The Gothic Novel in Southern Literature

Leslie Fiedler observes in his Love and Death in the American Novel: "The final horrors, as modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds." This observation may be taken in a sense as true, for such modern novels as Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms bring about part of their Gothicism from the tendency to grope into the mystery of the human mind, just like the Gothic tales of Hawthorne or Poe. Absalom, Absalom!, however, which is the main concern of this paper, has different qualities from those of works of the 19th century, because Faulkner, fully understanding the historical significance of the radically innovative, artistic devices of modernism which flourished in the 1920's, experimentally put them into practice in his own novels like The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. Absalom, Absalom! is also such a novel. Thus, employing four narrators (namely, four points of view, some of which are not wholly reliable) who try to reconstruct the past shadowy story of the Sutpen family by their imagination, this novel serves to produce and heighten, as François Pitavy notes, Gothicism at three levels, "at the surface level of the story, but more profoundly in the narration and in the narrative," especially because the first narrator Miss Rosa 's emotionally surcharged narration is intended to evoke a sense of doom. Another modernistic quality of this novel is the disintegration of the chronological flow of time in the development of the story, through which the reader, moving incessantly between the present and the past, cannot but perceive the destructive, corrosive force of time working in the story of the fall of the Sutpen family. These modernistic devices, together with the use of the theme of miscegenation, a taboo of Southern society, and the apocalyptic vision, help this novel go beyond merely sensational Gothic novels. Further, in considering the Gothic novel in the context of Southern literature, we should pay attention to Carson McCullers' comment: "I wonder sometimes, if what they call the 'Gothic' school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due largely to the cheapness of human life in the South." For, the sense of "the cheapness of human life in the South" seems to be closely related to the outburst of violence which is described not only in Absalom, Absalom!, but other Southern Gothic novels, the violence of the kind that stems from the Southern milieu embodied in religious fanaticism, racial prejudices, or the miserable condition of poor whites