental relationships established via OOO. This reaching out for a peaceable utopia is not the type of vegetarianism that we find in our Gothic texts.

The Gothic texts are all founded on an ambition to explain why seemingly ideal worlds (political, social, and familial) have become dystopian. The vegetarian, be it a creature, a soldier, or a wife seeking emancipation, appears as a figure who promises the possibility of radical change. In Shapiro’s terms, they appear as a possible activist agent. In each text, however, vegetarianism becomes detached from this radical ambition as our protagonists lose feelings of empathy and withdraw into alienated existences. The vegetarian represents yet another disavowed utopian vision as they become tarnished by dystopian urges for revenge and destruction. They begin in worlds which reflect the ambitions for a human and a non-human alliance that we find in OOO, but conclude in worlds in which those alliances have been severed. The transition of our vegetarians from radical agents to Gothic subjects is what this Element explores. This transition makes visible the reasons why our Gothic texts reflect on the failure of a type of radical politics, and in doing so, a different way of thinking about failure in these respective periods emerges. In each of our authors, the seemingly right type of vegetarian ultimately becomes the wrong type of non-meat-eater.

Section 1 explores how the creature appears to radically erase binary distinctions between subject/object, human/animal, and natural/unnatural. This erasure can be read as the novel’s principal challenge to the romantic conception of nature and is in alignment with the principles of OOO. The creature frequently appears within a romantic landscape, only to be defined as an abomination to nature. The creature is a paradoxical figure who has recognisably ‘human’ thoughts and feelings, but is artificially produced through science. His mixed animal and human composition appears to radically challenge what is meant by ‘human’ and ‘animal’, but it also generates the creature’s nebulous categorisation of ‘monster’. This points to a double vision in the text in which the creature is repeatedly misrepresented as monstrous, inviting the reader to reflect on issues of social perception and the generation of the injustice that it provokes. The creature’s vegetarianism appears to be radically aligned with politically peaceable intentions, during a period in which meat-eating was associated with forms of aggression. Treatises on the vegetarian diet by Joseph Ritson, and Percy Shelley dwell on the moral harm caused by meat-eating. Ultimately, however, vegetarianism fails to mitigate the violence of the creature. Vegetarianism is situated as a politically liberal possibility, but it does not create the vantage point from which a genuine, sustainable critique of nature and human dominance can take place. Read via OOO, the creature is unable to elude the binaries that define him because vegetarianism in the novel is regarded with ambivalence: associated with peace and violence.

The preparation and consumption of food is an important topic in the novel, and it is also important to consider how Frankenstein’s representation of alchemy implicates the gustatory rhetoric used by alchemists. Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) helps to develop this alchemical food-related context, which is linked to the novel’s repeated references to Promethean fire and cooking. Ultimately, the creature is the wrong type of vegetarian as he does not place non-human welfare at the centre of his thinking.

Section 2 explores how Machen’s views on meat-eating were developed during the First World War. Machen had long held the belief that meat-eating represented a form of physical, rather than spiritual, nourishment. This belief was reappraised during the war when models of spirituality were placed under significant stress. Machen’s views on spirituality, vegetarianism, and animals provide an ecologically inflected evaluation of the consequences of the war. Machen’s changing attitudes towards propaganda and media censorship are also explored as these influence his views on meat-eating and spirituality during the period.

Texts discussed include A Fragment of Life (1904), ‘The Bowmen’ (1914), ‘The Great Return’ (1915), and The Terror (Reference Machen1917), alongside Machen’s non-fictional writings on food and spirituality. For Machen, men have become meat-like in a time of war because they have lost their spiritual understanding of the world. Vegetarianism seems to provide the counter to this but, as in the previous section, this position cannot be maintained. In journalism published in 1917, Machen mocks the idea of nut cutlets and fruitarian roast turkey as faux versions of meat, which indicates that the appetite for meat-like nutrition still exists and is therefore no guarantee that genuine spiritual renewal is taking place. Machen’s writings on meat-eating and vegetarianism are illuminated by approaching his texts via an OOO critical stance, which helps to explain why, ultimately, Machen renounces vegetarianism in favour of promoting a wider vision of spiritual environmentalism that exists beyond the binary oppositions associated with humans and animals.

Section 3 focuses on the plight of Yeong-hye and her unhappy marriage and unhappy relations with her wider family. As a gesture of defiance, she renounces meat-eating as a way of asserting her independence. This generates hostility from her husband and her wider family, who attempt to make her eat meat. The novel’s structure provides different perspectives on Yeong-hye’s behaviour, from her husband, her artist brother-in-law (who sexually exploits her), and finally her sister. Across these narratives, Yeong-hye seemingly goes through a mental deterioration because of her battle against sexual and emotional manipulation. The novel culminates in her earnest ambition to be transformed into a tree as she feels a vegetal affinity with trees, which prompts her to give up eating altogether.

This model of freedom depends upon a newly formed immersive identity politics, which has much in common with the holistic ambitions of OOO. The issue of Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is, however, more difficult to accommodate as Yeong-hye’s concluding anorexia is the inevitable culmination of this attempt to live beyond material consumption, which is, ultimately, at the cost of the subject. Her sister’s concluding narrative reads nature through an ecoGothic lens, and this stands as the counterpoint to Yeong-hye’s optimistic, if self-destructive, version of nature.

In summary, all of these texts suggest that the utopianism of the vegetarian is not realisable within a world in which the forces of a Gothic dystopia prove to be irresistible.

1 Frankenstein and the Duality of the Vegetarian

The creature in Frankenstein, in trying to persuade Victor to make him a mate, emphasises the peaceful nature of his proposal by focusing on his, and his anticipated mate’s, vegetarian credentials:

The creature’s vegetarianism has attracted critical interest. Emelia Quinn reads Frankenstein as establishing the framework for the emerging figure of ‘The Monstrous Vegan’, a being who does not consume flesh, is a hybrid of animal and human, and is born outside of conventional heterosexual norms. Such a figure represents a new ‘distinct and identifiable trope of monstrosity’, which defies conventional formations of identity, consumption, and sexuality.Footnote ²⁶ Jackson Petsche has developed this idea of defiance within the context of food production, arguing that the creature’s hybrid identity positions him, ‘as a commodity of industrial animal food production that was not consumed but resurrected only to reject the human practice of meat-eating’, so that his very presence ‘endangers the speciesist and carnivorist social order’.Footnote ²⁷ Timothy Morton has explored how the novel’s vegetarian engagements relate to contemporary ideas about the politics of food, noting that ‘Despite the fact that she was not involved in the vegetarian circle of [Percy] Shelley’s early adult life, Mary Shelley’s novels display an interest in representing a temperate diet’.Footnote ²⁸ The novel’s representation of vegetarianism articulates, as we shall see, a radical, dissident possibility which the novel ultimately fails to endorse.

The creature’s experience of the world is linked to the wider context of the radicalism of the period. At one level, the novel reflects on the failure of the radical idealism that had galvanised the first-generation romantics. From the vantage point of 1818, their confidence that the revolutionary idealism of the French Revolution would lead to lasting change seems misplaced. The novel’s idealist thinkers (such as Victor but also Walton, with his overly optimistic expectations about possible Arctic discoveries) have their ambitions thwarted, which explains why Paradise Lost functions as a key text in the novel. These lost utopian ideals are made clearly present in the botched experiment of the creature’s creation, where Victor laments the difference between his idealistic pursuit of beauty and the apparent ‘monster’ that has been produced:

Quinn reads the novel as an early version of science fiction, in part because of these tensions between utopian and dystopian worlds.Footnote ²⁹ Victor’s otherwise radical idealism might seem to end in failure, but the novel raises the question of whether this can also be applied to the creature. At one level the creature is seen as monstrous, but he also defies this labelling. There is a double consciousness at work in the novel in which the events seen by the characters are challenged by a critical narrative reflection on those perceptions. Victor’s perception of the creature, for example, as an abomination to nature does not thereby make the creature ‘unnatural’. Indeed, the novel is at pains to position the creature within the natural landscape on the first two occasions that Victor sees him, first revealed by a flash of lightning and later seen stepping out of the Alps as a figure of nature, seemingly rhetorically summoned by Victor. These links between nature and the creature are important to acknowledge, as ultimately they relate to the creature’s vegetarianism (his ‘natural’ diet), which is linked to the novel’s dualistic representation of nature.

The scene in which Victor seeks consolation in the Alps after the death of William provides the most compelling reflection on the creature’s links to nature. The scenery evokes romantic sublimity as it ‘filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy’ (p. 75). These reflections prompt Victor to contemplate a life free of responsibility in which he envies ‘the brute’ whose ‘impulses’ for ‘hunger, thirst, and desire’ make them ‘nearly free’ rather than ‘moved by every wind that blows’ (p. 75). This reflection on the vicissitudes of life prompts a reference to the inevitability of change outlined in Percy Shelley’s ‘On Mutability’ (1816). These contemplations are brought together into a final direct plea made to the liberated spirits of nature who might inhabit such a landscape, ‘Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life’ (p. 76). At this point, the creature appears:

That ‘As I said this’ suggests that the creature has not coincidentally responded to Victor’s petition, but rather has been conjured out of Victor’s needs. The proximity between reaching out for a ‘brute’ and their arrival implies that the creature represents the personification of nature that was central to Victor’s appeal. This is not, however, how Victor sees it, as reflected in his first word to the creature – ‘Devil!’ (p. 77). The scene thus illustrates a disconnection between romantic conceptions of nature and apparently unnatural entities such as the creature. The central issue is whether the creature is artificial (assembled from dead body parts by science) or whether it is Victor’s romantic apprehension of nature, which has been culturally manufactured (and so is also not ‘natural’). As we shall see, this has implications for the representation of vegetarianism as a ‘natural’ diet.

Within the wider representation of nature the status of the creature as subject, or as monstrous object, can be helpfully explored by the application of ideas drawn from OOO. The creature represents dead matter brought back to life, and this emphasises the materiality of the body as a type of object. As Weinstock notes:

The dead undead creature evokes the uncanny, and because he is both alive and made out of death, he retains the type of liminality that Bartholomew, following Jentsch, identifies as a key characteristic of a version of the uncanny that is central to OOO, in which indeterminacy is the key factor. As Weinstock notes, in more environmental terms, the very existence of the creature raises awkward questions about a species hierarchy that positions humans at its apex. As the moment of Victor’s romantic reverie illustrates, the creature appears to represent the embodiment of a romantic conceptualisation of nature before this is erased by Victor’s feelings of horror at encountering an uncanny ‘monster’. Crucially, Victor’s perception is not necessarily one supported by the text, and this is also flagged in the creature’s subsequent narration of his inhuman mistreatment. Bartholomew, following an argument made by Morton about the inherently uncanny nature of a reality in which we cannot be sure of what is living and what is dead (because perhaps the dead are just differently ‘alive’), crucially notes that ‘while everything may be inherently uncanny (because reality is uncanny), not everything is experienced as uncanny’.Footnote ³¹ That is, the uncanniness of the scene is registered in a different way by Victor than it is in the scene itself, which provides a meta reflection on how Victor interprets the encounter. What we witness in this moment is the shift between the psychological (Victor’s horrified uncanny encounter with the creature) and the ontological (what the scene actually presents). This reflects Bartholomew’s claim that the uncanny appears in OOO as a reflection upon, rather than a direct experience of, the uncanny. The novel addresses these concerns through a contemplation of what it means to be a person, and this is repeatedly related to the production and consumption of food.

Critics such as Quinn, Petsche, and Morton have noted the significance of various treatises on vegetarianism that influenced Frankenstein. Chief amongst these is Joseph Ritson’s An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (Reference Ritson1802), which in turn influenced Percy Shelley’s A Vindication of a Natural Diet (Reference Smith and Hughes1813). Both works attempt to establish vegetarianism as an ethical practice that can transform humanity. To that degree, they promote the type of romantic idealism which Frankenstein persistently, if ambivalently (as in that double focus on the uncanny), challenges. Beyond these sources an analysis of alchemy (a topic addressed in the novel), via Gaston Bachelard’s analysis of fire, helps to ground these accounts of digestion within a pre-scientific world view which, as outlined towards the end of this section, has implications for how diet and consumption relate to a more persistent OOO world view.

