The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic

Susan Castillo Street, Charles L. Crow, Susan Castillo Street, Charles L. Crow

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137477743
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines 'Southern Gothic' - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do 'Southern' and 'Gothic' mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, 'Southern Gothic'is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imageryin film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Down at the Crossroads

Susan Castillo Street¹ and Charles L. Crow²

(1)

King’s College London, London, UK

(2)

Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

End Abstract

The legend of blues musician Robert Johnson, selling his soul to the Devil at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta in exchange for blues immortality, is one that will resonate with scholars working on the American South and on the Southern Gothic. Given the explosion of scholarship in this area over the last two decades, defining the South and the Southern Gothic is not a task for the faint of heart. In recent years, scholars have moved beyond traditional views of the South and of Southern literature as characterised by a strong sense of place, nostalgia for a lost past and a Lost Cause, and a history of defeat, articulated by white male writers. In her influential 2005 overview of the field of Southern studies, Barbara Ladd comments, ‘At present, southern studies takes shape at crossroads,’ and adds, ‘Inquiry into creole and creolist discourses in the South has taken us into New World, Americas, and African studies.’

In her critical work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and her essay ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’, Toni Morrison makes a compelling case for the necessity of grounding interpretations of American literary texts in their historical and social context, and of acknowledging the uncanny presence of a non-white, Africanist presence haunting American literature. She acknowledges the central paradox underlying American identity: that the Enlightenment ideas on which the country was built accommodate slavery, in that they are defined in opposition to it. She adds that the concept of slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities, since the dramatic polarity created by skin colour allows the young nation to construct its own identity by elaborating racial difference in order to define itself by what it is not, a ‘fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm and desire’, and by projecting this abjected darkness onto the bodies of (silenced) African slaves. Morrison continues, ‘The strong affinity between the nineteenth-century American psyche and the gothic romance has rightly been much remarked.’¹ Indeed, the gothic form has enabled writers to explore the shadow cast by the uncanny, haunting presence of the nation’s others.

It is in the South, though, that this shadow is most starkly defined and most darkly cast across the crossroads. Teresa Goddu states categorically:

The American Gothic is most recognizable as a regional form. Identified with gothic doom and gloom, the American South serves as the nation’s ‘other’, becoming the repository for everything from which the nation wishes to dissociate itself. The benighted South is able to support the irrational impulses of the gothic that the nation as a whole, born of Enlightenment ideals, cannot.²

She advocates the placing of American gothic texts within historical sites of haunting, and discusses the possibilities and perils of looking at texts through a gothic lens, while acknowledging the limitations of the Gothic in resurrecting and representing historical events.³

Indeed, the South is a region that has always been obsessed with crossroads and boundaries, whether territorial (the Mason–Dixon line) or those related to gender, social class, sexuality and particularly race. In the South, ghosts and men in white sheets are real, as are shackles and clanking chains, and the Southern Gothic is a genre that arises from the area’s often violent and traumatic history.

How, then, to address the intersections between ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’? Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner, in Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, have recently commented on the need to move beyond the capitalised terms ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’, viewed as monolithic entities, suggesting that it is more productive and critically fertile to pluralise regional and generic identification ‘into multiple, even contradictory forms of what counts as “southern” and as “gothic” all the while unsettling settled ideas of connections between the two’.⁴ Many scholars have focused on the complex intersections between region, nation and hemisphere. Deborah Cohn and George Handley applaud the move in Southern studies away from ‘nativist navel-gazing’ and evoke the image of a ‘liminal south, one that troubles essentialist narratives both of global-southern decline and of global-northern national or regional unity, of American or Southern exceptionalism’.⁵ Martyn Bone, Brian Ward and William Link, in The American South and the Atlantic World,⁶ similarly problematise boundaries of nation and genre in studies of the South.

There are other crossroads in Southern studies. Traditional views of class and ethnicity in the South are being challenged: given the level of racial fluidity there, John Lowe suggests, in his introduction to Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach, that ‘we may be moving ever closer to an all-embracing sense of southern ethnicity that is more culturally than racially defined’.⁷ Race is one of the most exciting areas in which contemporary scholarship is addressing rigid binary views of racial categorisation and interaction. Previously there existed an almost exclusive focus on relations between African Americans and whites, but Eric Gary Anderson and others are exploring the presence, or indeed the absence, of Indigenous groups in Southern writing.

Another area in which traditional Southern stereotypes are being challenged is that of gender and sexuality. John Howard’s landmark study Men Like That: A Southern Queer History ⁸ and Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation ⁹ are part of the explosion of texts focusing on the queer South. Kari J. Winter’s Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865 ¹⁰ and Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 ¹¹ examine representations of Southern women and deconstruct tired stereotypes such as that of the Southern belle.

This collection is organised into five groups of chapters: on Edgar Allan Poe and his legacy; on race; on Southern Gothic spaces and places; on gender and sexuality; and on voodoo, conjure, vampires and monsters.

