It’s easy to romanticize the South. We see it often in film. Beautiful trees dripping with Spanish moss. Pristine homes with sweeping porches and glittering white facades that open to acres of lush greenery. Quaint streets filled with restaurants and bars, jazz music in the air. Small town Main Streets with beaming, friendly faces, every outfit meticulously coordinated, every hair in place. Manners and genteel accents and gentleman offering their arms, their seats to ladies, the conversations punctuated with yes ma’am’s and yes sir’s and how y’all doing?
But behind all the gilded wrapping, there is a fecund abundance of decay and degradation. Lipstick smiles and paint covering dysfunction and rot. Southern Gothic stories prominently feature such landscapes and characters. The grotesque masquerading as the beautiful; the ancient families hiding behind money long spent; the perverse hiding in plain sight while it leers at a young girl who carries the sermon of what it means to be a lady in her heart. This veneer, this wrapping, has spawned innumerable theorizations and intellectual discussion of exactly how deep the symbolism runs when it comes to the Southern Gothic. We read these stories, we peel back the layers, and look long and deep at the nastiness concealed within. After all, the South has long had a problem with addressing its complex issues with racism, religion, prejudice, and poverty.
My own struggles with organized religion make frequent appearances in my fiction. It’s no great secret that I have complicated, bitter, angry feelings about Jesus and the rules he places on his followers. Particularly those who identify as anything other than cis-gendered, straight, white men. When it comes to addressing hypocrisy in religion, Flannery O’Connor is the gold standard. Her short story “Good Country People” and her novella Wise Blood encapsulate those grotesque attributes the South turns a blind eye to.
In “Good Country People” our protagonist, Helga, and our antagonist, Manly Pointer represent two spectrums of what it means to be good, Christian folk. Both are given physical deformities—Helga with her prosthetic leg and Manly Pointer with his blood red hand. Helga’s bitterness and anger have foundations in her inability to fit into the typical, stringent role of a Southern lady. She is not delicate, or beautiful, or soft-spoken. Her body, her voice, her opinions are all large and abrasive. She denounces the beliefs held by what she deems ignorant Bible thumpers in addition to the fake social niceties held in esteem by gracious Southern ladies in that time period. Helga is everything a social lady is not, but her true grotesque nature is not that she behaves so rudely but that underneath her bristly exterior she actually craves those things and is ultimately taken in by Manly Pointer’s “wolf in sheep’s clothing act.” His own grotesque characteristics are that he is hiding the evil, the perverse, beneath the good Christian veneer Helga disdains. She pays the price not only in the loss of her money (and her prosthetic leg) but also a loss in the anti-faith she’d used as armor. The romanticized view of the good, Christian lady; the lady those of us born and raised here are brought up to be, crumbles under the very pressures it creates.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved examines the grotesqueries of racism through the lens of the Southern Gothic. Beloved, in her haunting, comes to represent the atrocities of slavery and racism—Sethe’s ghost is the child she murdered out of love and fear of the subjugations she experienced as a slave. Beloved is the symbolic representation of the loss of selfhood, her embodiment taken from her by these terrible forces. The haunting is not to be feared, but the force that made that ghost is. Evil is subversive here. Beloved’s vengeance is a representation of the rage that white people dismiss as unjustified or long past its expiration date. The South’s history is dismissed too frequently as exactly that—history. No one wants to look closely at that wound that never fully closed, and we see the ramifications of such willful ignorance far too frequently. The evil lies in the blatant blindness, the weak attempts to smile, to paint such horrors with the brush of “oh, honey, things like that don’t happen. Not anymore.” In horror, we peel back the skin—literally and metaphorically. It’s uncomfortable, even easy to dismiss such examinations as little more than gore, but these are necessary assessments. Even in fiction.
There is a tendency, in Southern Gothic, to demonize poverty. The trailer park and rural shacks without running water are places that inspire disgust or anxiety. They are places teeming with the unwashed, uneducated masses, and we are taught early on to fear these places because monsters hide in plain sight here. Y’all remember True Detective Season 1? That’s not to say that terrible violence and evil can’t happen in these locations, it’s just that in Southern Gothic there’s a tendency to use these locations only as places of evil rather than examining the roots of the Southern tendencies to ignore poverty at best or to vilify it at worst. Gentrification of urban areas is a perfect example of this. Take a look at so many areas in Atlanta to see this at work. Privilege means not having to look at poverty and its impact. It means having those impacted by it work for you, clean your house, care for your babies, and pretending that you’ve somehow helped save them.
In my own writing, I’ve grappled with the hypocrisies related to organized religion and also the expectations placed on women from the time they are very young. Maybe I’m mistaken, but this feels prevalent in the South. It’s preached from the time you pop out of the womb that you’re going to be pretty and grow up and have pretty babies and keep a pretty house and stay pretty. Such a Pretty Smile has its roots in these very ideas. I cannot ignore such ideologies. They are a natural part of me. If such story-telling feels heavy-handed, or unrealistic, I can only apologize for the spilling of my own blood onto the page; for the sick, wet plop of my own heart as I tear it out and hold it out for you to examine. Every hidden darkness. Every quiet betrayal to the lady I was raised to be. The daughter my mother raised lost to the wolves she went seeking because even teeth and claws were better than the dishonesty she wore on her body in the name of being a “good girl.”
The Southern Gothic is not only the backdrop of my childhood. It is representative of the very core of me. The desperate need to finally break myself open, to draw an honest breath. To scream and show the teeth that have always been there.
Even if they are frightening.
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