Ritson’s treatise samples a number of authors from antiquity to Rousseau who support an argument about the importance of the vegetarian diet. Such a diet not only prolongs life, but also physically and morally enriches it. He argues that humans are not naturally adapted to hunt and eat meat; additionally creatures which are biologically close to humans, such as the ourang-outang, are noted as vegetarian. Ritson, following Rousseau, states that ‘[t]he ourang-outang … resembles man more nearly, and is furnished with a much greater share of sagacity, and appearance of reason, than any other animal but man, never meddles with animal flesh, but lives on nuts and wild fruits’.Footnote ³² The similarity with Mary Shelley’s creature is striking. Ritson also samples Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), a poem which, while asserting the presence of a great chain of being that links a series of worlds (from the spiritual to the animal), also affirms the presence of a soul permeating all life forms:

Ritson’s quotation emphasises the place that humans and animals share and resembles the types of connections suggested in OOO. Ritson argues that in eating animals, this link to a shared world is undone and that humans lose their place within nature. He also attacks forms of religious practice that require animal sacrifice, and scientific experiments on animals (of the type practiced by Victor Frankenstein). In short, meat-eating leads to physical and moral corruption and an estrangement from nature. Percy Shelley adapted these ideas into explicitly political terms in A Vindication of a Natural Diet.

Shelley addresses the question ‘How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life?’; the answer is ‘abstinence from animal food and spirituous liqours’.Footnote ³⁴ Vegetarianism reconciles the subject to nature and therefore conforms to one aspect of romantic idealism. The purity that vegetarianism induces changes both the subject and the world that they inhabit for the better. Shelley is also clear about why this idealist position has yet to be reached and identifies the forces that constrain it: ‘[t]yranny, superstition, commerce, and inequality’.Footnote ³⁵ Firstly, Shelley asserts a reading of the Fall from Paradise Lost (an important influence on Frankenstein). Adam and Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge, represent in allegorical terms ‘the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet’.Footnote ³⁶ In Frankenstein, the creature is also conscious of living in a fallen world in which he is unclear if he is Adam, or Satan. Frankenstein’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, indicates the importance of a myth which Percy Shelley interprets as being about food and cooking. For Shelley (following an interpretation of the myth made by John Frank Newton), Prometheus, punished for stealing fire from the Gods, has his liver repeatedly devoured by a vulture, which symbolises a theme of food consumption and hunger. Shelley also claims that ‘Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horror of the shambles’.Footnote ³⁷ The shambles (i.e., the slaughterhouse) is represented here by the raw liver pecked at by the vulture. The role of fire is important to consider and, as we shall see in the discussion of Bachelard, the duality of fire (providing warmth, but also destruction) is an issue that the novel explores in dietary and ontological ways.

Morton notes that Percy Shelley develops these ideas about vegetarianism in Queen Mab (Reference Smith and Hughes1813) (to which Shelley’s treatise was initially appended) and in the later Prometheus Unbound (1820). For Morton, the narrative of the Fall is essential to Percy’s vegetarian writings, which ‘places paradise in the future and describes the natural not in terms of things-as-they-are but as the process of eliciting what really is (from the dissembling husk of man-made customs) in order to produce what might be’.Footnote ³⁸ The pursuit of paradise represents the type of romantic idealism that Mary Shelley challenges in Frankenstein through references to vegetarianism and agricultural production.

At one level, the pursuit of paradise is represented by the idealistic pursuits of Walton and Victor. Their visions become dystopian, as idealism is placed under considerable pressure to generate the optimistic future that Percy Shelley suggested. The emphasis on imaginatively attempting to transform the world is paralleled by the creature’s journey, which is repeatedly rooted within the more prosaic demands of hunger. Prometheus, as the fire-giver who enables you to cook, ghosts the creature’s initial reflections on food. Crucially, he is not, at this stage, a vegetarian. The creature tells Victor about his discovery of a fire left by some beggars, who had also left behind some food. The creature keeps the fire going, in part because of the warmth it provides, but also because it enables an experiment with food:

The scene registers that the creature’s natural food (‘my food’) is a vegetarian diet, and thereafter the novel repeatedly focuses on the creature’s pursuit of food. Later, he encounters an old man cooking his breakfast over a fire. The man flees his hut in terror, which prompts another reference to fire when the creature notes:

The creature then ‘greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherd’s breakfast, which consisted of bread, cheese, milk, and wine; the latter, however, I did not like. Then overcome by fatigue, I lay down among some straw, and fell asleep’ (p. 83). The dislike of wine accords with the popular view that vegetarianism should be accompanied by abstinence from alcohol. The reference to Milton also captures the sense that the creature reads the world through pre-existing narrative forms and here sees himself as a demon at rest from suffering. He negotiates the world through feelings of hunger and injustice, but also through narrative structures which enable him to interpret, retrospectively, the significance of his treatment in a fallen world. The romantic conceptions of nature evoke a Wordsworthian pastoral (associated with shepherds and peasants) which functions as a natural counterpoint to representations of the barren polar icecap and the bustling town of Ingolstadt. The creature engages with this rural community through the food that it produces, as he records that ‘[t]he vegetables in the gardens, the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages, allured my appetite’ (p. 83). In the village, the creature discovers the cottage inhabited by the De Laceys, but before retiring to the hovel that is attached to it, he recounts that on this day he consumed ‘a loaf of coarse bread’ and a cup of water (p. 84). The repeated focus on simple vegetarian fare is developed when he sees Felix show Agatha ‘a large loaf and a piece of cheese’, noting that ‘She seemed pleased; and went into the garden for some roots and plants, which she placed in water, and then upon the fire’ (p. 86). The repeated references to a vegetarian diet indicate that the creature should not be seen as part of Victor’s meat-eating world. The peasants and the De Laceys might also seem to form a natural vegetarian world, but this is principally due to economic privation, rather than ethical choice. The creature notes of the De Laceys that ‘[t]heir nourishment consisted entirely of the vegetables of their garden, and the milk of one cow, who gave very little during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it’ (p. 88). The creature also notes that the De Laceys ‘often … suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly’ (p. 88). Out of sympathy with their needs, the creature refrains from stealing from their food store, ‘and satisfied myself with berries, nuts, and roots, which I gathered from a neighbouring wood’ (p. 88). The creature, overhearing the language used by the De Laceys, first learns the words relating to cooking, food, and the places where food could be foraged: ‘I learned and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood’ (p. 89, italics in original). He applauds their diet as ‘coarse, but … wholesome’ and recounts that during the spring they were able to feed themselves properly from plants grown in their garden (p. 91). The creature also notes that this applied to the wider community, reflecting that with the spring weather, ‘Men, who before this change seemed to have been hid in caves, dispersed themselves, and were employed in the various arts of cultivation’ (p. 92). These promising changes in the fortunes of the De Laceys motivate the creature to introduce himself to the blind Mr De Lacey. The significance of the scene might seem to relate to his blindness, but it is telling that the encounter first centres on hospitality and food, with Mr De Lacey noting that ‘as I am blind, I am afraid that I shall find it difficult to procure food for you’, to which the creature responds ‘Do not trouble yourself, my kind host, I have food’ (p. 108). His ultimate rejection by the De Laceys leads to the renunciation of the seemingly natural world they had inhabited. These scenes capture the importance of food, and they align the creature with a vegetarian diet, which has not been forced upon him (unlike the De Laceys). His choices around food are therefore in the main governed by ethical considerations about food as both a scarce resource and as part of a natural, meat-free diet.

In his revenge, however, the creature attacks the very nature which had seemingly sustained him: ‘I was like a wild beast that had broken the toils; destroying the objects that obstructed me, and ranging through the wood with a stag-like swiftness’ (p. 111). Milton is employed to frame this moment when the creature associates himself with the rage felt by the envious Satan in the Garden, ‘All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me’ (p. 111). Significantly, ‘from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species (p. 111). This ‘war’ is clearly an environmental one as the creature becomes aware that he needs a new version of nature that can accommodate him and a new ‘species’ to which he can belong. This identification of humanity as a different ‘species’ also reflects an implied animal-human opposition which, until this point, had been principally focused through a human perception of the creature as a subhuman ‘monstrous’ life form. He associates his rebellion with Milton’s Satan in the Garden of Eden as it is borne out of feelings of envy and injustice. It is an association which ensures that nature (here in the symbolic guise of Eden) cannot be seen in purely utopian terms because it is associated with the Fall.

As we saw with Victor’s account of the Alps, there is a double focus in the novel on what Victor conceives as natural and how the novel presents nature as a contested term. Crucially, the failure of romantic idealism, which underpins this compromised version of romantic nature, is also linked to the creature’s idealised vegetarianism. Vegetarianism, as mapped by Percy Shelley, constitutes the ideal way in which to live in harmony with nature. In Frankenstein, however, utopian idealism generates dystopian realities, which explains why vegetarianism becomes yet another form of idealism that the novel disavows. The double focus in the narrative on nature, however, also permits a reading that incriminates the type of natural living associated with the impoverished De Laceys. This is linked, albeit on a small scale, to the cultivation of land which, for critics such as Morton, implicates an agricultural mindset in producing a version of nature that is there to be dominated. The idea that nature can be mastered is also projected onto the creature as a monstrous entity that needs to be tamed or controlled. The double focus is not just on how the creature challenges a romantic conception of nature that characters such as Victor would like to endorse; it is also about how this version of nature, which is putatively democratic in its metaphysical ambitions, is confronted by another version of nature associated with agricultural production. The novel thus asks us to think about these links, not just in the scene with Victor in the Alps, but also in the cultivation of nature for food. This also raises questions about the political significance of the violence to which the creature subjects the natural world, in his wish to ‘tear up the trees’ and ‘spread havoc and destruction around me’, especially because this natural world is, in reality, a cultivated one.

After his rejection by the De Laceys, the creature returns to the cottage and finds Felix in the company of an agent acting on behalf of the landlord from whom the De Laceys have rented the cottage. The agent outlines the cost consequences incurred by breaking the lease, ‘Do you consider … that you will be obliged to pay three months’ rent, and to lose the produce of your garden?’ (p. 112). Neither issue is, of course, enough to persuade Felix to change his mind. Significantly, the garden is here identified as a cultivated space which links it to the wider community, the members of which, as noted earlier, during the Spring ‘were employed in the various arts of cultivation’. This activity represents a low-level form of subsistence farming, although one with an implied commercial value, as the agent indicates that the De Laceys cannot take the produce with them. In a small-scale, but politically loaded way, this exemplifies the attempt to impose control over nature, which explains why, after Felix has left, the creature destroys not only the cottage, but also ‘every vestige of cultivation in the garden’ (p. 113). The destruction of the cottage brings back into focus the importance of fire with the conflagration of the cottage seemingly supported by nature when a strong wind assists in its destruction ‘The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which clung to it, and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues’(p. 113). There will be more to say about this theme of fire and how it relates to the world of science and the economies of consumption, but before addressing that, it is important to acknowledge that the issue of agriculture is also developed elsewhere in the novel.

After the creation of the creature, Victor lapses into a fever for several months and is nursed back to health by Henry Clerval. Restored to health Victor reads a concerned letter from Elizabeth, which includes news about Victor’s fifteen-year-old brother, Ernest, and his employment prospects:

Elizabeth emphasises the restorative aspects of nature. Its health-giving attributes are not, however, obviously connected to farming because climbing and rowing may have improved Ernest’s health, but have not trained him to become a farmer. Indeed, Victor’s father (the uncle mentioned in this passage) indicates a preference for educating Ernest to become an advocate, with a view to him becoming a Judge. Elizabeth asserts the moral superiority of her Wordsworthian scheme when she retorts that Ernest:

Her letter notes that their conversation came to a somewhat abrupt conclusion when Victor’s father sardonically applauds her own skills at advocacy. The issue of Ernest’s future is not developed further in the novel, but Elizabeth’s account of Ernest’s possible future is important to consider, as it develops the theme of cultivation and articulates a view of nature which is linked to this double focus, in which the novel implicitly challenges a theme which a character (here Elizabeth) embraces. Her condemnation of the Law reflects the wider issue of injustice developed in the creature’s sense of grievance. Elizabeth’s sense that the Law represents a form of moral corruption, indeed is an ‘accomplice’ to vice, is offset by the asserted purity associated with the physical, and presumably moral, restoration provided by nature. This again attests to the importance of a romantic idealist version of nature. As we saw, however, in Victor’s contemplation of the Alps, there is also an implied critique made of this version of nature, as the creature appears to be conjured out of Victor’s need, only to be denied a place within the very model of nature that Victor venerates. In Elizabeth’s account of Ernest’s prospects, it is the added reference to farming which undoes the romantic idealism, because farming represents a controlled cultivation of nature rather than an embracing of a, nebulously defined, more natural life. Crucially, the superadded issue of farming highlights the role of work and consumption in an agricultural economy. Elizabeth’s seemingly innocent, or non-political, support for farming is at odds with how the novel critiques the domination of nature. It represents an attempt to conceal the idea of domination which the creature’s injustice, and reflections on cultivation, make visible.

