Chapter 2 - The Extractive Logic and the Climate Crisis in Gothic Appalachian Literature

Summary

Eighteenth-century explorers and settler colonials in Appalachia encountered massive old-growth forests and as early as 1742 discovered coal deposits alongside a river in West Virginia, marking the beginning of a highly covetous or vampiric approach to the region's natural resources that has shaped Appalachia ever since. From deforestation to deep coal mining, and from mountaintop removal (MTR) to fracking, time and again an extractive logic has been applied to the region, a logic defined by profit margins and callous disregard for the health of the environment and local communities.

All too often when outsiders think of Appalachia, they struggle to see beyond stereotypes to acknowledge the costs of fossil fuel extraction. Instead, and by a cynical sleight of hand, rural Appalachia and its people are viewed as a foreboding threat, which neatly serves to deflect from the real horrors of extraction. Such misapprehensions are tightly woven into the popular imagination because it is more comforting to accept that rural Appalachians are gun-toting, toothless terrors, than it is to expose and recognize the real monster in the room. That monster, of course, is generated by extraction. In his work specifically on rural horror in Appalachia, McClanahan asks, “What if the horrifying reality of the rural is a result of the ways that those landscapes and people have been exploited and harmed by human activity and capital?” For McClanahan, extraction wreaks havoc and devastation on both people and the environment, therefore across Appalachian literature extraction and the gothic are symbiotic, resulting in a body of work that writes back against fossil fuel extractivism, exposing its horrors and inequity.

Indeed, in her work on extraction and British literature, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues that “literary form and genre produce and extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding because of the deep and durational qualities of discourse.” It is, she suggests, the “durational qualities of lan-guage, genre, and form” that ensures “literature engages with environmental materiality across time, and for this reason it is a crucial archive for understanding the relation between environmental history and environmental crises today.”