Disturbing signs: Southern gothic fiction from Poe to McCullers.

Author: Joseph Grant Bain

This dissertation examines the many contending voices of southern history and the ways in which these voices converge in the Southern Gothic mode of writing. By examining Edgar Allan Poe, Charles W. Chesnutt, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Carson McCullers, I explore how the Gothic mode discusses the surplus of fears and desires bound in racial, class, and regional discourse. My argument focuses on the ways in which these authors either failed or refused to resolve the tension their works create, thus compelling the reader to accommodate and begin to understand the legion of compounded and fracturing perspectives giving rise to social discord. Most crucially, this dissertation explores the potential of the Gothic mode for demonstrating reconstructions of social meaning.

This project draws on Marxist, psychoanalytic, and historicist theory to explore the conflicts foregrounded in key works of Southern Gothic writing. Psychoanalytic theory provides the vocabulary for discussing the inarticulable surplus of Southern Gothic narratives. In Lacanian terms, the Southern Gothic embodies the traumatic “real-kernels” created by anxieties surrounding class, race, and sex within an unstable narrative framework. Marxist critiques of ideology, particularly those of Louis Althusser and Slavoj Zizek, reveal how these narrative instabilities minor the ideological instabilities of modern society. Applying Marx’s crisis theory to moments of ideological slippage demonstrates die potential for reconstructing ideological meaning toward a better future.

Introduction In her 1935 essay “Heroes and Monsters,” published in the Saturday Review of Literature. Ellen Glasgow characterized contemporary southern writers as Gothic writers, whose fascination with ruin, decay, and violence, however imaginatively rendered, would lead southern literature down an artistically and socially detrimental path. While her warning went largely unheeded, her address contributed the term “Southern Gothic” to the national literary vocabulary. Compared to the broader American Gothic, Southern Gothic narratives have received significant yet contradictory critical attention, stemming largely from the nebulous use of the term “Southern Gothic,” While mounting a particularly effective argument for the importance of gothic elements in Eudora Welty’s fiction, for example. Susan V. Donaldson simultaneously contributes to this growing uncertainty. At times, she seems to use this phrase to describe any traces of the Gothic tradition in Southern literature; elsewhere, she implies that the Southern Gothic is a distinct tradition in and of itself, rather than merely a collection of tropes within Southern writing. Although she addresses the problem in her introduction, claiming “Southern Gothic’ had become something very like a synonym - or a cliche - for modem Southern literature”, she fails to investigate the vagueness of the term, or to suggest a more appropriate usage, Donaldson is not alone. Elizabeth M. Kerr’s William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain (1979) and Ruth D. Weston’s Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty (1994) treat their subjects as if Southern Gothic had a concrete, agreed upon meaning.

The problem mainly stems from treating individual Southern authors’ use of the Gothic rather than examining the Southern Gothic as a mode in its own right. In tackling such a project, I hope to contribute the beginning of a more comprehensive dialogue over the Southern Gothic, which most seem to agree is characteristic of modem Southern literature, even if they cannot agree on what it means. A definition of the Southern Gothic is somewhat elusive, but the scattered and disparate critical musings can be synthesized into a more coherent discussion. Ellen Glasgow’s address to the Friends of the Princeton Library provides a piecemeal characterization of the Southern Gothic as a mode of writing “dominated by sophisticated barbarism and the sentimental cult of corruption” that presents a world of “moral and physical disintegration.” Her largest objection seems to be that, in dwelling on the horrid and decaying aspects of life. Southern Gothic writers present a world with no hope and. no future: “the literature that crawls too long in the mire”, she claims, “will lose the power of standing erect. On the far side of deterioration lies the death of a culture.”

Her sustained metaphor is one of evolution; after alluding to “the power of standing erect,” she invokes the first fish that crawled upon land as testament to “the impulse toward something better.” What Glasgow misses, and what i hope to demonstrate in this dissertation, is that Southern Gothic writers can and do strive “toward something better, or at least different.” Glasgow’s core criticism, is that Southern Gothic writers present an unrealistic world, in which there is no life and renewal to balance the decay and degradation such writers emphasize. In Glasgow’s eyes, these writers “imagine they are realists because they have tasted a stew of spoilt meat. But it takes more than spoilt meat to make realism”. Indeed, realism and its relation to literature seem to be at the heart of discussion concerning the Southern Gothic. William L. Andrews, writing of Charles W.Chesnutt, suggests that Chesnutt achieves “greater thematic seriousness”  once he leaves behind the “slightly gothic overtones’* of his conjure tales. Joseph R. Millichap characterizes realism and. Gothicism as a "critical dichotomy” creating “an unresolved problem in the analysis of [Carson Meddlers’] works,” For these writers and scholars, the Gothic and the realistic cannot coexist.

