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“The Old Fierce Pull of Blood”: Family and the Southern Gothic

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“The Old Fierce Pull of Blood”: Family and the Southern Gothic “THE OLD FIERCE PULL OF BLOOD”: FAMILY AND THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC BY REBECCA DAVIS A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS English May 2014 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: Barry Maine, Ph.D., Advisor Eric Wilson, Ph.D., Chair Aimee Mepham, M.F.A. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of the people who helped this thesis come into being: Dr. Barry Maine, my advisor, who was willing to accompany me through such a hybrid project, and Dr. Gillian Overing and Dr. Omaar Hena, who were both instrumental in guiding me in the pursuit of this option and its approval. I would also like to thank Dr. Eric Wilson for serving on my thesis committee. I would like to especially thank Aimee Mepham, who served both on my committee and as my Creative Writing professor, as well as my English 398/698 Advanced Fiction Workshop class, who helped me with their workshop commentary and helpful critiques. Most of all, I would like to thank my parents and brother, who had to deal not only with the books and papers thrown about my room but also my rants about writing and revision. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface………………………............................................................................................iv Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….vi William Faulkner and the Southern Gothic……………………………………………….1 Chapter One: Gothic Legacy and Family in Two of Faulkner’s Famous Short Fictions: “Barn Burning” and “A Rose For Emily”…………………………………………………9 Chapter Two: Exploring Southern Gothic Lineage: Faulkner’s Compsons in Short Fiction…………................................................................................................................22 Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic…………………………............................39 Chapter Three: A Good Parent is Hard to Find: Lineage and The Southern Gothic in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, “Good Country People”, and “The Lame Shall Enter First”……………………………………………………………44 References………………………………………………………………………………..62 Nobody to Blame But……………………………………………………………………67 A Winter Day in July…………………………………………………………………….94 A Story for Stella……………………………………………………………………….116 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………….136 iii PREFACE The following thesis incorporates two components: one research based and the other creative. The creative component, which consists of three short stories, exists in direct conversation with the research portion, as I seek to explore the techniques employed by my studied authors within original fiction. iv ABSTRACT This thesis focuses on the impact and influence of familial legacy and dysfunction on the Southern Gothic genre by focusing on short fiction written by two of the major authors of the genre: William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Through exploring texts such as “Barn Burning”, “A Rose for Emily”, “That Evening Sun”, “A Justice”, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, “Good Country People”, and “The Lame Shall Enter First”, the correlation between the gothic and family is made clear, as familial problems (due to blood inheritance or general dysfunction) often serve as the catalyst for the more well- known gothic motifs that are present in these tales, while also existing as elements of the gothic themselves. This thesis utilizes the writing theories of both Faulkner and O’Connor to evaluate the connection between the South, the gothic, and family, while also drawing upon scholarship focused on the American Gothic and the selected authors. v INTRODUCTION William Faulkner once wrote, “Yet (Southern) art, which has no place in southern life, is almost the sum total of the Southern artist. It is his breath, blood, flesh, and all” (Faulkner “Introduction to The Sound and the Fury” 157). Faulkner’s quote presents his view on art in the South—a complex and nearly paradoxical view at that—and also makes a claim that the Southern artist cannot be separated from his region. But there is also something deeper in the words, lurking there. I would argue that these words relate directly to Faulkner’s place in the Southern Gothic genre. Faulkner suggests that there is something innately regional (Southern, in this case) in Southern art and the Southern artist. Moreover, the use of such words as “blood, flesh, and all” adds a distinctly Gothic flavor to the quote, as the idea of the “gothic” is often related to violence (blood) or erotic desire (flesh). Faulkner is often associated with the Southern Gothic genre, as Susan V. Donaldson suggests: “Faulkner has often been hailed and condemned as the founding father, oddly enough, of both Southern pastoralism and Southern Gothicism in modern literature” (Donaldson 359). While Faulkner’s texts have been studied as examples of the Southern Gothic, there has been one obvious gap in the study: the impact of family history