Embedded Files
Southern Gothic (sometimes Southern Realism)
Characteristics:
Decayed surroundings, bizarre behavior, insanity
Faulkner is full of these gothic elements, not just as setting, but also to underscore this theme of the past overshadowing the present.
Carson McCullers is another author often described as Southern Gothic. In her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she explores the isolation of misfits and outcasts in a southern town.
Flannery O'Connor also fits this category. Her writing has been described as "sardonic" Southern Gothic for her inclusion of characters marked by disability, race, crime, religion, or sanity. Strong Catholic sense of morality.
Southern Gothic
Characteristics:
Sometimes grotesque humor—humor that derives from cruelty or injury.
Welty’s stories abound with this humor, as do those of Flannery O’Connor.
Use of religious imagery and backdrop of the Christian church in the setting of many of the stories.
Moreover, concern with sins, redemption, and salvation often occur as themes in these novels, one example being nearly everything that Flannery O’Connor wrote.
Carson McCullers
McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to Lamar Smith, a jeweler, and Marguerite Waters. She was named after her maternal grandmother, and had a younger brother, Lamar, and a younger sister, Marguerite.
Her mother's grandfather was a planter and Confederate soldier. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot descent.
From the age of ten, she took piano lessons; when she was fifteen, her father gave her a typewriter to encourage her story writing.
Carson McCullers
She graduated from Columbus High School. In September 1934, at age 17, she left home on a steamship bound for New York City, planning to study piano at the Juilliard School of Music. After losing the money she was going to use to study at Juilliard on the subway, she decided instead to work, take night classes, and write. She worked several odd jobs, including as a waitress and a dog walker.
After falling ill with rheumatic fever, she returned to Columbus to recuperate and changed her mind about studying music. Returning to New York, she worked in menial jobs while pursuing a writing career; she attended night classes at Columbia University and studied creative writing.
In 1936 she published her first work, Wunderkind, an autobiographical piece about a music prodigy's adolescent insecurity and losses. It first appeared in Story magazine and is collected in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.
Carson McCullers
From 1935 to 1937, as her studies and health dictated, she divided her time between Columbus and New York. In September 1937, at age 20, she married an ex-soldier and aspiring writer, Reeves McCullers. A New Yorker profile described her husband as ". . . a dreamer attracted to big, capable women." They began their married life in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reeves had found work. The couple made a pact to take alternating turns as writer, then breadwinner, starting with Reeves's taking a salaried position while McCullers wrote. Her eventual success as a writer precluded his literary ambitions.
Carson McCullers
In 1940, at age 23, writing in the Southern Gothic or perhaps Southern realist traditions, McCullers completed her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The title was suggested by her editor and taken from a Fiona MacLeod poem, "The Lonely Hunter." At the time, the novel was thought to suggest an anti-Fascist message.
After completing that novel, McCullers and her husband moved to Fayetteville, NC, where she completed Reflections in a Golden Eye (then titled Army Post) in just two months. She sold the book to Harper's Bazaar for $500 in August 1940. The magazine published in two parts, the issues for October and November.
Carson McCullers
Carson and Reeves McCullers divorced in 1941. After separating from Reeves, she moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. She became a member of February House, an art commune in Brooklyn. Among her friends were W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee and the writer couple Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles.
After World War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.
McCullers fell in love with a number of women and pursued them with great determination, but seems not to have succeeded in finding mutual attraction. Her most documented and extended obsession was with Annemarie Schwarzenbach. McCullers' passion, however, was not reciprocated, and the two remained friends with McCullers dedicating her next novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, to her.
Carson McCullers
There is the infamous obsession with Katherine Anne Porter and a much-implied ongoing “friendship” with Gypsy Rose Lee. McCullers still wore a lesbian persona in literature and in life.
In 1945, Carson and Reeves McCullers remarried. Three years later, while severely depressed, she attempted suicide. In 1953, Reeves tried to persuade her to commit suicide with him, but she fled and Reeves killed himself in their Paris hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills.
Her bittersweet play The Square Root of Wonderful (1957) drew upon these traumatic experiences. The potential suicide of Carson's father may have foreshadowed if not influenced these events. In the 1950s, McCullers was in therapy for a variety of reasons.
