Last month, Lisa Mahoney and Amanda Baldeneaux discussed what qualifies a work as part of the Southern Gothic tradition through an exploration of short stories. This month, they go deeper into the swamps and dereliction of old mansions and towns, exploring grotesque and questionable characters through Southern Gothic novels. Get your EMF readers ready, because we can’t talk about Southern Gothic novels without spending time with a few ghosts. Note: each of these discussions includes minor spoilers.
Lisa: Horror & Gothicism in Toni Morrison's Beloved
The finest literature in this genre employs Southern Gothic elements to highlight the cultural and historical abominations underpinning its characters’ experience. These profoundly individual tragedies evoke empathy in readers separated by space and time from the story’s setting. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved is arguably the pinnacle of the new Southern Gothic, a literary masterpiece set against the monstrous yet true horrors inflicted upon former slaves and their loved ones. The ghosts of family and friends abused and murdered by slaveowners linger, like a mental scarring, and prevent the former slaves from loving too much. As slaves, they had to protect themselves from forming too-strong attachments to lovers and children whom their owners might have sold off for any reason, any day.
As the story opens, Sethe and her daughter are living in isolation in a house haunted by a violent murder. Into this bloody light walks not Sethe’s missing husband, but a man who knew her while enslaved and who shares much of her terrible history. In the process of driving out the house’s petulant ghost, he generates a malevolent spirit, but when he learns of Sethe’s horrible choice, he cannot accept or forgive her at first. He doesn’t understand the extremes of mother-love and self-sacrifice, after all. How could he, never having experienced it; but if not he, then whoever could?
Other Southern Gothic elements include the infertility and grotesque sexual proclivities of the male slaveowners; Sethe’s overwhelming fear that she or her children will be dragged back into slavery by agents of the former ruling class; and the decay and devastation of the post-Civil War South, just across the river. Separated as we are from that era, the novel’s warnings are still relevant today, and its themes universal: grief and loss, choosing to love fearlessly, the ferocious power of maternal love, and clinging to the freedom which can allow healing to begin.
Amanda: Haunted by Failure in M.O. Walsh's My Sunshine Away
I hesitated to pick up a book that centers on a boy’s recollection of a young girl’s rape. But this narrator takes a surprising turn, recounting Lindy Simpson’s process of dealing with trauma as he navigates his own coming-of-age story. Our narrator transitions from puberty into adulthood, awakening to the horrors of the world, with the recognition that our power structure makes existence harder and more frightening for girls and women. The narrator uses Lindy's story to advocate the urgency for greater equality, sensitivity, and openness, a lesson painfully lacking in a world where #MeToo is a necessary movement.
Gothic elements in the book center on the narrator’s mental time travel to his childhood to relive and redo moments of importance or that he regrets. His childhood was idyllic—in his mind—but after Lindy’s rape, everything falls into irreparable ruin, reminiscent of the fallen families in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Clytie.” Like a good Poe tale, the unreliable narrator leaves us questioning if he’s contorting the story to gain sympathy and prove his innocence in Lindy’s rape, or to alleviate his guilt for committing the crime. His memories of Baton Rouge in 1989 bear the veneer of perfection, but the rape blows apart the idealized Southern town, life, and family. It reveals cracks that had been present all along: abusive marriages, misogyny, classism, and racism. Oppressive Louisiana heat overlays the novel, the swampiness of muck and mosquitoes, and the swampiness of memory. Writers of Southern stories who disdain their subject are easy to spot, but Walsh loves his setting in all its contradictions and complexities. The narrator defends his home against stereotypes, decrying a South often portrayed as “monstrous,” when in truth, it is a microcosm of the larger U.S., with its country-wide endemic of ugly history, persistent prejudices and power structures, and its strange obsessions with sports and celebrities.
A story of change and its aftermath, the novel starts as a love story between a boy and his neighbor, but ends as a love letter to his unborn child. The narrator evolves to see Lindy's trauma and how he failed her as a friend, and therefore failed in truly loving her. Rather than wallow in his failures, the narrator uses them to explain to his unborn son why it’s critical to make real connections with people, to listen to them, and to be there, even if you don’t fully understand what they’re going through. In other words, don’t center yourself: a critical lesson for white America and its revisionist history. And that’s the most Gothic element of all: if we fail to look our mistakes in the eye and own up to how we’ve wronged others, we’re doomed to a broken, isolated existence without healing, where wounds fester forever.
Lisa: Lost in the Labyrinth in William Gay's Twilight
Strong in noir elements, Twilight by William Gay is pure speculative fiction: Southern Gothic supported by a heroic journey. The teenage protagonist, Tyler, is pushed to undertake coming-of-age flight into a mythic Underworld (a dense, dark, dangerous forest called The Harrikin) where he struggles to bring two warped villains to justice. The first sinner is a Southern Gothic grotesque: a twisted, rich, necrophiliac undertaker who sexually abuses the dead and steals their valuables. The second villain is Sutter, hired to kill Tyler before he can reveal the truth about the mortician.
