Chapter 1 - War and Diseases of Despair in Gothic Appalachian Literature

Summary

Wars and diseases of despair are neither uniquely Appalachian nor southern nor American, but they are decidedly gothic. As Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffan Hantke indicate, “The Gothic […] thrived in its infancy, in times of war” and from “the atrocities of the French Revolution” to “the Napoleonic Wars,” warfare “provided a steady background noise to the development of the genre.” Moreover, Carol Davison argues that ever since its earliest iterations “the Gothic and addiction go virtually hand-in-glove.” While the war gothic and what Davison terms, “Gothic pharmography,” cannot be claimed by any one subgenre of the gothic, Appalachia's complex role in the Civil War where many communities held divided loyalties between the Union and Confederacy, its high percentage of military personnel, and the propensity for diseases of despair where poverty and limited job opportunities can result in high addiction levels, mean both the war gothic and gothic pharmography recur across the region's literature. Appalachian authors commonly turn to Civil War ghosts, traumatized war veterans, zombie-like drug addicts, and vampiric Big Pharma, as they present a region that, according to Stephen J. Scanlan, is “‘mined’ for its citizens in the same way it has been mined for coal,” a region highly susceptible to the machinations of Big Pharma and military recruitment.

For Monnet and Hantke, the Civil War gothic largely emerged after 1865, and as Leigh M. McLennon explains, typically, “The history of the Civil War is often framed through narratives that posit binaries about slavery versus freedom, the North versus the South and, correspondingly, good versus evil.” However, such binaries do not hold up in many parts of Appalachia. As Kenneth W. Noe notes, one of the many misapprehensions of Appalachia is that the region was almost “totally Unionist,” a stereotype “rejected […] by modern Appalachian historians” who have revealed the region also had a significant Confederate population. At the same time, George McKinney explains, across the region “the majority of mountaineers resisted the move to create a separate Southern nation,” a “sentiment” that “was strongest in East Tennessee, northwestern Virginia, western Maryland, and southeastern Kentucky” where a commitment to the Confederacy was not immediately guaranteed.