Carson McCullers
With influences such as Isak Dinesen, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, she published eight books; the best known are
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940),
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
The Member of the Wedding (1946).
The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love; at the time of its writing, McCullers was a resident at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga, New York.
McCullers' work is often described as Southern Gothic, but critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope.
Carson McCullers (from Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century)
McCullers was herself as peculiar and egocentric a person as any of her characters. An overindulgent mother encouraged her from her earliest years to behave exactly as she chose, and at the age of thirteen she was accustomed to hearing the catcall “freak!” from her schoolmates.
In later years her determination to succeed as a writer and her bisexual proclivity so undermined her husband’s self-esteem that he was driven to suicide, and she refused not only to mourn her husband but even to pay the cost of having his ashes sent from France for interment in the U.S.
In short, Caron McCullers was an eccentric, self-centered woman, preoccupied with money, with literary success, and with the satisfaction of her own emotional needs. No one else was quite real to her.
Carson McCullers (from Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century)
But the failings of McCullers' life were the material of her art, and all of her characters share her egocentricity and suffer the pangs of its attendant loneliness. Indeed, egocentricity and loneliness are facts of the human condition for them, not personal failings, and her fiction has in consequence an air of stark, existential angst.
Her view of the human condition is especially clear in her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). The main character is a deaf-mute who receives uncomprehendingly the confidences of four characters who mistakenly think him sympathetic, and the deaf-mute in turn confides his heartaches to a man who is feeble-minded as well as mute, extending the line of meaningless communication.
The novel is successful because its plain, grave style suits its rigid architecture, and because its characters touch the heart.
Carson McCullers (from Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century)
The Member of the Wedding (1946) vies with “The Ballad of the Sad Café” for literary distinction. Its central character, Frankie Addams, is a motherless tomboy who decides to become a member of her brother’s wedding in an attempt to be someone more than herself.
Reality eventually compels her accommodation to selfhood, but not before a world of adolescent loneliness is laid out for the reader with bittersweet realism and marvelous delicacy.
Carson McCullers
Her stories have been adapted to stage and film. A stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl's feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51. The original production won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best play of the season.
Many know her works largely by their film adaptations.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was adapted as a film with the same title in 1968, with Alan Arkin in the lead role.
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) was directed by John Huston and starred Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.
Carson McCullers
In his autobiography, An Open Book (1980), Huston said:
I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York. Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway. She was then in her early 20s, and had already suffered the first of a series of strokes. I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine. It wasn't palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity. But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life. And as her afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger.
Carson McCullers
Richard Wright, the author of Black Boy, reviewed her first novel, published in 1940 at the age of 22, and said she was the first white writer to create fully human black characters. In his review “Hugo: Secrets of The Inner Landscape,” he stated:
To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.
Carson McCullers
McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses and from alcoholism. At age 15 she contracted rheumatic fever; as a result of the heart damage, she suffered from strokes that began in her youth. By age 31, her left side was entirely paralyzed. She lived the last twenty years of her life in Nyack, New York, where she died on September 29, 1967, at age 50, after a brain hemorrhage.
McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), during the final months of her life. Her home from 1945 to 1967 in South Nyack, New York, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.
Carson McCullers (from Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century)
McCullers' work is often compared to that of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, somewhat to its disadvantage. Her artistry is less sophisticated than that of these other writers, to be sure, and her understanding of the dark corners of the mind is certainly less astute than theirs.
But McCullers' writing is distinguished from her fellow Southerners’ work by an empathy for the disaffiliate so profound that she is his preeminent spokesman in modern American literature. No one has written more feelingly than she about the plight of the eccentric, and no one has written more understandingly than she about adolescent loneliness and desperation.
Carson McCullers (from The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story)
The inescapable theme of McCullers' fiction is unrequited love. She held the bleak opinion that love is rarely, if ever, reciprocal, as she famously explains in “The Ballad of the Sad Café”:
“First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons . . . the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.”
“The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love,” McCullers clarifies: “The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp.”
Carson McCullers (from The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story)
Therefore, McCullers concludes, “the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. In a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved.”
