![]() ![]() The stories are rarely so sensationally flavoured the Southern Gothic is an undertaste, a taint. She said, ‘It can be summed up in these words: “On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.”’ The novelist Pat Conroy once quoted his mother on the subject of southern literature. Squint your eyes to see the family resemblance: small town life that harbours secrets and crimes flawed, disturbed and outcast characters decaying settings that suggest decayed values, especially hypocrisy and complicity and aberrant behaviour that runs from murder to madness to incest, stopping all stations. These authors’ works seem a mixed bag, but literary categories are always a mixed bag what matters is what they have in common. From Glasgow’s lightly tossed insult, a whole tradition sprang up. Thinking harder on it, critics and PhD candidates found distinguished precursors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Subsequently, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, Beth Henley, Cormac McCarthy and Anne Rice were added. More than just Caldwell and Faulkner, it seemed to capture an entire school of fine southern writers in its net: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy. The phrase caught on, as usefully descriptive phrases do, though those who subsequently used it rarely used it disparagingly. Wishing to deflate the respect these novels had attained from Yankee critics, Glasgow argued that they were no more than a throwback to the lurid, sensational novels of the English Romantic period, being too preoccupied with ‘aimless violence’ and ‘fantastic nightmares.’ Thus she categorised them as ‘Southern Gothic.’ She singled out Erskine Caldwell, author of, among other excrescences, a best-selling novel about miserable sharecroppers Tobacco Road, and William Faulkner, whose series of experimental novels set in the mythical Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, included The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Light in August. Her novels were very popular in her day and, in 1935, in her capacity as elder spokeswoman for the literature of her region, she disparaged a type of writing that created a negative impression of the South. A proud Virginian, Mary Glasgow was a writer of an earlier, more gentile generation, whose pen did not dwell too long on guilt and misery. It began as an insult – or at least a term of dismissal – from one American novelist to certain of her fellows. There’s something very warm and generous about those regional American writers… and it seems to be a literary ilk that would lend itself well to the Australian condition.’ Craig Silvey was onto something when he borrowed narrative tropes and themes from the Southern Gothic novelists he admired. ‘I’ve always been attracted to Southern Gothic fiction. ![]()
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