Abstract
This article will discuss Irish director Lee Cronin’s examination of abject motherhood and ecotrauma in his 2019 neo-gothic film The Hole in the Ground. After spending some time in a deep excavation in the nearby woods, Christopher, a young boy, starts acting in such a strange manner that his anguished mother endeavours to rescue her real son from this evil dopplegänger who, she is convinced, has replaced him. Drawing on folkloric beliefs of Irish changelings and absorbing boglands (Gladwin 2016), Cronin’s film explores the ghostly traces of trauma (Bernet 2000) on both the body and the land through the gothic templates of mental illness, ecophobia (Estok 2005) and paranoia. This article wishes to tap into the psychoanalytical framework of trauma studies (Freud 1895; Lacan 1966) to read abject motherhood as ‘afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit), the physiological response to a belated primitive shock. It will also show that Christopher’s uncanny physicality as both distant and alien (Walsh 2007) is part of a broader Irish narrative on dynamics of usurpation. Finally, it will question the film’s ecofeminist agenda (Thompson 2006) by arguing that its intermeshing of the human with the preternatural whereby Sarah becomes a mythical, Orpheus-like manifestation of Creed’s archaic mother (Creed 1993) mirrors a wider response to ecological trauma while bolstering a long-lasting Irish tradition of equating femininity with nurturing and suffering (Alexander 2016).
Keywords: Irish gothic, ecogothic, ecofeminism, trauma, abject, motherhood, archaic mother
Introduction
Lee Cronin’s 2019 The Hole in the Ground is an Irish neo-gothic film which Denis Murphy identifies as part of ‘the wider cycle of Irish horror output’ (Murphy 2019: 311). It focuses on single mother Sarah’s quest for solace as she hides away from an abusive partner in the Irish countryside with her son, Christopher. According to Derek Gladwin, neo-gothic works feature ‘a haunted or traumatised Irish society’ as well as ‘deep-seated disturbances in the nature of psyche’ (Gladwin 2016: 169). Cronin’s debut full-length film indeed features notions which have obsessed writers of the Irish gothic since the eighteenth century: the burden of the past, trauma, motherhood but also mental health. The premise of the film relies on the deep excavation mother and son come across in the dark and unwelcoming forest nearby their isolated house. Once Christopher has touched the hole, identified as a bog by the characters, he starts acting in such a strange manner that his anguished mother endeavours to rescue her real son from this evil dopplegänger who, she is convinced, has replaced him.
The ‘washed-out, brooding natural landscape of unmanicured meadows and eerie woodland’ (Murphy 2019: 311) which surrounds the location of the bog in the film, as well as the main character’s flight from the trauma of domestic abuse, perfectly mirror how Chris Baldick famously describes the gothic in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales: ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of a sickening descent into disintegration’ (Baldick 1992: xix). In an interview with Alex Rallo for the website Film Exposure, Cronin claimed: ‘what’s most interesting at the moment with Irish horror filmmaking in that space is that there is a resurgence delving into that dark and mysterious past’ (Rallo 2019). Perhaps unknowingly, the filmmaker thus draws on Baldick’s seminal definition of the gothic when he intertwines this obsession with the past with the prominence of space: ‘Anyone from outside of Ireland, when they think of the Irish countryside they would think of beauty, but also of mystery, that it’s somewhat a mysterious place. So, I think it is a good place to set a story’ (ibid.).
This article seeks to analyse Sarah’s complex relationship with her son and how their interaction with the hole in the ground referenced in the title conjures up discussions about trauma, ecological stakes, but also cultural constructions of motherhood in the Irish gothic tradition. This examination of individual and collective afterwardsness will be underpinned by theoretical concepts from the wider framework of ecogothic and ecofeminist studies, and will also draw from Barbara Creed’s seminal monograph The Monstrous-Feminine (1993).
Changelings and Hybrid Doubles
The driving force of the film is Sarah’s quest for her real son whom she believes has been replaced by an evil dopplegänger (or changeling) after his encounter with the hole in the woods nearby. Cronin’s rewriting of Irish gothic tropes enables him to toy with his audience’s expectations and potential familiarity with Celtic legends such as the ‘child abducted by fairies’, a very ancient superstition, and a commonplace template of Irish folklore to the point that Séamas Mac Philib contends that this belief was until recently still ‘quite strong’ in some areas of Ireland (Mac Philib 1991: 122). Common descriptions of the changeling attest to his unnatural features (long teeth, a beard) and insight. In that respect, it seems that Cronin chose to emphasise Christopher’s uncanny reactions and disturbing behaviour as well as his bodily deformities (a heightened sense of appetite and unnatural physical strength), thereby staging confusing scenes where the familiar blends with the weird. In one of them, the boy is playing alone in his room at night. Already suspicious of his real nature, Sarah decides to spy on him through the keyhole and under the door (a hackneyed trope of the horror genre) and, to her disgust, witnesses him playing with a spider before eating it. This sequence is of course a distorted echo of one of the first scenes between mother and son, during which Sarah is confronted with her son’s so-called arachnophobia as she tries to set free a spider. Cronin astutely plays with his own audience’s potential disgust by accumulating close-ups of the animal, so as to better confound the viewers when the boy suddenly stamps on it after saying ‘Dad would kill it for me’.
The evolution of the boy’s reactions – from fear and violence to ingestion – partakes of the construction of his hybridity and as such is evocative of Sue Walsh’s identification of the gothic child as the irrational locus of the individual, the spatial metaphor for the unconscious in which primal drives are ‘understood as the truth of the self’ (Walsh 2007: 183). Moreover, the claustrophobic aura of most of the indoor scenes echoes the progressive sense of anguish and distress felt by the single mother, who struggles to make sense of her son’s disturbing behaviour. Numerous close-ups of bodily parts (mainly Sarah’s and Christopher’s eyes or mouths) contribute to unsettling the viewer as well as engaging repeatedly with the gothic paraphernalia of the film. The boy’s monstrous and hybrid body thus echoes his mother’s fears and anxieties – the fear of ageing, whereby the changes in his behaviour and personality would reflect his maturing and forsaking of his identity as child.