Like many other writers known primarily as novelists, including fellow southerners Truman Capote and Eudora Welty, McCullers began her career by writing short stories that were later eclipsed by her longer fiction. Some stories are, in fact, prototypes of novels—“The Aliens” and “Untitled Piece,” for instance, both prefigure The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—but most differ significantly from the longer works of fiction in several ways.
Carson McCullers (from The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story)
The latter [longer works] are set in the South and often address interracial social relationships; the stories, on the other hand, most frequently take place in the North or in an unspecified geography and focus almost exclusively on white characters.
With the exception of “The Orphanage” and “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland,” the stories are also far less gothic than the longer fiction and typically depict the mundane rather than the eerie, bizarre, or grotesque.
Nevertheless, even the earliest short pieces reveal a fairly narrow focus that does not vary from the longer fiction’s themes of loneliness, abandonment, and rejected affection.
McCullers—"A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud"
Characters:
Leo—”bitter and stingy” man who owns the all-night café (Nighthawks by Edward Hopper?)
Paper boy
Man who has made love a science, with wife he calls Dodo
McCullers—"A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud"
Why is this story set in an all-night café?
Why these three objects in the title?
What is the man’s message about the science of love?
Does the young paper boy understand? Do any of the patrons in the all-night café?
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
One of the most important voices in American fiction, Flannery O'Connor's art combines jarring intensity, stylistic economy, sardonic humor, intellectual richness, and spiritual depth. Her importance is all the more striking in being based on a relatively small number of fictional works: O'Connor completed but two novels and two collections of short stories before lupus cut short her life at age 39.
Yet she also wrote several essays and lectures, dozens of reviews, and hundreds of letters, [whose relationship with her fiction poses] interesting critical questions about her art.
Alternately categorized as a Southern and a Catholic writer, her fiction's aesthetic power and indeterminacy defy easy categorization.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
Born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O'Connor grew up as an only child in an observant Catholic family and attended parochial school, her Catholicism remaining a vital force throughout her life and art.
After moves to Atlanta and Milledgeville, Georgia, O'Connor attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College and State University), where she contributed stories, poems, essays, and cartoons for the college literary magazine.
In 1945, she was accepted for graduate study at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa), having been awarded a journalism scholarship. Within a semester, she applied to the university's now prestigious Writers' Workshop, and worked closely first with Paul Engle, and later with Andrew Lytle.
Other writers and critics she encountered in the program included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Austen Warren, and Paul Horgan.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
She completed her MFA in creative writing in spring 1947, her master's thesis a collection of short stories entitled The Geranium with a title story published the previous year in Accent. At the same time, she won a Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for the work she had completed on her first novel.
In 1948, she moved to Yaddo, the artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, where she met Robert Lowell, Edward Maisel, Elizabeth Fenwick, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Following political upheaval at the colony, she moved to New York and met her future editor, Robert Giroux, and also Robert and Sally Fitzgerald – a couple devoutly Catholic and literary, whose habits were more compatible with O'Connor's than were those of Yaddo, and whose lifelong friendship would extend into literary executorship following her death.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
At Christmas 1950, just before returning home to Milledgeville, O'Connor experienced the first symptoms of what she would later learn was lupus, the incurable auto-immune disease that had killed her father nine years before. O'Connor moved back to Milledgeville, to Andalusia farm, bequeathed to her mother and uncle. She continued working on her novel Wise Blood. It was published in 1952, after significant revisions suggested by the writer Caroline Gordon, who became a close friend and correspondent.
Despite an improvement in O'Connor's health which allowed her to move back with the Fitzgeralds the same year, she soon suffered a relapse of symptoms and returned to Milledgeville, where she was told she had lupus.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
For the 12 remaining years of her life, O'Connor remained at Andalusia, living quietly and productively, settling into a disciplined routine of writing – cared for by her mother, surrounded by the peacocks that she loved, and occasionally traveling, despite her illness, to visit friends or engage in literary activities.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
Her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, was published in 1955, and she continued to write and publish short stories while working on her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, which came out in 1960. She continued to produce short stories, essays, and reviews until her death on August 3, 1964. A second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was issued posthumously in 1965.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
O'Connor's works are consistent in style and vision. Their distinctive style is bare and carefully crafted, rejecting a strong authorial voice or commentary in favor of vivid depictions of characters and actions by narrative voices who integrate colloquial slang, biting irony, powerful similes, and subtle shifts in tone.
