Southern Gothic
Gothic in America
In the early 19th century, Gothic was established in the United States by Charles Brockden Brown in his novel Wieland (1798). American Gothic began to take shape, with Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and its treatment of folktales, superstition, and a headless ghost. Like many early Gothic works, Irving builds the terror of a seemingly supernatural encounter very skillfully, and then offers an alternative rational explanation. Edgar Allen Poe brought Gothic sensibilities into American literature with numerous short stories themed around death, terror, madness, and decay. His most classic Gothic work is “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1830), which addresses the literal and metaphorical dissolution of a family and its ancestral home. Poe also contributed to the rise of Southern Gothic themes. Short stories by Nathanial Hawthorne, such as “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832) and “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) contain Gothic elements in conjunction with themes of Puritan repression, sin, and guilt.
American Gothic themes included tensions and issues unique to the American experience. These included the strong presence of Puritanism with its ever-watchful eye for sin, or nonconformity that could be punished as sin, and the expansion of the frontier through the homelands of Indigenous peoples. Isolation and folktales also played a part in the emerging American Gothic. New England and the western frontier were the natural settings for many of these works, but a powerful set of new voices emanated from the American South, a region that many scholars have identified as having the ideal elements and setting for Gothic.
Southern Gothic Context
American Gothic focused on the northeastern part of the new nation and its fears, tensions, and contradictions. Southern Gothic developed a different set of characteristics because of its landscape and lifestyle, which led to the South being seen as less civilized than the northeast. The climate is unlike that of New England and England, and host to different flora, fauna, and diseases. The South also remained largely agrarian in comparison with the more industrialized North, and had its own unique legends and mythologies.
But the greatest difference and strongest source of repression and evil came from the legacy of chattel slavery in the South. The misery and brutality of slavery posed a enormous contrast to the bucolic natural beauty and relaxed lifestyle of the upper class. Plantations managed to embody refined ease and gracious living while imprisoning families and forcing them into hard labor with no recompense other than basic survival. A powerful veneer of strict manners and custom overlay a sickening deprivation of fundamental human rights.
This foundational paradox was the perfect breeding ground for a special subset of Gothic that made use of it through themes such as the grotesque, decay, and brooding violence just below the surface of delicate manners. The Gothic elements of family secrets, a corrupt ruling class, and depravity took root effortlessly in a culture where enslaved women were raped, and their children raised close by but a world apart from the master’s white children.
Southern Gothic Characteristics
Given this foundation, it is not surprising that Southern Gothic evolved to have particular elements that relate to a distressed, conflictive, and repressive atmosphere. The characters in these works often show mental instability or addiction; the trope of drunken violent patriarchs and their wives who drank behind closed doors appeared in numerous works. Southern Gothic characters may have physical defects such as missing limbs or scars or badly-healed wounds that mirror the ills of their culture. They may be “innocents,” i.e. mentally impaired, aloof from ordinary life but serving to reveal the nature of people around them. The “outsider” character can also be used to highlight the insularity and isolation of people in Southern Gothic stories.
Settings in Southern Gothic serve the same purpose as in other types of Gothic, but the plantation house or a wealthy landowner’s home takes the place of the manor house or castle. As befits an agrarian culture, isolated cabins and farmhouses create a sense of being apart from the rest of society, little worlds with their own strange rules. Misty swamps and dark woods are as menacing in the American South as windswept moors and craggy coastlines are in England.
Southern Gothic Authors
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was considered the most renowned Southern Gothic author of the 20th century. He created a fictional county in which Southern aristocracy, poor white families, black descendants of enslaved people, and Native Americans all struggled with the legacies of the Civil War on their economy and social structure. His characters reflect the fractured postbellum reality as they struggle to stay alive and sane in a culture where codes and conventions no longer support or sustain them.
Flannery O’Connor’s short stories employ a distant, realistic tone to depict the lives of characters who seem lost in a repressed world of their own, or trying futilely to escape it. Some are casually, explosively violent, and others have physical deformities, a characteristic of a subset of Southern Gothic known as Southern Grotesque, in which characters’ physical flaws mirror their moral defects or those of the culture. O’Connor characterized her own work as both violent and comic in its efforts to describe the discrepancies and contradictions of life in the South, particularly religious fundamentalism.
Nobel winning author Toni Morrison captured the essence of Southern Gothic in her novel Beloved (1987), based on the true experience of a woman who escaped slavery with her family but for whom the price of freedom is destructive. She is haunted by the past despite reaching the North and freedom. The story is told in flashbacks as the protagonist Sethe is caught between two worlds and visited by the ghost of her murdered daughter.
Contemporary Southern Gothic is embodied in the works of Cormac McCarthy, who is sometimes characterized among the “Rough South” writers because of the high level of violence that leaves little to the imagination and calmly presents humanity reduced to its lowest state of existence. McCarthy addresses contemporary anxieties about society and its sustainability in works such as The Road (2006), a Pulitzer Prize winner that paints a violent, desolate picture of a post-apocalyptic South.
~ K. R. Bailey, 2021
References
Bjerre, T. Æ. (2017). Southern Gothic Literature. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.304
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2015). Gothic novel. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Gothic-novel