Further, their way of living depended on certain values, such as family reputation or remaining chaste (as it was for the women) and slavery in the South was legal. The Southerners, in contrast, were proud of their hard work on the plantations and loved nature. Mostly, their workplace was in offices and factories. Northerners were proud of working in economically developed states. The North was industrialized, whereas the South remained agricultural.
Historical Backgroundsīefore the beginning of this chapter, the differences between the Northern (the Union) and the Southern States (the Confederacy) must be observed first. The reason Southern Gothic authors preferably chose outsiders as the heroes of their novels is because they reflect the identity of the South, which back then was an errant society. Protagonists and heroes of Southern Gothic novels are found to be outsiders in fact, people who are ‘different’ in some way, whether physically or mentally, very often because of their race, their common language or class. Authors of the Southern Gothic literature examine the harm people can do to each other through their characters, which are typically broken in life and are struggling to find a place in the world. The stories often contain dark humor as well as elements such as dialects and incongruous habits of their characters. Referring to novels written in the era, they often include villains who disguise themselves as being innocent or victims and engage with the decline of the Southern aristocracy. It especially centers on the history of slavery and the plantation of the South after the Civil War and deals with the post-war situation in society. Compared to Gothic itself, Southern Gothic focuses on social and cultural issues, such as racial suppression and violence, paying less attention to creating suspense in the stories. Typical for Southern Gothic are depressing, disturbing and deranged characters and symbols. The Southern States in the USA are those which used to belong to the Confederacy (I will clarify this later). The Southern Gothic Literature is a subgenre of Gothic fiction in American Literature taking place in the Southern States of the USA, lasting from the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865) until today. In the attachment, I will explain the backgrounds for the titles of the books. I chose these books because each two of them represent two important subjects in the literature of the Southern States: A Streetcar named Desire by Tennessee Williams and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner express the downfall of Southern nobility and the exclusion of their characters from society, Light in August, also by William Faulkner, expresses intimacy and homosexuality in the Southern States and Bastard out of Carolina from Dorothy Allison is at the same time a coming-of-age novel dealing with a childhood subjected to poverty, violence and sexual abuse. I have bought four books from the Southern Gothic Literature to present in this essay. In this essay, I will discuss the Southern Gothic Literature, the genre which To Kill a Mockingbird was written in, its historical background and respectively the political and social circumstances that have influenced it. When doing some research on the story’s background, I found the term Southern Gothic and finally understood, why To Kill a Mockingbird was on the gothic shelf among the other books. I was happy about discussing To Kill a Mockingbird in eleventh grade and became even more engrossed with its story. Its genre, I concluded, was a bit different from Gothic, the genre that the other books I had bought were written in, though it did contain a lot of gothic elements in it, like Boo Radley, who is said to be a phantom, the Ewell family, people in Maycomb with a strange behavior, or the burning house of Miss Maudie. One of the books that I bought along with the others was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I noticed that reading those books was not quite so difficult, though it was hard at first to get into the stories. I had never been interested in books from the past centuries, but since I had a long row of modern day books, I decided to buy some of them and give it a try. In the foreign language category, there were books from the past centuries, such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom of the Opera or Northanger Abbey. Big Walker Mountain, Wytheville, ViginiaĪbout two years ago, I was looking in a bookstore for new books to read.
Mother issues and desire of the Compson boys Why Southern Gothic is no longer existing in the Southern Literatureī. Typical characteristics referring to Southern GothicĦ. Defining the Southern Gothic LiteratureĪ.
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