The stories are unsettling, an effect heightened by her use of the grotesque, an aesthetic of distortion and disjunction that we often associate with medieval gargoyles. The grotesque in O'Connor's art takes the form of
characters who are maimed or freakish (such as a man whose fetish is stealing women's prostheses)—”Good Country People”
similes whose simple disjunction evokes physical discomfort (as in “her eyes fixed like two drills on Mrs. Turpin”)—”Revelation”
and plots that turn suddenly and intensely violent (as when a comically depicted family outing ends in a mass murder)—”A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
Early critics used this grotesque element to categorize O'Connor as an example of “Southern Gothic” literature, or of “the school of Southern degeneracy” – a phrase that she poked fun at in her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction.”
O'Connor herself defended these jarring elements as a form of what Nathaniel Hawthorne described as “romance” – that is, fiction that focuses on the unusual and the extreme, that “lean[s] away from typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected.”
While the grotesque is a means of jolting readers out of their complacency, for O'Connor, it also contains an essential truth: “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
O'Connor's writings about her own art reveal a consistent and complex religious and philosophical vision, although critics remain divided on the extent to which her clear and almost dogmatic pronouncements adequately explain her aesthetic achievement.
Yet there is no denying that the Christian notions of sin, grace, and mystery permeate all of her works. And each one of her stories, she says, contains a moment of grace – a moment “in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.”
Flannery O'Connor
Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "[A]nything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."
Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves (as O'Connor was), while the issue of race often appears.
Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she wrote. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. . . . When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
Flannery O'Connor
She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them.
Another source of humor is the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor used such characters' inability to come to terms with disability, race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.
However, in several stories O'Connor explored some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her story "The Displaced Person," racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and intersexuality in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost."
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
O'Connor's literary influences were varied and extensive. In addition to admiring Nathaniel Hawthorne, as mentioned above, she stated that her foremost literary influence, “the largest thing that looms up,” was Edgar Allan Poe.
She also called herself “a great admirer of Conrad,” whose artistic vision, combining fidelity to concrete particularity with openness to mystery, reflected her own convictions.
She read the Catholic novelists such as François Mauriac, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.
She also read and admired Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol.
Flannery O'Connor (from Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature)
Of the Southern writers, she appreciated Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner – although she wrote of the latter, “Probably the reason I don't read him is because he makes me feel that with my one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens altogether.”
O'Connor's works won several awards during her writer's life, including a Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for first novel (1947); a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1957); an honorary doctorate of letters from Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame (1962); and three first prize O. Henry Awards (1956, 1962, 1964).
Her work also received two posthumous awards: her Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972, and her letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald under the name The Habit of Being, received a National Book Critics Circle Special Award for 1979.
Flannery O'Connor
Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgement Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium."
Despite her secluded life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. Politically, she maintained a broadly progressive outlook in connection with her faith, voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and supporting the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
Flannery O'Connor
In the PBS documentary, Flannery, the writer Alice McDermott explains the impact lupus had on O'Connor's work, saying, "It was the illness, I think, which made her the writer she is.“
Note, also in the PBS documentary is Hilton Als, writer, professor at Columbia who wrote an excellent article in the New Yorker, "This Lonesome Place," Jan. 21, 2001.
O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while suffering from lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital. Her death was caused by complications from a new attack of lupus following surgery for a fibroma. She was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Videos
Others:
Flannery O'Connor documentary (uses cartoon graphic style much like O'Connor's own)
Stephen Colbert reading Flannery O'Connor's The Enduring Chill
O'Connor—"Good Country People"
Characters:
Hulga (Joy) Hopewell
Mrs. Hopewell, her mother
Manley Pointer (a traveling Bible salesman)
Mrs. Freeman, hired women, with daughters Glynese and Carramae
O'Connor—"Good Country People"
What do these characters represent?
How are their names significant?
Why is Hulga so angry?
Breakout Room Question
We have only briefly discussed these two short stories. So, open-ended question.
What do you make of these stories? Choose one or both.
Alternate Breakout Room Question
What are the characteristics of small town life that were so appealing, and appalling, to these short story writers?
Recall our conversations about small towns when we read Tana French, The Searcher.
Next Week
The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
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