Many other artists and scholars characterize the Southern Gothic as a mode almost of hyper-realism. Edward Stone describes what he calls the progress of the Southern Gothic as one “everywhere of time and place”. His insistence on historical and geographical specificity in modem Southern Gothic (his key text is Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”) suggests an underlying emphasis on the realistic nature of modem Southern Gothic narratives. Lewis P. Simpson characterizes Southern Gothic writing as concerned above all with self and identity, with the reality “of the self as a spiritual entity in the universe.” This sort of realism is somewhat elusive because it remains “a mystery beyond scientific analysis.” For Carson McCullers, this “peculiar and intense realism” is the very backbone of Southern Gothic writing. Likewise, Flannery O'Connor argues “some write about rot because they see it and recognize it for what it is.”

The simple assurance of her phrase “what it is” belies the realist bent she sees at the heart of Southern Gothic writing. Drawing on these perspectives, this dissertation will define the Southern Gothic as a mode of writing that intensely investigates ways of knowing and presenting reality and ultimately posits any pronouncement of reality as only a form of realism. That is. Southern Gothic writers understand that any human conception of reality is constructed of a system of signs and representations, some inherited and some acquired, that 3 constitutes narratives about what is real. That Southern Gothic writers draw upon the devices of Gothicism to create their “peculiar and intense realism” is only to suggest the emotional and experiential truth that escapes traditionally realist narratives. The psychological horror elicited by Gothic devices then reflects the psychic turbulence generated by attempts to suborn various perceptions of reality to one dominant narrative. These writers combine “an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness of modem experience” (Williams) with “a realism based on social scientism” (Simpson viii) to present an ever-shifting, unstable, yet no less “real” reality. It is useful at this point to borrow some vocabulary from earlier work on constructing reality. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann intensely investigate the way individuals and societies create their “everyday reality.”

We can enter the worlds presented by various aesthetic or theoretical experiences, but we always return to the “real” world, the one formed by everyday language. These provinces are in the end “finite” because they are bounded by our departure from and return to “reality.” By opening up space of meaning, and blurring the boundaries between “finite provinces” and “reality.” Southern Gothic narratives cross into a Utopian dimension of artistic production. Although early Gothic fiction was scorned by eighteenth century arbiters of taste, it was immensely popular with an ever-growing readership. Similarly, despite Glasgow’s and other critics’ initial, distaste for Southern Gothic fiction, it enjoyed a relatively wide readership and greatly influenced modern American letters. Some of the appeal no doubt derives from the thrills and titillations inherent in the spooky atmosphere of Gothic writing, but by challenging accepted narratives and meaning, these narratives in a sense democratize the reading experience, encouraging the reader to draw his own conclusions rather than waiting for an author to point toward them.

The progenitors of the Southern Gothic draw noticeably upon the Gothic fiction of Europe and early America. Gothic literature is characterized by feelings of terror or horror evoked by the eruption of suppressed or forgotten societal narratives into the mainstream cultural consciousness. The seminal English Gothic works of the eighteenth century disrupted the Enlightenment narrative of Reason and progress by reminding readers of the lingering presence of unReason and 5 “barbaric” tendencies. These early Gothic writers set their works among the ruins of castles or monasteries—looming, archaic remainders of the “medieval’” incarnations of Church and Crown—and populated, these locales with ghosts, monsters, or other supernatural terrors, in order to remind their audiences that some experiences could not be explained by Reason, and that the unreasonable still existed within a supposedly well- ordered society.

The Southern Gothic mode differs from earlier American Gothic in its attitude toward realism. Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and even the first Southern Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Charles W. Chesnutt, always leave the reader a way to explain Gothic happenings in their texts. The spectral happenings in Brown’s Wieland are produced by a villainous ventriloquist, and perhaps Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown only dreamt his village’s Faustian meeting, while the spirit light imbuing Ahab’s harpoon in Moby Dick is most likely St. Elmo’s Fire. To return to Berger and Luckmann, these texts produce various “finite provinces of meaning”’ for the reader to inhabit. The tension of the Gothic arises from the intrusion of fantastic elements into an otherwise realistic world; for the reader, these tensions are contained within the finite province of the novel or tale.

