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Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

This paper explores how plant metaphors within speculative fiction of the long nineteenth century are gendered to explore concerns about social change and progressive views of modernity, particularly changing definitions of masculinity and femininity. Developing a Female ecoGothic approach for reading fin-de-siècle short stories, the paper revisits the figure of the New Woman as constructed through gendered nature, making a clear case for plant monsters as eco-femmes fatales and offering ways of re-reading ecological metaphors beyond patriarchal ideologies of female/nature binaries to foreground both as interactive agents. Moreover, being closely interlinked, the gardeners and gendered spaces of these stories provide key components in de-coding these monstrous plants as eco-femmes fatales. In exploring plant monsters as alternative ideas on the New Woman, this research offers not just a new perspective for gender studies, but equally provides an opportunity to consider plant-thinking and human-nonhuman entanglements through gender as avenues for greater understanding of our ecological kinship with the vegetal world.

Teresa Fitzpatrick is a Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her specific research interests are in the ecoGothic and speculative eco-fiction, critical plant studies, and gender studies with a focus on narratives from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Her doctoral thesis developed a material feminist ecoGothic framework to explore the intersectionality of nature and gender through cultivated plant monsters and their gardeners in speculative fiction of the long twentieth century and the eco-social changes this illustrated. She has contributed chapters on exotic flowers as eco-femmes fatales; wisteria as a signifier of domestic abuse; and on ecoGothic monstrosity to several edited essay collections, has written book reviews for several journals, and has presented her research at various international conferences. Her publications include:

  • Fitzpatrick, T. (2020) ‘Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femmes fatales’ in EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, ed. by Sue Edney. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp.130-147.
  • Fitzpatrick, T. (2023) ‘WISTERIA: A Female ecoGothic metaphor in American Fiction through the ages’ in Stratified Nature: Rethinking Women’s Writing in the Anthropocene, ed. by Marie Hendry. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp.19-34.
  • Fitzpatrick, T.  (2023) ‘The Rise of ecoHorror and ecoGothic Criticism’, in The Evolution of Horror in the 21st Century and Beyond, ed. by Simon Bacon. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. pp.261-276.


All welcome- this seminar is free to attend but booking is required.