THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC

When Poe wrote gothic stories, he generally set them in Europe because the USA doesn’t
have an aristocratic tradition of castles, monarchy and the Catholic church. But during the XX
century, after the civil war and the decadence of the South, a new form of gothic emerged in the
USA (with authors like William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote), which was an
adaptation of the European gothic to the scenery of the South. It was the Southern Gothic.
The right setting for this kind of gothic is provided by the scenery of the devastated South,
the medieval castle being replaced by the decaying abandoned mansions of the old plantations.
There is a symbolical spookiness in gothic that in Europe is created by the feudal aristocracy and
the church, which in the USA finds its equivalent in the decadent aristocracy of the South, and the
horror and guilt produced by slavery. There is also a sexual component, which in the USA is
provided by the taboo of miscegenation (the mixture of races): on the one hand, there is abuse of
black women by their white masters and on the other hand, white men’s fear of black men having
sexual relationships with white women, who are idealized in their minds. The white southern lady is
not respected by their white husbands but their idea of her is placed in a pedestal. On the whole, the
fears involved in this kind of gothic are the fear of the aristocracy of losing their dominant position
and their fear of black people.

►A decayed plantation mansion,

typical setting of Southern Gothic

An important component of the Southern Gothic is the use of the grotesque. During the Italian
Renaissance, Romans of culture took a great interest in their country's past and began excavating
ancient buildings. During their excavations, they uncovered chambers (known in Italian as grotte, in
reference to their cave-like appearance) decorated with artwork depicting fantastic combinations of
human and animal forms interwoven with strange fruits and flowers. The Italian word grottesca
became the name for this unique art style, and by 1561 it had mutated into the English noun
"grotesque." The adjective form of "grotesque" was first used in the early 17th century to describe
the decorative art. In Literature, the term was expanded to refer to the distortion and transgression
of boundaries, anything incongruous, deformed or exaggerated.
.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Faulkner belongs to a group of writers that emerged in the south of the USA in the decade of
1920 that is called the Southern Renaissance. What these writers have in common is that they
created a kind of literature which considered that in the period before the civil war, there were
values that were later lost. That life was morally superior (of course, the ones who think that way
are white southerners, not descendants of slaves). They have a nostalgic idea of the southern past
and a lot of resentment against the north and against their values: commerce, money, individualism
to the extreme. Except for slavery, they think that they had better values, that they were more
humanitarian, that they had a code of honor; a gentleman always respected his word. It was a rural
society in which everybody knew one another and they were like a community. They resent the
introduction of the urban habits and ideas because they think those urban citizens are more corrupt
and have no values. The hatred towards the urban is permanent. The magazine of their movement is
called The Agrarian. It is a pro-country movement. The way of life of the north is very nomadic
while the southerner is more sedentary. Faulkner never left Oxford, Mississippi, where he was born.
The serious problem about all these ideas is that it was a community that was based on
slavery. The thesis of these writers is that this is the reason why the war was lost, but that it was a
pity (so do they think) because those values were lost and the values of the north were imposed.
Faulkner explains it in moral and ethical terms. He says they lost the war because they
committed two “sins” (within inverted commas because he doesn’t believe in God): One was
slavery and the other was the robbery of the land from the Indians and its transformation into a
commodity (when for the Indians the land couldn’t be a commodity, it couldn’t be sold or bought as
it is our mother).
All his stories and novels together have to do with the history of the south from the moment
the first settlers took the land until after the civil war and reconstruction period. He invents a
county: the mythical Yoknapatawpha county, whose county seat is the city of Jefferson. He
believed Yoknapatawpha was in Chickasaw language “water which flows slowly on the prairie”
and used it as a metaphor for his writing style, because action advances very slowly. In this county,
there are several families and characters whose experiences at different moments in their lives he
narrates in different stories and novels. The feeling this creates is that these characters have a life
beyond fiction.

