By Dr James Green, University of Exeter
(j.a.green@exeter.ac.uk)
In Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in The Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada (1852), a part memoir, part novel of her experiences as a settler during the 1830s, the isolation and dangers of the ‘wilderness’ reach a climax; her husband away on business, Moodie has only her infant for company as the darkness draws in:
The night had closed in cold and foggy, and I could no longer distinguish any object at more than a few yards from the door. Bringing in as much wood as I thought would last me for several hours, I closed the door; and for the first time in my life I found myself at night in a house entirely alone. Then I began to ask myself a thousand torturing questions as to the reason of their unusual absence. Had they lost their way in the woods? Could they have fallen in with wolves […]? Could any fatal accident have befallen them? I started up, opened the door, held my breath, and listened. The little brook lifted up its voice in loud, hoarse wailing, or mocked, in its babbling to the stones, the sound of human voices. As it became later, my fears increased in proportion. I grew too superstitious and nervous to keep the door open. I not only closed it, but dragged a heavy box in front, for bolt there was none. (Chapter X)
The scene’s claustrophobic intensity brings together physical and psychical factors, making conspicuous the influence of the British Gothic tradition (Sugars 38). The precarious threshold between the hostile, wild exterior and the safety of the homestead reflects and intensifies Moodie’s unstable mindset—her sense of alienation from the landscape and her fellow immigrants, and her growing sense that ‘civilized notions of middle-class British propriety are at odds with the transfiguration of values necessary for survival in the Canadian bush’ (Sugars 39). Moodie’s development into a model of robust self-sufficiency was to be a long and uneasy negotiation over many years, and a warning that the promises of the ‘New World’ were difficult to realize.
Roughing It is a key example of ‘wilderness Gothic’: literary responses to European involvement in the United States and Canada, in which are foregrounded ‘the realities (and dangers) of the natural world (not just of the built, human world), including […] often indifferent or hostile predators, terrain, and climate’ (Keetley and Sivils, 8). In creating them, writers might draw on their personal experiences, as Moodie did, or on the many explorations that took place during the mid-century and before. The most notorious, Franklin’s journey to the Northwest Passage, seized the post-1850s imagination for several decades. Last seen by Europeans in 1845, it took another fifteen years to determine that all 129 lives aboard the HMS Erebus and Terror had been lost to hypothermia and starvation as the men attempted to escape the ice-bound vessels and return to British Canada across the mainland. The journey’s most macabre and gothic detail, however, was the suggestion of cannibalism among the party as they neared their end. In Edwin Landseer’s 1864 painting Man Proposes, God Disposes (Figure 1), the gruesome spectacle of the ravenous polar bears, feasting on the party’s remains, may in fact deflect from the more distressing possibility of same-species consumption.
The wilderness Gothic has infused the Canadian literary consciousness ever since. One need only think of Canada’s most acclaimed living writer, Margaret Atwood, and the hybrid creatures of a novel such as Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood has addressed this lineage directly, her 1970 poetry collection The Journals of Susanna Moodie having unpacked the obscured psychological complexities that lay within the settler as she confronted a dangerous and unfamiliar environment. Of the ecophobic sensibility that often accompanies the ecoGothic (and perhaps with Moodie in mind), she writes: ‘Canadian writers as a whole do not trust Nature’, for the country is ‘the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head. It’s the kind of space in which we find ourselves lost’ (Bondar 72). Here and elsewhere, Atwood elaborates on the work of the Canadian critic Northop Frye, who proposed that a ‘garrison mentality’—small, isolated communities standing in opposition to an impossibly vast Nature—was the foundational force behind the nation’s literature and culture. Refusing to be exorcized by subsequent critics, this garrison mentality ‘continues to haunt the Canadian psyche’ (Malisch 3).
