Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) has received a great deal of critical attention, primarily for its depiction of monstrous motherhood. This essay seeks to extend that discussion through a comparison to Kent's second film, The Nightingale (2019), and its even more explicit construction of violence conducted by and against women. In this way we show that both films draw on the gothic trope of women suffering trauma and the more recent conversion of that suffering to the perpetuation of violent revenge. However, we argue that rather than constituting bravery, a restoration of justice, or a subversion of that victimization along the lines of the figure of Carol J. Clover's ‘Final Girl’, the acts of violence committed by the women in these films compound their traumatization by severing them from both others and themselves. The adoption of behaviours rendered masculine in the Gothic through the invasion of the home and the colonization of the bush thus confirms these women as monstrous rather than heroic. As in other recent Australian horror films, such as Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty (2011) and Sean Byrne's The Loved Ones (2010), women's monstrosity is bound up with their enactment of a masculine agency, such that there is no opportunity for them within the Australian Gothic to move beyond this traditional binary construct.

The Babadook and The Nightingale share many thematic and narrative concerns, but centrally, both depict a young woman struggling to deal with her traumatic loss: each film functions as a commentary on the impacts of gender on the experience of violence and mourning in the aftermath of horror, in the particular context of Australian colonial and contemporary history.

This chapter outlines the ways in which historical traditions of climatic medicine influenced nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial discourses. It further examines three authors’ engagements with and reaction to these discourses, in both fictional and non-fictional literatures of empire. Rather than simply recapitulating pro-imperial uses of climate science, works by Richard Burton, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling all ‘map’ race and climate in a way that reflects the ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of colonial discourse. Further, this chapter analyses the imaginative potential provided by the structures of fiction for authors like Conrad and Kipling to grapple with concepts of chronic disease, bodily transformation, adaptation, and degeneration in Africa and India.

This book began with a puzzle – why did the climatic paradigm of disease hold sway for so long within the colonial imagination, even as germ theory was gaining a strong foothold? Why did writers travelling to the West Indies and Africa continue to blame the interaction between bodies and the environment for illness? Undoubtedly, the links between climate and racial science made the concept of ‘environmental pathology’ an especially incisive political tool, allowing those who wielded it to label entire regions as fatal to subjects of a specific race or ‘constitution’ and thereby to delimit groups of people within specific climate ‘zones’. However, as Mark Harrison observes, political reasons alone do not fully explain the ‘longevity’ of this conceptual system (1999: 206).

Analysis of five Victorian writers – Mary Seacole, Richard Burton, Africanus Horton, Mary Kingsley and Joseph Conrad – has shown how images of climate morphed and changed through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Authors such as Kingsley, Burton and Conrad create foreboding visions of clammy mist, rotting vegetation, dirty pools and ‘sickly’ sun, while writers of colour such as Seacole and Horton stress their familiarity with the secrets of their native landscapes. I have suggested that these authors continue to depict the subtle and shifting balance of heat and cold, wet and dry, long after these factors were no longer widely considered scientifically conclusive, in order to enhance their own writerly authority. Narratives of illness from the environment give credence to the speaker's own experience in ways that narratives of infection cannot. The ‘longevity’ of climate in the literature of Empire, therefore, shows that Victorian authors were not only concerned with containing risk, but also with unbinding it, allowing disease to float in the air or travel on the tides. To do so allowed them an expertise of ‘place’ that trumped any laboratory test. The lives and livelihoods of these individuals were embroiled with the continuing colonial project, which may help to explain why elements of germ theory were merely assimilated to meteorological explanations for disease during the fin de siècle.

However, authors continued to revisit and revise the colonial association of tropical environments with illness well into the twentieth century.