Southern Gothic 2 Feb 2021 Recap Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic 2 Feb 2021

Recap – Southern Gothic • Grotesque characters • Dark humour and the macabre • A sense of alienation • Irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses • Taboo behaviour – murder, incest, necrophilia, cannibalism • The physical, moral and psychological decay of the South • The inability of the South to make progress • Proliferation of negative stereotypes of the South

Contemporary Southern Gothic • Cormac Mc. Carthy is arguably the most critically acclaimed contemporary practitioner of the Southern Gothic. • Robert Brinkmeyer sees Mc. Carthy’s ‘gothic imagination’ as ‘haunted by a frightening vision of destruction and waste’. • Lydia Cooper asserts, Mc. Carthy’s ‘horror-drenched and heavily allegorical aesthetic style’ is combined ‘with historically rooted commentary on social ills, such as issues of race, class, urbanization, and industrialization, to bring into focus repressed social anxieties. ’

Outer Dark (1968) • Outer Dark is Mc. Carthy’s second novel, published in 1968. • It is set in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Appalachia is a rural, mountainous region stretching through the Eastern/Southern States of Virginia, Kentucky, Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. • The novel tells of the story of brother and sister Culla and Rinthy Holme who have a child together in a remote cabin in the woods. • Culla leaves the nameless infant in the woods to die, but tells his sister that the newborn died of natural causes and had to be buried. • Rinthy discovers this lie and sets out to find the baby for herself. Culla also sets out on a journey. • Three unnamed strangers haunt the narrative following the characters as they journey through the wilderness.

Outer Dark Read the opening fragment which is on the first page of the ‘Outer Dark beginning’ PDF. Consider how this, the very first page of the novel, immediately establishes the southern gothic tone. On the next slide you can see an extract from a paragraph analysing this section with a link made to a southern gothic film, much in the same way as a link made to another literary text.

The opening fragment immediately establishes a foreboding, gothic tone, introducing the reader to three nameless strangers riding through a sinister landscape. By focusing on their ‘shadows’ first and describing them as ‘strung out in silhouette against the sun’ , Mc. Carthy heightens their ethereal, supernatural quality, heightening the gothic mood. This idea is reinforced by the writer’s trademark polysyndetic style which has the effect of slowing down the rhythm of the prose, enhancing the sense of mystery in this opening section and creating a sense of otherness in the characters and the landscape they inhabit, an idea we have often seen employed by gothic writers. The opening is also stylistically separated from the rest of the narrative and italicised, emphasising its otherness even further. The mysterious stranger is a common archetype of the southern gothic genre; that these spectral beings are introduced at the very beginning of the novel immediately highlights their significance and they literally and figuratively haunt the rest of the narrative. There are echoes here of Robert Mitchum’s malevolent preacher in Charles Laughon’s iconic The Night of Hunter (1955), who ruthlessly and relentlessly stalks two children in the film. This is accentuated through the expressionistic cinematography and disturbing music used to accompany the preacher’s hunt.

Read through the beginning and ending of Outer Dark carefully, looking up any words you don’t understand. Write some detailed notes for each section, including quotations (which can be copied and pasted as required), to show the story exemplifies the Southern Gothic style. Consider links to the classic and fin de siècle gothic fiction we have studied. Also consider links to southern gothic film/television Pick a short section and write a paragraph analysing how the section exemplifies the genre. Include a link to gothic fiction and film/television.

Wider reading Read the two short stories ‘Sweetness’ and ‘The Asset’. Do some research into the writers. Write some notes on how these exemplify some of the southern gothic features we have been exploring.