Thesis: Characters like gods, heroes, and monsters in Greek mythology are reimagined in

Southern gothic narratives as flawed individuals grappling with moral ambiguity and existential

dilemmas. These archetypal reinterpretations are then used to represent aspects of human nature

and societal tensions prevalent in the Southern context.

Subpoints?:

- Narratives: Greek mythological narratives serving as templates for Southern gothic

stories, offering frameworks to explore themes like fate, hubris, and the consequences of

human actions. These narratives provide depth and complexity to Southern gothic

storytelling, enriching it with timeless motifs and universal truths. (Metamorphosis?

Journeys?)

- Settings: The gothic/grotesque/decrepit and how it influences the story and changes the

characters

- Symbols: Symbols from Greek mythology: such as the labyrinth, the phoenix, and the

sirens, are recontextualized in Southern gothic narratives to represent themes

At its center, Greek mythology focuses, not on the supernatural, but on the human, and on the

flawed. The Greeks lived in a magical world; gods, nymphs and spirits lived amongst mortals,

and were responsible for the “odd” natural phenomena that could not be explained. At the same

time, however, this was a world that “made sense”: Greek rationalism in this period was the basis

of much Greek philosophical thought and also subsequently leaked into Greek religious thought.

In this philosophy, it was believed that the universe operated on a set of inherent, logical systems

and that humans could understand those systems through our own rational thinking and intellect.
This is seen in the organising system and hierarchy of the gods; in his journal article Ancient

Greek Religion, Hugh Lloyd-Jones notes that “the gods are distinguished from one another by

their attributes and functions, but they came to form a coherent system in which each deity has

his or her special place and relation to the others.” With this rationalism also came important

distinctions between the gods by their attributes and functions. As a result, the gods and

goddesses acted within their own parameters and according to their characters, as noted again by

Lloyd-Jones: “[Greek mythology’s] gods were by no means all good; their distinguishing quality

was not goodness, but power. Legend depicted them as being actuated by human passions, so

that their critics have found them easy to ridicule. The Christian Fathers treated them with

contempt, but indeed the same thing had been done by Greek philosophers long before their

time.” This defines the core of Greek religion; an emphasis on human-ness above everything

else.

“Until recently, Greek myths have been regarded with great admiration as the example, par

excellence, of what myths should be. It is true, however, that critics have not always agreed as to

the special qualities in which Greek myths excelled. In the first half of the twentieth century the

rationalism of Greek myths was particularly emphasized. Martin Nilsson expressed this view of

Greek Religion (1925). Speaking of the Greeks he says: ‘Their marvelous qualities of mind, their

rationalism, and clarity of thinking could brook no ambiguity or confusion. Hence was born

among them that independent searching after truth which is Science, the greatest offspring of the

spirit of Greece. We have seen that the same quality in a lower form, for which I should perhaps

use the term rationalism, gave to the Greek myths character, in contradistinction to the primitive

tale and folk-tale out of which they sprang. An outgrowth of the same kind is the humanizing of
the myths, the anthropomorphism characteristic of Greek mythology. It is due not only to the

plastic imagination of the Greeks, with its power of intuition, but also to their antipathy to the

primitive and fantastic ideas and characteristics of the folk-tale, which led them to clear away all

that too sharply contradicted the experiences of human life. The Greek myth has thus become

something other than the ordinary folk-tale, and rightly bears a separate name.

This attitude towards Greek myth is shared by H. J. Rose: 'The Greeks at their best were sane,

high-spirited, clear-headed, beauty-loving optimists and not in the least other-worldly. Hence

their legends are almost without exception free from the cloudiness, the wild grotesques, and the

horrible features which beset the popular traditions of less gifted and happy peoples. Even their

monsters are not very ugly or uncouth, nor their ghosts and demons paralysingly dreadful. Their

heroes... meet with extraordinary adventures but there is a certain tone of reasonableness running

through their most improbable exploits. As for the gods and other supernatural characters, they

are glorified men and women, who remain extremely human, and on the whole neither irrational

nor grossly unfair in their dealings. Such tales as contain and repulsive elements tend to drop into

the background or to be modified.’ Thus both these writers stress the human-ness, the

reasonableness and the realism of Greek myths which lead to the elimination of fantastic,

mystical and repulsive elements.

Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. “Ancient Greek Religion.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical

Society, vol. 145, no. 4, 2001, pp. 456–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1558184.

Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.

Conradie, P. J. “THE LITERARY NATURE OF GREEK MYTHS: A Critical Discussion of G.

S. Kirk’s Views.” Acta Classica, vol. 20, 1977, pp. 49–58. JSTOR,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/24591524. Accessed 2 Apr. 2024.