Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, music, film, theatre, and television that is heavily influenced by Gothic elements and set in the American South. Southern Gothic fiction highlights violence and cruelty as features of Southern culture, often through characters whose place in the social order exposes them to such treatment.
Common motifs include racism, gender and sexual difference, poverty and disability. Where Gothic literature depicted the intrusion of the barbaric past into the Enlightenment, Southern Gothic depicts the persistence of social trauma in the reconstructed South. The genre arose in reaction to romantic portrayals influenced by Lost Cause myths and the ideology of American exceptionalism
Elements of a Gothic treatment of the South first appeared during the ante- and post-bellum 19th century in the grotesques of Henry Clay Lewis and in the sardonic representations of Mark Twain. The genre was consolidated, however, in the 20th century, when dark romanticism, Southern humor, and the new literary naturalism merged in a new and powerful form of social critique. The themes largely reflected the cultural atmosphere of the South following the collapse of the Confederacy in the Civil War, which left a vacuum of cultural and religious values as well as economic devastation.
Like the original artistic term ‘Gothic,’ the term ‘Southern Gothic’ was at first pejorative and dismissive. In 1935, Ellen Glasgow critiqued the writings of Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and the ‘Southern Gothic School,’ stating that their work was filled with ‘aimless violence’ and ‘fantastic nightmares.’
The setting of these works is distinctly Southern. Some of these characteristics include exploring madness, decay and despair, continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with the lost ideals of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy and continued racial hostilities. Southern Gothic particularly focuses on the South’s history of slavery, racism, fear of the outside world, violence, a ‘fixation with the grotesque, and a tension between realistic and supernatural elements.’
Similar to the elements of the Gothic castle, Southern Gothic depicts the decay of the plantation in the post-Civil War South. Villains who disguise themselves as innocents or victims are often found in Southern Gothic literature, especially stories by Flannery O’Connor, such as ‘Good Country People’ and ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own,’ giving the reader a blurred line between victim and villain.
Southern Gothic literature set out to expose the myth of the old Antebellum South with its narrative of an idyllic past that covered over social, familial, and racial denials and suppressions.
A resurgence of Southern Gothic themes in contemporary fiction has been identified in the work of figures like Barry Hannah (1942–2010), Joe R. Lansdale (b. 1951), Helen Ellis (b. 1970), and Cherie Priest (b. 1975).
The Daily Omnivore 
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