Gothic stories and fictionalized travel accounts featuring dangerous exotic plants appeared throughout the nineteenth century and were especially prevalent at the fin de siècle. As the century progressed and the public's fascination with these narratives grew, fictional plants underwent a narrative evolution. By the end of the Victorian period, deadly plants had been transformed from passive poisoners into active carnivores. Stories about man-eating trees, among the most popular of the deadly plant tales, reflect this narrative progression. The trope of the man-eating tree developed out of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of a much less dangerous plant: the Javanese upas. Tales about the upas described the tree as having a poisonous atmosphere which killed every living thing within a several mile radius.Footnote ¹ The existence of this plant was first reported by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch in a 1783 article published in the London Magazine, and the story was recounted several times throughout the century (“The Valley of Poison” 46).Footnote ² A typical account of the popular tale would highlight the exotic location and the mysterious power of the tree:

Even though more credible adventurers revealed the inaccuracies of Foersch's report and thoroughly discredited the fantastic powers attributed to the upas, the story nonetheless took hold of the Victorian imagination. As a result of Foersch's widely-circulated narrative, the word “upas” was rapidly incorporated into the English lexicon; writers such as Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens use the upas as a metaphor for a person, object, or idea that has a poisonous, destructive atmosphere.Footnote ³ The upas was even a subject for nineteenth-century art, as evidenced by Francis Danby's 1820 gothic painting of a solitary upas tree in the midst of a desolate rocky landscape. Although the myth of the upas focuses on the tree's lethal powers, it is important to note that the upas is, relatively speaking, a very passive “vegetable monster.” The plant is potentially dangerous, but stationary; extremely isolated, it is only harmful to those who rashly ignore the warning signs and wander within the area of its poisonous influence. Even in these exaggerated accounts, the upas is a non-carnivorous monster that grows in a remote, uninhabited area of Java.

The passive upas tree was the pattern for Victorian depictions of deadly plants until the twilight of the century, when authors refigured the upas legend to create much more actively sinister plants. These late-century narratives combined the size and lethal power of the upas tree with attributes of common carnivorous plants, creating vegetable monsters that were not only deadly, but active predators as well. The Victorians had maintained an interest in carnivorous plants throughout the period, and avid botanists were always keen to obtain samples of sundews, pitcher plants, and Venus Flytraps for their collections; but it was not until the publication of Charles Darwin's Insectivorous Plants in 1875 that stories of man-eating plants began to appear in cultural and literary narratives. By examining the almost animalistic movement and digestion of carnivorous plants, Darwin's work in many ways made the existence of a meat-eating plant seem like an evolutionary possibility. To a Victorian audience, actively carnivorous plants certainly represented monstrous evolutionary progress and “a striking instance of reversal of the prevailing order of things” (Prior 7). The seemingly “scientific” reports of man-eating plants originating in the late 1870s respond to these evolutionary anxieties by categorizing deadly plants as disturbing animal/plant hybrids. Literary conceptions of lethal flora, which developed in conjunction with these late-century reports, also share these concerns. Arthur Conan Doyle's story about giant pitcher plants, “The American's Tale” (1879), inaugurated a distinctive cluster of gothic fiction featuring animated carnivorous plants.Footnote ⁴ Although these new imaginings of dangerous plants appeared in a variety of forms, including vampiric orchids and carnivorous vines, it was the sheer power and endless appetite of the man-eating tree that particularly captivated the Victorians.Footnote ⁵ Works such as Phil Robinson's short story “The Man-Eating Tree” (1881) and Frank Aubrey's novel The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1897) present trees that are active predators and opportunistic man-eaters; the trees reach for, snatch, and hold their prey in order to drain their victims of blood. Set deep within colonial jungles, these two narratives combined the legend of the upas with the terrifying possibilities of Darwinian evolution in order to create a new, more deadly form of dangerous plant.

Victorian Britain's long-standing fascination with carnivorous plants stemmed in part from a larger “cultural interest in the Gothic form in literature, architecture and art, and, in terms of natural history, bizarre spectacles” (Chase 329–30). Despite a variety in the species of killer plants that authors imagined, there are thematic continuities which distinguish man-eating plant stories as a sub-genre of late-Victorian gothic fiction. Although the appearance of a man-eating plant is certainly the most distinguishable feature of this fiction, the genre is perhaps best defined by the anxieties that it engenders: these stories explore fin-de-siècle fears about evolutionary hybridity, aberrant nature, and colonial environments. With their emphasis on adventure, man-eating plant tales are best positioned as a sub-genre of “imperial Gothic” fiction, which according to Patrick Brantlinger, is a “blend of adventure story with gothic elements” (227).Footnote ⁶ Brantlinger notes that the “imperial Gothic” addresses some Darwinian concerns, such as individual atavism and cultural regression, which these stories also explore through the violence of the human characters. But in man-eating plant tales, the threat of Darwinian evolution expands beyond fears of human degeneration to also highlight the threat of an unconquered and highly evolved natural world. The predatory plants in these texts are well-adapted meat-eating machines that indiscriminately consume anything within their reach. If Darwinian evolution presented “a narrative within which any combination of morphic traits, any transfiguration of bodily form, was possible,” then plants with the appetite and cunning of a mammalian predator suggest a disturbing new evolutionary hybrid (Hurley 6). These hybrid monstrosities became the bogeymen of the vegetable kingdom, and upon these plants centered fears about foreign environments – fears that were particularly directed towards the unknowable natural world and the dangerous, still-undiscovered species lurking within the colonial jungles.

