Southern Gothic

I have decided to write about the Southern Gothic since it completely caught my attention in classes due to the fact that it is an entirely new topic for me as I related Gothic with architecture, painting and literature, but I wasn't aware of the existance of this subgenre in literature.

First of all, Southern Gothic is a literary tradition which appeared in the early stage of the twentieth century and it is rooted in the Gothic style, meaning it is a subgenre of the gothic novel, with the particularity that it is exclusive of American literature. Albeit, as a subgenre, it shares similarities such as the use of ironic, bizarre and/or paranormal or supernatural events; it has several features that separates it from Gothic, owing to the fact that Southern Gothic uses those elements not only with the purpose of creating and setting a suspense or tensional atmosphere, but also to show and describe the socio-cultural nature of the south of America.

In addition to this, other features of Southern Gothic are the "grotesque", which has to do with going beyond the limits and distorting or altering them, meaning that something grotesque is between real and fiction  and at the same time linked with tragicomedy; the use of "deeply flawed" characters for the sake of spotting bitter aspects of the Southern culture; and, the attraction to describe the radical and antisocial behaviors which come up as a response to the social code. Some of the writers who explore in this subgenre are William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, among others. 

Moreover, as William Faulkner was one of the writers who explored this subgenre, we can find certain elements previously mentioned in his short story, A Rose for Emily, in the sense that the settings create this atmosphere of suspense with this old big mansion, the decadence of the character and that smell of putrefaction which suggests that something mysterious was happening there. Finally, we can also distinguish the damaged character, Emily, and her isolation due to the social code imposed which caused her mental instability, and afterwards the necrophilia, that led her to kill Homer and transgress the limits by sleeping with the corpse, turning into a symbolic and emblem Southern gothic heroine.

All in all, Southern Gothic was highly influential on Faulkner's writing, as we can notice in his short stories, making him one of the most representative authors of this subgenre, mixing the traditional aspects of Gothic with the socio-cultural critic to the South.