Poe and his Legacy

Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is in many ways the Ur-text of the Southern Gothic. To say that Poe casts a long dark shadow in Southern Gothic studies is a very considerable understatement. Tom F. Wright argues that situating Poe in terms of the Southern Gothic enables us not only to evaluate the extent of his influence on other writers, but also to address some of the limitations of the category itself. It has often been said that the legacy of William Faulkner, like that of Poe, looms large over subsequent writers, but it is equally true that Faulkner is the inheritor of Poe and the gothic tradition. Richard Gray, in his essay on William Faulkner, describes the ways in which Faulkner and other Southern writers use gothic conventions to subvert the triumphant narratives of American exceptionalism. Paula Bernat Bennett, in ‘Dreamland: Antebellum Southern Women Poets and Poe’, analyses Poe’s legacy, delving into the ways in which his writing served as a template against which Southern writers could articulate concerns about the limitations placed on women in the South, the existence of domestic violence and the dangers related to slavery and slaveholding. Carol Margaret Davison picks up the motif of collapsing mansions and haunted plantation houses as a contact zone between racialised and gendered bodies, an uncanny realm where the past and present come face to face. Edward Sugden, in ‘The Globalisation of the Gothic South’, argues that the Southern Gothic is not about repression but about spatial compression, in that it seeks to contain and neutralise global forces into certain nodal points, adding that these points are inherently unstable, ultimately exploding Southern claims to cultural homogeneity. He adds that Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ does precisely this, compressing earlier Southern globalism into its structure only to conclude with the apocalyptic image of the Usher mansion collapsing into the stagnant tarn.

Southern Gothic Space(s) and Place(s)

The second group of chapters focuses on definitions of space and place in the Southern Gothic. Matthew Wynn Sivils, in ‘Gothic Landscapes of the South’, traces the development of literary tropes such as the swamp in the depiction of Southern landscapes, from their origins in colonial writers such as John Smith and Garcilaso de la Vega to the present, viewing them as sites of racial and environmental haunting. Janet Beer and Avril Horner, in ‘Southern Hauntings: Kate Chopin’s Fiction’, discuss Chopin’s Louisiana as postcolonial space. Sarah Robertson, in ‘Gothic Appalachia’, describe gothic tropes such as the stereotypical feral hillbilly as well as environmental disasters such as strip mining in order to characterise Appalachian Gothic as a politicised genre, and Appalachia as a site of both exploitation and resistance. Nahem Yousaf, in ‘New Immigration and the Southern Gothic’, explores the ways in which immigrant writers and characters problematise the geographical and cultural boundaries of the Southern Gothic. Éric Savoy, in ‘Flannery O’Connor and the Realism of Distance’, discusses spatial and temporal distance in O’Connor’s fiction. Bev Hogue, in ‘Florida Gothic: Shadows in the Sunshine State’, looks at the dark side of a place that is often viewed as a tropical paradise, examining the work of writers such as Francis Parkman, Lafcadio Hearn, Peter Matthiessen, Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer. Ivonne M. Garcia, in ‘Gothic Cuba and the Trans-American South’, discusses Louisa May Alcott’s use of gothic conventions and tropes in order to configure Cuba as a double of the South, linking the United States and the Spanish Caribbean through the Gothic. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, in ‘A Long View of History: Cormac McCarthy’s Gothic Vision’, suggests that what he describes as McCarthy’s long view of history and its relation to the spaces in which McCarthy’s fiction is sited are central to the gothicism of this work.

New Orleans has often been viewed as the archetypal city of the Southern Gothic, a liminal space where rigid racial taxonomies and norms of gender, sexuality and class are called into question. Three chapters look at New Orleans as gothic space from different perspectives. Sherry R. Truffin examines the confluence of New Orleans’s geography, history and culture, highlighting its tradition of carnivalesque hedonism and excess. Owen Robinson, in ‘George Washington Cable and Grace King’, looks at gothic elements in the work of these two New Orleans writers and the ways in which they challenge or reaffirm the conventions of the local colour genre. Finally, Bill Marshall describes four key motifs (the house, skin colour, capitalism and the Jew, and blood) in the work of Francophone New Orleans writers Victor Sejour, Alfred Mercier and Sidonie de la Houssaye.

Race and the Southern Gothic

Given the South’s history of chattel slavery, it could be said that race is a motif that underlies every chapter in this collection. A particular focus on race and racial issues, however, can be found in the third group of essays. Michael Kreyling evokes the Southern plantation as uncanny space, referring to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Maisha Wester analyses gothic representations of the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s revolt, as well as African American appropriations of the Gothic in slave narratives. Emily Clark, in ‘The Tragic Mulatto and Passing’, traces the roots of this trope to eighteenth-century Orientalism and the extended Caribbean. The law, and its dramatic consequences for the lives of many Southerners, is analysed in Ellen Weinauer’s ‘Law and the Gothic in the Slaveholding South’, in which she casts the law as gothic villain, making the case for the idea that laws concerning slaves haunt the South, but that paradoxically they ultimately failed to erase the humanity and personhood of slaves. Christine A. Wooley, in ‘Charles Chesnutt’s Reparative Gothic’, discusses issues of slavery and reparation, evoking Chesnutt’s increasingly pessimistic vision as regards the real possibility of racial progress in the South. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, in ‘Jim Crow Gothic: Richard Wright’s Southern Nightmare’, looks at gothic elements in this writer’s short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, set in the rural South. Michael L. Manson, in ‘The Turn from the Gothic...