SOUTHERN GOTHIC
English 1302
SOUTHERN GOTHIC
 Southern Gothic Literature is a sub-genre of gothic literature (think
Poe and Shelley) unique to American literature that takes place exclusively
in the American South.
 Focuses on character, social, and moral shortcomings in the American
south; it reached its height between 1940-1960s.
 Notable Southern Gothic authors include: Flannery O’Conner,
Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, and Carson
McCullers.
ORIGIN
 Elements of a gothic treatment of the South were apparent in the
19th century, ante- and post-bellum, in the grotesques of Henry Clay
Lewis and the de-idealised visions of Mark Twain. The genre came
together, however, only in the 20th century when Dark Romanticism,
Southern humour, and the new Naturalism merged into a new and
powerful form of social critique.
Images of the Great
Depression inspired
Photographer Walker Evans
to claim: "I can understand
why Southerners are haunted
by their own landscape."
Dorothea Lange's “Migrant Mother” depicts
destitute pea pickers in California, centering on
Florence Owens Thompson, age 32, a mother
of seven children, in Nipomo, California, March
1936.
CHARACTERISTICS
 deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may or may
not dabble in hoodoo
 ambivalent gender roles and decayed or derelict settings
 grotesque situations
 sinister events relating to or coming from poverty, alienation,
racism, crime, and violence.
CHARACTERISTICS
 drafty castles laced with cobwebs
 secret passages
 frightened, wide-eyed heroines whose innocence does not go
untouched
 Comments on society’s negatives or weaknesses to point out truths
of America’s southern culture
 Often disturbing but realistic
THE GROTESQUE
 A character’s negatives/undesirable characteristics allow the author
to show/comment on unpleasant aspects of southern culture—racial
bigotry, crushing poverty, violence, moral corruption or ambiguity.
 Something physical in the setting is unusual and often broken
 Carson McCullers observes that Southern writers frequently
juxtapose “the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the
trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of man with
a materialistic detail.”
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such
memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in
his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And
like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol
and drugs. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two
Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was
derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal
Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting,
deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of
decency.” He was Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest
playwrights in American history. (PBS.com)
(March 26, 1911-February 25, 1983)

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969)

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1969)

Summer and Smoke (1948)

Small Craft Warnings (1972)

The Rose Tattoo (1951)

The Two-Character Play (1973)

Camino Real (1953)

Out Cry (1973, rewriting of The Two-Character Play)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)

Orpheus Descending (1957)

This Is (An Entertainment) (1976)

Suddenly, Last Summer (1958)

Vieux Carré (1977)

Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979)

Period of Adjustment (1960)

Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)

The Night of the Iguana (1961)

The Notebook of Trigorin (1980)

The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1962, rewriting of 
Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981)
Summer and Smoke)

A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)

In Masks Outrageous and Austere (1983)

The Mutilated (1965)

The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968, aka Kingdom of
Earth)
A STREETCAR NAMED
DESIRE
 Blanche DuBois A sensitive,
delicate moth-like member of the
fading Southern aristocracy who
visits her sister in New Orleans.
Mystery surrounds her throughout
much of the play.
 Stella Kowalski Blanche's
sister who is married and lives
in the French Quarter of New
Orleans. She has forgotten her
genteel upbringing in order to
enjoy a more common
marriage.
 Stanley Kowalski A
rather common working man
whose main drive in life is
sexual and who faces
everything with brutal
realism. He is a true man of
his time.
 Harold Mitchell (Mitch)
Stanley's friend who went
through the war with him.
Mitch is unmarried and has a
dying mother for whom he
feels a great devotion.
 Eunice and Steve Hubell The
neighbors who quarrel and who own
the apartment in which Stella and
Stanley live. They live on the second
level, while the Kowalskis live on the
ground floor.
ELEMENTS TO NOTICE
 Music
 Colors, light (present or absent= truth)
 Names of people, places, things
 Gestures
 Culture clashes
 Flashbacks
WILLIAM FAULKNER
 September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962
 American writer and Nobel Prize laureate
from Oxford, Mississippi.
 Faulkner is one of the most important writers in
both American literature generally and Southern
literature specifically. Two of his works, A Fable (1954)
and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction.[2]
 The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930),
Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
FAULKNER
Southern Gothic often hinged on the belief that daily life and the refined
surface of the social order were fragile and illusory, disguising disturbing
realities or twisted psyches. Faulkner, with his dense and multilayered
prose, traditionally stands outside this group of practitioners. However,
“A Rose for Emily” reveals the influence that Southern Gothic had on his
writing: this particular story has a moody and forbidding atmosphere; a
crumbling old mansion; and decay, putrefaction, and grotesquerie.
“A ROSE FOR EMILY”
 First published in the April 30, 1930 issue of Forum.
 The story takes place in Faulkner's fictional city, Jefferson,
Mississippi, in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha County.
 It was Faulkner's first short story published in a national magazine.
 Resistance to change: the most recurrent theme in the story.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
SPEAKS ON “ROSE" IN 1955:
I feel sorry for Emily's tragedy; her tragedy was, she was an only child, an only daughter. At first when she could have found a
husband, could have had a life of her own, there was probably some one, her father, who said, "No, you must stay here and
take care of me." And then when she found a man, she had had no experience in people. She picked out probably a bad one,
who was about to desert her. And when she lost him she could see that for her that was the end of life, there was nothing left,
except to grow older, alone, solitary; she had had something and she wanted to keep it, which is bad—to go to any length to
keep something; but I pity Emily. I don't know whether I would have liked her or not, I might have been afraid of her. Not of
her, but of anyone who had suffered, had been warped, as her life had been probably warped by a selfish father . . .
[The title] was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and
nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute . . . to a woman you would hand a rose.
From Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert Jelliffe (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Ltd., 1956), pp. 70–71.
BARN BURNING
 Written at the ebb of the 1930s, a decade of social, economic, and
cultural tumult—the decade of the Great Depression
 Set in the post-Civil War South, Faulkner creates a family that is at
once self-centered and cunning. This is a story of one man's
conviction regarding the righteousness of his own actions and the
life-altering decisions this creates for his youngest son's (Sarty) sense
of decency as it conflicts with his sense of loyalty to the family.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
 March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964
 She was a Southern writer who often
wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied
heavily on regional settings and grotesque
characters. O'Connor's writing also
reflected her own Roman Catholic faith,
and frequently examined questions
of morality and ethics.
“A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO
FIND”
 The short story was first published in 1953 in the
anthology Modern Writing I
 Irony, religious overtones, grotesque… must read to find out
more!
“GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE”
 In "Good Country People," O'Connor uses irony and a finely
controlled comic sense to reveal the world as it is - without vision or
knowledge.
 As in O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," a stranger
- deceptively polite but ultimately evil - intrudes upon a family with
destructive consequences. In Hulga's case, despite her advanced
academic degrees, she is unable to recognize evil until it is too late.