The Gothic of Brown, Hawthorne, and Melville creates yet other finite provinces within the narratives. Within the finite province of “Young Goodman Brown” for example, Hawthorne creates the province of the black mass in. the woods, which is bounded from the everyday “reality” of Goodman Brown’s Puritan village. Although Hawthorne’s protagonist is unable fully to erect the ontological boundaries between his “everyday” village and the “finite” province of the black mass, the reader can do so simply by interpreting the events as a dream: Goodman Brown dreams his venture into the woods and the Satanic gathering he witnesses there, and then wakens the next morning back in the “real” world. The Gothic happenings of the tale are bounded within the finite province of the woods, which is further bounded in the finite province of the tale itself, thus insulating the reader somewhat from the estranging and destabilizing effects of the uncanny in the narrative.

In Poe and. even Chesnutt, however, this plausible deniability is more elusive. Poe’s narrators speak from such an intensely indrawn world, that although the reader can believe all supernatural events are only in the narrators’ minds, there is little recourse to strict “realism.” The tales present few strictly bounded “finite provinces” to insulate the reader. Likewise, readers of Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman can conclude, like Chesnutt’s John does, that Julius’ stories are simply imaginative folk yams spun for ulterior motives, that the distinction between John’s standard English and Julius’ Southern black patois constructs boundaries around the finite provinces of the tales. Nonetheless, these tales nonetheless resonate outside their frames, effecting John in ways of which he is not always consciously aware. By first erecting the boundaries of the frame narratives and then transgressing those boundaries, Chesnutt forces the reader to question how “finite” the tales’ provinces actually are. By the early twentieth century, however, Southern Gothic writers had embraced the horrifying and spectral elements of the Gothic mode as ways to express the day-to day experience of the Depression-era South. The modern South may not actually be haunted, they suggest, but it sure feels like it is.

In earlier American Gothic narratives, reality competes with the Gothic. In the modern Southern Gothic, reality feels Gothic. As the twentieth century progressed, the distinction between Southern Gothic and modern American Gothic began to blur. Of the six authors Irving Malin discusses in New American Gothic (1962) for example, three are Southern writers: Tuman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. The other three, James Purdy, John Hawkes, and J. D. Salinger, began their careers well after Faulkner and Wolfe, and amid the later generation that includes Capote, McCullers, and O'Connor. Leslie Fiedler similarly leaves a gap in his study between the late nineteenth century writers like Henry James and Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers. He resumes his discussion with Saul Bellow’s work a few pages later, and talks briefly about Truman Capote.

The unreality of the modem Southern experience surely stems in part from the series of crises gripping the United States in general and the American South specifically during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “Ligeia” (1838) and “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838) during the depression that began in 1837, and wrote all of his work in an America gripped with heightening tensions over the institution of slavery and struggling to achieve some form of national cultural identity. Charles W. Chesnutt began his career amidst the fallout of the 1898 Wilmington insurrection that replaced a bi-racial local government with a white-supremacist model, ushering in the Jim Crow era and halting Southern civil rights accomplishments for decades. Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner wrote their most powerful works surrounding the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Richard Wrright also began writing during the Depression, when the nation’s economic concerns were felt doubly by African-Americans; Wright’s experiences with the Communist Party heightened his experiences of crisis because of the intensified persecution of African- Americans with Communist ties. Finally, Carson McCullers, along with Wrolfe, Faulkner, and Wright, made her literary debut while the South was struggling to emerge from decades of poverty and the nation cast a weary eye toward the rise of Nazi Germany.

These writers worked in conditions of widespread anxiety, fear, and even paranoia, and the Gothic mode must have appealed to them in large part because of its ability to capture and express the instability of a culture in crisis. Furthermore, Southerners were less able to distance themselves from these various crises. Although the entire nation experienced rising racial tensions, the South became the focal point for these tensions because it clung to the institution of slavery. The horrendous poverty of the Great Depression was worst in the South, where the sharecropping system kept landowners in constant contact with their tenants, whose privations were on full display. Even the Nazi threat was particularly resonant in the South, because southerners saw so many parallels between their own racial attitudes and those of Hitler’s Germany/ While the entire nation struggled with these various conflicts, the South was most intensely affected. To paraphrase Leigh Anne Duck through Berger and Luckmann, the South became a “finite province” for many the nation’s crises. The Gothic works so well to evoke social crises and tensions because of the generic and narrative instability inherent in the mode. 

