Southern Gothic writers love, just love, commenting on social issues-social issues that pertain to Southern society, that is. Have a look at this excerpt (Quote #5) depicting his death. Guizac, one of the protagonists of Flannery O'Connor's story "The Displaced Person," dies in a pretty grotesque way. William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" ends with the discovery of a corpse in Ms. The war itself was a pretty grotesque experience, and it lived on in people's memories for a very long time, so it's really no wonder that we see elements of that grotesqueness in the work of Southern Gothic writers. Secondly, Southern Gothic writers were writing about a defeated society: the South is the part of the country that lost the Civil War. No, seriously: these folks are into things like incest, decomposing bodies, castration, and lot more.Īre Southern Gothic writers just weird? What gives? Well, for one thing, Southern Gothic literature is partly inspired by Gothic literature, which is all about horror and spooky stuff. Southern Gothic writers have a pretty kinky taste for the macabre and the grotesque.
Southern-gothic-kafka-and-moby-dick-moby-dick-music In this quotation (Quote #6), Big Daddy wakes up to an ironic truth: he can't actually escape his mortality. Check out this character's story here.īig Daddy Pollitt in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof tries to ignore his own mortality by acquiring huge amounts of wealth. The irony is that he ends up marrying a woman who is part black. Thomas Sutpen, in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, spends his whole life trying to prove that he's better than black people. Southern Gothic writers deal with the irony of Southern history by writing about characters and events whose lives are shaped by irony. This was a region that had been extremely wealthy and powerful for much of its history, thanks to slavery, but the South's defeat in the Civil War meant that this once super-powerful and super-wealthy region found itself, well, permanently down in the dumps. This partly has to do with the history of the South.
Gothic literature motifs full#
Southern Gothic literature is full of irony. That would be like if a story about a tea party with stuffed animals ended with a high-speed car chase and dramatic rooftop shoot-out. That's when the plot of a story takes the characters (and us readers) somewhere totally unexpected-in fact, the opposite of where you'd expect things to end up. In literature, there's also what you could call an ironic turn of events. It's like saying, "That fedora is totally hot," when what you really mean is, "That fedora is totally fugs." First, there's what you could call an ironic use of language: that's when an author (or a character) says the opposite of what he or she means. Irony is a word that gets thrown around a lot (we're looking at you, Alanis), but what does it actually mean? Well, in literature, it can mean a couple of things. It deals with a whole range of themes, from society and class to family. Explore why it made such a splash here.įlannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a classic Southern Gothic short story. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is one of the most famous (and awesome) novels in the Southern Gothic tradition. Williams was a playwright, and though a lot of his work deals with familiar Southern Gothic themes-decay, for instance, is a big one in his work-he mostly wrote, well, plays. The most famous works of Southern Gothic literature are novels like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as well as short stories like Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" or Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."Īs always, there's totally an important exception: Tennessee Williams. For one thing, Southern Gothic is partly inspired by Gothic literature, and most Gothic literature was also written as prose fiction. Southern Gothic is most closely associated with prose fiction, as in novels and short stories.
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