The Haunted States of America

Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American Fiction

James Morgart

• Editorial: University of Wales Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786838780
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Prior studies of post-war American Gothic literature (and even American horror films) have primarily interpreted Gothic cultural production of the post-war period through a Cold War lens. Despite legitimate reasons for such an approach, this emphasis has limited inquiries into post-war fiction as well as our understanding of the nation's complicated identity. While the federal government and its investigative agencies may have been preoccupied with the so-called 'red menace' that threatened to spread across the planet, each region of the country already possessed major strains of Gothic fiction that focused on regional anxieties – namely of those connected to women and minorities that threatened the region's constructed identity and balance of power. The Haunted States of America shifts the focus to these Gothic strains by examining how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.

1

‘The Death of a Culture’: Subversion of Monstrosity in the Southern Gothic

Southern literary history highlights a region at war over its culture with the Gothic as its primary rhetorical weapon. At the heart of this is, of course, slavery and racism; however, it extends into a basic discourse of what is ‘normal’ and what is not according to the standards set by white Southern aristocratic men. What is expected of the bodies and behaviours of Southern men, women and children? What is considered ‘civilised’? There is no doubt that, on occasion, the Gothic has been used in favour of hegemonic forces, extending as far back as John Smith’s account of Native Americans as ‘strange and inexplicable at best, savage instruments of the devil at worst’.¹ At the foundation of the South’s culture is a mobilisation of Gothic language to dehumanise and construct the Cultural Other as monster. As Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock explains, ‘a convenient first step in running roughshod over someone is always to label that person or group as a monster’, a tendency that is demonstrated through labelling Native Americans as ‘savages’ and thus ‘asserting the monstrosity of those of African descent’ as a means of justifying slavery.² This tradition of framing the Other as monstrous in Southern literature extends from John Smith to Thomas Jefferson’s characterisations of African Americans in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and Edgar Allan Poe’s treatment of race in The Narrative of Arthur Pym (1838).³ It is also obvious in Poe’s obsession with dead women, ‘the reductio ad absurdum of the Old South’s chivalric fixation on Woman as decorative object’.⁴ As Weinstock observes of short stories such as ‘Morella’ (1835), ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) and ‘The Black Cat’ (1843), ‘ghosts insistently figure the threat of the irrational and tend to be coded as feminine’ as female characters are regularly identified as or associated with the monstrous.⁵ Most notable of these is ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, a story revolving around a brother’s ambiguously incestuous obsession with his dying sister, whose allure as sexualised object threatens the foundation of so-called civility. Only in death does her illness-reified monstrosity seem to dissipate – that is, until she returns to haunt her brother and narrator alike. As Lewis P. Simpson observes, Poe’s short story ‘represent[s] the ultimate nightmarish vision of the plantation myth of the Old South’, as the Southern belle’s return from the dead is marked by a horrific scene that climaxes with the destruction of the house.⁶

During the mid-nineteenth century, the Gothic was inverted by these so-called ‘monsters’ as they produced their own literature to, in Teresa A. Goddu’s terms, ‘haunt back’.⁷ As critics have pointed out, slave narratives invert this haunting by exposing the horrors and terrors inflicted on enslaved people by white masters. For example, Ellen Weinauer observes that Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) ‘uses Gothic conventions to expose slavery’s darkest secrets’ and portray white masters as monstrous oppressors, while Hannah Crafts’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative (c.1850s) demonstrates the ‘terrifying lengths to which white society will go to protect the idea of “race” itself’.⁸ By the end of Reconstruction, white supremacists were indeed going to ‘terrifying lengths’ with racist Jim Crow laws, horrific lynchings and an onslaught of racist mythmaking, ranging from the circulation of Sambo art to the publication of plantation novels.⁹ These works were part of an extensive promotion of the myth of the Lost Cause – an attempt to rewrite the Civil War as fought in defence of states’ rights and the ennobled heritage of the South rather than as a racist defence of the inhumane and horrific institution of slavery. While Sambo art and the celebration of lynchings fuelled racism and circulated pernicious myths about African Americans, plantation novels conflated the culture’s white male patriarchy with cavalier figures to form the new myth of the Old South by peddling the ‘chivalric and spiritually elevated qualities of the South’s aristocracy’, portraying it as racially superior and claiming to have ‘descended from the English Norman aristocracy and manifesting that culture’s generous, honorable, brave, and gallant nature’.¹⁰ This sort of cultural production reached its zenith with D. W. Griffith’s wildly popular The Birth of the Nation (1915), an artistic form of cinematic propaganda combining myths from the Lost Cause, lies about Reconstruction and horrific stereotypes about African Americans, ‘all summoned to demonstrate on a big screen how the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and the deconstruction of Reconstruction saved White America’.¹¹ In spite of Griffith’s effort, criticism of the culture began to mount, particularly from H. L. Mencken in his ‘The Sahara of Bozart’ (1917), resulting in the rise of a group of reactionary writers known as the Southern Agrarians who published I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), addressing ‘the deleterious effects of industrialization on traditional Southern culture’.¹²

