1. Southern Gothic Tradition

2. Traditional Gothic

3. What Does “Gothic” Mean?

4. Setting A general mood of decay
Settings that are grandiose, if gloomy or bleak
Dark, mysterious castles chock full of secret passageways (or rooms!) and supernatural phenomena are common elements used to thrill the reader.

5. Characters Cast of off-kilter characters Broken bodies, minds or souls
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
Freakishness
In most Gothic stories, there is an important character who is set apart from the world by in a negative way by a disability or an odd, and often negative way of seeing the world.
Outsiders
Gothic 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.”

6. Themes/Characteristics
Imprisonment
This is often both literal and figurative.
Many Gothic tales include an incident where a character is sent to jail or locked up.
There are also Gothic characters that live in fate's prison.
Loves that are destructively passionate
Violence
Racial, social and class difference often create underlying tension in Gothic novels that threatens, and usually does, erupt in violent ways
Action that is dramatic and generally violent or otherwise disturbing

7. Southern Gothic Tradition

8. Setting Geographically limited Emphasis of history
Setting and atmosphere evoke vivid emotional response
Setting symbolically symbols the end of an era
Utilized the decaying South
Analogy between medieval settings and southern settings
Came about after the Civil War
Struggle between Old and New South
Southern Gothic settings feel “Southern”
Old, run-down towns; porches with rocking chairs, etc.

9. characters Victim is helpless against his torturer
Torturer has immense power, sometimes supernatural
Victim is often trapped by impenetrable walls—physical or psychological
Issues of race, alienation, and otherness are central to Southern Gothic
Freakishness: character is set aside by disability or viewpoint of the world
Uses a spin on gothic archetypes
Archetypes become American Southerners
Monster becomes an uneducated drunk
Damsel in distress becomes a reclusive spinster
Heroic knight becomes white-suit lawyer
Use of the grotesque
Character’s negative qualities allows author to examine unsavory aspects of society; creates sympathy (bigots, self-centered, egotistical)
Something in the town, house, or farm is bizarre and often falling apart

10. Themes/Characteristics
Atmosphere of mystery, darkness, oppressiveness
Melodramatically violent and psychologically abnormal
Tragedy and repressed behaviors come to the forefront
Explore the psychology of human existence
Exploration of subconscious through dreams
Good versus evil in characters
Personal and community experience
Broken bodies and broken souls
Problems created by social norm
Questions establishment’s ethics and justification
Morality is in question; what is the innocent’s place in the world?
Often asked to be the redeemer
Purity of heart rarely overpowers desperation
Violence
often the result of racial or social tension
Walls heightens the sense of hopeless isolation; the classic gothic image is a person trapped in a castle tower
Atmosphere symbolizes death closing in

11. Themes/Characteristics
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

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

13. Main Writers William faulkner Truman capote Harper lee
Carson mcCullers
Flannery o’connor
Eudora Welty
Cormac McCarthy
Tennessee Williams
William Gay

14. Bible Way