It is not to a novel or film, however, that I propose we should look for a torch-bearer of the Canadian wilderness Gothic today, but instead a videogame: Klei’s Don’t Starve (2013)1. Part of the survival genre, Don’t Starve’s eponymous instruction is beguilingly simple; players confront a procedurally-generated landscape peopled by hostile fauna and flora, and must ensure that their player character’s varied needs are continuously met. To do so, they must combine ingredients foraged from various biomes—logs, sticks, rocks, and so on—into increasingly complex items (Figure 2). Weather, seasonal changes, and the darkness (inhabited by supernatural presences) represent further dangers, and without immediate action they will succumb to any of these threats. In its visual design and emphasis on exploration, Don’t Starve’s influences are recognizably those of the filmmaker Tim Burton and Minecraft, respectively. Comparatively little attention has been given to understanding the game within the Canadian ecoGothic tradition, however. Yet its appeal lies, I argue, in its repackaging of those colonial attitudes that drove the European settlement of Canada: the offer of a wilderness endlessly available for exploitation and mastery. Each ‘new world’ of Don’t Starve recreates the ‘New World’ as it was conjured within the imperialist responses of the early European settlers: ‘a place populated by monsters, savages, sublime landscapes and strange mythical beasts’ (Sugars 11). The game moreover dangles, as a ludic objective, the kind of transformation depicted in an illustration to Moodie’s Roughing It (Fig. 3), with ‘wilderness’ (Canada’s past) being re-made into a productive, agrarian, ideal (Canada’s present). Numerous details foster this reading: players may trade with tribal, humanoid Pigs and will encounter hybridized, peculiar versions of animals inhabiting real-world North America, including Snurtles, Catcoons, and Pengulls. The case of the ‘Moose/Goose’ (its uncertain name is knowingly irresolvable), particularizes the setting even further, attracting as it does the remark from one player character: ‘whatever it is, it’s definitely Canadian’.
Yet, to see Don’t Starve as a simple repackaging of colonial teleology does a disservice to the complexity of its message about human relations with the environment. By necessity, players are driven to develop a stewardship role in respect of the game’s eco-systems: an ethics of responsible living that ensures their sustainability. In contrast to many survival games, in which the ‘spectacle of scarcity’ is superseded all too quickly by ‘abundance’ (Baumgartner 50), Don’t Starve never lets players forget the tenuousness of the natural resources they depend upon. It is eminently possible to push ‘Beefalo’—neutral ‘mobs’ that can be hunted for meat and fur—into extinction by mismanagement (an all-too-obvious allegory for the fate of their real-life namesake, the American buffalo), while other aspects of the environment regenerate only after a lengthy absence (or not at all). In a paper for the ‘Dark Economies’ conference in 2021 (delayed due to the covid-19 pandemic, that other crisis of our present)2, I hope to give greater depth to this idea that Don’t Starve reveals the ecological consciousness that can be written into the sandbox genre and narrated through an ecoGothic sensibility: a re-writing of the ‘garrison mentality’ in which the conspicuous separation of civilization and wilderness can ensure the ‘survival’ of the latter.
Works Cited
Baumgartner, Robert, ‘“Main Objective: Don’t Starve”: Representations of Scarcity in Virtual Worlds’, RCC Perspectives, 2 (2015), 45-52.
Bondar, Alanna F., ‘Bodies on earth: exploring sites of the Canadian ecoGothic’, in eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, EcoGothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)
Ganz, Shoshannah, ‘Margaret Atwood’s monsters in the Canadian ecoGothic’, in eds. Andrew Smith, William Hughes, EcoGothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)
Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils, ‘Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic’, in eds. Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (London: Routledge, 2017)
Malisch, Sherrie, ‘In Praise of the Garrison Mentality: Why Fear and Retreat May be Useful Responses in an Era of Climate Change’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 39.1 (2014)
Sugars, Cynthia, Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014)
Biography
Dr James Aaron Green is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, specializing in the intersections of British popular fiction and science, with additional interests in game studies. His work is published with Victorian Network and forthcoming in the Journal of Victorian Culture and Gothic Studies. His first monograph, Sensation Fiction and Modernity: The Meanings of Ambivalence in Mid-Victorian Britain, is due to be published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.
Twitter: @JAaronGreen
- Originally released for Microsoft Windows and Linux. A multiplayer version and now stand-alone title, Don’t Starve Together, was released in 2014.
- ‘Dark Economies: Anxious Futures, Fearful Pasts’ (https://darkeconomies.co.uk/), July 7-9 at Falmouth University, UK. The conference ‘will look back to the past in its examination of how dark concerns and anxieties were envisioned, and to the future and the visionary imaginings of how things can be.’ Don’t Starve represents a case that pulls on historical templates in appraising future anxieties, doing so through a medium that exemplifies the digital present.