A distrust of the natural world is not a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but, as Simon Estok points out, has a rich and complex literary history which needs to be more fully explored. Recently, Estok encouraged scholars working in ecocriticism to investigate “ecophobia,” or “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world,” in literature (6). Estok's hope is that a focus on ecophobia can help to create a more unified theory of ecocriticism, but also that it will help to shed light on historical and contemporary attitudes towards nature. Tom Hillard suggests that in a more viable theory of ecophobia “‘fear’ [of the natural world] might be a more accurate word than ‘hatred’” and seconds Estok's call for new criticism (686). Both critics see an ecophobic reading of literature as one that would situate texts in relation to their historical environmental moment and thus map literary reactions to the environment.

According to Hillard, the Gothic mode of fiction may offer the most productive ecophobic readings because it is “obsessed with fears of all types” and it “provides a useful lens for understanding the ways that many authors – regardless of when they are writing – represented fears and anxieties about the natural world” (689). Hillard uses the term “Gothic nature” to designate a dark, unwelcoming, and potentially dangerous environment – one which opposes conceptions of a sustaining, idyllic “Mother Nature.” The bodies of the monstrous plants and animals which inhabit gothic environments confound scientific categories and mimic cultural conceptions of the “freakish body” which become “magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment” (Garland Thomson 2). A gothicized nature, then, allows authors (and by extension readers) to explore their anxieties about both the natural world and humans’ impact upon the environment. While the Victorians may have viewed the English countryside as a form of domesticated nature, they “viewed Nature in the world at large, outside Britain, as awaiting their exploration and discovery,” and found exotic landscapes to be “alternately threatening and sublime” (Knoepflmacher xxii). The distinction between “domestic” and dangerous “othered” environments suggests that British ecophobia was largely reserved for specifically colonial environments, and that within late nineteenth-century British Gothic fiction is an exploration of the contact zones between the home country and the strange new environments under imperial control. These contact zones, as presented in man-eating tree literature, bring into stark relief the impact colonization was having on native environments, making them rich sites for critical readings of fin-de-siècle ecophobia.

This paper explores the emergence of these monsters in fin-de-siècle fiction by focusing on how Robinson and Aubrey use the man-eating tree to investigate the impact of imperial ambitions on the colonial environment in their fiction. Like other fin-de-siècle gothic tales, these stories celebrate colonial adventure and highlight the dangers still lurking in exotic jungles; yet when it comes to the environment, Robinson and Aubrey's works are ambivalent towards the imperial drive to conquer and subdue. Despite creating vegetable monsters designed to inspire horror and repugnance, these two authors present a benevolent and protectionist attitude towards exotic environments in their texts. The Victorian march to catalogue, collect, import, and indiscriminately consume is challenged here, and these stories suggest that some wild places and things should remain unconquered. Aubrey and Robinson especially highlight the problems of mindless imperial consumption when they position the monstrous plants as doubles for their English prey; the tree's endless consumption of animal flesh reflects the Victorians’ growing consumption of natural resources and the destruction of the environment caused by colonial expansion.

The protagonists of these stories place themselves in danger when they interact with the environment through the invasion of habitats or the collection of natural products. In this fiction, the active consumption of colonial products in the form of collecting and importing native plant species engenders deep-rooted anxieties. Much recent scholarship has examined the convergences of British consumption, material objects, and the imperial project. Erika Rappaport has pointed out that most of these studies separate the “everyday” from the unusual and that the collection of “the rarified object” would evince “the fantasies, fears, and pleasures associated with gaining and losing imperial possessions” (290). In the case of these man-eating plant stories, the collection of rarities is also linked to a destructive consumption. As consumers of the colonial environment, the protagonists of these stories become gothic doubles for the insatiable carnivorous plants. Just as the plants suggest fears about the progress of evolution, their human doubles reflect fears about the effect colonial expansion and invasion was having on the environment. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that many late-century ecophobic texts include fears about the environment in addition to fears of the environment. As Richard Grove notes, concerns about the destruction of colonial environments arose even before the nineteenth century, and “the hypothesis of a purely destructive environmental imperialism does not appear to stand up at all well” (7). Even within narratives that display fear and hatred towards man-eating plants there remains an undercurrent of concern for colonial ecology.

