Southern Gothic is an American subgenre of the Gothic style, probably most familiar to you from the Brontë sisters of Victorian England. (No, we’re not talking about Hot Topic here.) Like its European ancestor, Southern Gothic relies heavily on the supernatural, just with less “Oh, Heathcliffe!” and more “Oh no, racism!” (Unlike gothic novels, southern gothic novels are more interested in uncovering social crimes and injustice than being dark for the sake of being dark.) Grotesque elements are also common to both genres, but can take the form of actual bodily blood or just grossly flawed characters. that they are somehow tolerable enough to remain interesting. (See also: “Oh, Heathcliffe!”)
William Faulkner is known to have been especially good with the Southern Gothic style, and many American children have been reading his haunting and sickening “A Rose for Emily” since high school. Beginning with a funeral and ending with the discovery of a decades-old corpse, this short story traces the life of Miss Emily Grierson, the recently deceased village spinster. It turned out that her father was a bit overbearing, and while we don’t know if any abuse was involved, let’s just say that she couldn’t exactly break her curfew until she was 35 years old. When the old man finally meets her maker, Emily refuses to admit he’s dead or leave the house for three days, which wouldn’t be so creepy if her decomposing body wasn’t still in it.
The even creepier part, though, is that this isn’t the same dead body that turns up at Emily’s house at the end of the book; that one belonged to her short-term ex-boyfriend, who drank it, dined it, and tried to rescue her a few years after her father’s death. Boy, did he pick the wrong woman. While Emily is clearly insane, her father’s mistreatment of her and the resulting psychological damage from her make her a sympathetic character. So sympathetic, in fact, that the townspeople help cover up the murder by spreading whitewash around her house when she starts to stink. (YOU WON’T BE MY NEIGHBOR!) So let’s recap how “A Rose for Emily” compares to a Southern Gothic novel. Death? Check. Injustice? Check. The grotesque? Double check. A terrifying lockdown with a mysterious past in an apparently haunted house? Mate.
Now that we have an idea of what gender is, let’s do a little comparison. One of America’s most widely read and beloved Southern Gothic novels is To Kill a Mockingbird, which chronicles Scout and Jem Finch’s shy childhood interactions with local social outcast, Boo Radley. You may not find this book particularly gothic, especially if you grew up wanting to befriend Jem and Scout (and possibly even Boo), or have Atticus as a parent, but technically speaking, it fits the bill. Let’s take a look at those criteria again.
- The supernatural. Granted, Mockingbird isn’t exactly supernatural, but told through the eyes of a terrified six-year-old, it might as well be. A scary guy locked up in his house for decades because he probably stabbed his dad in the leg with scissors? It’s not natural, that’s for sure. The only thing stopping Boo from becoming a full-fledged Emily Grierson is the fact that she’s not hiding any bodies that we know of.
- Injustice. hello boy! Almost every character in the novel is at least somewhat racist, including our lovely narrator from time to time. The plot centers on the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man who is wrongly accused, and ultimately convicted, of raping a white woman, who fabricated the story to hide her infatuation with Tom from an abusive father. When Tom tries to escape from prison, he is shot at no less than seventeen times. You know, just in case.
- the grotesque. While To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t gory, some of the characters in it can be downright gross. Ms. Dubose is a great example of a grotesque character; She’s a humorless old freak with an unnecessarily possessive attitude towards her camellias, but since we later find out that she’s trying to kick a nasty morphine addiction, we end up feeling a little bad for her. Sometimes a drug habit or an overbearing parent is all it takes.
So while the two stories may seem vastly different at first glance, they share a particular blend of gothic elements that allows them to unglamorously explore the social and cultural issues of the South, whether it be racism and bigotry or simply the obsolescence of “Beauty of the South”. “dating approach. You decide which one is scarier.