"The Plant Kingdom Strikes Back: Metamorphic Counter-Violence in Daphne du Maurier’s 'The Apple Tree' (1952)"

Résumé En

European culture still bears the imprint of ancient Greek or Roman narratives centered on females whom the Gods turn into trees, either in the wake of the sexual violence forced on them (the myths of Daphne, Dryope, or Leucothoe come to mind), or as a perennial manifestation of human sorrow in the face of death (as with Platanus or Baucis).Both semantic strands are exemplified, and subsumed, in Daphne du Maurier’s “The Apple Tree,” in which a widower becomes obsessed with an ungainly apple tree which, he convinces himself, stands in his orchard as a malevolent reincarnation of his wife and as a living reproach for his indifference and rough treatment of her in her lifetime. Though he hacks it down, the tree’s superior agency concludes the story when it traps him to death in its gnarled roots.Critics often underline that literary or filmic representations of powerful monstrous plants constitute “a weak decentering, in which the primacy of the human is simply replaced with that of the plant, rather than a deconstructive approach in which the very relation between center and periphery is dissolved.” I will nevertheless argue that, in this particular story, the piece of wood which, “like a hand, hesitant and timid,” touches the widower before he dies is a far cry from the anthropocentric representations of universal violence of which science fiction usually imagines the vegetal to be capable. Beyond gender struggle considerations, the soft individualized counter-violence depicted here can be construed today as an ecological instance of our need to see plants differently than as “the utterly and ineffably strange, embodying an absolute alterity” —in other words, as vital to our understanding of ourselves as part of the world we inhabit.