To understand how radically Robinson and Aubrey revised early Victorian legends about carnivorous plants, it is instructive to first examine Arthur Conan Doyle's story “The American's Tale,” which features giant man-eating pitcher plants. This story, published in 1879, offers a useful comparison to the later stories because Doyle's plants, much like the upas, are passive predators. Doyle's tale is a transitional piece that bridges the gap between the mid-century myths about inactive, yet deadly, plants and later fictional renditions of carnivorous flora. “The American's Tale” closely parallels the obscure American folktale of “Rot-Gut Pete,” which Prior says “seems to embody the quintessence of ‘the ‘man-eating tree’ motif” (19).Footnote ⁷ The story is narrated by an American, Jefferson Adams, to a captive audience of professional British men. Adams tells a story about the tensions between English-immigrants (or “Britishers” as they are called) and native-born Americans in a small Arizona town. The quiet Englishman Tom Scott and the hot-headed American “Alabama” Joe Hawkins trade insults at the local bar, which ignites the mutual resentment of the British and American factions in the town. After Scott gains the upper-hand in their disagreement, Hawkins vows revenge and slinks off to ambush his rival. Unfortunately for Hawkins, Scott “lived in an out-of-the-way sort of place, you see, clean off the trail, and had to pass through the Flytrap Gulch to get to it. This here gulch was a marshy gloomy place, lonely enough during the day even; for it were always a creepy sort o’ thing to see the great eight- and ten-foot leaves snapping up if aught touched them; but at night there were never a soul near” (253). Ignoring the dangers of wandering into the swamp, Hawkins lies in wait for Scott to come home. They find his body the next day:

In Hawkins’ ignorance or carelessness he becomes a victim of the pitcher plant, which devours him despite his efforts to escape. Unintentionally, the plant has solved the nationalistic discord of the town, since Hawkins was a chief instigator of the conflict between the Britishers and the Americans.

Doyle's story begins the literary process of transforming Victorian cultural myths about deadly plants from passive threats into active predators. By taking a familiar carnivorous plant – the pitcher plant – and combining it with elements of the upas myth, Doyle creates a monster that actually derives its sustenance from animal matter and has limited motion. Yet the pitcher plants in “The American's Tale,” like the upas, are relatively benign and are only reactionary; they respond to touch and do not actively seek out prey. As long as one knows not to lay or lean into their leaves, they can be safely avoided. Doyle's story is unusual for late-century carnivorous plant stories because the English immigrant proves he knows more about the colonial landscape than the native-born resident. This beneficial knowledge, the story suggests, cannot come from books but must be based in observation and first-hand experience: “‘Mind you,’ he continued, ‘I hain't got no grudge against your men of science. I likes and respects a chap as can match every beast and plant, from a huckleberry to a grizzly with a jaw-breakin’ name; but if you wants real interestin’ facts, something a bit juicy, you go to your whalers and your frontiersmen, and your scouts and Hudson Bay men, chaps who mostly can scarce sign their names” (248–49). Here, the usefulness of scientific knowledge is questioned and the importance of experience accentuated. Scott not only is able to live in the midst of a dangerous marsh, but also uses his knowledge of the environment for his benefit. The story strongly implies that Scott is well aware of Hawkins’ propensity for ambushing his victims, and that he returns home in order to draw Hawkins into the perils of the swamp. Doyle's story demonstrates that the English colonizer can successfully navigate the hazards of the colonial environment through a respect for the natural world and observation-based knowledge of native ecosystems. Therefore, because the story suggests the possibility of cooperation between colonizer and environment, it is hard to classify this story as truly “ecophobic” even though it presents a vegetable monster. While “The American's Tale” is about the triumph of the English over native-born residents and the environment, the stories that follow reveal the danger inherent in an ignorance of the natural world.

One such story is the Anglo-Indian author Phil Robinson's “The Man-Eating Tree” which shares several thematic elements with Doyle's text.Footnote ⁸ Published only a few years after Doyle developed his giant pitcher plants, Robinson's tree marks an important step in the evolution of Victorian myths about carnivorous plants. The story demonstrates this progression through its man-eating tree, which is “more terrible than the Upas” because it is animated, seemingly sentient, and markedly more dangerous than either the upas or Doyle's pitcher plants (296). In “The Man-Eating Tree,” the English adventurer Peregrine Oriel stumbles upon the plant while on a hunting expedition in Nubia. As in Doyle's story, a native, rather than the colonial explorer, becomes the victim of a predatory plant; but unlike the wily Englishman Scott, Oriel has no intimate knowledge of the colonial ecosystem to guide him and he only escapes the clutches of the bloodthirsty tree through a combination of luck and western fire-power. Compared to earlier fictional accounts of dangerous plants, such as Doyle's work, the ecophobia is more apparent in “The Man-Eating Tree” and the story displays much more ambivalence about the relationship between the colonizer and the environment.