What’s more, the relationship between mother and son is deeply rooted in issues of misunderstanding, incapacity to communicate and resentment as Christopher implicitly blames Sarah for his displacement from the urban to the rural space, and probably for the disintegration of his family unit (despite his mother’s efforts to provide for him and build a newly defined home in the vast house they have just moved into). Their capacity to bond is further hindered by Sarah’s growing fear of her son’s innate violence and her consequent distrust of him – whereby her feeling of estrangement is metaphorically embodied by his abduction and replacement by a changeling. Christopher becomes ‘both the most familiar and most distant and alien’ (Walsh 2007: 189), and Sarah would rather see him as a usurper than as her own child (teenager?) whom she fears. Her paranoia reaches its climax when she repeatedly screams ‘You’re not my son!’ towards the last third of the film, after realising that the boy no longer knows about their old games and tricks. Here the scene aligns childhood with performance and falsehood, and further anchors the film in its Irish background. The fear of usurpation and revenge no longer pertains to a distinctively Irish sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic communities, but to a more encompassing split between natural hybridity and contamination, and to mankind’s attempt at rationalising it.
Within the diegetic space of the film, Sarah’s struggle against these dynamics of usurpation can also be understood as a manifestation of her own unresolved handling of violence and abuse which resonates with Ireland’s conflicted past, as I will discuss in my second part. Christopher’s brutality and masculinity (particularly displayed when they fight in the kitchen and then the basement) become that otherness which Sarah cannot make abject and which threatens her: ‘It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). In The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed identifies cloning as a grotesque bodily invasion that also participates in horror fiction's reworking of the primal birth scene (Creed 1993: 17). In her discussion of the archaic mother figure, she posits that narratives of parthenogenetic births in which procreation is possible without the agency of the opposite sex usually depict monstrous, hybrid children nurturing a strong bond with their mother (Creed 1993: 45). By introducing Sarah as a single mother and choosing not to provide his viewers with explanatory analepses featuring her son’s father, Cronin emphasises Sarah’s role as primordial mother, ‘point of origin and of end’ (Creed 1993: 17). However, I contend that the changeling’s latent primitivity and aggressiveness towards Sarah encourages a psychoanalytical reading of the mother as the victim of birth-giving (which Christopher’s coming out of the hole as a monster re-enacts), offering new readings of sexual and maternal trauma.
‘Afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit) and Ecotrauma
Reducing Cronin’s plot to Sarah’s acceptance of and confrontation with her son’s innate violence, one may read the mother’s neurotic symptoms as her belated confrontation with the primitive shock as it returns to haunt her and her (uncanny) domestic space. The plot indeed relies upon an untold premise: Sarah’s escaping from an unhealthy relationship with her son’s father. Such a violent past not only impacts the complex bond uniting Sarah and Christopher, but it also seems to have left its marks onto the mother’s body. The viewer is made aware of Sarah’s partner’s physical, and potentially sexual, violence twenty minutes into the film, but only if they understand the meaning of the scar on her forehead (the result of an ‘accident’ according to the character, which still irritates). The scar is actually hidden under her fringe, only revealed to the audience when Sarah is asked by her doctor to show it to him. Even though she is the direct victim of her former partner’s violence, she never explicitly mentions domestic violence: at the beginning of the film Sarah says to her son, ‘It’s not that simple, sweetie.’ Later Christopher says: ‘I know Dad makes you sad.’ Later, Sarah’s doctor questions her explanation: ‘Was it actually an accident, Sarah?’ Since the camera adopts her viewpoint in most of the scenes, her traumatic past is equally never disclosed to the viewer via a flash-back or more self-explanatory shots. Somehow, Sarah’s muteness as regards her trauma partly prompts her son’s distant and weird behaviour. He is the one who is blinded and denied access to truth and explanation, to the real event obscured by layers of memory (here, his mother’s attempts at re-enacting scenes of domesticity and normality). Christopher even repeatedly calls his mother a liar when she refuses to discuss their domestic situation and consequently flees into the woods where he finds the excavation site. Sarah’s wilful (or unconscious) holding back of an explanation is thus staged as the triggering event which disrupts their everyday life.
Cronin’s feature film could, then, be understood as an illustration of taboos and traumas from the past which belatedly jeopardise the future, as most gothic texts are. In Freudian and Lacanian studies, trauma is understood as the physiological response to a belated primitive shock. Put forward by Freud in Studies in Hysteria (1895), the notion of Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardsness’ in English) occurs when an individual’s initial trauma is obfuscated by layers of memory until the real memory is forgotten or repressed. Jacques Lacan offered a few decades later to revise Freud’s theory in what he coined the study of the ‘après-coup’ (Lacan 1966). In both theorists’ accounts, trauma is strongly attached to the notion of time and to the impact of an action from the past onto the present (especially on the individual’s sexual development). Trauma theory can therefore offer interesting insights into Irish gothic narratives such as The Hole in the Ground: Sarah’s psychological struggles as well as the absorbing crater she is obsessed with can equally be understood as the ghostly traces and gaping wounds – ‘plaie béante’ in French – left by the initially repressed traumatic event (Bernet 2000: 144). Additionally, the scar eventually bleeds when Sarah steps out of the shower one night. That scene symbolises the beginning of her doubts and suspicions and stands out as another occurrence of bodily borders being transgressed and encroached upon. Somehow, Sarah re-enacts the scene of domestic abuse – she even dreams of Christopher exposing and reopening the wound – whilst the bleeding reduces her sexuality and femininity to the repetition of her trauma, just like Christopher’s identity is restricted to his position as son/usurper.
The unearthing of Christopher’s dopplegänger appears as a symptomatic response which aims to disrupt the social and societal structures of Sarah’s present. But Sarah should not be seen as the only victim; on the contrary, I contend that trauma in this narrative is not restricted to the deluded psyche of the paranoid mother, but can also be understood as collective and ecological. While Freud’s and Lacan’s approaches to trauma are mostly restricted to the individual response of a victim confronted to a foreign otherness, recent studies to trauma in specific contexts of war, terrorism, genocide or natural disasters cogently call for a broader understanding of the notion of trauma as it can be collective as well as individual. (It is to be noted however that Freud mentioned war trauma in Civilization and Its Discontents [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930] when he discussed victims of shell shock.) In his introduction to Eco-Trauma Cinema (2020), for instance, Anil Narine acknowledges this on-going debate and wonders ‘whether trauma as a primarily individual experience can describe a society-wide experience’ (Narine 2020: 2). More specifically, the concept of ‘ecological trauma’ (or ‘ecotrauma’) has recently aroused interest in academia: in studies of pop culture, film and literature (E. Ann Kaplan, Anil Narine) but also in psychoanalytical studies (Donna M. Orange, Sally Waintrobe), the latter questioning discourses and praxis at a time of, as Lee Zimmerman would argue, a ‘normalisation’ of the crisis (Zimmerman 2020: 14).