 All these critics point to the destabilizing narrative structure of the Gothic as a useful dialectical tool for understanding competing historical discourses, and such historical understanding is crucial to any sustained analysis of the Southern Gothic. This dissertation argues that the Southern Gothic is a mode of literature that uses conventional Gothic tropes—decaying edifices, seemingly supernatural occurrences, characters with demonic qualities or appearances, and a pervading sense of dread.—to express the compounded, often unconscious fears of a group of people uncertain of their place in history. Southern Gothic writing crystallized in the American South during the 1930s, when the South faced crippling economic and political crises leading to a desperate groping for identity. While the dominant social feeling looked toward the Old South as a model for identity, modern Southerners could not help but notice the failure of such outdated institutions to address their material and social problems. The various engines driving earlier Gothic narratives intertwined within the South to create a more fragmented yet still sustained Gothic mentality among many modem writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and later Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Truman Capote. These authors struggled to express the anxieties and fears surrounding Southern issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and regionalism and nationalism.

Like nineteenth century American Gothic writers, Southern Gothic writers contend heavily with racial discourse. The inner turmoil and structures of guilt plaguing nineteenth century Americans remained in the Jim Crow South, which found itself defending the defunct and “peculiar” institution of slavery even as it struggled to present itself as a region built by white hands and sustained by white blood. The Gothic strain of these narratives, however, forces the truth to the surface. Beneath the veneer of Southern gentility and the facade of whiteness lurked the truth of black slavery and of miscegenation, both genetic and cultural, upon which the South was truly built. Alongside the racial tensions and antagonisms of the early modem South runs the issue of class, intertwined with race in many crucial ways. Working class whites found themselves torn between competing discourses, but unable truly to take part in any of them. Although they largely ascribed to notions of racial superiority, they could not help but notice the poverty they shared with most African Americans, with whom they often competed for pitifully low-paying jobs.

The South’s working class population, of course, contained most of the region’s black population as well, but ingrained, divisive racial discourse eliminated even the possibility of shared class feeling and. consciousness. The twin issues of race and class are perhaps most vividly recognized in Richard Wright’s portrayal of the communist party in Black Boy (1945) or by the heartbreaking ultimate failure of community in Carson McCuIler’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). The violence, latent and manifest, within the working class conditions finds ready expression in these Gothic narratives. Ellen Glasgow’s list of Southern Gothic writers is composes solely of white authors, and indeed most criticism of the Southern Gothic has focused on white writers. Despite this, the Gothic thrust of Southern writing has drawn heavily from African-American culture and writing.

Charles Chesnutt’s conjurers, Zora Neale Hurston’s use of voodoo and Gothic Horror, and Richard Wright’s sustained, nightmarish expression of African-American life all feed the Southern Gothic tradition with narratives that explore longing for identity and stability similar to that felt by white writers. In the hands of theses black writers, however, new narratives emerge. Living in a supposedly new and free world that feels so much, like the old and enslaved one, Southern black, writers attempt to wrest an identity beyond the constraints of Jim Crow. Many of these writers were forced to leave the South in order to fully realize their potential, and as such are often claimed as writers of the Harlem Renaissance, or as African-American writers rather than Southern writers. Despite this, many black authors felt the pull of the South even in Northern climes, and much of their fiction serves to elide the supposed differences between regions, revealing a Gothicized black, experience pervading African- American experience. 

This was only a small part of a dissertation written about Southern Gothic by an Arkansas university student using factual evidence [ you can read the rest if you want to pay 5 dollars here. But I honestly think the preview was enough. ]. What should be learned about Southern Gothic from this post? A lot, hopefully. It isn’t just about slavery and racism, like so many ignorant people think – that is just a small piece of the pie. It’s also about the inner struggle with self while living in those times, reality, theology, religion, class, and a whole shitload of other stuff, some of it fictional like; witchcraft and the supernatural. It is depicted by the grotesque and decay because they provoke particular prominent feelings associated with southern gothic and southern gothic literature. It’s about being disgusted and disturbed by the darker parts of our history and utilizing different forms of art photography, art, music, and literature to remind us that America was not always so beautiful. In the year 2014, we don’t have much to look back on other than writings and remains, shells of plantation buildings and churches, farms, mills, and so much more, which is why we see so much of it in the genre. We have only what we can take photographs of and what we read about in libraries for inspiration. 

Southern Gothic is also anything driven from southern history, that we would not accept or practice in social society today. So just in case your wondering or don’t quite understand, I’ll put it into perspective for you. Issues like the controversy of same sex marriage and relationships, prejudice against homosexuals in the southern U.S and current christian politics etc, will eventually fall into the Southern Gothic genre 70 or 80 years from now. If you take this statement the wrong way you’re totally overlooking my point.

Also keep in mind, that Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of American Gothic, which ties into Americana. Hopefully this helps those of you who randomly stumble on the Southern Gothic tag, or are just curious as to what it is exactly.