The issue of consumption provides a wider framework in which to consider food production, and metaphors about diet and digestion can be usefully developed further via Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), which helps to draw together the novel’s important themes of nature, food, and fire. Bachelard also reflects on specific links between fire, alchemy, and the digestion of food. The context of alchemy is important to this reading of Frankenstein as it establishes a model of the world which, in its holistic characteristics, has something in common with ideas drawn from OOO. Alchemical metaphors of consumption generate a form of idealism which is beyond the romantic and suggest ways in which vegetarianism might retain a vestigial radicalism in a novel which has otherwise become suspicious of idealistic radical ambitions. It is, again, an issue related to the dual vision of the novel.

Bachelard argues that fire has not been properly subjected to scientific scrutiny and consequently it retains associations with supposedly primitive cultures and structures of mythology, including the myth of Prometheus. For this reason, Bachelard maintains that any examination of fire needs to be grounded in a psychoanalytical reading which reveals how historically specific tensions are projected onto fire, as a force associated with passion (sexuality), but also with destruction (Thanatos). Bachelard notes the dual nature of fire, which supports an analysis of the double focus on nature that we witness in Frankenstein. According to Bachelard, fire ‘shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse’.Footnote ³⁹ These apparent binary oppositions are not, however, easily mapped onto the type of division generated by the agricultural imagination, critiqued by Morton and others. Rather, these terms recognise the spectrum of activity, much of it symbolic, related to fire, and testify to how culturally specific contexts condition projections of fire. The different aspects of fire reflect diversity rather than division, which is related to the early cosmology with which fire was associated. To grasp the significance of this, it is important to understand the gustatory and digestive metaphors employed by alchemists, many of whom are cited in the novel and who have had an oblique influence upon it.

Victor notes that his early childhood reading consisted of the work of alchemists such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. When a university student Victor admits this early influence to Professor Waldman, who acknowledges alchemy’s influence on modern chemistry: ‘these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for the foundations of their knowledge’ (p. 31). Bachelard’s reading of the alchemists focuses on their emphasis on fire as an agent of transformation in a material’s chemical structure. He also notes the repeated rhetorical reliance of alchemists on food and consumption as a way for understanding this process. Bachelard summarises that in alchemical metaphors the, ‘inner, covered, preserved, possessed heat resulting from a well-digested meal leads’ alchemists ‘to postulate the existence of a hidden and invisible fire in the interior of matter, or, as the alchemists would say, in the belly of the metal’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Something akin to the precepts of OOO takes place in this blurring of distinctions in this digestive meld. This metaphor of digestion emerged as a way of understanding the calorific value of heat:

This process of digestion reflects the ambition in OOO to break down the distinctions between inanimate and animate. It also provides a point of origin for the creature who, although seemingly brought to life through the powerful fire of electricity, is nevertheless repeatedly associated with the consumption of food. The creature’s inability to be socially assimilated also bears some relationship to these alchemical metaphors. Bachelard’s principal claim is that it is because fire has not been scrutinised with modern scientific rigour that this alchemical version of fire, as a form of digestive consumption, has retained its status as the dominant metaphor for ideas about assimilation. Even after Victor is made scientifically aware of electricity through his father’s experiment with a kite (based on Benjamin Franklin’s experiment in 1752), he cannot quite cast off the influence of the alchemists, when he notes that ‘by some fatality I did not feel inclined to commence the study of any modern system’ (p. 25). The older alchemical system is rooted in a medieval mindset in which the attachment to a wider cosmology is expressed through metaphors of digestion and assimilation. This is a cosmology which, in its assertion that all life is consumed within other forms of life, is in accordance with the principles of OOO as a self-supporting system in which the animate and inanimate are ineluctably linked. Bachelard concludes that:

The creature is developed out of this type of imagining, and it is revealing that he also employs metaphors of digestion when contemplating his feelings of anger and desire for revenge: ‘The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite: no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food’ (pp. 114–15). He is a consumer of vegetables but also of bile (and alchemical metaphors). The creature is thus aligned with a cosmology that reflects on the limitations of romantic idealism. Vegetarianism represents one such version of idealism, which in Frankenstein fails to generate the type of holistic view of environmental belonging that we find in both theories of OOO and in contemporaneous treatises on vegetarianism. Read in alchemical terms, a more positive model of vegetarianism is tacitly developed in these metaphors about the role of digestion within a holistically modelled world. The ambitions of OOO are rearticulated in these metaphors about consumption, which represent the way in which the novel laments the failure of utopian ideals. It provides an alternative model of belonging to that found in the now tarnished version of idealism associated with the romantic conception of nature.

At an ostensible level, the novel’s engagement with alchemical modes of science is related to Victor’s pursuit of the elixir of life, albeit now rendered in anatomical terms. It is, however, the representations of fire and Prometheus which lead to the incorporation of images of fire where, as in alchemy, fire is related to cooking and to destruction. It also provides an alternative environmental context, which Victor attempts to cast off when he follows a more modern scientific curriculum at university. Again, in keeping with the dual focus in the novel, this represents an attempt to move beyond the alchemical even while his more modern science is, as noted by Waldman, indebted to it.

Alchemy and the myth of Prometheus are related to fire and cooking in the novel, as well as referencing Victor’s Promethean ambitions (which Bachelard refers to as ‘The Prometheus Complex’). Fire becomes the force, which at the moment of destruction enables a type of positive conjoining. The conclusion of Frankenstein dwells on this issue when the creature takes Victor’s body to destroy in a fire, which will also constitute the creature’s funeral pyre. The creature tells Walton:

This is not double–edged satire, as the creature’s sense that he will find happiness in oblivion is entirely compatible with his desire for assimilation. His final speech makes this clear:

The consumption by fire is the ultimate form of consumption and provides the opportunity to become atomically blended with the wider world. This final fire can also be read as a type of abstract reflection on fire itself as a consuming force because in the final moment of self-destruction, it represents the truth, the essence, of fire in its purest form. Bachelard reflects on this very possibility, which also supports a reading of the end of Frankenstein. Although Bachelard sees this final, pure, abstract fire as beyond ‘flame or ashes’, because it is not negatively destructive and leaves no crude residue, it is similar to the creature’s ‘super-human superfire’ (the phrase is Bachelard’s) in which:

Finally, consumption represents a type of idealistic completion. This metaphysical reflection on fire is also related to food. Fire, in Frankenstein, cooks the roots eaten by the creature, even while the meat-eating Victor cannot see beyond the creature’s apparent animality. These ideas are focused through an analysis of the creature and his way of engaging with and consuming nature. The novel struggles to affirm this idealism because of the repeated association of idealism with failure. In the end, a type of double vision appears in which the novel’s reflections on that apparent loss of idealism constitute a lament for what the vegetarian has been forced to surrender. The final cooking of the vegetarian creature generates ‘transformations of value’ as it raises questions about how a pure, natural, articulation of holistic subjectivity cannot be accommodated by a world associated with failed idealism and an agricultural mentality that relies on domination and division.

Vegetarianism as a conflicted form of idealism is also an issue addressed by Arthur Machen, whose wartime writings provide another way of exploring the links between food consumption and OOO.

2 The First World War: Arthur Machen’s Vegetarian Epiphany

To consider war as an ecological disaster seems like a self-evident environmental consideration.Footnote ⁴⁴ The destruction of the landscape and the generation of a near-uninhabitable no-man’s-land represents a clear, fundamental moment of ecological crisis. It may also seem as though the consequences of such human activity sit beyond the critical subtleties and nuances of either OOO or ecoGothic criticism, but there is a way of addressing this issue which does not fall back on evaluating the starkly obvious. Indeed, there is an important body of critical work which has addressed this topic. Ryan Hediger in Animals and War (Reference Hediger2012) argues that ‘the history of nonhuman animals in human war reveals a great deal about the nature of human relationships with other animals and about the nature of war’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is because the systems of domination between humans and non-humans are seemingly challenged in war due to the historical reliance that humans have had on animals during various conflicts (Hediger notes how, at different historical moments, horses, dogs, pigeons, and porpoises have all played a role, albeit an enforced one, in supporting the activity of war). The cultural representation of meat, and meat’s production and consumption, also enables consideration of how animals were regarded during a time of war. Nick Fiddes has noted how meat consumption ‘tangibly represents human control of the natural world’, which echoes the attempt to master the environment through the machinery of war (which is also, for Fiddes, a feature of a certain type of agricultural practice).Footnote ⁴⁶ The experience of war is, however, also one in which, as Vicki Tromanhauser has noted, the wounded soldier presents damaged flesh which evokes ‘the matter of our own meatness’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The horror of war is that humans become animal-like at such moments, and it is these elisions between humans and animals that are explored by Machen. Machen’s wartime writings, consisting of a mixture of journalistic propaganda and fictional precautionary warnings, provide an illuminating example of how we might think about war and environmentalism, and the starting point for these considerations can be located in Machen’s interest in food.

The relationship between accounts of nature, animals, and meat-eating is triangulated in Machen’s writings as a way of asserting the importance of a spiritual dimension challenged by a war which, for Machen, unsettles natural and spiritual relations. As we shall see, in Machen the turmoil of war radically reconfigures the relationship between animals and humans, even while his longstanding and highly abstract (Machen was no vegetarian), critique of meat-eating is employed at this time to emphasise just how far humanity had fallen. These issues are closely tied to Machen’s reflection on propaganda, which prompts him in The Terror (Reference Machen1917) to revisit the patriotic impulse that led him to write ‘The Bowmen’ (1914). It is a reflection that raises questions about the metaphysical status of the nut cutlet – a status seemingly embraced in ‘The Bowmen’ but mocked in an article from 1917, for quite specific anti-propagandist reasons.Footnote ⁴⁸

Machen’s ‘The Bowmen’, first published in the Evening News in September 1914, purports to be an eye-witness account of the British Army’s retreat during their ill-fated campaign against the Germans near Mons. The tale is famous for originating the myth of the Angel of Mons, who appears surrounded by ghostly archers who lay to waste the German forces, so enabling the British to retreat. Critics have noted, but rarely explored, the moment where the soldier makes his desperate appeal for help to St. George. Seemingly facing imminent death, suddenly:

At this point, St. George and his ‘Agincourt Bowmen’ appear and attack the German forces (p. 226). This vegetarian epiphany during a moment of deathly attack feels incongruous and strategically unpromising. Nevertheless, it represents a way of reflecting on the war which Machen develops in the short story ‘The Great Return’ (1915) and his novella The Terror (Reference Machen1917). The reference to St. George is telling. Elsa Richardson has examined the proliferation of vegetarian restaurants in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s. Many of these were founded by political progressives and provided affordable food mainly to office workers in big urban cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow. She also notes the existence of St. George’s House Café in St. Martin’s Lane in London, which catered for ‘a higher class of customer’ and appealed to celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw and the actress Fanny Brough.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such a high-profile establishment is likely to have been known by Machen when he was resident in London, and its evocation in ‘The Bowman’ indicates just how self-aware Machen was of the reality of the vegetarian context.Footnote ⁵¹

