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.