‘[R]ebels against gentility’: post-war Southern Gothic writers

A mere five years after the publication of I’ll Take My Stand, Ellen Glasgow coined the phrase ‘Southern Gothic’ to categorise an emerging movement in writing that actively rejected the values of the Old South and Lost Cause and focused on the darker side of Southern existence.¹³ Naming only ‘the fantastic nightmares of William Faulkner’, it is obvious that Glasgow was by no means taken in by the entire movement, flatly ‘object[ing] to the aimless violence’ and lamenting that there are ‘a few scattered realists, as lonely as sincerity in any field, who dwell outside the Land of Fable inhabited by fairies and goblins’.¹⁴ For her, the Southern Gothic was a literary trend that featured ‘fabulous Southern monsters’ and ‘goblins’ written by ‘rebels against gentility’ and that, if continued, would result in the ‘the death of a culture’.¹⁵ In contrast, Glasgow called for more works like those produced by Southern Agrarian Stark Young, whose novel So Red the Rose (1934) is ‘more history than romance’ with its ‘glowing reaffirmation of courage in defeat’, or Douglas Southall Freeman, whose four-volume R. E. Lee: A Biography (1935) highlighted the ‘superb life of [Confederate General Robert E.] Lee, which has restored not only pure biography to English letters … but even the obsolete word “duty” to the American tongue’.¹⁶

Glasgow’s essay is another marker in an unending battle over the South’s identity, exemplifying Richard Gray’s observation that Southern writers ‘are caught between the conflicting interests and voices that constitute the region and the regional debate, all of them demanding recognition and power’.¹⁷ In other words, Glasgow’s essay reflects the dominant culture’s struggle to maintain values connected to an oppressive past. Glasgow lauds Lee’s ‘courage in defeat’, ‘duty’ and ‘nobility’, which uncomfortably echo the values of the Lost Cause’s fabled aristocracy. What Lee embodies is the Southern ideal of what a man should be based on standards set by the Lost Cause myth and the Old South’s culture that gives extraordinary value and privilege to white males. As Mary Ellis Gibson notes, ‘[f]or understanding southern literature, the concept of patriarchy is particularly important’.¹⁸ Even in the twenty-first century, with the New South firmly established, ‘patriarchal views, particularly with respect to the father’s role in the family, still find staunch adherents among many fundamentalist southern Christians’.¹⁹ The father’s influence over the family is so all-consuming that a family’s patriarch is considered ‘ideologically independent of all but providence’.²⁰

