Southern Gothic [Gothic Americana]

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Wednesday, 05 December 2018

genres and subgenres

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction in American literature that takes place in the American South.

Those Poor Bastards

Common themes in Southern Gothic literature include deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, ambivalent gender roles, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence. Due to the era that many of these stories were written, many include very racist elements and themes.

Origins

Elements of a Gothic treatment of the South were apparent in the 19th century, ante- and post-bellum, in the grotesques of Henry Clay Lewis and the de-idealized visions of Mark Twain. The genre came together, however, only in the 20th century, when dark romanticism, Southern humor, and the new literary naturalism merged into a new and powerful form of social critique. The thematic material was largely a result of the culture existing in the South following the collapse of the Confederacy. It left a vacuum in both values and religion that became filled with poverty due to defeat in the Civil war and reconstruction, racism, excessive violence, and hundreds of different denominations resulting from the theological divide that separated the country over the issue of slavery.

Sixteen Horsepower

The term “Southern Gothic” was originally used as pejorative and dismissive. Ellen Glasgow used the term in this way when she referred to the writings of Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner. She included the authors in what she called the “Southern Gothic School” in 1935, stating that their work was filled with “aimless violence” and “fantastic nightmares.” It was so negatively viewed at first that Eudora Welty said, “They better not call me that!”

Characteristics

The Southern Gothic style employs macabre, ironic events to examine the values of the American South. Thus unlike its parent genre, it uses the Gothic tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South – Gothic elements often taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one.

Warped rural communities replaced the sinister plantations of an earlier age; and in the works of leading figures such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, the representation of the South blossomed into an absurdist critique of modernity as a whole.

There are many characteristics in Southern Gothic Literature that relate back to its parent genre of American Gothic and even to European Gothic. However, the setting of these works are distinctly Southern. Some of these characteristics are exploring madness, decay and despair, continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with the lost ideals of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy and continued racial hostilities.

Southern Gothic particularly focuses on the South’s history of slavery, racism, fear of the outside world, violence, a “fixation with the grotesque, and a tension between realistic and supernatural elements”.

Similar to the elements of the Gothic castle, Southern Gothic gives us the decay of the plantation in the post-Civil War South.

Villains who disguise themselves as innocents or victims are often found in Southern Gothic Literature, especially stories by Flannery O’Connor, such as Good Country People and The Life You Save May Be Your Own, giving us a blurred line between victim and villain.

Southern Gothic literature set out to expose the myth of old antebellum South, and its narrative of an idyllic past hidden by social, familial, and racial denials and suppressions.

Southern Gothic (also known as Gothic Americana, or Dark Country) is a genre of music characterized by a fusion of alternative rock and classic country/folk. The genre shares thematic connections with the Southern Gothic genre of literature, and indeed the parameters of what makes something Gothic Americana appears to have more in common with literary genres than traditional musical ones. Songs often examine poverty, criminal behavior, religious imagery, death, ghosts, family, lost love, alcohol, murder, the devil and betrayal.

Artists
16 Horsepower
Big John Bates: Noirchestra
Bob Dylan
Bonnie Prince Billy
Boondox
Brown Bird
Panther Burns
Calexico (band)
Johnny Cash (later work on American Recordings)
Slim Cessna’s Auto Club
Vic Chesnutt
Dorthia Cottrell
The Cramps
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nicole Dollanganger
Dr. John
Drive-By Truckers
Drivin N Cryin
Tav Falco
Bobbie Gentry
The Gun Club
The Handsome Family
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Iron & Wine
Cotton Jones
Legendary Shack Shakers
Mark Linkous
Lydia Lunch
Julie Mintz
Jay Munly
Murder by Death
Old Crow Medicine Show
Will Oldham
Kid Congo Powers
Delta Rae
James Ray (rock musician)
Dax Riggs
Thayer Sarrano
Smog
Sparklehorse
Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter
Dan Tyminski
Adia Victoria
Mirel Wagner
Jim White
Hank Williams III

Photographic representation

The images of Great Depression photographer Walker Evans are frequently seen to evoke the visual depiction of the Southern Gothic; Evans claimed: “I can understand why Southerners are haunted by their own landscape”.

Another noted Southern Gothic photographer was surrealist, Clarence John Laughlin, who photographed cemeteries, plantations, and other abandoned places throughout the American South (primarily Louisiana) for nearly 40 years.

Postmodern pastiche

The Builders and the Butchers

William Gibson took an ironic look at the cult of “Southernness” in his novel Virtual Light. Rydell, the stolid, southern antihero, is looking for a job at an LA shop called Nightmare Folk Art—Southern Gothic. The (northern) owner says he finds Rydell unsuitable: “What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality….The Mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality”.

Put out by finding himself not southern enough for this New Englander, “‘Lady,’ Rydell said carefully, ‘I think you’re crazier than a sack full of assholes.’ Her eyebrows shot up. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There what?’ ‘Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.'”