In the midst of such a fruitful framework, any discussion of trauma in The Hole in the Ground is bound to depart from the analyses the aforementioned works are used to providing. Indeed, Cronin’s work cannot be labelled as a disaster film or climate change narrative – rather, I argue that it offers an ecocritic subtext which overlaps with its more obvious gothic and horror paraphernalia. Although Nature does not explicitly wreak havoc on its surroundings, as argued in Joseph J. Foy’s definition of the subgenre of ecohorror (Foy 2010: 167), it nevertheless breeds deceitful monsters – children whose depiction reflects a sense of transgenerational (and transhistorical) dread of changelings and wetland evil spirits. This is particularly pregnant in the scenes involving Sarah and her mentally deranged neighbour, Noreen. Both women are temporarily connected in the film as they are convinced that their sons have been replaced by evil dopplegängers – albeit at different times. Noreen is an old lady, forever trapped in the unresolved trauma of her child’s death which occurred decades ago and for which she is said to be responsible. At the beginning of the film, Sarah is indeed told that when she was released from the psychiatric hospital, Noreen ran over her son and killed him. Halfway through the film, Noreen is found partially naked, her head buried in the (porous) ground of her garden. When Sarah is herself half buried by Christopher in the aftermath of their confrontation, the viewer understands how Noreen potentially died (even though the film never rules suicide out). I would like to argue that this particular scene is a lurid rewriting of the unearthing of bog bodies – a staple of Irish fiction and poetry – and that the absorbing hole in the ground summons a long-lasting imagery of eerie wetlands and sinking bogs, with which the Irish gothic is rife.
If direct references to the bog are subtle (none apart from the ‘Rattlin’ bog’ rhyme sung by Christopher and his fellow classmates at school), it is obviously symbolised by the deep excavation mother and son come across in the dark and unwelcoming forest nearby their isolated house. In an article published in 2009, Tim Wenzell bemoans the loss of primaeval forests in Ireland, which he imputes to the colonisation of Irish land and its transformation into farmland. The same year, he offers further analysis by identifying urban sprawl as the ‘new menace’ of world capitalism and globalisation, the ‘underbelly’ of the Celtic Tiger (Wenzell 2009: 1). Evocative of both colonial conquest and the gothic fear of contamination, Wenzell’s urban sprawl appears as a useful tool to designate Cronin’s modern rendition of the premodern bog. His excavating site conjures up images of nineteenth-century peat harvesting, but also of the twenty-first-century economic boom and consequential rapid urbanisation of Ireland during its ‘Celtic Tiger’ years. The aerial shots particularly encourage this reading of the hole/bog, a dark anomaly created by man, jarring in the otherwise green tones of the picture. The chromatic opposition between the greyish sucking hole and its surrounding wild and lush forested area thus reflects postcolonial understandings of the imperialist and colonialist destruction of the natural world. A marking of the trauma inflicted on the fragile body of nature, the hole is temporarily stripped of its preternatural features to become ephemeral and yet destructive, as its sucking power never seems to cease (it is even echoed in a close-up of water and foam being sucked into the plug right before Sarah steps out of the shower), until it literally absorbs Sarah when she decides to rescue her son. This ontological hesitation between bog and excavation, fairy mound and construction site, is once again characteristic of the film (and of the Irish gothic). The excavation/bog re-enacts this human imprint onto the land in the form of a traumatic scar or marking. As such, the main character’s grappling with domestic abuse and maternal paranoia mirrors a wider, more collective response to ecological trauma. If the hole in the ground is the open wound of Ireland’s ecotrauma, then the abduction of its sons and mothers appears as the ultimate after effect – the very endangerment of Irish society’s capacity to survive and reproduce.
Ecofeminism and the Primeval Mother
By choosing a hole in the ground as the nodal point and space of his film, Cronin embraces an Irish gothic legacy of more than 250 years while ascribing new functions and symbolism to the setting of his climax. Until the very last scenes of the movie, its dark influence over the natural environment of Sarah’s house is easily perceptible. Hers is an unwelcoming abode: a huge house which always appears empty, its doors slamming shut in the middle of the night and surrounded by the unfamiliar and dark woods nearby. The vast forest is mostly filmed from a distance or right from within, where its lofty trees, countless and greenish in daylight (black and white at night) contribute to the creation of a claustrophobic and oppressive vastness. What’s more, the wide-angle shots always represent the woods as a dark force to the right of the screen, which the frame cannot totally contain. Beyond the previously mentioned opposition between forests and wetlands – directly inherited from Ireland’s colonial history – Cronin’s approach to the natural space provides new composites, new models for the representation of ‘dark nature’ (Schneider 2016: vii). This natural and isolated space turns out to be threatening and its depths unfathomable. It negates the homely qualities of the turf and the lushness of its surroundings thanks to the work on the colour palette whereby green becomes grey.
Similarly, the sucking power of the hole is extended metaphorically to Sarah’s house: both are dark and protean spaces, at times meandering, narrow and oppressive. Sarah’s basement is equally damp and unwelcoming – a fecund space which breeds monstrous hybrids. It appears as the industrialised mirror image of the bog – its grey concrete walls are bare, just as much as the walls of the bog are brown and crumbling because of tree roots – which holds captive Christopher’s dopplegänger (while Sarah’s real son is believed to be detained in the depths of the tunnel). In Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of space, the basement in a house is akin to the unconscious of one’s mind – deep, dark and chaotic (Bachelard 1957: 37). The mother’s quest for truth in The Hole in the Ground thus necessitates going underground twice – to get rid of the usurper before rescuing the legitimate son. Swapping home for bog, the inside for the outside, the familiar for the uncanny fully deprives the domestic space of its warmth, comfort, and protection – until ‘home’ is eventually annihilated when the mother sets fire to it.
The interconnectedness between those two spaces – home and bog – once again testifies to the gothicity of Cronin’s narrative. In that respect, Sarah’s geographical (geological, almost) descent is evocative of that into the darkness of her own insanity and paranoia. As such, the bog at times embodies the very threat of mental collapse, domestic violence but also societal entombment – a modernised incarnation of the ‘civil death’ of nineteenth-century gothic fiction heroines (Clery 1995: 126). In the film, vulnerable women (and mothers) are literally buried as Sarah and Noreen have their heads put underground by supernatural forces (Christopher, in the case of Sarah). Such scenes extend the absorbing qualities (and threat) of the bog to the earth and the soil in general, and further the gothicisation of the domestic setting, as the two women are half-buried in their own gardens. By identifying his female protagonist with the main natural landscape of his film, Cronin inscribes The Hole in the Ground in an ecofeminist background and suggests a structural similarity between men’s domination over women and their attempts to control Nature. Both Sarah and Ireland’s greenery are therefore cast as fragile bodies, surfaces marked by a traumatic scar.