The Southern Gothic in general, and Faulkner’s work in particular, threatens the very culture that Glasgow seeks to preserve (if not outright forge) because it portrays such a culture as ‘a nightmare of patriarchy, a world of male power in extremis in which cruel parodies of family were presided over by perverse versions of the father figure’.²¹ Additionally, Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell are notable for establishing a Gothic trend in Southern literature that both invert the monstrous motif and highlights the region’s marginalised people at a time when romanticised versions of Southern aristocrats, such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), continued to circulate. This is seen repeatedly in Faulkner’s work, ranging from his standalone short stories such as ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930), wherein the title character’s actions are ‘a perverse reaction to the pressures of a stiflingly patriarchal society’, to his collection of short stories such as Go Down, Moses (1942), in which ‘the most substantial story… hinges on past secrets involving incest’ between a plantation owner and his enslaved daughter.²² It is a theme Faulkner most fully develops in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) through the self-made plantation owner Thomas Sutpen, a monstrous patriarch. As Elsa Charléty observes in the works of Faulkner and Caldwell, ‘The myth of the Old South and the discourse of the Lost Cause are called into question by figures that were obliterated by the nicely polished glass of the dominant discourse: poor blacks, poor whites, physically impaired people, the mad, the deviant, and indefinable’.²³ Rather than gloss over racial oppression, Caldwell’s early works feature ‘in a crude way the brutality and gratuity of lynchings in small rural Georgia towns’ through his ‘unsparing prose [that] reduces human bodies to shapeless heaps of meat, distorted and mangled in unnatural positions’.²⁴ For Charléty, this is a ‘celebration of death, decadence, and decay’.²⁵ While these observations are accurate insofar that such works are set in opposition to the dominant culture, the Southern Gothic that emerged in the middle part of the twentieth century and flourished throughout the post-Second World War period is slightly more complicated than a ‘celebration’ of the ugliness that has been hidden by the adulation of Southern aristocratic ideas and an imaginary past.

Instead, much of post-war Southern Gothic literature exhibits an innovative use of the Gothic – one that actually unravels the monstrous characterisations of marginalised figures. In fact, there are a number of post-war Southern Gothic works that can be seen as devoted to revealing, in their own way, that the notion of ‘monstrous’ is simply a social construct forged by a dwindling southern patriarchy.²⁶ Prominent among these is Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) – a coming-of-age novel that, as J. Douglas Perry argues, turns the Gothic ‘inside out’ by convincing readers that the ‘gothic nature of the outside world’ is more dangerous than that of the novel’s primary setting of freaks and grotesques.²⁷ Capote’s novel does slightly more than this, however, by limiting readers to the perspective of Joel Knox, a 13-year-old boy whose imagination – like that of Catherine Morland’s in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) – has been cultivated by his voracious appetite for Gothic novels and fairy tales, which he then uses to interpret the non-normative world he has been thrust into. Through his exposure to, and interactions with, social outcasts, Knox comes to recognise that their Gothic qualities are not repulsive or terrifying at all. Sent by his aunt to reconnect with his father, Knox compulsively worries about being rejected by his father prior to their first meeting, only to discover that the patriarch he has built up in his mind lay in a powerless, catatonic state. The lack of patriarchal influence allows Knox to define his own sense of ‘normal’ in a marginalised land where he encounters a number of grotesques and transgressive sexual behaviour. For example, Idabel Thompkins, who eventually becomes one of Knox’s closest and most trusted friends, is initially introduced to readers as a ‘freak’ for her tomboy appearance and demeanour.²⁸ Most prominently, Knox’s stepmother’s brother, Randolph, cross-dresses as ‘the Lady’, which confuses and frightens Knox at first, leading Knox to link ‘the Lady’ to Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen, a character that frightened him terribly as a child.²⁹ By the end of the novel, Knox’s sexuality has been awakened by Randolph. No longer frightened by the Lady, Knox instead identifies with and embraces a non-normative lifestyle.

