Southern Gothic Literature is often distinguished from other genres of literature through author’s fixation on the grotesque, as well as their development of damaged, or even delusional characters. Among demonstrating these recurrent themes in “Good Country People”, Flannery O'connor focuses on the stark contrast between each character’s self proclaimed identities versus their true nature. From a judgmental character like Mrs. Hopewell uttering “Everybody is Different” (O’connor 3), to Manley Pointer pulling pornographic playing cards from his Bible, O’connor has packed her story from start to finish with irony, making the characters more memorable and the climax more shocking. But why go the lengths that O’connor, along with most other Southern Gothic Authors, has to create such intensively ironic situations? Because as unappealing as it sounds, hypocrisy is one of the most relatable human traits. When readers enter Hulga’s house, chock-full of social expectations and “self-satisfied Christian-sounding cliches” (Nielson), they immediately feel her contempt for society and begin to understand her defiant behavior. Reversely, when Mrs. Hopewell lies to Manley about there being a Bible on her nightstand,…
The Southern Gothic Period is a period in American Literature that is classified by its grotesque imagery and Deep South setting. Race, Religion, and the Civil War are all topics of criticism for…
Southern gothic is believed to be “disturbed people doing disturbing things.” In Good Country People, readers may think and analyze that the events that occur are a good form of southern gothic. Good country people is southern gothic beginning with the characters and events that happen. Beginning with Mrs. Hopewell calling her daughter Hulga because thrives and enjoys hearing ugly things. Another example is her being a hypocrite to Manley Pointer in his face when she meets him.…
Gothic literature is a type of writing that is characterized by the elements of fear, death, and gloom. Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a good example of Gothic Lit because it uses the factors of a spooky home, the weather is bad, and there is a ghost or a monster. “He suffered from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable.(18)” This sentence is tied to gothic literature because he is in a old house and he is going crazy. Therefore…
Francis Russell once said “fiction evocative of a sublime and picturesque landscape… depict(ing) a world in ruins.” Gothic fiction can be characterized by the elements of fear, horror or the supernatural. Other elements that characterize this type of fiction might include darkness mystery, or romance, lust and even dread. William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” uses a gothic setting to describe Miss Emily’s home. The upstairs and the outside of the house shows the darkness romance and lust of the setting in which she lived.…
Rooted in the American South, the genre of Southern Gothic emphasizes on grotesque aspects of life. Flannery O’Connor helped define this genre, finding ways to engrave horrors and fears into her readers’ minds. The short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “Enoch and the Gorilla,” identify as Southern Gothic because of their symbolism, setting, and character. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor utilized symbolism throughout the family’s trip to foreshadow their twisted fate.…
Relating to Gothic literature, Gothic films appropriate the subversive shudders of the eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic literature, it has for a century infiltrated popular culture increasingly taking centre stage. Some of the early gothic rock artists adopted traditional horror film images and drew on horror film soundtracks for inspiration. The common characteristics include vampires, ghosts, werewolves, bats, cobwebs, monsters, old dark houses, sublime castles, dungeons, graveyards and secret passages. The vampire embodies both life and death taking the life of others to sustain itself and in so doing living immortally, has been adopted by part of the Goth subculture as a cultural icon. Horror film fans would say that the Goth genre…
Changes are not easily made in life. To be able to change, one must be able to handle and accept the consequences that going to happen because it not only affects the person that is willing to change, but it also affects the people that surround them. Common themes that are seen to advance Southern Gothic Literature short stories are the usage of “tradition” and “interiority” as a means of getting the readers to feel sympathy for the characters that have no control of changing their fate. From gender roles to society rules, people have an appetite for control and traditions are one aspect of life that people can and will control. Traditions are beliefs/procedures that are made from one point in time and then continued and done routinely. When traditions are being challenge to change or are in the process of being changed, the ones that are accustomed the most to certain traditions being to fear of losing control of what is theirs. In the short stories by Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson, both authors show that some traditions are found to be helpful and advantageous while others are poor and…
This can be seen in many ways, writers of Southern Gothic show the image of the South as a…
Murder, horror, gore; these are just a few of the elements that fuel the Southern Gothic genre. Flannery O’Connor, a prominent 20th century author and writer of thirty-two short stories, was a well-known proponent of Southern Gothic literature. Her short stories not only highlight the macabre, but instill unease within readers, two purposes aided by the usage of irony, symbolism, and theme.…
Southern Gothic literature has many of the same aspects as Gothic literature; Southern Gothic literature, which is a sub-genre of the Gothic writing style, is unique to the American South. It focuses on topics such as death, madness, and the super natural as well has having many mystical, bizarre, violent, and grotesque aspects. Gothic literature has left a deep impression to the people. Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O'Connor wrote stories filled with grotesque characters, violence, and bizarre situations. They made Southern Gothic unique and attracting to readers. These tools are used "to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South…
Authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Faulkner have presented gothic literature throughout their writing during the 18th and 19th centuries. Gothic literature is defined as a "distinct modern development in which the characteristic theme is the stranglehold of the past upon the present"(294 Drabble and Stringer).Therefore, to deliver this theme to their readers they used gothic elements to create a "dark" sensation especially in the area of setting. All three authors in their literature portray accursed or decaying settings that are associated to violence, poverty, and human behavior. It appears authors like Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner were drawn to this elements of Gothicism for what it revealed about human psychology…
Flannery O’Connor was one of the most known authors for writing southern gothic short stories. Southern gothic became a style of writing in the wake of the civil war and brought up questions in society like, ‘Why is violence such a large part of the south’s culture?’ and, ‘How did the South have such a hard time picking itself up after its defeat in the war?’ Southern gothic is usually decayed, grotesque, or derelict settings and situations and had themes of ambivalent gender roles, poverty, alienation, crime or violence. The use of O’Connor’s characters shows the entertaining but subverts the expected while also bringing up issues like the civil rights movement and gender roles in the style of Southern Gothic…
The natural world, is the environment that directly torments and haunts the pages in nearly all American Gothic tales, that is the thesis in which Matthew Sivils present to us in his essay, American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-Present (121). Throughout his essay he goes on to explain how different Authors use this idea to construct their stories, but there is also a deeper, more political view on why we fear, the environment. That reason is because nature cannot be controlled, and the American dream is to control and dominate all which surrounds it in the hopes to exploit and manipulate it for personal uses to gain power…
There are points in a person’s life when they must grow, drop their naïve illusions about the world and step into the shoes of an adult and accept the harsh reality of life. Jasper Jones is a ‘coming of age’ novel written by Craig Silvey set in small town Corrogan. With the main theme being right of passage or coming of age. Jasper Jones has been compared to a Southern Gothic Genre story. Using the narrative conventions of characterisation, setting and language elements of Jasper Jones will be shown to have a connection to the Southern Gothic Genre.…