It would, however, be reductive to restrict Cronin’s film to a female gothic or female monstrous reading. Roger Dadoun’s ‘anxiety of fusion and of dissolution’ remains undoubtedly relevant, with the hole/bog typifying ‘the mysterious black hole that signifies female genitalia which threatens to give birth to equally horrific offspring as well as threatening to incorporate everything in its path’ (Creed 1993: 20; 27). Moreover, the film’s final act can be read as a rewriting of the child's exploration of the ‘gigantic, cavernous, malevolent womb of the mother’ identified by Creed (1993: 19). But the film stands out in its choice to superimpose Christopher’s ordeal with Sarah’s, the latter being enacted while the former remaining on the level of fantasy. Sarah takes on the role of the deluded child, and confronts her own obsessive, ‘oceanic’ motherhood (Creed 1993: 20) in the dark depths of the hole. Furthermore, she is cast as the virginal and desexualised mother, who eventually reunites with the parthenogenetic mother when she enters the tunnel and comes out, holding her unconscious son in her arms. Creed (1993: 46) contends that the monstrous child is usually analysed as representing their mother's illegitimate desire. By rejecting her changeling son, Sarah denies such identification, and recasts Christopher as the object of sexless maternal protection and perfection. The medium shot of the chimeric creature formed by Sarah and Christopher walking away from their burning house suggests a desire for non-differentiation between mother and son, and reinscribes Cronin's narrative into one of perfect, primeval motherhood – one validated in traditional Catholic and Gaelic narratives of sacrificial mother figures.
Moreover, when she manages to reach the surface, Sarah potentially moves back to the beginning of her tale – a happy, urban and domestic life with her son. Sarah’s new abode indeed suggests a return to the urban and to the enclosing walls of a small flat – the claustrophobic apparatus of the beginning and the very place she could have been fleeing from at the start of the film. The hole thus becomes that ‘abject space [showing] the potential for both powerful resistance of order and a troubling tendency toward the reinforcement of gender norms’ (Alexander 2016: 224), forcing Sarah to crawl back into the dark hole of coded femininity and motherhood.
Conclusion
In the final shot of the film, as Sarah’s eyes linger on her son riding his bike in circles and on the picture where his face appears blurry, the camera’s eye lingers on the wall covered with mirrors, long enough for the accustomed viewer to look for a slight movement – the traumatic mark of a ghost being trapped there – but which actually never manifests itself.
This unsolved question of interpretation somehow loops the loop as it takes the viewer to the beginning of the film and the aerial shot of an upside-down world: was the hole the scary place after all? Was the house, the epitome of traditional domesticity, the source of the threat? If so, the hole can be seen as a place of truth and confrontation, like the gothic castle once was: a place of secrets revealed about the heroine’s parentage, where she confronts patriarchal abuse and from which she eventually escapes, relinquishing Ireland’s oppressive conservative past. The film astutely uses ecophobia as understood by Simon C. Estok: the irrational fear of nature and its agency (Estok 2005: 112) and turns it into a fear of invasion, mostly psychological. But because the film precludes any definite interpretation of its ending, the viewer becomes this voyeur forced to peer into the secrets of the palimpsestic nature of the hole-as-bog (Montaño 2017: 134), its geological layers which become, for them, as many layers of interpretation. In the last shot, they are faced with their own gaze: it’s up to them to make sense of Christopher’s and Sarah’s unearthed bodies – did they flee their trauma or embrace it? Sarah’s neurotic and hallucinatory symptoms are not totally gone, a way to remind the audience that the gaping wound is still there, and that it needs suturing. Cronin’s ending aptly (and perhaps unconsciously) illustrates the ontological ambivalence characteristic of Irish gothic in general: the impossibility to choose between motion and stasis – and its horrifying in-between.
This article will discuss Irish director Lee Cronin’s examination of abject motherhood and ecotrauma in his 2019 neo-gothic film The Hole in the Ground. After spending some time in a deep excavation in the nearby woods, Christopher, a young boy, starts acting in such a strange manner that his anguished mother endeavours to rescue her real son from this evil dopplegänger who, she is convinced, has replaced him. Drawing on folkloric beliefs of Irish changelings and absorbing boglands (Gladwin 2016), Cronin’s film explores the ghostly traces of trauma (Bernet 2000) on both the body and the land through the gothic templates of mental illness, ecophobia (Estok 2005) and paranoia. This article wishes to tap into the psychoanalytical framework of trauma studies (Freud 1895; Lacan 1966) to read abject motherhood as ‘afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit), the physiological response to a belated primitive shock. It will also show that Christopher’s uncanny physicality as both distant and alien (Walsh 2007) is part of a broader Irish narrative on dynamics of usurpation. Finally, it will question the film’s ecofeminist agenda (Thompson 2006) by arguing that its intermeshing of the human with the preternatural whereby Sarah becomes a mythical, Orpheus-like manifestation of Creed’s archaic mother (Creed 1993) mirrors a wider response to ecological trauma while bolstering a long-lasting Irish tradition of equating femininity with nurturing and suffering (Alexander 2016).
Keywords: Irish gothic, ecogothic, ecofeminism, trauma, abject, motherhood, archaic mother
Introduction
Lee Cronin’s 2019 The Hole in the Ground is an Irish neo-gothic film which Denis Murphy identifies as part of ‘the wider cycle of Irish horror output’ (Murphy 2019: 311). It focuses on single mother Sarah’s quest for solace as she hides away from an abusive partner in the Irish countryside with her son, Christopher. According to Derek Gladwin, neo-gothic works feature ‘a haunted or traumatised Irish society’ as well as ‘deep-seated disturbances in the nature of psyche’ (Gladwin 2016: 169). Cronin’s debut full-length film indeed features notions which have obsessed writers of the Irish gothic since the eighteenth century: the burden of the past, trauma, motherhood but also mental health. The premise of the film relies on the deep excavation mother and son come across in the dark and unwelcoming forest nearby their isolated house. Once Christopher has touched the hole, identified as a bog by the characters, he starts acting in such a strange manner that his anguished mother endeavours to rescue her real son from this evil dopplegänger who, she is convinced, has replaced him.
