Southern Gothic literature

Created by Devin Thomas

I. Summary

II. History

III. The "Grotesque" in Southern Gothic literature

IV. Southern Gothic Literature and Modernism

Southern Gothic is a style of writing unique to American literature, a subgenre of the Gothic fiction first popularized in England in the late eighteenth century. Like its predecessor, Southern Gothic literature relies upon lurid, macabre subject matter; however, in contrast, it uses this disturbing material not to create suspense or fear but to dissect social issues and illuminate the cultural climate of the American south (see Southern Agrarians). Like its predecessor, Souther Gothic fiction "at its best provides insight into the horrors institutionalized in societies and social conventions" ("Southern").

Key writers of Southern Gothic literature include William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty.

II. History

The term "Southern Gothic" was first used by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ellen Glasgow during a lecture at the University of Virgina in 1936 ("Faulkner"). Glasglow used the term depreciatively, attempting to describe what she perceived as "a new and disturbing trend in Southern fiction" ("Faulkner") amongst writers such as Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner.

As a movement, Southern Gothic grew out of the Reconstruction South. Critic and historian William Van O'Connor observes that the post-Civil War reconstruction of the South stripped the land of its resources and left in its wake a generation of economically disadvantaged and emotionally stunted individuals. Reasoning that "poverty breeds abnormality (and) in many cases, people were living with a (moral) code that was no longer applicable" (qtd. in Presley 37), Van O'Connor postulates that this form of fiction grew from a Southern populous that had been isolated and marginalized.

Thus, much Southern Gothic fiction eschews the stereotypical archetypes of antebellum Southern literature - the demure belle or chivalrous gentleman, for example - and chooses instead to dwell on deeply flawed characters or purposefully overstated figures of the absurd.

III. The "Grotesque" in Southern Gothic Literature

One of the key features of this literary subgenre is the grotesque, an element of the narrative that is "irregular, extravagant or fantastic in form" ("Grotesque"). A grotesque character may posesses an exaggerated personality trait or characteristic for the purpose of eliciting both empathy and disgust in the reader ("Grotesque"). In her fiction, Flannery O'Connor employed two types of grotesques: "physical grotesques" or "secular grotesques." Physical grotesques possess a deformed body in order to indicate some kind of spiritual deformity. Secular grotesques, on the other hand, are those who have for one reason or another rejected God's will and seek to destroy the soul in an attempt to save the body (Shinn 59). For

Conversely, some writers use the grotesque to reflect the absurdity of the South as they perceived it. Elements of the grotesque can be seen in the bizarre situations that populate William Faulkner's mock-epic As I Lay Dying: Vardaman drilling holes into his mother's face while she lays in her coffin elicits both compassion for a son who wishes to help his mother and a horrifying vision of a disfigured corpse; Anse's novel-ending marriage to another woman confirms the reader's fears about the selfish Bundren father while also pointing out the absurdity of the entire journey, as Anse hardly waits until his wife is buried to claim another. Even the very central push of the novel - the journey to Jefferson - is grotesque, as Faulkner conjures imagery of decaying flesh and an ever-growing flock of circling vultures.

Because this feature plays such a prominent role in the genre as a whole, many critics have referred to this literary movement as "Southern Grotesque" rather than "Southern Gothic."

IV. Southern Gothic Literature and Modernism

In exploring and expressing what critic Lewis A. Lawson describes as a "philosophy of the absurd," Southern Gothic literature shares with modernist fiction like "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, which points out the decline of modern society and the absurdity of modern life (qtd. in Presley 37).

In contrast, Southern Reniassance literature - which counts Southern Gothic literature as a major subgenre - defies the modernist convention of New Criticism (which focused its criticism on the text of a literary work rather than the historical or biographical context of the work). As many critics point out, Southern Renaissance literature serves as a pinnacle of Southern literary art, a "culmination of the region's literary and cultural history rather than some bizarre modernist deviation from it" (Simpson). Faulkner - arguably the most important writer of the Southern Gothic subgenre - acts as a bridge between these two divergent ideas: on one hand, he is a highly experimental writer who plays with conventions of narration and dialogue; on the other hand, his work cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the history and culture of that place and time.

WORKS CITED

"Faulkner and the Southern Gothic." University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. 23 April 2007. http://web.uccs.edu/history/courses/hum399faulkmor/faulknergoth.htm 

"Grotesque." The New York Public Library Literature Companion. Ed. Anne Skillion. New York: Free Press, 2001.

"Southern Gothic." The New York Public Library Literature Companion. Ed. Anne Skillion. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Presley, Delma Eugene. "The Moral Function of Distortion in Southern Grotesque." South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 2. (May, 1972), 37-46.

Shinn, Thelma. "Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace." Contemporary Literature, Vol. 9., No. 1. (1968): pp. 58-73

Simpson, Lewis P. "Introduction to the History of Southern Literature." The History of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisianna State University Press, 1985.

Quote beneath the Flannery O'Connor photograph above from:

O'Connor, Flannery. "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." 1960. http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html

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