The following is the map of Yoknapatawpha he invented with all the character’s homes and
sites where important events in his works occur:
Faulkner’s stories were published in popular magazines. He is a self-educated man, who has no
high school studies. His stories are very demanding to the reader but not because of erudition. Their
difficulty has to do with the complexity of their plots and syntax. He takes elements from popular
genres: gothic, detective, the sentimental novel.
Gothic: as we have seen before, the genre has to do with the fear of the unconscious, the
feeling that there are areas of the mind which we can’t control and that when those areas are set free
from repression, what dominates is chaos and also pleasure, sexual pleasure. In Dracula, the sexual
component is very important.
All the zones of horror have to do with the night, when we are controlled by pleasure and
hidden desires, and that destroys us, the character is punished. The idea behind is that we mustn’t
let pleasure take control (things which also have to do with religious repression).
The setting is very important and in Faulkner there are old mansions of the time before the
civil war. This place is always a big house and implies an absolute limit with the rest of the world:
once one is inside, it is very difficult to get out and what goes on there is ruled by other laws. Those
outside do not know what happens inside and cannot go in. That house is the human mind and the
attics and cellars have to do with the areas which do not belong to reason, with the unconscious,
what is out of control.
The gothic is a conservative genre, which regrets the loss of the control that existed before
the French revolution. The villain is the centre of the genre, that’s why the books are called with the
name of the villain. The one who has the interesting psychology, the most important speeches, is the
villain.
Guilt is also very important. The castle is the authority in a state of decadence. It is an anti-
realistic, symbolical genre dedicated to the prohibited. The guilt in the American gothic has to do
with the indian genocide and with slavery. Moby Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, also
have elements of the gothic. Guilt and sin are at the bottom of the gothic and they have also got to
do with sex. In the USA it has a lot to do with miscegenation and the southern white lady.

► Southern white lady

The adaptation of the gothic to the USA included a new element that is the grotesque:
the combination of elements that don’t go together and of deformity.
Detective: Faulkner is interested in the detective of enigma. It takes place in a
society that is ill. The virus is the criminal. There is defense of that society through
reasoning. The detective defends that society through reason and catching the virus. The
genre is always interested in the law and punishment. Faulkner is interested in the guilt
and the punishment.
In the detective, there are two parallel lines of time: one is the investigation, in
which time goes forward; the other is the reconstruction of the story that led to the
crime, in which time goes backwards. This line of time is important for Faulkner
because he considers that the only line of time is the past.
The detective story revolves around an incident, almost always a murder.
Faulkner´s books also revolve around an incident.
Melodrama or the sentimental novel: Faulkner is very interested in
melodrama. Especially in emotions. He is very passionate and emotional in his style: he
uses a lot of adjectives (he wants the images to be felt), tragedy, dis-encounter and
decadence. He is also interested in incest, especially between siblings.
The melodrama is nostalgic: of something that has been lost. That is interesting
for Faulkner because the time before the civil war is looked on with a nostalgic feeling.
Another element taken from the melodrama is the idea of the noble savage: the idea that
children and primitive people are noble, good. In Faulkner, Indians, children, and black
people are good, unless they are corrupted by whites.
Handling of time in Faulkner: In Faulkner’s narrations everything happens in
the past. Faulkner believes that in order to understand the present, we have to revise our
past. And he reflects this view in the way in which he writes his stories. He is very
coherent. He reveals this idea in the plots and in the style.
At the level of plot: when we start reading, the important incident (usually a
crime) has already happened. When we get to the consequences of the incident, we have
to go back to learn what happened. The whole story is an attempt to reconstruct what
happened. We have to go back in time to reconstruct the events. Generally, there are
several versions or little bits that we have to put together. That’s why it demands a very
active reader. As we have seen, of the two lines of time that make up the detective story,
he is interested in the one that goes backwards to the past. Once the reconstruction of
facts gets to the incident in question, it is skipped. The next thing we see is that it has
already happened. The important incident is never described.
At the level of style: The use of never-ending subordinated clauses forces us to
go back to the beginning when we get to the end of each because, when we finish
reading the subordinated clause, we have already forgotten the antecedent. His
sentences are the same as his idea of time: they force us to go back and revise. The same
thing happens with repetitions. There is a lot of repetition and that helps to create an
atmosphere, but it is also something that takes us to the past because we feel that we
have already read that.
Thus, the content and form are absolutely linked.