3.3 - Gothic and the American South, 1919‒1962

Summary

This chapter explores the significance of Gothic to an emergent American modernist aesthetic, surveying a range of current theories of Gothic and focusing particularly on the legacies of slavery and the politics of segregation in the American South, but also evoking other historical traumas. European modernism is conventionally understood largely to have disavowed Gothic romance; by contrast, under the influence of William Faulkner and others, the particular strand of fiction associated with the Southern Literary Renaissance developed Gothic motifs into a distinctive idiom through which to explore themes of otherness and difference and to reflect on the significance of the individual and collective past, in depictions both disavowing and incorporating everyday deviance amid a society of social taboos against miscegenation, incest, homosexuality that were everywhere symbolically enforced though commonly violated in practice. In doing so, and in developing an ambivalent, paradoxical body of writings that might best be described as ‘modernist regional Gothic’, such writers as Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor took Gothic in a radically new direction.