Phil Robinson's story of a man-eating tree is heavily dependent on a “real” account of an exotic carnivorous tree that was circulating in the late 1870s and 1880s. This travelogue reflects the theme of decadent consumption that will be emphasized in later fin-de-siècle fiction. The account supposedly originates in a letter from the “eminent” (and most likely fictional) biologist Carl Liche, who discovered a man-eating tree while on a scientific expedition to Madagascar.Footnote ⁹ In Liche's account, the native people of the island worship a curious tree that has a trunk with the texture of a pineapple, leaves that are sharp and pointed like the agave plant's, and waving tentacles at its crown. The tree exudes a potent hallucinogenic sap which that the natives use to fuel their religious orgies. According to Liche, to obtain the sap, the natives “surrounded one of the women, and urged her with their javelins, until slowly, and with despairing face, she climbed up the stalk of the tree, and stood on the summit of the cone, the palpi swirling all about her” (7). After she drinks some sap from a reservoir at the top of the tree, the “palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if by instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils” (Liche 8). The tree's “demoniac intelligence” marks a change from earlier accounts of dangerous plants, like upas trees, which passively poisoned and did not kill for their own sustenance. Liche's tree is a more active agent which seems almost sentient and uses its animated tentacles to hold its victim. Once these tentacles have the woman firmly in their grasp, “the great leaves rose slowly and stiffly, like the arms of a derrick, erected themselves in the air, approached one another and closed about the dead and hampered victim with the silent force of a hydraulic press and the ruthless purpose of a thumb screw” (Liche 8). Here, the tree becomes transformed into an unfeeling machine which unflinchingly closes around its victim. Like a worker who has fallen into the components of a giant machine, the indifferent tree crushes and devours its live, struggling victim. The tree, however, is contrasted to the savagery of the natives:

In the midst of the frenzy, as the tree absorbs the human corpse and the humans imbibe the tree's sap, the native people and the tree become symbolically merged. As the orgy escalates, Liche is pulled away by his guide, out of fear that he will be attacked by the frenzied crowd. He hides in the jungle, disgusted by the ceremony he has just witnessed.

Liche's story is clearly an ecophobic tale about a mysterious and dangerous colonial environment. The way nature is depicted here is important, as Liche's account anticipates (and influences) some of the themes of later carnivorous-plant stories; in particular, the extravagant consumption displayed in the story and the doubling of the humans and the tree will be repeatedly emphasized in later depictions of deadly plants. Liche's tale not only relates the violence of the indifferent, mechanized tree, but also the violence of the native people and their selfish sacrifice of the woman; this account positions the native people as even more dangerous and repulsive than the colonial environment. The natives’ ingestion of the tree's sap is cannibalistic, as it is “mingled horribly with the blood and oozing viscera of the victim.” The natives’ blind ingestion of sap mixed with human flesh marks a decadent form of consumption, where substances are devoured without regard to their purity or origin. Furthermore, the communal sacrifice of the woman is also evocative of rape. Although the tree is not gendered, the female victim is forced into the tree's deadly embrace by the native men and the images of the tree's tentacles encircling the woman as well as the native men feasting on her body are both sexually charged. The sexual undertone of the woman's sacrifice is typical of colonial narratives that emphasized native abuse of women and the necessity of protective empirical rule. In not partaking in the orgy, the European scientist is carefully distinguished from both native inhabitants and the predatory plant. In many ways, the horror of the tree is elided by the natives’ actions and the tree merely becomes an extension of native violence. The story reflects common beliefs about the “savagery” of colonial people, and the need for European empires to civilize them and tame the dangerous environment.

The obvious imperialist agenda of the Liche letter is also common to late-century “colonial hunting narratives” that glorified the imperial enterprise of expansion and domination. Robinson's short story is not only based on Liche's tale, but also reflects the influence of these hunting narratives as well; for example, in the “Man-Eating Tree” Robinson transforms the rather cowardly Liche into the strapping hunter-explorer Peregrine Oriel. This transformation is significant because by the end of the nineteenth-century the big-game hunter was “the archetypal colonial figure” and a potent symbol of the British Empire's strength and supremacy over colonial lands and peoples (Ryan 99). In “The Man-Eating Tree” Robinson describes Oriel as a restless traveller and amateur scientist who has discovered, hunted, and collected rare colonial oddities during his worldwide wanderings. As scholars such as Harriet Ritvo, John M. MacKenzie, and James R. Ryan have shown, through exploration, collection of biological specimens, and interaction with native peoples, the colonial hunter was highly influential in shaping the ideology of the Empire at home and abroad. Colonial hunting narratives, whether they took the form of memoirs, novels, guidebooks, articles, or travelogues, “shared a conventionalized format that emphasized the difficulties and dangers encountered by the hunter in order to magnify his eventual triumph” (Ritvo 257). In these narratives, the hunter is positioned as an imperial agent and his triumph over deadly exotic beasts becomes a metaphor for the struggle for, and eventual success of, imperial conquest.

“The Man-Eating Tree” begins like a typical colonial hunting narrative in its introduction of a dangerous exotic threat to the British adventurer. Out scouting for his dinner, Oriel shoots into an antelope herd and wounds a fawn, which tries to escape by running towards an oddly solitary tree at the edge of the forest. Otona, a young native guide, follows the fawn under the tree and Oriel watches in horror as the two are engulfed by the vegetable monster:

By setting up the conflict which will lead to the inevitable battle between the colonizer and the exotic threat, Robinson seems to follow the usual hunting narrative trajectory; he diverges from this trajectory, however, when he pits Oriel against a plant, and not an animal, antagonist. This unusual variation on the colonial hunting narrative reflects the influence of man-eating plant stories like Liche's, which made life-threatening plants seem like an evolutionary possibility.

