southern gothic in american literature. what is gothic? originally named for the german “goths.”...
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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 literaturerelies 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
William Faulkner
“A Rose for Emily” and As I Lay Dying
Flannery O’Connor
“Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Truman Capote
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
How does “A Rose for Emily” demonstrate characteristics of
Southern Gothic?
How does death affects society’s perceptions of
individuals?
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