The reasons as to why the soldier reaches out for a vegetarian vision illuminate how Machen saw the war as a battle between bodies and a spiritual dimension that is lost within the very bloody carnality of the war itself. This has clear implications for OOO which, as noted by Elizabeth Grosz, argues ‘that there is no definitive break between animals and humans or between animals, plants and inanimate objects’.Footnote ⁵² This section argues that these divisions are exacerbated in the war as nature takes revenge against humanity, thereby asserting a form of ecophobia which ultimately reinscribes the very divisions that Machen’s tacit OOO position ostensibly challenges. Machen’s seemingly idealistic view of vegetarianism is developed, and revised, in his fiction which reflects upon war because he identifies a version of the false vegetarian whose fare (nut cutlets) is based on a version of faux meat-eating. These revisions illustrate that, as in Frankenstein and The Vegetarian, a meat-free world is not, in the end, represented as quite as radical as it initially appears. Yet again, the wrong type of vegetarian becomes the problem. Before examining ‘The Great Return’ (1915) and The Terror (Reference Machen1917) more closely, however, it is necessary to chart how Machen’s earlier views on meat-eating relate both to his long-running critique of Protestantism and to an interest in how animals and humans interact. For Machen, how the human subject can live in the world is intimately associated with the nature of the world that they perceive. How to belong in a world which, during a time of war, seems threatened with extinction places a particular pressure on the idea of belonging and to make sense of this requires a brief excursus into the world of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) has long been seen (the occasional dispute aside) as making an important ecological contribution to how it is possible to ‘be’ in the world in a way which does not do irrevocable damage to it.Footnote ⁵³ His essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (based on a speech delivered to architects in 1951), examines how it is possible to live authentically in the world. For Heidegger, there are four impulses which need to be aligned in order for this to occur: the desire ‘to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to escort mortals’.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Heidegger, these impulses reflect the human predicament in which one is mortal, but also spiritual. To dwell is not just to live in a house; it is to become spiritually housed within the world. Nature is thus not simply the environment; it is freighted by a spirituality that speaks to us and makes demands upon us for its preservation. To that degree, Heidegger’s essay should be read as a critique of materialism, and it has much in common with Machen’s views and more generally with the OOO position on nature. The human subject in both Heidegger and Machen appears to be associated with an act of becoming as they reach out for something which is beyond the material, physical world that they superficially, because non-spiritually, inhabit. Like the un-named soldier in ‘The Bowmen’, moments of epiphany take us into this world. Within such a vision the environment is not just a place, but also an idea about that place, which corresponds to Timothy Morton’s notion of environmentality as a form of visionary becoming. For Morton (2016):

The environment can thus be seen as a spectral place; one which is there but not there, as a work in progress, and as a place for which we are responsible. It is also a place which in its coming into being promises to change how we look at nature. For Jane Bennett nature, considered in OOO terms, represents ‘an active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new’ which ‘buzzes within the history of the term nature’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Machen, these issues are folded into a contemplation of an occulted spiritual dimension that inhabits nature. Machen’s A Fragment of Life (1904), and two journal articles from 1907, help to establish how and why he sought to offset a spiritual vision against a material world, with the latter associated with meat-eating.

A Fragment of Life focuses on the lives of the recently married Edward and Mary Darnell, who reside in a lower-middle-class suburban home. Their lives are constrained by financial hardship and a growing sense of disappointment with the narrowness of their lives. The novella makes visible the machine-like world of work that frames Edward and Mary’s mundane reality. It also makes visible the spaces existing beyond it, which invites them to consider an alternative way of living in the world, which requires an engagement with its mystical, and spiritual, hidden realities.

Edward struggles with the conventional ‘nonsense’ that ‘assured him that the true world was the visible and tangible world’, which is challenged by ‘a faint glimmering light … risen within him that showed the profit of self-negation’Footnote ⁵⁷ This world becomes visible to him in dreams which mix desire with memories of an earlier version of his self, one that existed before the conventions of the adult world had suppressed his spiritual impulses. In these moments, he becomes transformed:

The novella is clear about what needs to be cast off – the narrow world of work and the routines of a lower-middle-class life. This enables both Edward and Mary to discover this spiritual world. Revealingly, food also plays an important role in this.

The domestic world of the Darnells is given some focus through what they eat. The world of work only pays for ‘a certain quantum of bread, beef, and house-room’ (p.205). Edward reflects on a period when he had been profligate in buying ‘cutlets … braised beef … fillet steak’ (p. 159), whereas in his married life he settles for ‘chops, a bit of steak, or cold meat’ (p. 160). Meat consumption is not simply part of the conventional world that the Darnells seek to renounce; it stands in opposition to a spiritual life. Edward shares one of his spiritual visions with an enraptured Mary, after which:

Meat is not just part of the ‘common things’ which constitute their conventional life; it is also, as this scene establishes, a topic which banishes a spiritual vision because here spiritual nourishment is denied in a focus on physical nourishment. Machen returned to this issue in his non-fiction, where he addresses what he sees as the limitation of a grey Protestantism which is prosaically immune to the poetry of a quasi-Catholic view of the world (and A Fragment of Life includes a poem at the end, celebrating that ‘Ever the Song is borne on high/That chants the holy Magistry’ [p. 221]).

In ‘Sancho Panza at Geneva’, published in The Academy in June 1907, Machen critiques what he sees as a puritan strand within Protestantism, which is a consequence of feeding the body rather than the spirit because ‘Protestants live on roast beef and plenty of it’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This carnality means that it cannot constitute a true faith, leading Machen to conclude that ‘Protestantism is a revolt against Christianity’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Feeding the body in this way turns the Protestant into a subhuman figure, because Machen claims that Protestantism ‘is a recurrence … to the state of the beast-man before it had received the quickening’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Meat-eating leads to atavism and places the subject on a pre-human and non-spiritual path. This is different from the type of reconnections which are advocated in A Fragment of Life, which centre on the disappearance of bodily needs. Machen returned to these issues in ‘“Consolatus” and “Church-member”’, published in The Academy in December 1907, in which he claims that ‘The modern Puritan accepts the good things of life with an apologetic grumble which he calls “grace,” conscious in a dim way that he has no real right to enjoy his roast beef’.Footnote ⁶¹ At this point, Machen appears to advocate vegetarianism as an antidote to all this unspiritual consumption of meat – ‘there is a sect apart which gives no obedience to the command, kill and eat’.Footnote ⁶² These issues are returned to by Machen in his wartime writings, which have a noticeably robust focus on how to spiritually dwell in a world that seems threatened by violence. The question he re-examines is how it is possible to maintain a spiritual identity in a conflict that constitutes a spectacle of brutal carnality.

‘The Great Return’ focuses on some strange occurrences in the Welsh town of Llantrisant. The war provides a context to the tale with references made to bombardments and fears about Germans supporting spies at a time when ‘We had invaded Thibet’, an intrusion which, for Machen, encapsulates the violence done to spirituality at this time.Footnote ⁶³ The narrator asks a parishioner about the services which are held in the local chapel, and she tells him that the refrains are, for her, the ancient ‘“Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the drink.” “Thanksgiving for the old offering”. “Thanksgiving for the appearance of the old altar.” “Praise for the joy of the ancient garden.” “Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.” And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness’ (p. 240). This prompts the narrator to address the specific praising of food and drink:

The landscape around the town represents a different type of spiritual engagement than that found in the church. The landscape is untouched by the phrases used in church, which represent the type of ossifying rhetoric that Morton associates with an attempt to constrict new evaluations of nature. For Morton, this type of religious rhetoric takes ‘the god’s command from time immemorial and for time immemorial, saying to ourselves that this phrase and this phrase only is the one true phrase of all time’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The story also implies that at a time of national crisis the formal religious ceremonies cease to work; their claims are ‘nothing but madness’, whereas nature represents the resurrection of an older spiritual power: ‘The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple’, as the narrator records ‘the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages’ (p. 250). This is a form of nature which is both spiritual and touched by the war, reflected in the ‘burnt offering’ and the vivid, unnatural, colouration of nature. The idea that nature can be looked at differently at this point is extended to animals, so that when the narrator critiques the idea that one can only know the world through the senses, so that ‘The ordinary man … says that he sees a cow, that he sees a stone wall, and that the cow and the stone wall are “there”’, whereas ‘metaphysicians are by no means so easily satisfied as to the reality of the stone wall and the cow’ (p. 250). This leads him to contemplate that ‘a real existence, this much is certain … is not in the least like our conception of it’, meaning that ‘If we could “see” the real cow she would appear utterly incredible’ (p. 250). In the context of Machen’s wider engagement with hidden spiritual realities, this turns the cow into a spiritual being, and therefore not one that should be considered as ‘the meat’ that the discredited preacher associates with ‘Paradise’. Machen addresses this issue in War and the Christian Faith (Reference Machen1918), where he argues that although ‘It will seem a violent paradox’, nevertheless, ‘I do believe that the chief aim of prayer is to raise us to the condition of the beasts; to raise us, not to reduce us, to their state’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is because he sees that humans, not animals, were driven out of paradise and therefore animals still live in a state of grace that informs how they dwell in the world. Animals are true to their nature ‘because they are wholly immersed in their proper businesses; they are fish altogether in the water’, whereas ‘We are not sure of our real business’ because we are distracted by work and so estranged from our ‘only one real business’, which is reaching God through prayer.Footnote ⁶⁶

Animals in ‘The Great Return’ are thus associated with the divine because at this time of national crisis, nature is revitalised, peaceful and bountiful, which is reflected in a moment when:

In ‘The Great Return’ the cow is not meat; animals play in harmony and dwell in the world in a superior way than humans. Indeed, animals appear to be freighted with the type of natural spirituality that has been banished from those churches that see animals as food.

To see the animals (at least cows) as food is to assert the type of subject–object dichotomy that is intimately associated with the mastery of nature. It is revealing that a farmer bears witness to the antics of the dog and the fox as his sense of astonishment is rooted within a farming mindset which regarded nature as something that needed to be subdued and controlled by the demands of agricultural need (and so a view in which ‘play’ is notably absent from the working life of a sheep-dog). It is also telling that in the above passage, the benign animals cavort in a scene associated with fruit and corn rather than meat. The possibilities of a non-animal harvest thus shape how the animals are tied by kinship rather than hostility. The tale also indicates that for the cow to be seen differently, it requires a metaphysical re-evaluation. This chimes with Fiddes’ view that the industrial processes which came to drive changes in agricultural practice generated not just an economic transition, but also a philosophical one because these mechanical developments indicated that nature was there to be controlled. For Fiddes ‘control over nature, and over animals’ reproduction, lives, and deaths, denotes the emergence of civilisation metaphysically as well as physically’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Agricultural life and the machines of war are conceptually brought into alliance in Machen’s The Terror, as we witness the animals rebelling against both. The understanding of the causes of that rebellion effects the metaphysical shift that Machen saw as necessary in order to rethink the cow as an animal that has a presence that transcends its position within the agricultural economy.

Animals in ‘The Great Return’ are playful and benign; the same, however, cannot be said for the animals in The Terror, which purposefully attack the military complex, suggesting they have come to see humans as unspiritual entities, or as little more than meat. The Terror begins with an account of the war up until 1917 and addresses what it sees as two years of inaction by British forces, which had only recently come to an end. The focus is on a media blackout on any references to problems encountered by British forces during this period. This is an allusion to the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which was passed in August 1914, granting the government wide-ranging powers, including the right to censor. The Terror thus purports to be an exposé of what the government had tried to conceal. The narrator discusses the presence of a ‘secret circular’ consisting of suppressed eye-witness accounts of unusual activity and aggression by animals towards the military. It includes an account of a Royal Flying Corps plane that had been brought down by ‘a flight of pigeons’ which had broken the propeller, ‘and the machine had fallen like lead to the earth’, with the pilot killed.Footnote ⁶⁸ Pigeons had been used during the war to relay messages from the trenches, and their attack should be seen as a form of revenge for animal co-option in the war at this time. There is also a report of an explosion at a munitions works with the dead hastily interred before their relatives could see them because the faces of the dead, according to an eye-witness ‘were all as if they had been bitten to pieces’ (p. 278). The investigation of these strange circumstances takes the narrator to West Wales.

Whereas in ‘The Great Return’ nature has a positive aspect to it which produces the type of spirituality sadly lacking in the Church, in The Terror, the landscape is desolate and mysterious; ‘a wild and divided and scattered region, a land of outland hills and secret and hidden valleys’ (p. 281), populated by towns which are little more than ‘clusters of poorish, meanly-built houses, ill-kept and down at heel’ (p. 280). These are, in environmental terms, dwellings associated with alienation. Nature becomes a hostile place in which to dwell because it is devoid of the spiritual dimension that characterises Machen’s earlier writings. The narrator recounts the death of the Williams family (mother, father, and three children), who live in a cottage ‘on the edge of a dark wood’ which sits on ‘a lonely and unfrequented by-road that winds for many miles on high and lonely land’ (p. 283). They are found with ‘Their skulls … battered in as if by some heavy iron instrument; their faces were beaten to a pulp’ (p. 283). It turns out that they have been killed by horses. Hediger notes of the First World War that ‘Horses loom like a ghost presence through this conflict’, because although eight million horses were killed in the war their loss was often left out of discussions of the fighting.Footnote ⁶⁹ For the narrator, the news censorship of these stories of animal unrest means that such accounts ‘must somehow be connected with the war’ (p. 291), and the novella invites the reader to make these links. War and a now hostile nature are aligned, and the narrator’s investigation is in part a contemplation of why these links have appeared and how they relate to the war. For Fiddes, issues of meat consumption are inherently linked to the ambition to control nature; however, in the tale, these issues are turned on the humans as they become victims of the animals, and in their human death become constituted as a type of meat that can be disposed of. Before the narrator also reaches this conclusion he, at first, thinks that the Germans must be responsible, but the evidence, ultimately, takes him in a different direction.

