“Everybody you tell will be haunted too”: Examining the Melding of Gothic and Modernist Literature in Mildred Haun’s The Hawk’s Done Gone

This essay examines how Mildred Haun uses Appalachian themes and settingsto bridge the melding of Gothic and Modernist fiction through her short storycollection, The Hawk’s Done Gone. By examining this melding of two polargenres, I seek to bring attention to an underappreciated author’s work andfurther expand the canon of Taryn Norman’s concept of “Gothic Modernism”into the rural literature space and beyond. I use cross-references to aid myliterary analysis of several stories in Haun’s collection to showcase her usage ofGothic Modernism.The Hawk’s Done Gone is a collection of stories that merges superstition,folklore, and modern realism with dark themes of witchcraft, infanticide,and incest to create a series of darkly-themed snapshots of Appalachian liferanging from the Civil War era to the 1940s. Despite the haunting threadsconnecting these stories, Haun deftly injects Appalachian songs, dialect,and culture into her writing to lend an Appalachian spin on the expectedconventions of Modernism’s cityscapes or Gothic literature’s rural, wealthyplantations. Haun’s skillful blending creates a new, liminal space of terror,where readers feel tension from the characters, situations, and landscapes. Inthis essay, I show how this text combines its Modernist timeliness, using EzraPound’s idea of “make it new,” while also bringing in classic Gothic literaturetropes (fearful weather, blood curses, and prophecy) to deepen the text’scomplexity and showcase Modernist concerns, fears, and horrors