The ‘washed-out, brooding natural landscape of unmanicured meadows and eerie woodland’ (Murphy 2019: 311) which surrounds the location of the bog in the film, as well as the main character’s flight from the trauma of domestic abuse, perfectly mirror how Chris Baldick famously describes the gothic in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales: ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of a sickening descent into disintegration’ (Baldick 1992: xix). In an interview with Alex Rallo for the website Film Exposure, Cronin claimed: ‘what’s most interesting at the moment with Irish horror filmmaking in that space is that there is a resurgence delving into that dark and mysterious past’ (Rallo 2019). Perhaps unknowingly, the filmmaker thus draws on Baldick’s seminal definition of the gothic when he intertwines this obsession with the past with the prominence of space: ‘Anyone from outside of Ireland, when they think of the Irish countryside they would think of beauty, but also of mystery, that it’s somewhat a mysterious place. So, I think it is a good place to set a story’ (ibid.).
This article seeks to analyse Sarah’s complex relationship with her son and how their interaction with the hole in the ground referenced in the title conjures up discussions about trauma, ecological stakes, but also cultural constructions of motherhood in the Irish gothic tradition. This examination of individual and collective afterwardsness will be underpinned by theoretical concepts from the wider framework of ecogothic and ecofeminist studies, and will also draw from Barbara Creed’s seminal monograph The Monstrous-Feminine (1993).
Changelings and Hybrid Doubles
The driving force of the film is Sarah’s quest for her real son whom she believes has been replaced by an evil dopplegänger (or changeling) after his encounter with the hole in the woods nearby. Cronin’s rewriting of Irish gothic tropes enables him to toy with his audience’s expectations and potential familiarity with Celtic legends such as the ‘child abducted by fairies’, a very ancient superstition, and a commonplace template of Irish folklore to the point that Séamas Mac Philib contends that this belief was until recently still ‘quite strong’ in some areas of Ireland (Mac Philib 1991: 122). Common descriptions of the changeling attest to his unnatural features (long teeth, a beard) and insight. In that respect, it seems that Cronin chose to emphasise Christopher’s uncanny reactions and disturbing behaviour as well as his bodily deformities (a heightened sense of appetite and unnatural physical strength), thereby staging confusing scenes where the familiar blends with the weird. In one of them, the boy is playing alone in his room at night. Already suspicious of his real nature, Sarah decides to spy on him through the keyhole and under the door (a hackneyed trope of the horror genre) and, to her disgust, witnesses him playing with a spider before eating it. This sequence is of course a distorted echo of one of the first scenes between mother and son, during which Sarah is confronted with her son’s so-called arachnophobia as she tries to set free a spider. Cronin astutely plays with his own audience’s potential disgust by accumulating close-ups of the animal, so as to better confound the viewers when the boy suddenly stamps on it after saying ‘Dad would kill it for me’.
The evolution of the boy’s reactions – from fear and violence to ingestion – partakes of the construction of his hybridity and as such is evocative of Sue Walsh’s identification of the gothic child as the irrational locus of the individual, the spatial metaphor for the unconscious in which primal drives are ‘understood as the truth of the self’ (Walsh 2007: 183). Moreover, the claustrophobic aura of most of the indoor scenes echoes the progressive sense of anguish and distress felt by the single mother, who struggles to make sense of her son’s disturbing behaviour. Numerous close-ups of bodily parts (mainly Sarah’s and Christopher’s eyes or mouths) contribute to unsettling the viewer as well as engaging repeatedly with the gothic paraphernalia of the film. The boy’s monstrous and hybrid body thus echoes his mother’s fears and anxieties – the fear of ageing, whereby the changes in his behaviour and personality would reflect his maturing and forsaking of his identity as child.
What’s more, the relationship between mother and son is deeply rooted in issues of misunderstanding, incapacity to communicate and resentment as Christopher implicitly blames Sarah for his displacement from the urban to the rural space, and probably for the disintegration of his family unit (despite his mother’s efforts to provide for him and build a newly defined home in the vast house they have just moved into). Their capacity to bond is further hindered by Sarah’s growing fear of her son’s innate violence and her consequent distrust of him – whereby her feeling of estrangement is metaphorically embodied by his abduction and replacement by a changeling. Christopher becomes ‘both the most familiar and most distant and alien’ (Walsh 2007: 189), and Sarah would rather see him as a usurper than as her own child (teenager?) whom she fears. Her paranoia reaches its climax when she repeatedly screams ‘You’re not my son!’ towards the last third of the film, after realising that the boy no longer knows about their old games and tricks. Here the scene aligns childhood with performance and falsehood, and further anchors the film in its Irish background. The fear of usurpation and revenge no longer pertains to a distinctively Irish sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic communities, but to a more encompassing split between natural hybridity and contamination, and to mankind’s attempt at rationalising it.
Within the diegetic space of the film, Sarah’s struggle against these dynamics of usurpation can also be understood as a manifestation of her own unresolved handling of violence and abuse which resonates with Ireland’s conflicted past, as I will discuss in my second part. Christopher’s brutality and masculinity (particularly displayed when they fight in the kitchen and then the basement) become that otherness which Sarah cannot make abject and which threatens her: ‘It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). In The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed identifies cloning as a grotesque bodily invasion that also participates in horror fiction's reworking of the primal birth scene (Creed 1993: 17). In her discussion of the archaic mother figure, she posits that narratives of parthenogenetic births in which procreation is possible without the agency of the opposite sex usually depict monstrous, hybrid children nurturing a strong bond with their mother (Creed 1993: 45). By introducing Sarah as a single mother and choosing not to provide his viewers with explanatory analepses featuring her son’s father, Cronin emphasises Sarah’s role as primordial mother, ‘point of origin and of end’ (Creed 1993: 17). However, I contend that the changeling’s latent primitivity and aggressiveness towards Sarah encourages a psychoanalytical reading of the mother as the victim of birth-giving (which Christopher’s coming out of the hole as a monster re-enacts), offering new readings of sexual and maternal trauma.
