Southern gothic literature elements7/3/2023 ![]() ![]() Movies like Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and Antebellum (2020), starring Janelle Monáe, bring Southern Gothic tales to the big screen. Their novels deal with consistent topics like plantation manors, women and the black experience through the Southern Gothic tradition. Their works are read in classrooms across the country.īut the reach of Southern Gothic literature bleeds into the arts more widely: Southern Gothic writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, who have both received a Pulitzer Prize, have reached the status of gods as two of the most famous black writers in America. Black authors have dominated the genre across the twentieth century and using elements of horror and surrealism to describe the black experience as it was and is. The black literary community has been an especially prominent and formative contributor to Southern Gothic fiction, it’s allegorical relevance metamorphizing with the times. The trademark characteristics of Southern Gothic fiction make it adaptive specifically to American history and life in America. Southern Gothic’s relevance to a specifically American audience opens up the genre in ways unimaginable to its forebearers– the Brontë sisters certainly could not have conceived of Gloria Naylor’s stunning 1985 novel Linden Hill, a book that is shaped like an inverted pyramid to mirror Dante’s circles of Hell, and takes place in the American suburbs. It certainly feels to me– as an ardent reader of Gothic fiction– that Southern Gothic’s influence is pervasive in American culture without many people realizing the extent of its influence. ![]() Southern Gothic stories are at once metaphysically impalpable and real, showcasing the horrific stuff of daily life through the weird, the sublime and phantasmagoria. These writers, while serving as a solid starting point for readers of Gothic literature, are merely torchbearers for a subgenre that is much larger in scope and style. What all of these great writers share, aside from their astounding contributions to the literary canon, is their frank whiteness– and the fact that they barely scratch the surface of the genre. The names readers generally think of when seeking out Southern Gothic fiction usually begin with Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Cormac McCarthy, or Tennessee Williams. Southern Gothic literature revealed the racial divide, oppression, loneliness, poverty and violence of the times. In the deep South, Gothic literature took on an uncanny and lively form of its own with odd, misunderstood characters that challenged the occidental and bucolic ideal that had taken root. If the poster child for early Gothic literature was the fashionable, lascivious and classically educated Lord Byron, then Southern Gothic writing was the distant and howling bastard child from the calcareous backlands of America. Widely popular and grotesque Gothic fiction reached the heart of America and gave birth to a new modern subgenre: Southern Gothic. That same tradition was repurposed to the United States by 19th-century writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. ![]() Their work is the beginning of a genre that gives rise to Southern Gothic Literature.Īngria developed its laws, communities and protagonists that were existent outside of English society, which is exactly what Gothic writing accomplished while revealing the most earthly and taboo desires of the British. As children, the Brontë sisters created and penned the wildly vivid and intensely detailed fantasy world of Angria to leave Haworth, and ironically, their dreams about escape existed in an intermediary realm between the supernatural and reality that is a good analogy for Gothic literature as a whole. This once tumbling, sprawling place– a place in Yorkshire I have never been to– will always conjure up the idea of Gothic literature and the hazy grey vale I imagine the Brontë sisters were confronted with in Haworth when they wrote such seminal pieces as Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. How Southern Gothic Literature Came to Be ![]()
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