He investigates an incident in 1915 when horses attacked an army camp at night by stomping on tents and killing two soldiers. This was followed by attacks made by swarming bees. The playful sheep-dog of ‘The Great Return’ is now transformed in stories about ‘sheep dogs, mild and trusted beasts, turning savage as wolves and injuring the farm boys in a horrible manner’ (p. 295). There is some discussion of secret Z Rays being used to make the animals aggressive, or even German forces living underground who are orchestrating these attacks.

The occupants of a farmhouse are found dead, and evidence is discovered inside that they appear to have been under siege and died of thirst, despite having easy access to a well in a nearby wood. The body of Mr Griffiths, the head of the family, is found outside of the house with a deep gash in his side. A visitor to the house, who has died with them, leaves behind an account of what happened. Everything was normal until one night they saw what appeared to be a tree with points of light in it, which rose above the house and settled around it ‘like a burning cloud’ (p. 342). Mrs Griffiths took the environmentally informed view ‘that ancient devils were let loose and had come out of the trees and out of the old hills because of the wickedness that was on the earth’ (p. 342). Mr Griffiths was killed after being gored by one of his animals, and it is noted of the others that they ‘were closely besieged by their own cattle and horses and sheep’ (p. 353), until they ran out of water. Here, we can see the rebellious tendency of animals associated with agriculture attacking those who seek to subdue them.

It transpires that these lights, which seem to form into a tree-like cloud, are in fact moths that attack anyone outside, effectively choking them to death by entering the mouth; a number of other people who have been killed in this way are subsequently discovered. The final scenes of The Terror indicate that all of this activity took place between 1915 and 1916, and that since then the animals have returned to their more usual patterns of behaviour. The reasons for this outbreak of malevolence are explored.

The narrator notes that some of his friends:

The animals have become conscious of their superior physical strength, as one Dr Lewis (who summarises many of the issues) tells the narrator:

It is the limits of this ‘mysterious inhibition’ that the narrator wants to explore. Animals associated with agriculture have become seemingly wild, or unprepared to act as ‘humble slaves’. Fiddes’ analysis of agriculture’s generation of a version of nature as othered and to be dominated is relevant here. This is also an idea that Morton has explored in relation to the ‘Weird’, seeing ‘Weirdness’ as the antidote to this strategy of demarcation between the human and the non-human. At the heart of this lies a paradox which Morton states as:

The human subject, disturbed by the idea of belonging to a world in which they are threatened by an ‘othered’ nature, is forced to manufacture the types of divisions (between humans and animals, for example), which generate an alienation that ultimately reproduces the feeling of being under siege that the act of division was intended to eradicate. In The Terror, the narrator’s concern is that the relationship between animals and humans appears as a response to the crisis generated by the war. Within this weird moment, there is also an epiphany. The narrator concludes:

This conclusion is more complex than it initially appears. The elevation of the spiritual over the rational identifies the type of instrumental thinking about the world, which generates the crisis that rationality was meant to solve. This is similar to Morton’s position on the uncanny human who uses rationality to generate demarcations, only to find that divide and rule creates an internal division.

These ideas are relevant to a way of thinking about the war as an act of self-destruction. For Machen the war was a physical, political, and national conflict that had generated new imperatives, which meant that people were in danger of losing sight of spiritual values. As Tromanhauser states in their analysis of nurses’ accounts of surgical wards in the First World War, ‘Flesh menacingly gums up the metaphysics of human subject formation and jams the machinery of our making and world-building’.Footnote ⁷¹ Also, as Fiddes notes, with meat-eating, ‘Bloodshed is central to meat’s value’, because ‘We eat not only the animal’s flesh; with it we drain their lifeblood and so seize their strength’.Footnote ⁷² The metaphysics of what it means to be human becomes reversed in The Terror as predatory humanity becomes subject to predation. The novella establishes a critical view of human and animal relations which reflects Hediger’s conclusion that a contemplation of the treatment of animals in wartime ‘offers a route to unwork further the human/animal distinction and hierarchy’.Footnote ⁷³ The novella also challenges the idea that animals can be seen through an agricultural lens, which would see them merely as meat. The narrator claims:

The animals see that humanity has lost sight of spirituality because humans have made themselves animal-like, and so consequently have lost authority. In War and the Christian Faith, Machen will argue that animals ‘being in paradise, cannot so much as conceive the desire for an order and life which do not belong to them’, and this spiritual vision might seem different to what we witness in The Terror as animals attempt to take over from humans.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, Machen’s idea of ‘instinct’ as a form of spirituality indicates that animal behaviour is directed by a force which seeks to protect the world. In this way, the novella can be read as a trenchant indictment of how war has corrupted an already fallen (and so post-vegetarian) humanity, to a degree that animals are prepared to conceive of a world which is devoid of humans, because in deposing of humans, animals seek to restore a spirituality that they perceive humanity to have lost. Animal violence is a righteous one in which they attack specific formations of organised activity associated with agriculture and the military, which also pose a threat to nature. Why animals have given up the fight is not clear, but the idea that they pose a continuing threat is apparent, with the last line noting ‘They have risen once – they may rise again’ (p. 357).

The Terror not only establishes a different formation of nature than that found in ‘The Great Return’, but it also refutes myths about the war, including a popular one at the time about the presence of secret Russian troops in Britain, and also ‘The Angel of Mons’ myth that Machen had created in 1914. These myths are debunked ‘as vain rumours and fantastic tales’ (p. 274), which were only granted a bogus credibility because they had appeared in newspapers. Machen, as a journalist, was acutely conscious, as The Terror demonstrates, of forms of censorship which might conceal the truth even while ‘fantastic tales’ such as ‘The Bowmen’ are permitted publication because they work as propaganda. What constitutes ‘reality’ at this time is clearly politically loaded, and while many commentators saw ‘The Bowmen’ as proof that God was on their side, they did not dwell on the soldier’s reference to nut cutlets. The representation of food and its relationship to Protestants and animals is associated by Machen with a truly spiritual path. St. George with his archers from Agincourt is manifestly a false and propaganda-inspired vision, and that this is a fake spiritual vision has implications for how we read those nut cutlets.

Machen’s support for a vegetarian vision accords with his idea of feeding the spirit rather than the body. Meat-eating does obvious violence to animals and is repeatedly referenced as an illegitimate form of nourishment centring on strictly bodily needs. However, the soldier’s vision in ‘The Bowmen’ is ultimately a sham spiritual vision because it is associated with the war and not pure spirit. This in turn is reflected in The Terror in the view of the human subject, noted earlier, that ‘If he were not king he was a sham, an imposter, a thing to be destroyed’. This is a view not far removed from how Machen viewed vegetarians, like his soldier, who eats ‘cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak’. In an item titled ‘Let Us Keep the Tavern’ published on 22nd August 1917 in the Evening News, Machen lampoons this type of vegetarian:

The tone of the article is light-hearted, but the idea of corruption rather than substitution points towards the idea of truth-telling, which is so important in The Terror. This type of vegetarianism is a bogus one because it seeks to emulate something which it is not. It is as false as the vision of St. George. In this context, it represents a type of false thinking which denies, as Machen also puts it in his article, ‘the attractive power of vegetables’. The question this begs is whether Machen had always intended the vegetarian vision of his besieged soldier to be questionable, or whether he came to this view in 1917 as a way of critiquing what had become a popular propaganda myth? The balance of evidence would suggest the latter. The Terror indicates that to see animals as potential meat compromises any possible spiritual vision, so that envisioning vegetables or nuts as meat-like is to come too close to maintaining this unspiritual view.

For Machen, it is necessary to find a way of living in the world that is spiritually authentic. This position is ostensibly in accord with an OOO view of nature in which subject and object, and human and animal distinctions become erased: here through the presence of a spirituality which touches all life forms. A Fragment of Life charts this anxious journey as Edward and Mary engage with the positive disorientation that their reflections of a life lived beyond suburbia involve. Food is a factor in Machen’s spiritual vision. The consumption of meat elevates the corporeal over the spiritual and leads to feelings of estrangement. Animals are freighted with a spiritual identity that they share with humans, but this common bond is undone both by the war and in agriculture. These wartime writings reflect upon how to live spiritually in a world at a time of international crisis, when spiritual considerations seem to be in abeyance. The lack of authenticity is what, for Machen, positions his soldier in ‘The Bowmen’ as a sham vegetarian, trapped in a propaganda narrative about a bogus spiritual intervention. How to get back to the truth, and work beyond the censor, is addressed in The Terror, and is embraced as the point at which the limitations of the human become manifested in a devastated landscape, populated by vengeful animals. Machen’s contribution to thinking about animals and the war is an important one. His First World War writings indicate that national turmoil can be registered as a spiritual turmoil which implicates food, animals, and the landscape as critically speaking back to what is truly threatened on the Western Front: what it means to be human. That very reflection ultimately undoes the binary elision which characterises OOO thinking. Yet again, vegetarianism cannot be aligned with spirituality because, at heart, Machen’s is a reactionary, humanist vision which wants to purify humanity in order for it to regain the authority it has seemingly lost on the battlefield.

3 Han Kang’s The Vegetarian: Becoming Plant

The Vegetarian (2007) focuses on the plight of Yeong-hye and her unhappy marriage and unhappy relations with her wider family. As a gesture of defiance, she renounces meat-eating to assert her independence, which angers her husband, Mr Cheong, and her wider family, who attempt to force her to eat meat. The novel’s three parts provide different perspectives on Yeong-hye’s behaviour, from her husband, her unnamed artist brother-in-law (who sexually exploits her), and finally her sister, In-hye. Across these narratives, Yeong-hye seemingly mentally deteriorates as a consequence of sexual and emotional manipulation. The novel culminates in her earnest ambition to be transformed into a tree as she feels a vegetal affinity with trees, which prompts her to give up eating altogether.

As this brief outline suggests, the novel positions vegetarianism as a rebellion against the patriarchal norms that circumscribe Yeong-hye’s life, and this view of the radical vegetarian has much in common with Frankenstein and the wartime writings of Arthur Machen. Like them, however, there is a fundamental ambivalence in the representation of vegetarianism which threatens its radically transgressive potential, because at the end of the novel, Yeong-hye’s ambition to become a tree feels less like the consequence of emancipatory intent, than the result of a serious mental decline. There is, however, ambivalence here (one which characterises all the literary narratives discussed in this Element) concerning whether the ambition to create a meat-free self constitutes a sustainable act of defiance. This ostensibly radical ambition becomes seemingly compromised by the inability to generate a feasible, politically progressive, narrative about belonging, because ultimately Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism is not as radically utopian as it initially appears. This central ambivalence about the novel’s ostensible radical identity politics has been addressed by Jimmy Packham, who states that:

This very ‘blurring of boundaries’ is reflected in the structure of the novel, as while its three sections develop Yeong-hye’s story, they also generate different perspectives on her. As in Frankenstein, the voice of the vegetarian is mediated and potentially lost within these competing perceptions. Crucially, these narratives are frequently punctuated by accounts of Yeong-hye’s dreams and occasional private reflections on her dietary and personal transformation (especially in the first section), often involving imaginary scenarios in which she challenges authority. The fact that these scenarios are private to her and so not visible to her protagonists emphasises Yeong-hye’s psychological and emotional alienation. These two issues, the ontological and the aesthetic (the structure of the novel), play key roles in the novel’s tacit engagement with ideas drawn from OOO.

Rose Casey argues that the novel generates a radical, immersive view of experience which can be read through Stacy Alamio’s account of nature and ethics. In this view, the novel’s refusal to accept models ‘of mastery’ is grounded in an OOO rejection of all binaries that depend upon models of domination.Footnote ⁷⁷ Form and content are thus closely politically aligned, but the issue of political redemption is, as we shall see, difficult to maintain given the version of Yeong-hye articulated in her sister’s concluding narrative.