‘Afterwardsness’ (Nachträglichkeit) and Ecotrauma
Reducing Cronin’s plot to Sarah’s acceptance of and confrontation with her son’s innate violence, one may read the mother’s neurotic symptoms as her belated confrontation with the primitive shock as it returns to haunt her and her (uncanny) domestic space. The plot indeed relies upon an untold premise: Sarah’s escaping from an unhealthy relationship with her son’s father. Such a violent past not only impacts the complex bond uniting Sarah and Christopher, but it also seems to have left its marks onto the mother’s body. The viewer is made aware of Sarah’s partner’s physical, and potentially sexual, violence twenty minutes into the film, but only if they understand the meaning of the scar on her forehead (the result of an ‘accident’ according to the character, which still irritates). The scar is actually hidden under her fringe, only revealed to the audience when Sarah is asked by her doctor to show it to him. Even though she is the direct victim of her former partner’s violence, she never explicitly mentions domestic violence: at the beginning of the film Sarah says to her son, ‘It’s not that simple, sweetie.’ Later Christopher says: ‘I know Dad makes you sad.’ Later, Sarah’s doctor questions her explanation: ‘Was it actually an accident, Sarah?’ Since the camera adopts her viewpoint in most of the scenes, her traumatic past is equally never disclosed to the viewer via a flash-back or more self-explanatory shots. Somehow, Sarah’s muteness as regards her trauma partly prompts her son’s distant and weird behaviour. He is the one who is blinded and denied access to truth and explanation, to the real event obscured by layers of memory (here, his mother’s attempts at re-enacting scenes of domesticity and normality). Christopher even repeatedly calls his mother a liar when she refuses to discuss their domestic situation and consequently flees into the woods where he finds the excavation site. Sarah’s wilful (or unconscious) holding back of an explanation is thus staged as the triggering event which disrupts their everyday life.
Cronin’s feature film could, then, be understood as an illustration of taboos and traumas from the past which belatedly jeopardise the future, as most gothic texts are. In Freudian and Lacanian studies, trauma is understood as the physiological response to a belated primitive shock. Put forward by Freud in Studies in Hysteria (1895), the notion of Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardsness’ in English) occurs when an individual’s initial trauma is obfuscated by layers of memory until the real memory is forgotten or repressed. Jacques Lacan offered a few decades later to revise Freud’s theory in what he coined the study of the ‘après-coup’ (Lacan 1966). In both theorists’ accounts, trauma is strongly attached to the notion of time and to the impact of an action from the past onto the present (especially on the individual’s sexual development). Trauma theory can therefore offer interesting insights into Irish gothic narratives such as The Hole in the Ground: Sarah’s psychological struggles as well as the absorbing crater she is obsessed with can equally be understood as the ghostly traces and gaping wounds – ‘plaie béante’ in French – left by the initially repressed traumatic event (Bernet 2000: 144). Additionally, the scar eventually bleeds when Sarah steps out of the shower one night. That scene symbolises the beginning of her doubts and suspicions and stands out as another occurrence of bodily borders being transgressed and encroached upon. Somehow, Sarah re-enacts the scene of domestic abuse – she even dreams of Christopher exposing and reopening the wound – whilst the bleeding reduces her sexuality and femininity to the repetition of her trauma, just like Christopher’s identity is restricted to his position as son/usurper.
The unearthing of Christopher’s dopplegänger appears as a symptomatic response which aims to disrupt the social and societal structures of Sarah’s present. But Sarah should not be seen as the only victim; on the contrary, I contend that trauma in this narrative is not restricted to the deluded psyche of the paranoid mother, but can also be understood as collective and ecological. While Freud’s and Lacan’s approaches to trauma are mostly restricted to the individual response of a victim confronted to a foreign otherness, recent studies to trauma in specific contexts of war, terrorism, genocide or natural disasters cogently call for a broader understanding of the notion of trauma as it can be collective as well as individual. (It is to be noted however that Freud mentioned war trauma in Civilization and Its Discontents [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930] when he discussed victims of shell shock.) In his introduction to Eco-Trauma Cinema (2020), for instance, Anil Narine acknowledges this on-going debate and wonders ‘whether trauma as a primarily individual experience can describe a society-wide experience’ (Narine 2020: 2). More specifically, the concept of ‘ecological trauma’ (or ‘ecotrauma’) has recently aroused interest in academia: in studies of pop culture, film and literature (E. Ann Kaplan, Anil Narine) but also in psychoanalytical studies (Donna M. Orange, Sally Waintrobe), the latter questioning discourses and praxis at a time of, as Lee Zimmerman would argue, a ‘normalisation’ of the crisis (Zimmerman 2020: 14).
In the midst of such a fruitful framework, any discussion of trauma in The Hole in the Ground is bound to depart from the analyses the aforementioned works are used to providing. Indeed, Cronin’s work cannot be labelled as a disaster film or climate change narrative – rather, I argue that it offers an ecocritic subtext which overlaps with its more obvious gothic and horror paraphernalia. Although Nature does not explicitly wreak havoc on its surroundings, as argued in Joseph J. Foy’s definition of the subgenre of ecohorror (Foy 2010: 167), it nevertheless breeds deceitful monsters – children whose depiction reflects a sense of transgenerational (and transhistorical) dread of changelings and wetland evil spirits. This is particularly pregnant in the scenes involving Sarah and her mentally deranged neighbour, Noreen. Both women are temporarily connected in the film as they are convinced that their sons have been replaced by evil dopplegängers – albeit at different times. Noreen is an old lady, forever trapped in the unresolved trauma of her child’s death which occurred decades ago and for which she is said to be responsible. At the beginning of the film, Sarah is indeed told that when she was released from the psychiatric hospital, Noreen ran over her son and killed him. Halfway through the film, Noreen is found partially naked, her head buried in the (porous) ground of her garden. When Sarah is herself half buried by Christopher in the aftermath of their confrontation, the viewer understands how Noreen potentially died (even though the film never rules suicide out). I would like to argue that this particular scene is a lurid rewriting of the unearthing of bog bodies – a staple of Irish fiction and poetry – and that the absorbing hole in the ground summons a long-lasting imagery of eerie wetlands and sinking bogs, with which the Irish gothic is rife.
