Southern Gothic literature

Southern Gothic literature is a genre of writing that often focuses on themes of horror and grotesqueness that is meant to shock and disturb readers. The genre is characterized by dark situations, and it seeks to expose the problems of Southern society through the portrayal of complex characters. William Faulkner introduced the genre in the 1920s, but Southern Gothic literature reached its peak from the 1940s to the 1960s. In addition to Faulkner, other writers who popularized the genre include Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, and Truman Capote.

Background

Gothic literature developed from the Romantic literature of the medieval period. Gothic writers took the focus on fantastic and lurid events and placed them within a context of horror. Horror here was built not only around terrifying monsters and villains but also around fears of religion and status changes. Critics place the Gothic genre of literature in the mid-seventeenth century, citing works such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otrantoand Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron. Allan Lloyd-Smith in his book American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction observes that Gothic tropes and ideas can be seen in earlier works than these. Anne Williams in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic makes the more direct claim that Gothic and Romantic literature fall within a shared category. Williams also argues that Gothic literature is more prevalent than believed, developing, as she argues, as the primary literature of the Americas. The dark, melodramatic conflicts of the early colonies and the fear and change inherent in the founding of the United States led to a preoccupation with intense, melodramatic literature.

Southern American literature as a genre has its origins in what it was not, namely, Northern. Popular Northern American literature valued factory economics, urban growth, and the abolitionist movement. Southern literature developed in opposition to these values. Southern writers created an idealized Southern image with a romanticized view of plantation life and slavery. This idealization of antebellum, or pre–Civil War, Southern life would continue in stories set in the South even after the end of slavery. Writers who created works that questioned the orderly Southern mythology offered in these more mainstream works came to be classified as Southern Gothic.

Overview

Southern Gothic works exist within the context of Gothic literary traditions in the Americas. Southern Gothic literature, like its other geographically placed relatives, relies on European influence in its foundation. Critics categorize works as specifically Southern for textual elements such as location, horrors, and fears inherent to Southern culture and history. The themes and values of Southern Gothic works are tied intrinsically to these elements.

Classic Gothic works often take place in castles or manors as they convey a sense of history affected by decline and decay. Southern Gothic works set their stories in the American equivalents of those places, the plantation homes found throughout the South. These homes, decayed as they are in works such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, act as physical representations of the decline of Southern lifestyles. William Faulkner would tie this decline into works such as his short story "A Rose for Emily" and his novel The Sound and the Fury. Harper Lee used these elements as well in To Kill a Mockingbird. Southern Gothic literature, influenced by the Great Depression and other economic issues, would also show that a town itself could have a sense of Gothic decay. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional county where he set most of his works, is a physical manifestation of the changes the South faced. These places and the change they represent speak to a sense of horror very specific to the South.

The fantastic and the terrible are often found in the monstrous characters of Gothic and Southern Gothic works. Writers such as Anne Rice made these monsters literal; her vampires exist as manifestations of high culture and horror. Outside of European influences, Southern Gothic stories utilize voodoo and other myths based in African American culture to create a sense of unfamiliarity and horror. Stories such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and characters such as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird create a feeling of fantastic situations and characters that are rooted within reality. Reality itself can be the source of horror when the reader feels detached from it. Flannery O'Connor in her essay "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" referred to the South as "Christ-haunted," arguing that Southern writers understood the sense of being displaced and haunted within a very real reality, that something "grotesque" could be understood this way. In this way, Southern Gothic themes can be seen as part of a larger whole of Southern culture.

Writers of Southern Gothic fiction opposed overgeneralization about theme and genre classifications. Flannery O'Connor acknowledges the shared themes but argues that they come from a shared cultural experience. Ambrose Bierce's antiwar sentiments are clear in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," but when viewing it as a Southern Gothic work, the themes of the novel stand out as being in opposition to the Southern trend of mythologizing the Civil War. Harper Lee confronts oppression and bigotry in To Kill a Mockingbird, but its status as Southern Gothic literature places it within a history of racial violence and oppression. Southern Gothic also observes the South through the lens of the broader and changing world. Faulkner and writers such as Erskine Caldwell place the South in the context of the Great Depression and changing economics for Southerners. These works, filled as they are with tragedy and decay, attempt to provide honest observations of Southern culture. In this way, Southern Gothic literature, even with its horror and luridness, attempts to speak to the deeper truths of humanity.

Bibliography

Arnold, Edwin T. "Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre." New Georgia Encyclopedia, 16 May 2016, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/tobacco-road-and-gods-little-acre. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.

Beirce, Ambrose. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." The Norton Anthology: American Literature, edited by Nina Baym et al., W.W. Norton, 2011.

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, Penguin Books, 2003.

Hughes, William. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. Continuum, 2004.

MacKethan, Lucinda. "Genres of Southern Literature." Southern Spaces, 16 Feb. 2004, southernspaces.org/2004/genres-southern-literature. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.

O'Connor, Flannery. "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction (1960)," Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.

Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. U of Chicago P, 1995.

Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.