The novel’s embracing of the otherworldly is closely linked to vegetarianism, which is repeatedly manifested through references to dreams. Yeong-hye’s husband states that he sees nothing remarkable in his wife, whom he regards as a type of non-person existing only to support his needs, that is, until he finds her throwing out the meat from their fridge. When asked why she is doing this, she responds, ‘I had a dream’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The dream is a nightmare in which Yeong-hye finds herself in the woods and covered in blood because of eating meat. This figure is both her and not her and evokes feelings of uncanniness: her reflection on the dream notes that she sees ‘my face, undoubtedly, but never seen before. Or no, not mine, but so familiar … nothing makes sense. Familiar and yet not … that vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling’ (p. 12, italics in original). As Bartholomew has explored, in OOO the uncanny becomes transferred from psychology to ontology so that, following Heidegger, ‘the uncanny can be not just a feeling or a mood, but an unconcealment of being’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yeong-hye’s dream is not a return of the repressed, as Freud’s uncanny would have it, but rather an exposure, ‘an unconcealement’, of what lurks within. This is not a return of something old and familiar, such as a repressed memory, but rather ‘a fleeting encounter with the deep, default unfamiliarity of reality’.Footnote ⁸⁰ It provides the space where a different type of familiarity is encountered because, following Jentsch, ‘familiarity is only possible because reality is primordially unfamiliar’.Footnote ⁸¹ Yeong-hye’s reality is one which belongs to others, in which she feels herself consumed by their demands. The battle against consumption therefore becomes familiar to her because it is uncannily present in other (non-food related) structures of power linked to consumption and to her husband’s work-related ambitions.

The pragmatic husband is baffled by Yeong-hye’s decision to adopt a vegan diet:

His mixture of the commonplace and the supernatural glosses his layered private and professional world. It is both a commonplace world, revolving around work and a sinister (‘evil’) world in which he repeatedly rapes Yeong-hye. The novel foregrounds how his ostensible respectability as a junior manager, dutiful to his bosses as he seeks advancement, is at odds with his maltreatment of Yeong-hye, which extends from emotional and psychological abuse to rape. At a more subtle level, the novel suggests that these two worlds are related, as both his professional and personal lives are associated with mastery and control. He has no obvious inner world as he sees experience in terms of surface and appearance, rather than depth. He has no curiosity, for example, about the reasons for Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism, dismissing her account of it as ‘crazy spiel’ (p. 17). Her feelings are beyond his interests: ‘I resisted the temptation to indulge in introspection. This strange situation had nothing to do with me’ (p. 19). Yeong-hye’s imagined replies to him are hypothetical and reflect her estrangement from him. One such reply includes a reflection on the limitations of a world defined by the kitchen. After a row with him ‘Suddenly, everything around me began to slide away, as though pulled back on an ebbing tide. The table, you, all the kitchen furniture. I was alone, the only thing remaining in all of infinite space’ (p. 19, italics in original). The domestic world disappears, and Yeong-hye’s aloneness is emphasised, but also her freedom. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that she is looking for another way of belonging in the world outside of the confines of patriarchal scripts. Matters come to a head at a formal restaurant dinner that Yeong-hye and her husband have been invited to by his bosses. Yeong-hye refuses to eat meat, and vegetarianism becomes subjected to a sustained tirade from the bosses and their wives. Because Yeong-hye does not, for them, provide a proper rationale for being a vegetarian (she makes vague reference to her dream), she is not regarded as a proper vegetarian. The novel registers their disgust with vegetarianism in a comment made by one of the bosses’ wives:

Yeong-hye’s responds with a defiant stare (indeed, a glare) at the boss’s wife. The husband claims that the ‘stare appalled everyone present’ (p. 25) and that he finds Yeong-hye’s behaviour inexplicable, ‘What shadowy recesses lurked in her mind, what secrets I’d never suspected? In that moment, she was utterly unknowable’ (p. 25). Shortly after this, Yeong-hye is haunted by dreams of murder characterised by ‘Murderer or murdered … hazy distinctions, boundaries wearing thin’ (p. 28, italics in original). The dream dwells on the restaurant meal and the acts of aggression associated with eating meat (that baby octopus), in which victim and victimiser are so intimately related that the distinctions between them become erased in a horrifying act of consumption.

These early scenes in the novel establish why Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism represents a withdrawal from the world of domesticity and a business world associated with predatory forms of consumption. Her defiance is registered in her progressive refusal to acknowledge or engage with either of these worlds. It takes her on an ontological journey which provokes a contemplation of other ways of belonging to the world which do not rest on the binary oppositions that govern the private and public worlds of her husband and his colleagues.

Casey notes that ‘The materiality of Yeong-hye’s arboreal inclining is experiential and phenomenological and it is prompted, at least in part, by the material effects of intersecting modes of structural violence’.Footnote ⁸² These levels of violence become clear when Yeong-hye is physically confronted by her father at a family meal, when he tries to force her to eat meat. Yeong-hye’s husband describes his father-in-law as a ‘patriarchal man’ who ‘never tired of boasting about having received the Order of Military Merit for serving in Vietnam’, noting that ‘not only was his voice extremely loud, it was the voice of a man with strongly fixed ideas’ (p. 29). The father represents a type of violence which tacitly reflects the sexual assaults inflicted on Yeong-hye by her husband: acts which her husband also construes within the vernacular of wartime domination. Once physically subdued, she endures the rapes ‘as though she were a “comfort woman” dragged in against her will, and I was a Japanese soldier demanding her services’ (p. 30). The father, in attempting to force her to eat meat, demands that others help by physically restraining her, in a clear echo of these earlier rapes. He repeatedly hits her, and she responds by cutting her wrist, which requires hospital treatment. This assault prompts another narrative introjection from Yeong-hye in the form of a memory of being bitten by the family dog, which was then dragged to death by her father behind a motorcycle and its remains cooked and eaten, including a portion by Yeong-hye.

By this point, Yeong-hye’s rejection of meat also clearly represents a repudiation of patriarchal authority. While in hospital, she reflects on a pain in her solar plexus which she attributes to the residual presence of all the animals she has eaten ‘Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of animals I ate have all lodged there’ (p. 49, italics in original). This requires a purging and a reaching out for a new, meat-free way of living. The physical and emotional renunciation of her husband begins this journey, which is further developed in the relationship with her brother-in-law.

The second section, titled Mongolian Mark, is set some time after Yeong-hye has been left by her husband. It is narrated in the third person and centres on Yeong-hye’s nameless brother-in-law, who is married to her younger sister, In-hye. He is a professionally frustrated middle-aged video artist who has ambitions to complete a project involving filming couples, who have images of flowers etched on their bodies, having sex. He is conscious that such a film could be construed as pornographic, and he initially wants to develop the project so that it retains its art house ambitions. The section reflects on the attraction that he had felt for Yeong-hye, although for the brother-in-law, she is less conventionally attractive than his wife. For him, ‘She might well be called ugly in comparison with his wife, but to him she radiated energy, like a tree that grows in the wilderness, denuded and solitary’ (pp. 63–4). His arboreal fantasy of her makes her, for him, an ideal participant in his video project, which he persuades her to take part in. Calling her on the telephone, he notes that she had ‘the quiet tone of a person who didn’t belong anywhere, someone who had passed into a border area between states of being’ (pp. 70–1), a view which mirrors his own feelings of disconnection from his earlier work and from his wife and son.

The section title (Mongolian Mark) refers to a birthmark resembling blue petals that Yeong-hye has on her buttocks, a birthmark which is usually lost in adult life. For the artist, ‘the fact that she didn’t eat meat, only vegetables and cereal grains, seemed to fit with the image of that blue petal-like mark, so much so that one could not be disentangled from the other’ (pp. 71–2). The flower represents a symbol of purification, and his desire to paint Yeong-hye’s body in flowers is greeted with enthusiasm by her as it enables her to see herself as belonging to a positive version of nature. The artist had anticipated that the birthmark would be sexual and had fantasised about it as an opening and closing orifice before he saw it. Instead, on seeing it for him, ‘there was nothing sexual about it; it was more vegetal than sexual’ (p. 83). He paints red and orange budding flowers over her body and notes that even when covered in these images of vibrant fecundity, she remains seemingly chaste, ‘This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated’ (p. 85). He notes, however, that this elimination has been made by her and is not the consequence of the flowers painted on her, so that ‘what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented’ (p. 85). The painting progressively incorporates elaborate flower designs, and it is noted that:

The position occupied by Yeong-hye reflects ideas about environmentality that are also developed in OOO. Alaimo argues that:

This section of the novel explores the extent to which this transformation becomes possible for Yeong-hye, who is seeking to cast off the patriarchal narratives that have sought to position her as a transgressive wife and daughter. She is looking for an identity which exists beyond these circumscriptions and develops a growing awareness of the ethical importance of renouncing meat-eating.

It is worth emphasising this issue of the renunciation of meat, as although it is implicit in the second section of the novel, it is a theme that runs throughout the text and is linked to the models of gender, which the novel critiques. This also helps to demonstrate how these ideas about eating and nature are related to ideas from OOO.

Yeong-hye’s pursuit of an alternative way of belonging is a clearly gendered narrative in which men are associated with a type of meat. She had told her husband the reason that she was no longer interested in sex with him was because ‘Your body smells of meat’ (p. 17). Her father’s associations with war also forges links to meat-eating that Kang addresses in her later Human Acts (2014), centring on the Gwangju uprising of May 1980, which opposed the coming into power of Chun Doo-hwan as part of a military coup. The largely student-led protests were violently suppressed, and several hundred (possibly several thousand) protestors were killed. The novel focuses on what this means to those caught up in the uprising, with one of the novel’s narrators noting at the sight of the dead bodies: ‘I was filled with hatred for my body. Our bodies, tossed there like lumps of meat’.Footnote ⁸⁴ As in Machen, brutal violence turns people into meat, albeit here they are victims rather than perpetrators. Her father’s assault, when he attempts to make Yeong-hye eat meat, turns her into meat in her father’s eyes as she is simply there to be dominated. In Human Acts, the resistance to meat is more nuanced as it is not only the eating of meat that becomes problematic, but also its cooking. For Eun-sook, one of the witnesses of the uprising, ‘When the blood and juices rose to the surface she had to look away’ (p. 76) as she cannot help but imagine the pain felt by the animal.

This domination of animals is related to the suppression of people by a despotic regime in Human Acts and through the domination of patriarchal structures in The Vegetarian. Alamio develops this critique further when she reflects on the whole idea of eating, because ‘the most palpable trans-corporeal substance is food, since eating transforms plants and animals into human flesh’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Eating seems to do a type of violence to nature because nature is the place where a physically sustaining trans-corporeality can take place. Yeong-hye’s renunciation of eating in the final section of the novel indicates a preparedness to embrace this idea. As Alamio notes, these reflections on nature raise ‘Potent ethical and political possibilities’, a view shared by Elizabeth Grosz, who begins her The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (Reference Grosz2017), with ‘This is a book on ethics, although it never addresses morality, the question of what is to be done’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The focus instead is on ontology and what Grosz refers to as ‘ontoethics’ as ‘a way of thinking about not just how the world is but how it could be’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This position echoes Alaimo’s as questions of ethics become elided by issues of ontology that raise concerns about environmental belonging. Yeong-hye’s journey follows this trajectory, and the second section represents an important role in her development as it provides a reflection upon the aesthetics of nature and how that too might be related to issues of belonging.

It is also notable that in keeping with the models of OOO developed by Alaimo and Grosz, Yeong-hye’s development is ontological rather than strictly ethical. Her renunciation of meat-eating has a clear ethical edge, but it is not obvious that this leads to the moral transformation of Yeong-hye because she is not searching for a new type of spiritual or humanist ethics that could link her to other like-minded people. Rather, hers is a personal journey in which the pursuit of a new way of belonging may have effects for others (in generating an ethics of belonging, or an ontoethics as Grosz terms it), but which is not consciously intended to generate a structured belief system with its own rituals and processes. For her, the pursuit of a new way of belonging depends upon making the nightmares stop. These issues can be related to the function of an aesthetics of nature, which is addressed in the second section.