Indeed, even though the colonial danger in Robinson's story is a plant, the man-eating tree turns out to be a formidable adversary. This is due in large part to the tree's outward appearance of normalcy. Robinson's man-sucking plant is stripped of the more unusual features attributed to the tree in Liche's tale. While Oriel notes that “he had never seen a tree exactly like it before,” the agave-like leaves and pineapple bark are gone, and from a distance the tree almost appears to be ordinary (300). The benign appearance of the tree propels Oriel to investigate it, for he cannot comprehend that the tree is predatory and thinks Otona's death was caused by “some great serpent among its branches” (301). Instead of finding a snake, he realizes that the tree is oddly sentient and that it “discovered [his] presence at about fifty yards distance” (302). Unlike Doyle's pitcher plants, which react to touch, Robinson's tree can sense the approach of warm-blooded animals and becomes agitated. It can move without direct physical stimulus, and the tree begins reaching for Oriel as he edges closer. Even more terrifying, Oriel believes that in its desperation for food, the tree can physically move its location and that in “[l]eaning over towards me, it seemed to be pulling up its roots form the softened ground, and to be moving towards me” (304). Not only is the tree aware of its surroundings and remarkably mobile, but it acts much more like a predatory animal than a plant. The plant's mammalian body, which has a fleshy “soft bole” and sap that congeals like blood, further confirms that it is a strange animal/plant hybrid. This clearly shows that narratives of man-eating plants were evolving by the end of the century, and that authors were combining animal and plant characteristics in order to form frightening new evolutionary hybrids.

In Liche's account of the man-eating tree, the plant and the native people become symbolically linked during the sacrificial orgy, and Robinson employs a similar rhetorical strategy when he personifies his tree. Repeatedly, the tree is described as having human characteristics, particularly the leaves: “Like hands they fumbled together, their fleshy palms curling upon themselves and again unfolding, closing on each other and falling apart again, – thick, helpless, fingerless hands (rather lips or tongues than hands) dimpled closely with little cup-like hollows” (302). The leaves are like “hands,” “lips,” and “tongues,” while the boughs of the tree are “arms” (304). By personifying the tree, Robinson creates a direct link from the plant to its human counterpart and the violence of the tree represents the darkest aspects of humanity. In Liche's account, the native people become frantic for the tree's sap, but in Robinson's retelling it is the plant itself, rather than the native humans, that becomes orgiastic. Yearning for food, the tree becomes “hysterical with excitement” and highly agitated: “It strained, shivered, rocked, and heaved. It flung itself about in despair. The boughs, tantalized to madness with the presence of flesh, were tossed to this side and to that, in the agony of a frantic desire” (302–03). These passages are highly evocative of the previously quoted lines from Liche describing the “savage hordes” who became “mad and frantic” from drinking the sap mixed with human viscera. The tree, like Liche's savages, also becomes cannibalistic when highly agitated. The “leaves turned upon each other,” and as Oriel watched, “a large leaf, vampire-like, had sucked out the juices of a smaller one” (303). The tree in Robinson's story takes on the attributes of the savage, cannibalistic natives found in Liche's account; but by transposing the barbarity of the cannibalistic natives onto the tree, Robinson simultaneously moves away from stereotypes about native peoples and instead highlights anxieties about dangerous colonial environments.

While Robinson does not symbolically link the man-sucking tree to native Africans like Liche, he does draw similarities between the deadly plant and Oriel. Robinson enacts this doubling not only by personifying the tree, but also by connecting both Oriel and the plant to excessive violence. The man-eating tree's violence (which has already been described) is highlighted throughout the story, but Oriel's violent outburst is reserved for the “kill scene.” Most hunting stories have an “emotionally charged chase narrative” but a “coldly technical” description “of the decisive moment” (Ritvo 265); Oriel's slaughter of the man-eating tree, however, is anything but cold or technical. Oriel begins his attack of the plant in order to defend himself, but his violence becomes increasingly intense even after he has secured his personal safety: “My fury increased with the slaughter till, when my ammunition was exhausted, the splendid giant was left a wreck – as if some hurricane had torn through it” (304). Robinson likens the violence of Oriel with that of a natural disaster, highlighting the lethal damage he has done to the plant. Even though Oriel has completely decimated the tree he continues to maim it, and he finally “rush[ed] forward over the fallen foliage, and with a last paroxysm of frenzy drove my knife up to the handle into the soft bole, and, slipping on the fast congealing sap, fell exhausted and unconscious, among the still panting leaves” (305). Oriel, overtaken by bloodlust and a desire to revenge the death of Otano, has whipped himself into a murderous “frenzy.” Oriel's actions are so violent and excessive that his native attendants, who locate him after hearing the gunshots, are disturbed by the sight of the butchery and fear for their lives, believing that Oriel has gone mad (ibid).