Here, our Gothic labyrinth is the Harrikin, a tangled wood of trails circling nowhere, populated by hermits and ghosts of those oppressed by capitalists and slaveowners. Tyler’s desperation drives him in there where mining shafts are abandoned, railroad lines are grown over. Graves of miners and slaves are robbed and gaping. Tyler tries to help the strange, isolated Harrikin folk hindering Sutter, who sinks into madness destroying these innocent and not-so-innocent recluses. One of the folk Tyler encounters is a classic Gothic maniac: a drink-crazed, religion-babbling and abusive farmer-father. A black-clad “old witch woman” cooking over a fire sells spells, hexes, and fortunes; she disappears just before Sutter can attack her. Scenes open and close with beautifully-written, unearthly nightmarescapes referencing Greek mythology, and northern European folktale creatures, myths, and fairytales. On the balcony of an abandoned, crumbling plantation, Sutter sees the ghosts of rich whites dancing to music carried on the wind. Are these ghosts memories, hallucinations, or real?
Amanda: Into the Underworld in Karen Russell's Swamplandia!
The setting of Swamplandia! seems, on first blush, the most Gothic element about the novel. Swamplandia! the park is an alligator-wrestling spectacle, its heydey sometime before the influx of Internet or cellphones. On an island in the Florida Everglades, the park is cut off from “mainlanders,” full of monstrous alligators and one bear, and surrounded—it would seem—by ghosts. Like My Sunshine Away, Swamplandia! is a story of childhood. Ava Bigtree looks back on her 13th year, Swamplandia!’s demise, her forced transition to the mainland, and her family's disastrous family fall from their own brand of Southern aristocracy, again like in "Usher" or "Clytie."
The novel traces how each member of the Bigtree family handle the death of its beloved matriarch, and specifically, how handling their grief in isolation leads to their downfall and expulsion from their private Eden. Ava’s older brother, Kiwi, goes to work at a rival themed attraction, The World of Darkness, a hell-park where families with young children swim in blood-red pools and slide down tubes of pretend-whale guts into pits. (Fun!) Ava’s sister, Ossie, decides that loving the dead is easier than staying with the living, and runs off to date a dredgeboat ghost. Even their father, "Chief" Bigtree, in his faux-Native headdress, defects and leaves the kids to their own devices, with tragic consequences. With no father or big brother around, Ava sets out with the reclusive Bird Man to save Ossie from crossing in to the Underworld.
These two grotesques, Chief Bigtree and the Bird Man, are even more Gothic than the swamp. Samuel Bigtree is an aging white man wearing a headdress while ignoring the actual Native Americans who populate the Everglades. The Bird Man wears a coat covered in buzzard feathers, hides in trees, and is completely divorced from society in a [big spoiler!] fake-wise-man-but-actually-just-a-rapist-way. I’m skeeved out even thinking about him now. I’m even more weirded out thinking about the novel's missed opportunity around rape; but perhaps that’s another element of the grotesque. The book is, at heart, a coming of age story, but instead of her own sexual awakening, Ava is subjected to everyone else’s sexuality. Like Eudora Welty's Clytie, Ava gets zero control of her entry into puberty, a too-common element of a culture that dismisses women’s sexual self-ownership.
Yet like many Gothic heroines, she does discover the secrets that bound her family together—a different kind of awakening. The biggest lie she uncovers is the notion that the Bigtrees (or any man) had dominion over nature. Their “wrestling” of alligators was a series of tricks and holds to put the alligators to sleep; their swamp home, a failed attempt at farming the rich, drowned soil. The Bigtrees share culpability for the degradation of the swamp: wiping out bird populations, driving out Native Americans, killing women over expensive alligator hides. The quest to rule the swamp is populated by death, destruction, and lies, and ultimately the swamp wins, evicting the Bigtrees to the mainland. There, instead of alligators, they have only their grief, relationships, and growing up to wrestle; all of it a mucky, grotesque business that can only be truly mastered with honesty and a willingness to feel the humanity of hurt.
Lisa: Bluebeard's Legacy in Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom
Welty's novel could be slotted into any number of genres. It's Southern frontier tall tale, set in a still-settling 1800s New Orleans: a wild romp through absurd plot twists and wild exaggerations accepted by the characters as part and parcel. Wanted bandits plot to catch each other for bounties. The famous Mike Fink tells of being eaten by a giant alligator and using a persimmon tree to get out. More insane is the premise that Rosamond, the cheerful and lovely daughter of Clement the plantation owner, could fall in love with a highwayman who raped her and run away to live with him in his den of thieves.
