Southern Gothic Fiction

Core Idea

Southern Gothic is a mode of American fiction, flourishing from about the 1930s to the 1960s, that uses Gothic elements in the setting of the American South. In place of haunted castles it has decaying houses, isolated towns and grotesque characters, and its horrors usually come from history and society rather than ghosts. William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty are its central writers. The mode uses the strange and the violent to expose the South's unresolved past: slavery, the Civil War, racial violence, poverty and religious extremity.

How It's Best Learned

Read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930) and track how the town's collective narrator controls what you learn, and when. Then read O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1953) and ask what the grandmother's final moment reveals. Compare both with a classic European Gothic tale and list which conventions changed in the move to the South.

Common Misconceptions

• Southern Gothic stories rely on ghosts and supernatural events. (Most are realistic in their events. The horror comes from obsession, cruelty, isolation and a past that will not stay buried.)
• The grotesque characters exist only to shock or mock Southerners. (Writers used them to reveal moral and spiritual truths. O'Connor said she used distortion so that readers would see what they normally overlook.)
• Any story set in the South is Southern Gothic. (The label applies to work that combines a Southern setting with Gothic features such as decay, the grotesque, violence and buried secrets.)

Explainer

The Gothic novel, which began in eighteenth-century Britain, used ruined castles, family curses and trapped heroines to create dread. In the twentieth century, writers from the American South found that their own region supplied all of these without inventing anything supernatural. The ruined castle became the decaying plantation house. The family curse became the history of slavery and the defeat of 1865. The trapped heroine became a woman ruled by her father's pride or by the town's watching eyes.

William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930) shows the method. The story is told by "we," the voice of a Mississippi town that has watched Miss Emily Grierson for decades. Faulkner jumbles the order of events, so the reader moves among her father's death, her courtship with a Northern construction foreman named Homer Barron, her purchase of arsenic, and the smell from her house. Only after her funeral does the town break open an upstairs room and find Homer's skeleton, with a strand of her gray hair on the pillow beside it. The horror is human, and the town's silence is part of it. Faulkner later wrote, in *Requiem for a Nun* (1951), "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic writer from Georgia, pushed the grotesque further. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1953), a family's road trip ends when they meet an escaped criminal called the Misfit. The story is comic, then violent, and at the last moment the self-absorbed grandmother reaches toward the killer with something like grace. O'Connor argued that distortion helps readers see what they normally ignore. She also joked that Northern readers call everything from the South grotesque unless it really is, in which case they call it realistic.

Other writers widened the mode. Carson McCullers wrote about lonely misfits in small towns in *The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter* (1940). Eudora Welty mixed comedy and strangeness in stories such as "Why I Live at the P.O." Harper Lee's *To Kill a Mockingbird* (1960) uses Gothic touches in the mysterious figure of Boo Radley.

When you read Southern Gothic, ask what the strange or violent surface reveals about history, race, class, faith and community.