If direct references to the bog are subtle (none apart from the ‘Rattlin’ bog’ rhyme sung by Christopher and his fellow classmates at school), it is obviously symbolised by the deep excavation mother and son come across in the dark and unwelcoming forest nearby their isolated house. In an article published in 2009, Tim Wenzell bemoans the loss of primaeval forests in Ireland, which he imputes to the colonisation of Irish land and its transformation into farmland. The same year, he offers further analysis by identifying urban sprawl as the ‘new menace’ of world capitalism and globalisation, the ‘underbelly’ of the Celtic Tiger (Wenzell 2009: 1). Evocative of both colonial conquest and the gothic fear of contamination, Wenzell’s urban sprawl appears as a useful tool to designate Cronin’s modern rendition of the premodern bog. His excavating site conjures up images of nineteenth-century peat harvesting, but also of the twenty-first-century economic boom and consequential rapid urbanisation of Ireland during its ‘Celtic Tiger’ years. The aerial shots particularly encourage this reading of the hole/bog, a dark anomaly created by man, jarring in the otherwise green tones of the picture. The chromatic opposition between the greyish sucking hole and its surrounding wild and lush forested area thus reflects postcolonial understandings of the imperialist and colonialist destruction of the natural world. A marking of the trauma inflicted on the fragile body of nature, the hole is temporarily stripped of its preternatural features to become ephemeral and yet destructive, as its sucking power never seems to cease (it is even echoed in a close-up of water and foam being sucked into the plug right before Sarah steps out of the shower), until it literally absorbs Sarah when she decides to rescue her son. This ontological hesitation between bog and excavation, fairy mound and construction site, is once again characteristic of the film (and of the Irish gothic). The excavation/bog re-enacts this human imprint onto the land in the form of a traumatic scar or marking. As such, the main character’s grappling with domestic abuse and maternal paranoia mirrors a wider, more collective response to ecological trauma. If the hole in the ground is the open wound of Ireland’s ecotrauma, then the abduction of its sons and mothers appears as the ultimate after effect – the very endangerment of Irish society’s capacity to survive and reproduce.
Ecofeminism and the Primeval Mother
By choosing a hole in the ground as the nodal point and space of his film, Cronin embraces an Irish gothic legacy of more than 250 years while ascribing new functions and symbolism to the setting of his climax. Until the very last scenes of the movie, its dark influence over the natural environment of Sarah’s house is easily perceptible. Hers is an unwelcoming abode: a huge house which always appears empty, its doors slamming shut in the middle of the night and surrounded by the unfamiliar and dark woods nearby. The vast forest is mostly filmed from a distance or right from within, where its lofty trees, countless and greenish in daylight (black and white at night) contribute to the creation of a claustrophobic and oppressive vastness. What’s more, the wide-angle shots always represent the woods as a dark force to the right of the screen, which the frame cannot totally contain. Beyond the previously mentioned opposition between forests and wetlands – directly inherited from Ireland’s colonial history – Cronin’s approach to the natural space provides new composites, new models for the representation of ‘dark nature’ (Schneider 2016: vii). This natural and isolated space turns out to be threatening and its depths unfathomable. It negates the homely qualities of the turf and the lushness of its surroundings thanks to the work on the colour palette whereby green becomes grey.
Similarly, the sucking power of the hole is extended metaphorically to Sarah’s house: both are dark and protean spaces, at times meandering, narrow and oppressive. Sarah’s basement is equally damp and unwelcoming – a fecund space which breeds monstrous hybrids. It appears as the industrialised mirror image of the bog – its grey concrete walls are bare, just as much as the walls of the bog are brown and crumbling because of tree roots – which holds captive Christopher’s dopplegänger (while Sarah’s real son is believed to be detained in the depths of the tunnel). In Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of space, the basement in a house is akin to the unconscious of one’s mind – deep, dark and chaotic (Bachelard 1957: 37). The mother’s quest for truth in The Hole in the Ground thus necessitates going underground twice – to get rid of the usurper before rescuing the legitimate son. Swapping home for bog, the inside for the outside, the familiar for the uncanny fully deprives the domestic space of its warmth, comfort, and protection – until ‘home’ is eventually annihilated when the mother sets fire to it.
The interconnectedness between those two spaces – home and bog – once again testifies to the gothicity of Cronin’s narrative. In that respect, Sarah’s geographical (geological, almost) descent is evocative of that into the darkness of her own insanity and paranoia. As such, the bog at times embodies the very threat of mental collapse, domestic violence but also societal entombment – a modernised incarnation of the ‘civil death’ of nineteenth-century gothic fiction heroines (Clery 1995: 126). In the film, vulnerable women (and mothers) are literally buried as Sarah and Noreen have their heads put underground by supernatural forces (Christopher, in the case of Sarah). Such scenes extend the absorbing qualities (and threat) of the bog to the earth and the soil in general, and further the gothicisation of the domestic setting, as the two women are half-buried in their own gardens. By identifying his female protagonist with the main natural landscape of his film, Cronin inscribes The Hole in the Ground in an ecofeminist background and suggests a structural similarity between men’s domination over women and their attempts to control Nature. Both Sarah and Ireland’s greenery are therefore cast as fragile bodies, surfaces marked by a traumatic scar.
It would, however, be reductive to restrict Cronin’s film to a female gothic or female monstrous reading. Roger Dadoun’s ‘anxiety of fusion and of dissolution’ remains undoubtedly relevant, with the hole/bog typifying ‘the mysterious black hole that signifies female genitalia which threatens to give birth to equally horrific offspring as well as threatening to incorporate everything in its path’ (Creed 1993: 20; 27). Moreover, the film’s final act can be read as a rewriting of the child's exploration of the ‘gigantic, cavernous, malevolent womb of the mother’ identified by Creed (1993: 19). But the film stands out in its choice to superimpose Christopher’s ordeal with Sarah’s, the latter being enacted while the former remaining on the level of fantasy. Sarah takes on the role of the deluded child, and confronts her own obsessive, ‘oceanic’ motherhood (Creed 1993: 20) in the dark depths of the hole. Furthermore, she is cast as the virginal and desexualised mother, who eventually reunites with the parthenogenetic mother when she enters the tunnel and comes out, holding her unconscious son in her arms. Creed (1993: 46) contends that the monstrous child is usually analysed as representing their mother's illegitimate desire. By rejecting her changeling son, Sarah denies such identification, and recasts Christopher as the object of sexless maternal protection and perfection. The medium shot of the chimeric creature formed by Sarah and Christopher walking away from their burning house suggests a desire for non-differentiation between mother and son, and reinscribes Cronin's narrative into one of perfect, primeval motherhood – one validated in traditional Catholic and Gaelic narratives of sacrificial mother figures.
Moreover, when she manages to reach the surface, Sarah potentially moves back to the beginning of her tale – a happy, urban and domestic life with her son. Sarah’s new abode indeed suggests a return to the urban and to the enclosing walls of a small flat – the claustrophobic apparatus of the beginning and the very place she could have been fleeing from at the start of the film. The hole thus becomes that ‘abject space [showing] the potential for both powerful resistance of order and a troubling tendency toward the reinforcement of gender norms’ (Alexander 2016: 224), forcing Sarah to crawl back into the dark hole of coded femininity and motherhood.