Similarly, Carson McCullers’s fiction appears to reaffirm the notion that abnormality is celebrated through her grotesque figures, each of which represent ‘affirming qualities and practices of growth, promise and transformation’.³⁰ However, part of this growth is to recognise that their ‘grotesqueness’ is a construct of the South’s cultural past, founded, as it is, upon the ‘intolerance and sectarian hatred’ that ‘divides them irreducibly and tragically’.³¹ This is especially evident in the character of Jester Clane in Clock Without Hands (1961), a novel set in the 1950s about Clane’s struggle with his homosexuality and his grandfather’s racist support of Lost Cause myths. Throughout the novel, readers are repeatedly confronted by the grandfather’s beliefs that civilisation was built on slavery, that African Americans were happier under the plantation system, and that it is the duty of upperclass Southerners to make it possible for poor whites to look down on blacks, a concept central to a ‘herrenvolk democracy’.³² Having grown up in such a household, it is of no wonder that when Jester questions his own sexuality, he decides that ‘[i]f it turned out he was a homosexual like the men in the Kinsey Report, [he] had vowed that he would kill himself’.³³ However, when Jester falls in love with the angst-ridden Sherman Pew, his grandfather’s black caretaker, Jester proves himself capable of being the only character to remain uninvolved in monstrous acts. Sherman, for example, attempts to kill Jester’s grandfather by replacing his insulin shots with water, and the grandfather organises a Ku Klux Klan-esque meeting that eventually results in the bombing of Sherman’s house. Throughout the most heinous acts and racist rhetoric that Jester and readers are exposed to, Jester remains the most level-headed character, constantly attempting to understand Sherman’s angst as well as to dissuade his grandfather from his reactionary ways. Even when Jester is pushed to the brink after Sherman’s death and plans revenge by bringing Sherman’s murderer up in an airplane so that he might kill him mid-flight, Jester experiences an epiphany wherein the poor white – who has fourteen children because he believed his only path to prosperity was if his wife could give birth to quintuplets – is the pawn in a racist patriarchy, noting ‘in that instance the seed of compassion, forced by sorrow, had begun to blossom’.³⁴ In contrast, when news of integration being mandated reaches his grandfather, the elderly Judge Clane rushes to the radio but cannot find the words to further his narrative. Instead, he finds himself only capable of reciting ‘the first speech he had memorized in law school’ – the Gettysburg Address.³⁵ Jester, despite his fears of being a freak, avoids becoming a monster during a critical moment and instead finds ‘compassion’ while his grandfather falls apart in the face of adversity and loses the words to further his false narrative.

Repeatedly, post-war Southern Gothic works can be seen breaking down monstrosity in order to disarm the dominant culture’s false narratives. Although much more ambivalent and ambiguous in their portrayals of the South, Tennessee Williams’s plays exhibit strains of the cultural imagination of the South as a construct as well, often located in the metaphors and symbolism associated with his characters. As Stephen Matterson observes, for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and ‘many other major Williams characters, deception and self-deception are necessary conditions for existence’.³⁶ As symbolic representations of the Old South, characters such as Blanche can only function so long as they maintain ‘Romantic fictions of the self’.³⁷ Notably, Flannery O’Connor engages the grotesque and cultural constructions of Southern ‘normality’ through her Catholic faith by using the Gothic to reveal ‘a dimension of the truth beyond our understanding’.³⁸ For Eric Savoy, this dimension of truth can be understood either theologically – as O’Connor does – as ‘salvation’ or psychoanalytically as a ‘realism of the Real’, which is characterised by its ‘resistance to symbolization’.³⁹ A lack of symbols equates to an inability to construct meaning, which inevitably weakens, if not obliterates, narrative construction. Post-war Southern Gothic that functions in such a way is characterised not by simply horrifying readers or indulging in Otherness, but rather it can be identified through a variation of what William Moss recognises in Walker Percy’s work: a subversion of motifs to the point that Percy’s ‘Gothic signifiers signify nothing’.⁴⁰

In other words, this particular post-war Southern Gothic trend shows how monstrosity is forged by a false narrative. Instead of simply inverting the Gothic and depicting the Old South’s culture as horrific and terrible, these works are also marked by a desire to dismantle the Old South’s categorisations and narratives by subverting what such a culture has repeatedly labelled as grotesque and frightening. By unsettling such categorisations, these works weaken the dominant culture’s control over the mindset of future generations as they reveal the hollowness of such attempts to paint African Americans, women, homosexuals, the poor and the disabled as threatening and uncivilised figures. To demonstrate how this use of the Gothic functions in post-war Southern Gothic literature, it is worth focusing on two exemplars: William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948) and William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness (1951). By examining these works, both Southern patriarchy’s oppression of marginalised figures and how Gothic characterisations of such figures are subverted to undermine Southern cultural norms are made starkly visible.

A ‘nightmare of doubt’: subverting the Gothic through marginal mentorship in Intruder in the Dust

Published in 1948, Intruder in the Dust received mixed reviews, with one of the few aspects that linked reviewers being that their attention was set on Gavin Stevens, the protagonist’s uncle, rather than on Charles ‘Chick’ Mallison, the novel’s 16-year-old protagonist who seeks to prove the innocence of Lucas Beauchamp, a black man wrongfully accused of murdering Vinson Gowrie, a poor white man. Writing for the New York Times, Harvey Breit declared that although the novel was ‘less than The Sound and the Fury’, it ...