1. Southern Gothic

2. What is Gothic? Originally named for the German “goths.”
Renaissance usage
Architecture, focus on the medieval, death, decay
17th-18th century novel

3. Visual Representations of the Gothic

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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

10. Other Specific Features of Southern Gothic
Freakishness
Outsider
Imprisonment
Violence
Sense of Place

11. 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.

12. 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.”

13. 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.

14. Violence
Racial, social and class difference often create underlying tension in Southern gothic novels that threatens, and usually does, erupt in violent ways.

15. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. Explores Humans’ powerlessness in an indifferent universe
Moral decay of community
Burden of history
Horrors of human’s treatment of each other

21. 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

23. Who was William Faulkner?
B 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)

24. 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.

25. 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”

26. 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.

27. A Rose for Emily Macabre Black/dark humor= 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

28. The End

29. Credits
“Southern Gothic” painting
To Kill a Mockingbird Pictures
Genre information