Oriel's “madness” moves this story away from typical hunting tales, in which anxieties about the colonial environment are resolved through the killing of the exotic beast, allowing the hunter “to reenact on a personal level the violent appropriation that underlay the serene majesty of the empire” (Ritvo 265). In the typical form of the hunting story the kill, then, is the climax of the story and a victorious moment that represents British dominance over both nature and the colonies. In “The Man-Eating Tree,” however, the plant's climatic death scene causes uneasy tension (and not triumphant resolution) at the end of the tale. This tension results from Oriel's mad bloodlust, and Robinson uses Oriel's violence in order to position the tree as his gothic double. Since Oriel is a symbolic representative of the empire and the tree acts as a substitute for the colony, this doubling may seem paradoxical, but Robinson employs these violent similarities between the Englishman and the plant in order to critique the empire. By demonstrating that both the imperial agent and the colonial monster share a propensity for violence, Robinson is able to draw attention to the similarities between perceived colonial barbarity and the violence of imperial expansion. While the empire's violent dominance of the colonial monster is usually celebrated in hunting narratives, Robinson suggests that this violence is just as barbarous as anything in the “savage” colonies. The “ghastly relics of many former meals” that Oriel discovers “piled round the roots” of the tree not only illustrate the consumptive power of the plant, but also suggests that the ideological foliage of the empire camouflages a consumptive drive that is similarly destructive. By questioning the empire's vast consumption, Robinson participates in a sub-set of late-century hunting narratives that promoted conservation of wild animals and environments (MacKenzie 201). By the fin de siècle, it had become apparent that big game hunting was causing species destruction and other environmental ravages. This prompted many hunters to advocate for preservation of colonial lands in order to protect the environment for the enjoyment of future generations. The move to promote conservation over consumption did not, however, abate the imperialist agenda of these hunting narratives. Instead, protectionist hunting stories emphasized that only through imperial administration are colonial environments effectively preserved (MacKenzie 201).

Like hunting narratives that critiqued certain imperial practices without objecting to the overall mission of the empire, “The Man-Eating Tree,” interrogates aspects of the empire without becoming explicitly anti-imperialistic. While Oriel's violence towards the plant may invoke narrative tension, at no point in the story is Oriel's expedition or his dominant relationship to the native guides questioned. Instead of critiquing the empire wholesale, Robinson's story suggests ways for the modification of imperial rule. An important modification must be in how the empire understands and responds to colonial threats. Upon reflection, Oriel seems to admit that his violence towards that plant may have been excessive because he acknowledges that the plant was only acting according to instinct. In the beginning of Robinson's story, the narrator wonders whether or not “the sensitive plant [is] unconscious” and situates Oriel in relation to his beliefs about nature and evolution (298). While Oriel's belief “that the stronger shall endeavour to consume the weaker” echoes both Darwinian concepts and naturalizes imperial rule, he also admits that “if in the whole range of the animate world there is this gift of self-defence against extirpation, and offence against weakness, why is the inanimate world, holding as fierce a struggle for existence as the other, to be left defenceless and unarmed?” (297–98). According to Oriel's own beliefs about evolution, the plant is not a monster or freak of nature, but a product of the natural processes of evolution that has met an “urgent self-interest” for survival. The plant's violence is a result of evolutionary adaptation, while Oriel's slaughter of the plant reads as excessive and perhaps unnecessary. After the initial attack, which freed him from danger, Oriel had no reason other than his ecophobic fear of the plant's power to continue maiming the plant. By positioning Oriel's slaughter of the tree as brutal, Robinson suggests that instead of blindly meeting violence with violence, the empire should perhaps gain a better understanding of colonial threats and employ other methods for imperial control.

Frank Aubrey's popular novel The Devil-Tree of El Dorado, “which went into numerous editions over a period of more than ten years,” registers some specific shifts in man-eating plant fiction since the publication of Robinson's story (Moskowitz 243). Like Robinson, Aubrey draws inspiration from purportedly “real” accounts of meat-eating plants for his fiction and The Devil-Tree of El Dorado reveals the influence of Liche's tale, particularly in relation to the idolization of the tree by the native people. Yet the story moves away from the pattern of hunting narratives and is more directly inspired by tales emerging late in the century about South American environments (and the carnivorous trees which lurk in new world jungles). In his 1887 work Sea and Land, J. W. Buel mentions the Ye-te-veo (or I-see-you), a tree which indiscriminately consumes insect and animal prey. A few years later, in 1892, reports began circulating in British newspapers about the Nicaraguan “Devil's snare.” According to these reports, an American naturalist named Dunstan discovers a plant that “seems literally able to drain the blood of any living thing which comes within its death-dealing touch” when it attempts to eat his dog (“The Devil's Snare” 6). As with Liche and Robinson's man-eating trees, the Devil's snare's “voracity is almost beyond belief;” it subsists off of flesh and uses its sucker-like vines to grasp and suck the blood out of its prey (“The Devil's Snare” 6). In situating his story in the jungles of British Guiana, Aubrey was responding directly to these tales and also to a more general shift in the mythology of carnivorous plants that continuously moved these man-eaters from one colonial environment to another.

