• Find the folder with your name on it and sit
down with your partner.
DO NOT OPEN YOUR
FOLDER!
Southern Gothic
in American Literature
Goals
• Analyze images to identify key characteristics of
the Southern Gothic Fiction genre
• Review or learn Key terms: imagery, genre, tone,
mood, archetype
• Explore regional cultural influences on artistic and
literary movements
• Anticipate themes, images and other
characteristics of TKAM
Imagery in Art and Literature
• visually descriptive or figurative language,
especially in a literary work that can
function as a way to better imagine the
world of the image or piece of literature.
• Imagery draws on the five senses, namely
the details of taste, touch, sight, smell,
and sound.
Mood
• In literature, mood is a literary element that
evokes certain feelings or vibes in readers
through words and descriptions.
• Usually, mood is referred to as
the atmosphere of a literary piece, as it
creates an emotional situation that
surrounds the readers
Theme
Life lesson, meaning, moral, or message about life
or human nature that is communicated by a
literary work.
– a main idea or an underlying meaning of a literary
work that may be stated directly or indirectly.
In other words…
Theme is what the story teaches readers.
Activity Directions: Step 1
• Inside each folder are three items.
1. Image
2. Gothic Image Analysis Sheet
3. A note-taking guide
• With your assigned partner, take 5
minutes to analyze the image and answer
the corresponding questions on the Gothic
Analysis Sheet.
• When finished, wait quietly for your
classmates to finish.
Activity Directions: Step 2
• Find your assigned small group.
• Share your image and analysis with new
members.
• Give feedback on new team member’s
image. Do you see/feel the same things
they did when you look at the image?
What is Gothic?
• Origin: German “goths”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/29/403677/-History-for-Kossacks-When-Mercenary-Armies-Go-Crazy
During the renaissance the term was used
as a synonym to describe Northern
European art as “barbaric”
• Abbey Church of St
Denis, France
•
Compare the Architecture
Gothic architecture would become
associated with the melancholy and the
grotesque.
How does this apply to literature?
• 1700-1800’s
• Writers published novels and poems which
celebrated the gloomy atmosphere of
medieval ruins and churchyards
• Europe
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
• Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909)
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
• American Literature
• Many works by Edgar Allen Poe “The Raven”( )
• Nathanial Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (
Themes Motifs, and Characteristics
• Classic Gothic stories included themes of
decay, death, and madness
• Many of the stories took place in Medieval
settings employing the use of Castles,
misty/murky, dark environments.
• Other characteristics include the
appearance of ghosts, mysterious
circumstances, and secrets
How do the following pictures
represent Gothic style?
What is Southern Gothic Literature?
Is a Sub-genre of the Gothic style and
unique to American literature
• relies on supernatural, ironic or unusual
events to guide the plot
– to explore social issues and reveal the
cultural character of the American South.
Background
• Takes classic Gothic archetypes, such as the
monster or the heroic knight, and turns them into
American Southerners
Who might fit those roles in TKAM?
1.Take two minutes to talk with your partner about
which characters in TKAM fit those roles.
2.Speculate: What are some other ways TKAM fits
Gothic characteristics?
Archetype
• a typical character, an action or a
situation that seems to represent such
universal patterns of human nature.
• Most notable feature is the “grotesque”
– a character whose negative
qualities allow the author to
highlight unpleasant aspects
in Southern culture.
– Something in the town, the
house, the farm is bizarre
and often falling apart
Defining Features
1. Cast of off-kilter characters
2. Brokenness: bodies, minds or souls
•
Used to question morality and ethical justification of
established social patterns
3. Innocence: the “Innocent” is a common
character, who may or may not be “broken,” but
who often acts as a redeemer for others
Other Specific Features of
Southern Gothic
4. Freakishness
5. Outsider
6. Imprisonment
7. Violence
8. Sense of Place
Freakishness
• In most southern gothic stories, there is an important character who is
set apart from the world in a negative way by a disability or an odd,
and often negative way of seeing the world.
Outsider
• Southern novels are filled with characters who are set a part from
the established cultural pattern, but who end up being heroes
because their difference allows them to see new ways of doing
things that ultimately help to bring people out of the “dark.”
Imprisonment
• This is often both literal and figurative.
– Many southern gothic tales include an incident where a character is sent
to jail or locked up.
– Mental imprisonment
– There are also Southern gothic characters that live in fate's prison.
Violence
• Racial, social and class difference often create underlying tension in
Southern gothic novels that threatens, and usually does, erupt in
violent ways.
Sense of Place
• You can’t read a Southern Gothic novel without understanding what a
Southern town “feels” like:
– old small towns
• Houses have front porches with rocking chairs
• Old downtown with stately but worn-down buildings
Goals
• Analyze images to identify key characteristics of
the Southern Gothic Fiction genre
• Review or learn Key terms: imagery, genre,
tone, mood, archetype
• Explore regional cultural influences on artistic
and literary movements
• Anticipate themes, images and other
characteristics of TKAM
Exit Ticket
• Now that we have discussed southern
gothic literature…
– use your knowledge and notes to
– answer the two questions on your exit ticket.
– Turn in your exit ticket when you are finished
and begin your homework: TKAM CH 13-14
What is it?
• Geographically limited
• Utilized the decaying South
– Analogy between medieval settings and southern settings
– Came about after the Civil War
– Struggle between Old and New South
• Tragedy and repressed behaviors come to the forefront
• Explore the psychology of human existence
Characteristics
• Exploration of subconscious through dreams
• Good versus evil in characters
• Setting and atmosphere evoke vivid emotional
response
– Setting symbolically symbols the end of an era
• Personal and community experience
• Emphasis of history
Explores
• Relationships between races and genders
– Treatment of blacks and women
– Love that is not returned
• The corruption and decay of the south
– Dislocation and decadence of the South
• Distorted religious views
• Clash between those with power and those without
• Isolation of individual
Explores
• Humans’ powerlessness in an indifferent
universe
• Moral decay of community
• Burden of history
• Horrors of human’s treatment of each other
Southern Gothic Writers
Flannery O’Connor
“Good Country
People” and “A Good
Man is Hard to Find”
Truman Capote
William Faulkner
“A Rose for Emily”
and As I Lay Dying
• In the 20th century, the idea of Gothic
literature developed with the age. William
Faulkner turned the dark castle settings
into decaying southern plantations and
the ghosts became the death of honor
and nobility of tradition and gentility.
Flannery O’Connor saw evil in modernism.
She depicted places and people who had
lost morals, values, and religion.
The End
Credits
•
“Southern Gothic” painting available @
http://www.internationaldigitalart.com/IDAA/2005IDAAGallery/pages/029_southern_gothic.html
•
To Kill a Mockingbird Pictures available @
http://www.foothilltech.org/rgeib/english/tkm/culminatingproject/pictures/
•
Genre information available @
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic
– http://www2.oprah.com/obc_classic/featbook/thlh/gothic/thlh_gothic_main.jhtml
– http://www2.oprah.com/obc_classic/featbook/thlh/gothic/thlh_gothic_features.jhtml