Southern Gothic literature brings the Gothic genre to the American South, often addressing past issues and focusing on damaged characters. It highlights the plight of those oppressed by traditional Southern culture and is limited to a certain geographic space. Notable authors include Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner.
The Southern Gothic movement in literature brings the feel and sensibility of Gothic, a genre originating in late 18th-century England, to the American South. Just as early Gothic writers used the genre in part to critique what they saw as the moral blindness of the medieval era, so Southern Gothic writers address their own past through Gothic tropes. This genre is unusual as a genre in that it is significantly limited to a certain geographic space. Many of the 20th century’s most notable American authors wrote in this tradition, and the genre can also be seen in music and film.
Southern Gothic literature draws on the traditions of the broader Gothic genre, which typically includes supernatural elements, mental illness, and the grotesque. Much literature in this genre, however, avoids the supernatural and instead deals with disturbed personalities. It is known for its damaged and delusional characters, such as the heroines of Tennessee Williams comedies. Instead of perpetuating fictionalized stereotypes of the antebellum Southern, Southern Gothic literature often brings the stock characters of Gothic melodrama and novels into a Southern context to make a point about Southern mores.
Southern Gothic literature is often concerned with the plight of those ostracized or oppressed by traditional Southern culture: blacks, women, and gays, for example. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is about a clearly innocent black man who is convicted of rape and killed simply because of his race. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee William (1948) reinvents the Southern belle as a pretentious and mentally unstable woman, and her Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) portrays the favorite son of a Southern dynasty as a repressed homosexual whose alcoholism threatens her marriage. William Faulkner’s oft-anthologized “A Rose for Emily” (1930) brings the recurring gothic theme of unrequited love leading to madness to a Southern city where disapproving residents narrate with one voice. Other notable writers in the tradition include Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Truman Capote.
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