The artist asks Yeong-hye if she was able to wash off the flowers painted on her. She responds ‘I didn’t want it to come off … so I haven’t washed my body. It’s stopped the dreams from coming’ (p. 97). They embark on a sexual relationship in which the flowers on their bodies, consisting of representations of opening buds and pistils, play an important supporting role, at least for the artist. For Yeong-hye, the attraction is purely to the flowers as she seeks a way of engaging with the world that might permanently halt the dreams, which have not been stopped by the renunciation of meat. Ultimately, Yeong-hye and the artist are discovered in flagrante delicto by In-hye, who calls the emergency services to have them detained, partly out of revenge and partly out of a concern for Yeong-hye’s mental health. Naked, Yeong-hye steps on to the flat’s veranda: ‘She thrust her glittering golden breasts over the veranda railing. Her legs were covered with scattered orange petals, and then she spread them wide as though she wanted to make love to the sunlight, to the wind’ (p. 118). At this point, it seems that Yeong-hye has successfully introjected the aesthetic energy of the images of nature which cover her body, but the situation is more complicated because these representations of nature are imposed upon her by the artist and are used to sexually exploit her. The flower-festooned Yeong-hye has become the artist’s sexual fantasy, which challenges the idea of an aesthetics of ontoethics that has been ostensibly, if tacitly, developed in this section. The problem is explored by Casey, who acknowledges that this part of the novel ‘makes for uncomfortable reading: it is sensuous and enthralling even as it describes a man salaciously exploiting his mentally ill sister-in-law’.Footnote ⁸⁸ For Casey, this section functions as a critique of aesthetics rather than champions a radical, transformative image-making that provides Yeong-hye with a new way of envisioning her connection to the world. This section ‘confronts the varieties of domination that are found in aesthetic theorizing, at once rejecting the model of masterful control and recognizing that a powerful art work is seductive and disarming’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The artwork represents an aesthetic domination of nature, which is used to sexually dominate Yeong-hye. The novel therefore reflects on how images of nature represent an attempt at mastery which is comparable to the other examples of masculine control found in the novel’s first section. For Casey, however, all is not lost because the structure of the novel bears witness to Yeong-hye’s journey from a narrative of abuse to one which, in the final third section, celebrates her ability to find a new radical way of belonging that depends upon an immersive experience that reflects the radical ambitions of OOO. Casey concludes that the novel’s ‘hallucinatory modality performs the aesthetic’s immersive capacities, establishing a felt experience of non-masterful forcefulness, or immersive and pacific world-bearing, that shifts power from masterful critic to the artwork itself’.Footnote ⁹⁰ There is much that is critically important in Casey’s reading, but it is also necessary to fully interrogate the ambivalent final section of the novel, where this solution to domination is asserted. If read Gothically, this section turns nature back into a malevolent force, one that so often characterises the ecophobia of ecoGothic texts and undoes Yeong-hye’s putative rebellion.

The ecoGothic represents a specific formation of the Gothic that explores the complex ways in which subjects inhabit what often feels like a highly threatening world. Images of the wilderness play an important role in this, as they provide a way of thinking about the human attempt to dominate nature and how nature challenges that domination.Footnote ⁹¹ We saw a clear example of that in Machen’s account of how the war’s destruction of nature (of the landscape and the animals within it) is met with a counter-violence in which animals sought to assert their dominance. Typically, in such moments, nature becomes associated with a violence which mirrors that of the human protagonists. In The Vegetarian, this type of ecoGothic impulse is expressed through In-hye’s reading of nature, specifically trees, which identifies them as a malevolent force that is at odds with how Yeong-hye’s passivity is ostensibly reflected back to her by the trees. For Yeong-hye the trees represent a different form of agency, which is positive as it exists outside of the systems of patriarchal power that have dominated her life. If the trees are read ecoGothically, as they are by In-hye, a rather different narrative emerges in which the trees are granted a troubling form of agency in which, in Weinstock’s terms, they constitute Gothic things.

The final section of the novel, ‘Flaming Trees’, focuses on Yeong-hye’s treatment in a psychiatric hospital. This represents a final form of incarceration for her, after marriage and aesthetic and sexual control in the previous sections. For Yeong-hye, the way out is represented by the woodland which populates a nearby mountain range. Early on, she escapes from the facility, but is discovered by a nurse in these woods, who notes that she found Yeong-hye ‘standing there stock-still and soaked through as if she herself was one of the glistening trees’ (p. 125). In-hye is increasingly haunted by menacing arboreal images which come to her in dreams or in otherwise half-awake visions. One night, exhausted after tending to her unwell son, In-hye slipped ‘into a sleep that was more like fainting, and saw a tree flickering in the rain like the spirit of some dead person’ (p. 127). Falling into a deep sleep she is struck by a vision of Yeong-hye in which she says to her:

The closing lines echo the image of her on the veranda from the conclusion of the previous section. Yeong-hye is here presented as a type of earth mother associated with fertility. At one level the dream is prompted by In-hye’s motherly tendering of her son, but it also taps a more Gothic mood in its overtones when In-hye reflects not on what Yeong-hye is saying to her, but on her shifting tone:

The transformation is revealing. Yeong-hye’s message feels positive in its engagements with nature, but the voicing grants it a more troubling inflection as it migrates from warmth and innocence to a more dehumanised mode of expression in a three-part trajectory which echoes the three sections of the novel. In-hye reads this vision as indicating that she needs to be like a surrogate mother to Yeong-hye because the reaching out for the trees feels child-like. This transforms Yeong-hye into a figure of innocence, but there is also fear and malevolence here which becomes specifically related to how In-hye sees her feelings of isolation reflected in her own relationship to the trees and in Yeong-hye’s apparently demented ambitions. After awakening from the dream with fright she becomes aware that her fear was prompted ‘by a waking hatred the likes of which she’d never felt before’ (p. 127). This ‘hatred’ has an implicit link to the trees, which in the dream are associated with the animalistic dehumanisation registered in Yeong-hye’s changing tone of voice.

In-hye develops a growing awareness of the power of nature, specifically plants. On a visit to the psychiatric facility, she notes on her walk, ‘the flaxleaf fleabane which has broken through here and there’ (p. 128). Read via OOO, this can be seen as positive, as an instance of what Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Reference Bennett2010) refers to as ‘an active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new’ which helpfully breaks down the notion that vitalism is the sole preserve of humans.Footnote ⁹² Weinstock, however, has noted that the Gothic functions as ‘contemporary Thing Theory’s shadowy doppelgänger – that is, as a generic framework that shares many of Thing Theory’s preoccupations but with an inverted affective valence: horror rather than hope’.Footnote ⁹³ That sprouting flaxleaf fleabane is, for In-hye, just the start of a Gothic apprehension of nature which stands in opposition to Yeong-hye’s more seemingly positive engagements with it.

On a subsequent visit to her sister, In-hye contemplates a zelkova tree in the front garden of the hospital. The tree is nearly 400 years old and In-hye imagines that on bright sunlit days it communicates ‘something to her’ (p. 135). In the rain, however, it ‘keeps its thoughts unspoken’ (p. 135). In the rain, the tree seems older and darker, more reticent and seemingly more sinister than it appears on sunny days. In-hye notes that ‘the leaves tremble silently on the twigs as the raindrops batter down on them. And she sees her sister’s face, flickering like a ghostly after-image overlaid on the silent scene’ (p. 135). These Gothic trees are thus closely associated by In-hye with her sister. The fear that awakens her in the dream is due to the change of tone in Yeong-hye’s voice, and here she appears as a flickering spectral image that seems to have been generated from within the trembling leaves. Critical analysis of the final section of the novel has tended to focus on Yeong-hye’s transformation, but what is also important is In-hye’s role in projecting a Gothic version of Yeong-hye, which has a quite different origin to Yeong-hye’s quasi-OOO ambitions. It is this projected Gothic world which challenges the types of freedoms otherwise associated with OOO accounts of nature.

The final section emphasises the similarities and differences between Yeong-hye and In-hye. Both have had unhappy marriages and have lived circumscribed lives, although it is clear that In-hye sees Yeong-hye as more naturally rebellious against those patriarchal forces. In-hye recollects the moment when their father tried to force Yeong-hye to eat meat by hitting her, ‘In-hye’s body had jerked violently, as though she herself was the one receiving the blow’ (p. 136). This identification with Yeong-hye, however, only goes so far as it is overwritten by feelings of resentment. A doctor indicates that signs of improvement in Yeong-hye mean that she would be suitable for outpatient care. In-hye, however, does not want her released and reflects on the underlying animosity which prompts this:

In this concluding section, as in the previous sections, Yeong-hye finds herself subject to a form of imprisonment (now in a hospital), albeit one borne out of resentment rather than patriarchal control. In-hye’s surface compassion for her sister masks yet another attempt to control the rebellious freedoms which the novel repeatedly associates with the refusal to eat meat. In-hye is conscious that it is Yeong-hye’s incarceration which has now escalated this freedom into a type of madness in which Yeong-hye refuses to eat anything.

For Yeong-hye, the trees function as a surrogate family and represent a positive replacement of the biological family and her husband. She tells In-hye, ‘all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters’ (p. 144). They are brothers and sisters to each other, and by trying to become a tree Yeong-hye is reaching out for this type of family companionship. In-hye is conscious that Yeong-hye’s incarceration in the hospital has led to a significant decline in Yeong-hye’s mental health and that this is matched by an apparent physical regression in which Yeong-hye becomes increasingly infantilised. Her weight loss means that she can no longer menstruate and she looks increasingly ‘like a freakish overgrown child, devoid of any secondary sexual characteristics’ (p. 151). The nurse tending her indicates that Yeong-hye has become so slight that ‘It really is like caring for a baby’ (p. 151). Yeong-hye indicates to In-hye that her arboreal transformation is complete and that she simply needs sunlight to survive. The seeming mental disappearance of Yeong-hye prompts in In-hye a series of reflections on her own life, which has been focused on conforming to ideas about correct behaviour. It has, she realises, destroyed her. Like Yeong-hye, she has also been sexually abused in her marriage and her conformity and silence represent a type of death that she now sees Yeong-hye optimistically reaching out for. In-hye realises that she too is dead because ‘She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure’ (p. 162). Later, feeling chest pains (echoing the pains felt by Yeong-hye in the first section, which she saw as caused by all the meat she had eaten), she becomes conscious of the potential presence of physical death in her otherwise dead world:

The novel explicitly links the two sisters as Gothic doubles. Confronted by the fading Yeong-hye, In-hye ‘peers into her sister’s empty black pupils, but all that she sees reflected there is her own face’ (p. 167). In-hye considers the possibility that ‘Might Yeong-hye’s current condition be the natural progression from what her sister has recently been experiencing’? (p. 167). Is Yeong-hye’s journey also In-hye’s? This question leads In-hye back to a contemplation of the trees to see whether there is something positive in Yeong-hye’s ambition to join them. This is, in terms of the argument pursued in this Element, a moment in which the ecological ambitions of OOO are interrogated. At this moment the Gothic reasserts itself in ecoGothic terms because, seen from In-hye’s perspective, the trees are not as welcoming as Yeong-hye’s utopian OOO position implies. In-hye’s listens to what the trees might say to her: ‘Whatever the words were, they hadn’t been words of comfort, words that would help her pick herself up. Instead, the tree’s words were frighteningly chilling, mercilessly insistent upon life’ (p. 169). That life is independent from her because ‘In-hye hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her. None of the trees would accept her’ (p. 169); instead the trees ‘just stood there, stubborn and solemn yet alive as animals, bearing up the weight of their own massive bodies’ (p. 170). These massive bodies stand as a counterpoint to the physical fading of Yeong-hye as the closing scenes reflect on her final demise.

In these final moments, In-hye contemplates what is happening to Yeong-hye, who has now become as separate from her as the trees, ‘What is she harbouring inside her, beyond reach of her sister’s imagination? What terror, what anger, what agony, what hell?’ (p. 181). The narratorial voice has shifted as that use of ‘her sister’s imagination’ suggests that this is now explicitly about In-hye’s inability to understand. This keeps alive the implicit conflict between the utopian ideals of OOO (as far as they are manifested in Yeong-hye’s arboreal ambitions) and the menace of an ecophobia which characterises the ecoGothic (reflected in In-hye’s estrangement from nature, and from what her sister might be imagining). These two positions are irreconcilable and the concluding lines of the novel address this from In-hye’s perspective as she stares at the trees in a way which demands an answer from them:

This takes us back to the type of uncanny experience identified by Bartholomew in which a radical uncertainty is maintained so that ‘uncanniness is not unique to human psychology but must apply, in some sense, to objects in general’ which, like the trees, retain an inscrutable presence.Footnote ⁹⁴ The novel indicates that bridging the gap between human and non-human, here in the guise of trees which are also animalistic, is not possible because seen through In-hye’s eyes, they retain a menacing alterity. The implication is that trees are not on the human subject’s side. This emphatically ecoGothic position has implications for how we ultimately read Yeong-hye’s plight: as willing participant in a new way of belonging to the world, or as Gothic victim of a malevolent nature? The novel may leave this question unresolved, but a possible answer to it can be found in Kang’s Reference Kang2025 novel, We Do Not Part.

