The Gothic School

The underdevelopment of the rural South, caught between atavism and progress, that resulted from its uneven relationship to the industrial development that was more rapidly modernizing other parts of the nation, also informed a school of Southern fiction that was historically labeled the Gothic School. This mode predominantly represented the South's small rural communities, where provincial life appeared to operate at a visibly slower pace than that of the national-historical time (Bakhtin) with which a Bildungsheld must become synchronized. The Southern Gothic registered the South's sublime elements, including its rural vistas, but accentuated the liminal, uncanny, and grotesque social, economic, and political dimensions of geographical affiliation, creating the visage of a “peasant” region operating both within and without national-historical time. Often focusing on rural and remote places where the Depression had impoverished the local economy, where opportunities for education were limited, Southern women's writing accentuated the region's “contorted and fragmented bodies,” as Sarah Gleeson-White explains, establishing the basis of what she calls the Southern grotesque as opposed to gothic (“Peculiarly Southern,” 46). Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers deferred to these textual strategies of estrangement to acknowledge “a tragic history in which they have partaken, even in silence,” whether by perpetuating the South's “burdensome models of femininity” or by overlooking slavery's “tragic legacy and a literally fatal regional patriotism” (46). Southern women's “domestic” literature often welded “the ‘trivial’ and the ‘historical’” through such depictions of “throwaway bodies in an economy based on white privilege, a national epistemology of racial unknowing,” so as to “stir up new ways of thinking about labor and object relations” across different regional codes, Yaeger adds (Dirt, 254).

All Southern writers, according to McCullers, regardless of the authors’ “politics, [or] the degree or non-degree of liberalism in a Southern writer,” inherited a “peculiar regionalism of language and voices and foliage and memory” that bound authors to a “homeland within a homeland” (“Books I Remember,” 515). Yet, McCullers's emphasis on the unsettling paradoxes of regionality through such juxtapositions as Yaeger and Gleeson-White observe, situated her novels in a “genre of writing” that was “sufficiently homogenous” by the 1940s for “critics to label it ‘the Gothic School’” (McCullers “Russian Realists,” 471).