The shift to a South American setting signals the increasing importance of this area to Britain's colonial interests and influences much of the novel's political ideology. In the “Preface” to The Devil-Tree of El Dorado, Aubrey calls for the British annexation of Roraima in order to prevent the territory from becoming a part of Venezuela. Mount Roraima is a tepui, a plateau that rises thousands of feet above the surrounding jungle, creating an isolated ecosystem at the top of the plateau. The difficulty of scaling Roraima's cliffs and exploring its heights, combined with the remoteness and mysteriousness of the plateau, inspired in the Victorian imagination visions of “lost worlds.” Aubrey, and other authors such as Doyle, conjectured that ancient cultures, or prehistoric plant and animal life, could have survived unaltered at the top of Roraima.Footnote ¹⁰ It is clear from Aubrey's “Preface” that Britain has an imperialistic duty to protect Roraima for future British scientific exploration: “we may be on the point of allowing one of the most scientifically interesting and geographically important spots upon the surface of the globe to slip out of our possession into that of a miserable little state like Venezuela” (ix). The “Preface” also suggests that Venezuela does not have the resources to preserve the unique environment of Roraima, and that Britain, with its power and wealth, is naturally better suited to tend to Roraima's conservancy.

Unsurprisingly, the novel has an imperialist agenda when it outlines the amazing “lost” white civilization of the Manoans who live in the legendary city of El Dorado. Three adventurers consisting of two Englishmen, Leonard Elwood and Jack Templemore, and the leader of the expedition, the mysterious Monella, undertake the dangerous trip to Roraima. On the heights of the plateau, they discover the golden city of El Dorado and a “lost” white race with a unique culture as well as its own technological, architectural, and medical advancements. The Manoans were once the rulers of a vast ancient empire, but have lived for ages in a seeming paradise of ease and peace, until they fell under the control of the wicked Dark Brotherhood. Using their advanced weaponry, the three adventurers overthrow the Dark Brotherhood and restore peace to Manoa. Over the course of the novel, it is revealed that Monella, as well as Elwood, are descendants of the Manoans; Monella is their missing amnesiac king and Leonard is descended from royalty. Elwood and Monella decide to remain in Manoa, but Templemore returns home made rich by gifts of jewels. Although the Manoans, protected by the impenetrability of Roraima and the vast forests that surround the plateau, have been isolationist for centuries, they are potentially threatened by further exploration into the region. Monella explains to Templemore that he cannot return to Manoa once he leaves, because further expeditions could prove potentially disastrous:

If the outside world intrudes upon the Manoans, it would lead to the probable ruin of the culture as well as the native ecology. Ostensibly, Templemore relates his adventure because of “the present state of indifference – or want of information – that seems to prevail in England” (391) and he believes it is vital to keep the territory in British hands.

Aubrey hints that Britain may be the only “natural” protector for Roraima because of the strong racial ties between the Manoans and the British. The novel continually stresses the “whiteness” of the Manoan people who were once “a great nation” (154). When an ancient sea covered most of the South American continent, the Manoans governed a vast island empire that they controlled through their sophisticated navy; however, the imperial ambitions of the Manoans caused them to over-extend their resources, which ultimately resulted in the loss of the majority their territory. The obvious similarities between ancient Manoa and Britain – both are island empires with strong navies and imperial ambitions – further confirms that Manoa represents a double for the British Empire. The racial categorization and imperial ambitions of the Manoans significantly confuses the traditional “othered” status of native people in British fiction. Carter F. Hanson is right in suggesting that “to both the English and the Manoans, the Indians inhabiting the countries around Roraima are completely othered,” but the Indians are constructed as too superstitious and too primitive to offer any real threat to Manoans (506). Instead, Aubrey situates the religious cult of the Dark Brotherhood (which is composed entirely of Manoans) into the role of the other and accomplishes this strategy by describing the priests as barbaric, uncivilized, and even racially different, as they are “of a dark, swarthy hue” (286).

The Dark Brotherhood's status as “other” directly affects the representations of the devil-tree in the text, because they use the tree as an integral part of their worship. The devil-tree is not wild, but carefully tended and fed by the Dark Brotherhood and it is sustained through the religious practices of the cult, who sacrifice live humans to it. The cult has also built their complex to incorporate the protective and sacrificial capacity of the tree. The entrance gate to the priests’ realm is carefully designed to be within the reach of the tree and only through a manipulation of sliding shutters can a visitor pass unmolested through the gate. Similarly, the holding cells for those condemned to be sacrificed are fitted with sliding shutters, so at any moment, day or night, the priests can slide away the protective barrier and allow the tree's branches to enter the cell and grab its victims. Indeed, the holding cells are especially designed to psychologically torture the sacrificial victims:

To highlight the cruelty of the Dark Brotherhood, Aubrey taps into cultural ecophobia to create a torture scheme that uses the tree to evoke fear and paranoia. In this passage, the tree becomes a ceaseless monster that never sleeps and never stops craving fresh food – it is a form of vegetable vampire that psychologically drains its victims before it consumes their flesh. Indeed, the almost god-like power of the tree is confirmed through its use as a “fetish” by the Dark Brotherhood.

