Southern Gothic
in American Literature
What is Gothic?
• Originally named for
the German “goths.”
• Renaissance usage
• Architecture, focus on
the medieval, death,
decay
• 17th-18th century novel
Visual Representations of the Gothic
The Gothic Novel
• Themes/motifs: Castles,
darkness, madness, secrets,
ghosts, mystery, haunted
houses
• The Characters (stock
characters): tyrants, villains,
bandits, maniacs, Byronic
heroes, persecuted maidens,
femmes fatales, madwomen,
magicians, vampires,
werewolves, monsters,
demons, revenants, ghosts,
perambulating skeletons, the
Wandering Jew and the Devil
himself.
Examples of the Gothic Novel
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the
Opera
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• Many works by Edgar Allen Poe *
• Nathanial Hawthorne
• Poe and Hawthorne as pioneers in the
American Gothic Tradition
Southern Gothic Literature
Sub-genre of the Gothic style
Unique to American literature
relies on supernatural, ironic
or unusual events to guide the
plot
uses these 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
– a spiteful, reclusive spinster; an uneducated drunk
– a quiet, wise lawyer
• 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 Feature
• Cast of off-kilter characters
– Broken bodies, minds or souls
• Used to symbolize problems created by the established pattern
• Used to question established pattern’s morality and ethical
justification
– 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
• Freakishness
• Outsider
• Imprisonment
• Violence
• 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.
– 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
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
Who was William Faulkner?
• B. 1897 in Mississippi, D. 1962
• American novelist whose work is set in his native
Mississippi; all of his novels inhabit a fictional place
he named Yoknapatawpha County.
• Faulkner won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in
1949.
• With Mark Twain and Truman Capote, Faulkner is
considered one of the most important writers of the
American South…some say of the twentieth century!
• “A Rose for Emily” – first published short story
(1930)
Faulkner’s Roots
• He lived in Oxford, Mississippi, most of
his life, and renamed this town
Jefferson in his fictional works.
• His great-great-grandfather was an
important man in northern Mississippi &
served as a colonel in the Confederate
Army.
• This man served as a model for the
famous (or infamous) Colonel Sartoris in
Faulkner’s novels.
Faulkner’s Roots…
• “Mississippi marked his
sense of humor, his sense
of the tragic position of
blacks and whites, his keen
characterization of usual
Southern characters and
his timeless themes, one
of them being that
fiercely intelligent people
dwelled behind the
façades of good old boys
and simpletons”
• 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.
A Rose for Emily
• Macabre
– Gruesome and
horrifying
– Ghastly and horrible
– Of, or pertaining to,
death
• Black/dark humor=
– Humorous effects
resulting largely from
grotesque, morbid, or
macabre situations
dealing with a horrifying
and disoriented world
– Aims to shock and
disorient readers, making
them laugh in the face of
anxiety, suffering or
death
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