on the gothic elements so often recognized in Faulkner’s fiction. Faulkner’s works are not the only ones that have been seemingly neglected in this regard. The author who “contemporized the Southern Gothic” (Walsh 29), Flannery O’Connor, who claimed that in Southern literature, one had the best option to view “a small history in a universal light” (O’Connor “The Regional Writer” 58), can also be seen as utilizing family and family history throughout her gothic texts. This thesis seeks to explore and demonstrate the ways in which selected short prose by Faulkner and vi O’Connor incorporate family or family legacy (be it immediate or inherited) and the ways in which these familial issues reflect not only a gothic motif themselves but also serve as a catalyst for other gothic action in the texts. For brevity’s sake, when familial legacy is directly correlated with some gothic action in a text, it will be referred to with the term “gothic turn”.1 Through this study, it becomes obvious that not only was familial dysfunction a preeminent theme within Southern Gothic literature, it also served as a sort of basis for other, more commonly recognized, gothic elements within the narrative. These family histories and accompanying dysfunction lead to some of the most memorable parts—and the most gothic—of the stories, such as the elimination of the Grandmother and her family in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and the literal decay of Miss Emily Grierson in “A Rose for Emily” by Faulkner. For our purposes, we will read the Gothic as a genre that is almost unable to separate itself from history. Gothic scholar Eric Savoy notes that the earliest American Gothic story, a 1798 novel by Charles Brockden Brown called Wieland; or the Transformation, was characterized by European influence, such as an abundance of sensationalism, but, more interestingly, it was also concerned with an obsession to return to the past as Brown focused on Puritanism and fledgling democracy; it is the latter focus on the past that survived in the genre, apparent in literature by Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Savoy suggests that the genre was as fluid as American thought, often reflecting preeminent concerns of the time: in Brown’s case: democracy, in later cases (post 1850s) American gothic writers sought to “rewrite history” to present a new “shadow (that) 1 The term “gothic turn” gestures towards the idea expressed in Eric Savoy’s “Rise of American Gothic” in which he suggested that the terms “trope” and “turn” are nearly synonymous (Savoy “Rise of American Gothic” ¶3). Savoy also utilizes the term “gothic turn” (Savoy “The New Face of the Tenant” 4) to reflect moments when texts become notably gothic in his recent chapter “The New Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic”. vii knows the underbelly of American history” (Savoy “Rise of American Gothic” ¶10-16). Further, Savoy points out that, American Gothic allows for a “national way of reconstructing history (arising) from a homegrown verbal tradition…” (Savoy “Rise of American Gothic” ¶18). In this way, it becomes obvious that the gothic is attached to history and also to storytelling. For our purposes, the history that we are looking at is not a broad national history but rather more localized familial ones. Also, the idea of familial storytelling is an important part of the Southern gothic, because oral tradition is interwoven into the region. As Faulkner wrote, “We (Southerners) need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage” (Faulkner “Introduction” 158). This idea is expounded upon by such scholars as David Minter who says, “no people is without a history but no people possesses its history unless its memory is raised to an active pitch and so becomes articulate, becomes…almost compulsively articulate” (Minter 190). In other words, history connects to articulation through language, through storytelling—written or oral. Another clear statement that demonstrates the correlation between the Gothic and history comes from Gothic scholar, Teresa Goddu: “while the gothic, as the site of excess, haunting, and ill health, threatens to resurrect a history that can never be exorcised, it also offers a way to signify against that history” (Goddu 155). Her opinion is echoed by Eric Savoy, who states that: “gothic texts return obsessively to the personal, the familial, and the national pasts to complicate…to implicate the individual in a deep morass of American desires and needs that allow for no final escape from or transcendence of them” (Savoy “Rise of American Gothic” ¶5). In other words, history is alive in Gothic texts and is also fluid. It can doom and it can save. Both Faulkner and O’Connor echoed this point. Faulkner wanted to lift his readers: “It is (the writer’s) privilege to help man viii endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of …the glory of his past (Faulkner “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature” 120), while O’Connor wanted to offer salvation: “an action or gesture which…would have to suggest both the world and eternity” (O’Connor “On Her Own Work” 111).
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