Then again, The Robber Bridgegroom reads like a Shakespearean comedy of mixed-up identities. Characters wrongly informed of their loved ones' deaths undertake desperate acts, and unlikely lovers forgive each other's tresspasses to be happily reunited. Clement tries to marry his daughter Rosamond to Jamie Lockhart, whom he believes is a respectable New Orleans businessman, while Jamie, disguised as a robber, is living in sin with Rosamond not far away.
The kindly Clement, blind to the evil of Rosamond's stepmother, and the dangerous forest full of wolves read like a fairy tale. Jamie is a woman-charming Odin, with his black raven, disguises, and trickster ways. Like most fairy tales, the story is patently didactic: Rosamond and Jamie suffer when lying and keeping secrets, and only after they quit can they can live happily together in the real world.
But ultimately, the novel belongs the Southern Gothic genre. The local elite are granted their land by real, Spanish aristocrats and build an economy of privilege on the backs of slaves and poor whites, yet no wealth satisfies the greedy stepmother. In this antebellum world, Native Americans have not quite been expelled from their lush homeland, but they are a vengeful, mysterious, and mistreated lower class: their women are taken and abused, their holy ground misused, and although they are doomed, it is they who kill the evil stepmother and end the mayhem.
Amanda: Death's Waiting Sword in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel I’m sure everyone else read in high school, but one I kept missing. Finished, my life feels emptier for not having read it sooner.
Our narrator Janie carries us from her early childhood with her grandmother, Nanny, and a white family, through her third marriage and widowhood, and recollects the long road toward the freedom to make her own choices. Her tale unfurls in Hurston’s 1930’s America, when racial tensions cut deep between white and black Americans, and between black Americans based on skin shade. Learning she isn't white is the first absurd social construct Janie recounts: as a child, she believed herself no different than the family she lived with. Then she's shown a photograph of herself with the other children, and laughed at for not recognizing herself.
Racial tensions are a recurring element in Southern Gothic, usually through white authors presenting the absurdity and ugliness that racism produces in the white characters who practice it. In Hurston’s novel, the black community is also prejudiced, with preferences for skin tones and classism creating dangerous discord. After her grandmother spots Janie kissing a boy over a fence, Nanny marries her off to an elderly farmer with icky feet he refuses to wash. She assures Janie that she will grow to love him, but Janie realizes Nanny just wanted to get her “taken care of." After Nanny’s death, Janie runs away with Jodie, who buys her new dresses and wants her to act as a decorous mayor’s wife in Eatonville, the African-American town in Florida he helps found. Janie lives smothered by Jodie's expectations: like the sexual clipping Ava experiences in Swamplandia!, Jodie's patriarchal norms prevent Janie from real self-discovery. The day Jodie dies, Janie finally feels free. She meets Tea Cake, the first man she feels real, equal love for. Unfortunately, life with an imbalance of power between man and God doesn’t often afford happy endings.
Janie’s story, like Ava’s, examines humanity’s struggles against the forces of fate and nature, as well as against the suffocating constructs we set up ourselves. In Janie’s Florida, the world, the sea, death and God are mythic, monstrous, elemental beings: the lake is a monster that gets up and walks during hurricanes, death is a square-toed being holding a giant sword, the sun leaves footprints on the sky. Life is a tree, with “dawn and doom” on its branches, and in contrast to the white former aristocrats who cling to their lineage, the African American community “is branches without roots," which "makes things come round in queer ways.”
Janie, like Jodie, is committed to “rooting herself,” but while Janie wants to root with freedoms equal to men's, Jodie wants to become a new aristocrat-mayor-businessman: "They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down."
Like other fallen families of the Southern Gothic, Jodie dies childless, his widow pleased to let him go as easily as she did Nanny. Despite their promises of post-slavery freedom, Jodie and Nanny both ultimately denied Janie autonomy. Yet Janie’s story still ends hopefully:
Tea Cake, the son of Evening Sun, had to die for loving her. She looked hard at the sky for a long time. Somewhere up there beyond blue ether’s bosom sat He. Was He noticing what was going on around here? He must be because He knew everything. Did He mean to do this thing to Tea Cake and her? It wasn’t anything she could fight. She could only ache and wait.
Additional Southern Lit Reading Recommendations:
- The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson
- Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
- Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
- Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown
- Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy
- Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
- Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
- Beware the Wild by Natalie C. Parker
- Boy's Life by Robert McCammon
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson
Join us in June when we read the newly released The Past is Never and speak with author Tiffany Quay Tyson! What are your favorite speculative southern literature or southern gothic novels? Let us know in the comments.
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