Conclusion
In the final shot of the film, as Sarah’s eyes linger on her son riding his bike in circles and on the picture where his face appears blurry, the camera’s eye lingers on the wall covered with mirrors, long enough for the accustomed viewer to look for a slight movement – the traumatic mark of a ghost being trapped there – but which actually never manifests itself.
This unsolved question of interpretation somehow loops the loop as it takes the viewer to the beginning of the film and the aerial shot of an upside-down world: was the hole the scary place after all? Was the house, the epitome of traditional domesticity, the source of the threat? If so, the hole can be seen as a place of truth and confrontation, like the gothic castle once was: a place of secrets revealed about the heroine’s parentage, where she confronts patriarchal abuse and from which she eventually escapes, relinquishing Ireland’s oppressive conservative past. The film astutely uses ecophobia as understood by Simon C. Estok: the irrational fear of nature and its agency (Estok 2005: 112) and turns it into a fear of invasion, mostly psychological. But because the film precludes any definite interpretation of its ending, the viewer becomes this voyeur forced to peer into the secrets of the palimpsestic nature of the hole-as-bog (Montaño 2017: 134), its geological layers which become, for them, as many layers of interpretation. In the last shot, they are faced with their own gaze: it’s up to them to make sense of Christopher’s and Sarah’s unearthed bodies – did they flee their trauma or embrace it? Sarah’s neurotic and hallucinatory symptoms are not totally gone, a way to remind the audience that the gaping wound is still there, and that it needs suturing. Cronin’s ending aptly (and perhaps unconsciously) illustrates the ontological ambivalence characteristic of Irish gothic in general: the impossibility to choose between motion and stasis – and its horrifying in-between.
References
Alexander, S. (2016) ‘Femme Fatale: The Violent Feminine Pastoral of Seamus Heaney’s North’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 39 (2), 218-235.
Bachelard, G. (1957) La poétique de l’espace. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Baldick, C. (1992) ‘Introduction’, in: Baldick, C. (ed) The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xi-xxiii.
Bernet, R. (2000) ‘Le Sujet traumatisé’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2, 141-161.
Clery, E. (1995) The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Estok, S. (2005) ‘An Introduction to Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: The Special Cluster’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 12 (2), 109-117.
Foy, J. J. (2010) ‘It Came from Planet Earth: Eco-Horror and the Politics of Post Environmentalism in The Happening’, in: Foy, J. J. and Dale, T. M. (eds) Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent through American Popular Culture. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 167-189.
Freud, S. & Breuer, J. (1895) Studies in Hysteria. Translated by Nicola Luckhurst, London: Penguin Classics.
Gladwin, D. (2016) Contentious Terrains: Boglands in the Irish Postcolonial Gothic. Cork: Cork University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press.
Lacan, J. (1966) Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
Mac Philib, S. (1991) ‘The Changeling: Irish Versions of a Migratory Legend in Their International Context’, Béaloideas, 59, 121-131.
Montaño, J. P. (2017) ‘Cultural Conflict and the Landscape of Conquest in Early Modern Ireland’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 40, 120-141.
Murphy, D. (2019) ‘The Hole in the Ground (Lee Cronin, 2019)’, in: Flynn, R. and Tracy, T. (eds) ‘Irish Film and Television – 2019 The Year in Review’, Estudios Irlandeses, 15, 311-314.
Narine, A. (2015) ‘Introduction’, in: Narine, A. (ed.) Eco-Trauma Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge, 1-24.
Rallo, A. (2019) Interview with Lee Cronin. Available from: https://filmexposure.ch/2019/03/11/interview-with-lee-cronin/#respond (Accessed 23 March 2020).
Schneider, R. (2016) ‘Introduction’, in: Schneider, R. (ed.) Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Walsh, S. (2007) ‘Gothic Children’, in: Spooner, C. and McEvoy, E. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Abingdon: Routledge, 183-191.
Wenzell, T. (2009) ‘Ecocriticism, Early Irish Nature Writing, and the Irish Landscape Today’, New Hibernia Review, 13 (1), 125-139.
Wenzell, T. (2009) Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Zimmerman, L. (2020) Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change: Literature, Psychoanalysis and Denial. Abingdon: Routledge.
Alexander, S. (2016) ‘Femme Fatale: The Violent Feminine Pastoral of Seamus Heaney’s North’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 39 (2), 218-235.
Bachelard, G. (1957) La poétique de l’espace. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Baldick, C. (1992) ‘Introduction’, in: Baldick, C. (ed) The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xi-xxiii.
Bernet, R. (2000) ‘Le Sujet traumatisé’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 2, 141-161.
Clery, E. (1995) The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Estok, S. (2005) ‘An Introduction to Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: The Special Cluster’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 12 (2), 109-117.
Foy, J. J. (2010) ‘It Came from Planet Earth: Eco-Horror and the Politics of Post Environmentalism in The Happening’, in: Foy, J. J. and Dale, T. M. (eds) Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent through American Popular Culture. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 167-189.
Freud, S. & Breuer, J. (1895) Studies in Hysteria. Translated by Nicola Luckhurst, London: Penguin Classics.
Gladwin, D. (2016) Contentious Terrains: Boglands in the Irish Postcolonial Gothic. Cork: Cork University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press.
Lacan, J. (1966) Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
Mac Philib, S. (1991) ‘The Changeling: Irish Versions of a Migratory Legend in Their International Context’, Béaloideas, 59, 121-131.
Montaño, J. P. (2017) ‘Cultural Conflict and the Landscape of Conquest in Early Modern Ireland’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 40, 120-141.
Murphy, D. (2019) ‘The Hole in the Ground (Lee Cronin, 2019)’, in: Flynn, R. and Tracy, T. (eds) ‘Irish Film and Television – 2019 The Year in Review’, Estudios Irlandeses, 15, 311-314.
Narine, A. (2015) ‘Introduction’, in: Narine, A. (ed.) Eco-Trauma Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge, 1-24.
Rallo, A. (2019) Interview with Lee Cronin. Available from: https://filmexposure.ch/2019/03/11/interview-with-lee-cronin/#respond (Accessed 23 March 2020).
Schneider, R. (2016) ‘Introduction’, in: Schneider, R. (ed.) Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Walsh, S. (2007) ‘Gothic Children’, in: Spooner, C. and McEvoy, E. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Abingdon: Routledge, 183-191.
Wenzell, T. (2009) ‘Ecocriticism, Early Irish Nature Writing, and the Irish Landscape Today’, New Hibernia Review, 13 (1), 125-139.
Wenzell, T. (2009) Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Zimmerman, L. (2020) Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change: Literature, Psychoanalysis and Denial. Abingdon: Routledge.