Southern Gothic Short Stories

Among my internet procrastinations this week, I've been looking up some of my favorite southern gothic short stories online...some I haven't read since Junior High! All of them are fantastic and more than a little spooky (think dead people and creepy old southern mansions), so turn out the lights and get yourself some reading done! (Hey, at least you'll have done something this week!)

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe

The Rocking Horse Winner by D.H. Lawrence

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

The Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe

Barn Burning by William Faulkner

* Important to note: many of these stories (especially Faulkner's writings) use southern rhetoric that's pretty evident of the racism in the culture at the time...and I obviously don't condone any of its usage. It does, however, begin to give us a picture of the problems (and consequent implications) of racism and hierarchies (arguably still present?) in the South.

A Culture of Conundrum

The American South—in the past it has simultaneously espoused slavery and hospitality; innocence and taboo; the forced sweat of the brow and a tall pitcher of sweet tea. From puritanical Protestantism to the shadowy rituals of Voodoo and/or derivative aboriginal African religions, the “cultural space” known as the south has operated (and built) a culture around some very interesting conundrums. The south almost feels like a faded picture…the lines and cracks and dust grow more pronounced as time moves forward, while culture outside the dusty album is converting all of its old photographs to an electronic database somewhere. Yet, there still seems to be a veneration of “the Old South.” Many people hold on to these pictures of the past and long for a time when things were more “simple”—a time of blue-bottle trees, story-telling, and rocking on the front porch in the summer sunshine.

…But were they ever, really? It feels to me a little bit more like Alice’s rabbit hole—the deeper you dig, the more you find and the longer you fall. As Tara McPherson asks in the introduction to Dixie: Then and Now, “How can southern studies help us retrieve this past and deploy it to new ends?” (10).

My personal sentiments on this “cultural space” echo those notable authors of southern Gothicism (William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor to name a few); while there are many grotesque elements of “southern-ness,” I feel an inextricable connection to the culture nonetheless. This semester, I hope to use this blog to further investigate these interesting connections and contradictions—from the ones that are still blatantly present to some that may have been swept under the rug.