The close association between the Brotherhood and the tree leads to the plant having the same “othered” status as the priests. Unlike Robinson, who devises a Darwinian explanation for the existence of his man-eating tree, Aubrey insists thoughout The Devil-Tree of El Dorado that the tree is a weird aberration of nature:

Aubrey's reliance on the sublime to discuss the “gruesome wonder” of the “unnatural” plant situates the tree as a gothic aberration and signals its othered status in the natural world. In constructing a sentient devil-tree that is “aware, by some unfailing instinct” when prey is within its reach, Aubrey particularly evokes an ecophobic reaction by emphasizing the plant's hybridity (319). The tree's strange combination of animal/plant characteristics figure it as a Frankensteinian monster that cannot be easily categorized or understood by the usual laws of Nature.

In situating the tree as a “freak” of nature, Aubrey may seem to be contradicting the underlying philosophy of his preface, which encouraged the annexation of Roraima specifically to protect the “hitherto unknown animals, plants, and fish” that have “been isolated from all the rest of the world for untold ages” (vi). Aubrey suggests that once Roraima is scaled, scientists would find new species that had arisen from naturally occurring mutations caused by the insulated environment. Indeed, in the novel Aubrey gives examples of the wonders that could be awaiting discovery; included are such marvels as tame pumas and the karina, a plant that, when ingested, allows the Manoans to lives for several hundred or even thousands of years. This leads Aubrey into a logical dilemma: how can the unique species of Roraima be natural wonders, while the devil-tree is a freak? In order to side step this problem, Aubrey strongly suggests that the tree was imported into the land. Upon seeing the tree in Roraima, Templemore states that he has “seen a small one before; in a forest in Brazil that we were working through” (226). In Templemore's account (which is clearly based off of reports of the Devil's snare) his party's dog gets entangled within the devil-tree, and they barely rescue the animal by cutting the grasping branches away. Templemore speculates that the devil-tree in Roraima “has been there a thousand – ah – two thousand years” which would situate its origin during the height of Manoa's colonial empire (ibid). All this suggests that the Manoans found, imported, and planted the tree during a period of colonial conquest. Thus, even though the tree has already been symbolically linked to the Dark Brotherhood, it is also connected to the novel's depiction of empire. The foreign origins of the devil-tree evoke fears about importation and dangerous colonial exchanges, and suggest that England could also be importing potentially harmful products.

In addition to fears about importation and cultural exchange, the tree's voracious consumption mimics the huge consumptive force of imperial rule. The carnivorous plant can consume several human beings a day, and seems always hungry for more food. The extent of the plant's greed is not illustrated until Monella overthrows the Dark Brotherhood. As punishment for their crimes, the priests are fed en masse to the plant; as the tree cannot consume all of its prey at once, it “stores” its living victims for later:

With its unending appetite, the tree is like the empire, which was ever grasping for more land and greater conquests. It is significant that the Manoan empire fell after it had extended its colonial grasp too far. Hanson is careful to note that although “the English and Manoans are syngeneic races that share an evolutionary predisposition for imperial rule,” the Manoan's failure as an imperial power does not “suggest that England will soon follow” (507). Hanson's claim that The Devil-Tree of El Dorado is not anti-imperialist is correct, but that does not exclude the possibility that Aubrey uses the fate of the Manoans to critique the practices of the empire. Especially in terms of the environment and consumption, Aubrey implies that the British could benefit by learning from the failures of the Manoans. Besides the horrific cultivation of the man-eating tree, the Manoans have made some other misinformed decisions which resulted in environmental devastation and species destruction, particularly in regards to their domestication practices which “have cleared the land of all wild animals, including serpents” (163). Conversely, the Manoans have adopted several environmentally-conscious practices, including vegetarianism and the eco-friendly storage of naturally occurring electricity for power. These latter strategies have allowed the Manoans to survive on an isolated plateau with limited resources. Combined with the repeated calls of the “Preface” for environmental protectionism, Aubrey suggests that Britain needs to safeguard colonial environments while simultaneously warning about the potentially negative effects of colonial rule.

While neither Robinson nor Aubrey's stories are anti-imperialist, both offer their warnings about the potential effects of colonialism on the environment. These works show that by the end of the century authors were willing to critique the Victorian project of expansion and industrialization. As Joseph Carroll points out, “British writers of the later nineteenth century lived in a long-cultivated, densely populated, and heavily industrialized country, but world exploration, colonial expansion, and the still fresh scientific revelations about geological time and evolutionary transformation offered a wide field for imaginative exploration into wild places” (305). As we have seen, in the late Victorian imagination “wild places” often stimulated ecophobic reactions to the colonial environment, but there is also anxiety that the colonial wilderness (dangerous as it was) was disappearing through the mechanisms of colonialism. Regret for the loss of wild places and dangerous exploits is, as Brantlinger notes, a key component of the Imperial Gothic, and reflects that the Victorians were uncertain about the supposed “progress” of imperial expansion (239; 230). It appears, therefore, that more readings about literary representations of colonial environments, plants, and animals are necessary for fully gauging reactions to the imperial project. In particular, ecophobic readings seem especially rich for understanding how fears of and about the environment haunted the fin-de-siècle imagination. Presently, there seems to be “a strong bias in the field [of ecocriticism] to American literature” and when ecocritics have looked across the Atlantic they “have gravitated toward the romantics” (305). Doyle, Robinson, and Aubrey's works show that there is significant room for more ecocritical readings in British literature, especially in the gothic literature of the fin de siècle.