Southern Gothic February 2021 Southern Gothic a genre

Southern Gothic February 2021

Southern Gothic - a genre that became popular in American literature after the civil war. Characteristics include: • • • Grotesque characters Dark humour and the macabre A sense of alienation. Irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses The physical, moral and psychological decay of the South The inability of the South to make progress • Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations and brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. • Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809– 1849) became the first writer to fully explore the potential of the Southern Gothic. Many of Poe’s best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic: the decaying house (and the family within); men and women driven half-mad by unexplained anxieties; and transgressive racial and sexual subjects involving identity, incest, and necrophilia. It is hard to overestimate the influence of Poe and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Featuring a decrepit mansion, characters sick in body and mind, and a live burial in a cellar vault, the story is saturated by an ‘insufferable gloom, ’ an overall mood that led William Moss to declare that ‘on the ruins of the house of Usher, Poe lays the foundation of a Southern Gothic. ’

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Despite Poe’s status as a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897– 1962) is widely considered the most important and influential writer working in the vein of the Southern Gothic. His experimental novel As I Lay Dying (1930) is all about a poor family trying to get their dead mother’s body, in its coffin, back to her home town to be buried. It certainly has elements of Gothic grotesque: at one point the coffin is almost swept away when the family have to get it across a river. The often anthologised “A Rose for Emily” (1930) is perhaps the clearest example of Faulkner’s southern Gothicism.

Read through the story 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 the work of Poe.

The generation of southern writers after Faulkner continued the exploration of the clashes between Old and New South. Writers like Tennessee Williams (1911– 1983), Carson Mc. Cullers (1917– 1967), and Flannery O’Connor (1925– 1964) drew on Gothic elements. O’Connor’s work is particularly steeped in the grotesque, a subgenre of the Gothic. Wider reading Use the following links to read two of Flannery O’Connor’s most anthologised stories: • http: //www. mrdoige. com/documents/oconnor_a. Good. Man. Is. Har d. To. Find. pdf • https: //repositorio. ufsc. br/bitstream/handle/123456789/163600 /Good%20 Country%20 People%20%20 Flannery%20 O'Connor. pdf? sequence=1&is. Allowed=y