Southern Gothic Literature

1. Southern Gothic Literature William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor

3. Gothic Literature • Popular in Europe in 1800’s • Known for creepy landscapes (castles, cemeteries) • Death, supernatural, haunted houses • Use of the grotesque • Classic archetypes • Tyrants, villains, ghosts, nuns, monks, magicians

4. Southern Gothic Literature • Relies on supernatural, ironic or unusual events to guide the plot • Uses these to explore social issues and reveal cultural character of the south (not just to be creepy) • Takes gothic archetypes and turns them into American Southerners: • Spiteful, reclusive spinster; uneducated drunk; quiet, wise lawyer • Focus on the “landscape of the mind”

5. Most notable feature: grotesque • A grotesque character inspires both empathy and disgust • Physically deformed, mentally deficient, socially unfit • Character whose negative qualities let author highlight unpleasant aspects in southern culture

6. Other features: • Freakishness • Set apart from world in negative way b/c of disability or negative view of the world • Outsider • Set apart from cultural pattern-often turn into heroes because of this • Imprisonment • Literal or figurative • Violence • Racial/social/class tensions erupt in violence • Sense of place • Old, small, Southern towns

7. William Faulkner 1897-1962

8. Biography • Oxford, Mississippi • Created an imaginary town based on Oxford • Yoknapatawpha • Broke all literary rules • Chronology, narrative structure, punctuation, point of view, stream of consciousness • Extremely long, complicated sentences • Not accepted at first: too hard to understand and too weird to accept • Both affectionate and critical toward the South • Themes: tradition, family, community, land, history, race

9. Examples of Stream-of-consciousness • For example, DarlBundren in As I Lay Dying thinks: "I am I and you are you and I know it and you dont know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl" (p. 51). Or consider The Sound and the Fury when Quentin Compson remembers: "A face reproachful tearful an odor of camphor and of tears a voice weeping steadily and softly beyond the twilit door the twilight-colored smell of honeysuckle" (p.95).

10. Flannery O’Connor 1925-1964

11. Biography • Born in Savannah, Georgia • Defined by region and religion • Georgia/Catholic • Satirist (social criticism where shortcomings are pointed out in hopes that they will be fixed) • Main targets: smugness, optimism, and self-righteousness • All work grows from Christian vision of secular society • At age 25 became ill with Lupus