Trees play an important role in We Do Not Part as they are used to form an artistic memorialisation for those killed in 1948–1949 by the Korean state. The novel focuses on the journey taken by the narrator, Kyungha, to Jeju Island after her artist friend, Ineson, has been hospitalised, meaning that her house and pets need looking after. Jeju Island was the scene of an uprising against martial law in Korea, and it was, like the Gwangju uprising explored in Human Acts, violently suppressed. Between April 1948 and May 1949, it resulted in an estimated death of 10 per cent of the Island’s population. Islanders were summarily executed, and there were widespread instances of rape perpetrated by Korean forces. Ineson’s mother was caught up in the uprising, and the novel charts how the violence of the past shapes the memories of the victims and their descendants. The novel emphasises the importance of remembering the uprising, and its spectral presence is indicated by the symbolic emphasis given to food and trees. Like Kang, Kyungha has written a book about the Gwangju uprising after which she is haunted by nightmares and subject to migraines, which prompt her to subsist ‘on water and small quantities of rice and white kimchi’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The existential queasiness induced by working on the Gwangju uprising is reflected in Ineson’s art, consisting of logs painted black to represent the burnt houses of the village destroyed by the army in 1948. These logs are contrasted with other untreated logs, in Ineson’s studio: ‘The other logs are immersed in stillness – not a single expression, not the slightest tremor – and it’s only these painted trunks that appear to be suppressing their inner turmoil’ (p. 163).

At this stage, Kyungha is unclear about what the logs signify, but the idea that they contain a type of agency is later reflected when in a gale she comes across a tree that ‘looks to rear itself up from the snow and amble towards me. I turn away’ (p.165). Trees are again granted vitality but they are also associated with the violence of the uprising, even if that is artistically imposed upon them by Ineson and psychologically inferred by Kyungha. The point is that nature lends itself to this type of imposition because the signs of arboreal menace are already ecophobically there in Kyungha’s horror of that tree which seems to pursue her.

Read ecoGothically The Vegetarian can be interpreted as a reflection on the depersonalisation of patriarchal processes. Yeong-hye’s reaching out for the trees seems like a radical response to this depersonalisation but is, when read Gothically, just another manifestation of it. The novel also develops a Gothic language of doubling between In-hye and Yeong-hye which registers the horror of what Yeong-hye wants to become; coded in a Gothic language of psychological decline, delusion, and alienation. This conflicts with the OOO narrative which erases the subject-object distinctions that In-hye wants to retain. It provides, however, another example of how utopian ideals, which here have their point of origin in vegetarianism, are sidelined by a more Gothically-inflected language of othering associated with In-hye, but also in the arboreal reflections of We Do Not Part. The Vegetarian is not a critique of vegetarianism as an idea but provides an explanation as to why it is not culturally and politically permitted to triumph as a radical ideal, because it is associated with a type of post-humanity which, ultimately, the novel disavows.

Conclusion

Our three authors, from different eras and addressing different national pressures, have much in common. Their refutation of the vegetarian is bound up with a wider refutation of radical ideas. This, however, is founded upon a paradox because all our authors advocate for the need for social and political change. The vegetarian in this context provides an example of how reactionary forces prevail against attempts to advocate for change. Matters of scale are also important to consider. Our vegetarians are isolated figures who lack the social and political authority to change the world and their ostensible failure can be largely attributed to this exclusion from social and political power. Mary Shelley’s creature, Machen’s private soldier, and Kang’s female protagonists are all on the fringes of society and are unable to transform it. Their plights are tragic in both personal and political terms and their positions are used to reflect on how powerful the forces of repression have become. The vegetarian is not an obvious Gothic ‘other’ in these narratives and they only become associated with this otherness because of how the central structures of power construe them. These are texts about thwarted utopians in which vegetarianism is defeated by dystopian realities. In this Conclusion it is helpful to recap on how the beginnings and endings of our texts helps to explain why and how the vegetarian becomes construed as a Gothic figure.

In Frankenstein the creature’s natural, original innocence is a product of the novel’s romantic context. His vegetarianism represents a form of getting back to nature which reflects the utopianism of romantic idealism. The problem is that utopian ideals do not fare well in a dystopian world. His utopianism can be compared and contrasted with that of Victor and Walton whose respective ambitions, to overcome death and to discover a route through the polar icecap, are represented as laudable ambitions to help others. As we have seen, however, the creation of the creature is a botched experiment which produces monstrosity rather than beauty, and death rather than life. Walton, stuck in the polar icecap with his near mutinous crew, has got there because of his idealistic embracing of scientific pursuits. Victor and Walton have much in common as both have sought to tamper with nature and in doing so their utopian ambitions have become compromised. The creature seems to them, and others, as an abomination to nature but the novel suggests his closeness to it. His natural, vegetarian diet seemingly integrates him into nature and this alternative utopian context (of living simply), powerfully contrasts with that of Victor and Walton. The novel suggests that humanity is the problem, not nature. The creature’s demise in the barren polar icecap represents the novel’s most trenchant critique of romantic idealism, but it is a plight that is fundamentally tragic and the novel is not triumphant about this. The creature, like Victor and Walton, is represented as a good person who has been led astray (albeit by revenge, rather than ambition). Romantic idealism by 1818 might feel like a dead letter after the culmination of the Napoleonic wars and the failure of radical French revolutionary ideals, but this is not quite the end of the matter. The creature’s immolation feels self-destructive but read through OOO it can symbolically be read as a different way of becoming part of a wider conceptualisation of nature. It is an ambition shared by all three of our authors who explore the complex way in which subjects are related to, or estranged from, models of the natural world.

Frankenstein also articulates a lament for a lost world of idealism, one which could still be established if the time was right. Victor at the end does not quite give up; he urges Walton to defy his crew and carry on with his expedition because although ‘I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed’ (p. 186). The world is not ready for his idealism and this is reflected in how vegetarianism as a natural, peaceable relationship with nature also becomes marginalised, even by idealists such as Victor and Walton. The creature’s journey from victim to ‘monster’ is partly dependent upon how he is perceived, but also on how that perception prompts his revenge. He wants to belong in a world which repeatedly rejects him and all of our texts can be read as revenge narratives, which want to interrogate the grounds on which revenge is generated.

These narratives are repeatedly related to models of nature in which the vegetarian provides the bridge between the human and nature. In Frankenstein the creature is both natural (naturally innocent) and unnatural (surgically manufactured) and this is used to raise challenging questions about the links between humanity and romantic conceptions of nature. His exclusion from a human-centred version of nature provides the novel’s most telling critique of romantic idealism and the model of nature on which it depends. The revenge narrative and its relationship with nature is developed in similar, if historically specific terms, in Machen. For Machen the issue of food is related to spiritual identity. He criticises Protestantism as too reliant on physical rather than spiritual nourishment and argues that this waning of spirituality is one of the causes of the war. Animals in Machen are granted a spiritual integrity because of their peaceable relationship with nature. Humans, in destroying nature in their pursuit of war provoke nature’s revenge in the form of animal attacks in The Terror. The novella’s conclusion is intended as a precautionary warning about future human behaviour. Tellingly, many of Machen’s animals are associated with agricultural production: cows, horses, and sheep-dogs. These animals fight back against the violence of the war and an agricultural logic which identifies them as beasts to be mastered and, in the case of cows, to be consumed. This prompts their collaboration with other creatures such as moths, pigeons, and porpoises, in order to generate a strategic alliance across the animal kingdom. This is clearly articulated in ‘The Great Return’ when the farmer recounts seeing his sheep-dog cavorting with a fox which represents an image of play, rather than work, which sits outside of his world of agricultural labour. The issue of food production is clearly central to the agricultural narrative of revenge and has some links to the vegetarianism that appears to be advocated as the antidote to German aggression in ‘The Bowman’.

Machen had an ambivalent relationship with ‘The Bowman’, which he had intended as a propaganda narrative, but which then took on a life of its own as soldiers seemingly came forward to confirm its veracity. His turning against the story explains his later criticism of the Defence of the Realm Act (which stifled negative views of Britain’s actions during the war), which is mocked in The Terror. At one level the vegetarian seems to be the counterpoint to the war, but they are also a participant in it (albeit, for Machen, one who is on the right side). They may be saved by their invocation of heavenly archers, but they too are seen as part of the problem. Machen’s later journalistic lampooning of vegetarians who eat faux meat is intended to rebuke them as faux vegetarians. They become as bogus as the propaganda narrative supported by the Defence of the Realm Act. Yet again, the vegetarian moves from solution to problem because they represent the wrong type of vegetarianism which yearns for meat in the symbolic form of the nut cutlet. Ultimately, it is the threat posed by animals, who refuse to see themselves as meat, which is where the radical potential lies. This narrative trajectory in which the vegetarian is embraced and then rejected characterises not just Machen’s writing and Frankenstein, but also Kang’s The Vegetarian.

Kang’s novel articulates an explicit critique of the patriarchy. Yeong-hye is reaching out for a way of belonging to the world which is free from the structures of social and sexual domination which defines her relationship with her husband, her father, and her brother-in-law. Her renunciation of meat-eating is the starting point for this rejection of patriarchal systems of authority. Her pursuit of belonging echoes the ambitions of OOO as we see her arboreal fantasies pursued as a type of reality in which her refusal to eat at all seemingly aligns her with this natural world. Her physical and psychological withdrawal is, for her, a condition of entry into nature. Her narrative is one of rejection rather than revenge, but it is through In-hye that the desire for revenge becomes articulated.

The male figures in The Vegetarian regard Yeong-hye as an aberrant figure who defies authority. In-hye observes this radical potential but is also aware of her own comparative subservience and resents Yeong-hye’s courage in challenging authority. This is reflected in the different ways in which Yeong-hye and her sister engage with nature. For Yeong-hye nature represents a world which liberates the subject from the social restrictions that characterise the patriarchy. For In-hye, nature in the form of trees, represents yet another experience of rejection in which nature becomes recast as malevolent and Gothic, which also generates Yeong-hye’s mental instability. The language of Gothic othering is institutionally channelled through the medical system, but it also has its roots in a more conventional Gothic doubling between Yeong-hye and In-hye and their relationship to nature. In-hye sees in her sister what she could have become if she had been brave enough to embrace an emancipatory world associated with a positive model of nature. She is, however, also conscious that nature does not let her belong in the same way. For her nature is a thing apart which is hostile to her and freighted with an ecoGothic menace. If the creature in Frankenstein is a tragic figure (alongside Victor, his double), so In-hye represents an alternative tragedy to that associated with Yeong-hye. Yeong-hye’s symbolic arboreal liberation meets its counter in In-hye’s Gothic exclusion. As in all of our narratives, it is the tacit precepts of OOO which play an important role in this.

Ideas drawn from OOO help establish the utopian credentials of our vegetarians. In all of the examples discussed in this Element, vegetarianism has provided the bridge between the human world and nature. It is a relationship which addresses an unevenness between the human and nature, because the reaching out for the freedoms, be they political or spiritual, associated with nature constitutes a critique of humanity. Object-oriented ontology promises a liberation from the oppressive binaries between human and nature, and human and animals, in what becomes an alternative way of belonging in the world. All our authors emphasise the need for social change and explore, with different levels of intensity and explicitness, the possibility that vegetarianism could provide the holistic antidote to forms of social oppression and human violence. Ultimately, these texts lament the failure of vegetarianism to provide this radical transformation because the powers of dystopian social repression become overwhelming. Vegetarianism is not therefore represented as a Gothic menace but provides a test case for how radical ideals become lost within wider repressive regimes.

This Element has focused on the vegetarian in Gothic texts as a way of identifying how the Gothic represents radical ideas about nature and alternative ideas of humanity. A focus on the vegetarian reveals how the Gothic reflects on models of social oppression and violence. These are not texts which are anti-vegetarian per se (even if they evidence a scepticism about certain types of vegetarianism) but rather explore how Gothic formations of otherness are used to push radical thinking to the social margins. These vegetarians are under threat, socially excluded (Mary Shelley), confronted with the violence of war (Machen), and incarcerated and dying (Kang). How the Gothic treats the vegetarian provides us with a new way of thinking about how oppressive regimes, at specific historical moments, treat the threat posed by the radical.