Elements of southern gothic literature

Donaldson, Susan V. “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic.” Mississippi Quarterly Fall 1997: 567-83. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 142. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 9 Dec. 2013. .

Southern Gothic stereotypes its characters as grotesque, racist, sexist, and as having a misguided sense of moral values.

Heroines are often under siege or being hurt by a dominant male, females usually make poor decisions in southern gothic literature.

Attention is brought on to watching the suffering of confined women.

“These stories are uncomfortable and vaguely salacious, I would argue, because they do evoke something of Freud’s beating fantasy, posing a triangular relationship between the woman who is beaten, the figure or figures who do the beating, and the spectators who stand aside and watch.”

Women are exposed, confined, and figuratively beaten for not being the traditional southern women that they are expected to be.

“Much like Welty’s characters, we as readers are encouraged to scrutinize these representations of the strange and the marvelous. But we are also urged to consider those who do the scrutinizing and the act of scrutiny itself.”

Palmer, Louis. “Bourgeois Blues: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Gothic in Early Faulkner and Caldwell.” The Faulkner Journal 22.1-2 (2006): 120. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. .

Characters struggle over material things which offer no moral or spiritual value in a story.

“They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.”

Ellen Glasgow clarified writers like William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell’s writings to a genre in which she named Southern Gothic Literature.

Southern Gothic takes away the class of gothic literature and places it into an almost “white trash” spectrum.

Traditional gothic is based off of 3 elements: an ancestral house, occult events, and a woman at risk.

Faulkner switches his focus from aristocratic characters to poor whites in the south, bringing on the peculiar situations in which these characters find themselves in.

Shaw, Bradley. “Baptizing Boo: Religion in the Cinematic Southern Gothic.” The Mississippi Quarterly 63.3-4 (2010): 445. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. .

“Means to explore complex intersections of religious belief, class, violence, and male sexuality.”

“As Lee shapes Scout and Jem’s story of moving toward adulthood through the sometimes dark vortex of a small Southern town, she makes efficient and effective use of a pliable narrative discourse that is fully established for both her and her readers.”

“The Southern Gothic label eventually proved flexible enough to account for a broad range of authors from Erskine Caldwell to Tennessee Williams. By the time Lee’s novel emerged as a pre-publication selection for the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, Faulkner’s Nobel prize for the “dark fabric” of his corpus was a decade old and the Southern Gothic was fully established as a persistent cultural discourse.”

Flora, Joseph M., and Lucinda H. MacKethan, eds. The Companion to Southern Literature. N.p.: Louisiana State Universirty, 2002. Print.

dark and divisive romance novels like traditional gothic, incorporated with plantation gothic and failure of the southern honor code, distorted family relations and obligations, and community expectations and pressure.

far fetched tales and southwestern humor morphs into grotesque characters, scenes, and situations in southern gothic literature.

southern gothic writers associate contemporary southern life with the absurdity of human existence in the 20th century.

tended to render the image of the south as a symbol of disorder and depravity of the modern age at its worst, filling their stories with a complete catalogue of the horrible and bizarre: rape and incest, murder and suicide, lynching, castration.

William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, Flannery O’ Connor, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote.