DISCLAIMER:

This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Copyright by

Hallie Karlyn Reiss

2014 The Thesis committee for Hallie Karlyn Reiss

Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: Looks Like The Birthplace of Bela Lugosi: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Films of the Southern Gothic

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: ______Caroline Frick

______Thomas Schatz Looks Like The Birthplace of Bela Lugosi: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Films of the Southern Gothic

by

Hallie Karlyn Reiss, B.A.

Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 This thesis is for my Mom, Diana, my Dad, Ron, and my brother, John, without whom I would not have made it out in one piece. I love you all so much. Looks Like The Birthplace of Bela Lugosi: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Films of the Southern Gothic by

Hallie Karlyn Reiss, M.A.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2014

SUPERVISOR: Caroline Frick

Films depicting, made in, and recreating the American South are always categorized as other kinds of genres: horror, film noir, romantic epic, women’s pictures, etc. On the other hand, the literary tradition of the Southern Gothic is often referred to when categorizing certain kinds of Southern films, yet it is still a genre that is considered to be primarily footed in literature. In those films, the identification of the Southern

Gothic is based upon the predetermined conventions of the literary genre, and is brought to life through visual and verbal clues. For the purposes of this thesis, I would like to convey how the literary genre of the Southern Gothic is also exemplified in the medium of cinema. I plan to do this by using examples from a selection of films which fall within the confines of the literary genre, but paying particular attention to the 1974 film, The

Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I hope to convince readers that The Texas Chainsaw

Massacre, a film which has its own set of predetermined genre tropes and history, might also be read in terms of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, and is a prime example of the way in which the literary genre is also cinematic. To do this I will use the 1939 film,

Gone With the Wind as an example of the Old South, of which to base the opposing

Southern Gothic ideals. My analysis will include case studies in which I analyze the way in which Southern hospitality is utilized in works of the Southern Gothic, and also how the Southern Gothic focuses on freakish characters to highlight the underbelly of the traditional Southern mythology. Table of Contents:

Introduction: Southern Gothic in Film……...…………………………………………..…1

Chapter 2: Southern Gothic Hospitality…...……………………………………………..22

Chapter 3: Mammies, Freaks, and Grotesque Bodies…..………..………………………38

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….51

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...55

Chapter 1 Introduction

I’d like to do a Western. But, rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times… Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And, I would call it a “Southern.”1

Django Unchained director, Quinton Tarantino, gave the quote above to the NY

Daily Press during the press tour for the film’s 2012 release. In the statement Tarantino stumbles upon an important point in the discourse of films regarding and depicting the

American South; there is no actual predetermined film genre of the American South, hence his emphasis on the ‘Southern.’ Films depicting, made in, and recreating the

American South are always categorized as other kinds of genres: horror, film noir, romantic epic, women’s pictures, etc. On the other hand, the literary tradition of the

Southern Gothic is often referred to when categorizing certain kinds of Southern films, yet it is still a genre that is considered to be primarily footed in literature. In those films, the identification of the Southern Gothic is based upon the predetermined conventions of the literary genre, and is brought to life through visual and verbal clues. For the purposes of this thesis, I would like to convey how the literary genre of the Southern Gothic is also exemplified in the medium of cinema. I plan to do this by using examples from a selection of films which fall within the confines of the literary genre, but paying particular attention to the 1974 film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I hope to convince readers that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film which has its own set of predetermined genre tropes and history, might also be read in terms of the Southern

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Gothic literary tradition, and is a prime example of the way in which the literary genre is also cinematic.

The Southern Gothic literary style is possible because of its juxtaposition against the romantic Southern literature that came before it. The Gothic South is a reaction against the falsities of the romantic perceptions of the American South, particularly the

Southern literature during reconstruction and the Modern era. For this very reason, the films which can be identified as Southern Gothic must also be seen as a binary against the more traditional romantic versions of the Southern myth. For this reason, I will use the

1939 film Gone With the Wind as the example of the romantic South. Gone With the

Wind is not the only film depicting the South as romantic and epic, but it is the clearest example of Southern mythology that the Southern Gothic is rebelling against.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a particularly interesting case for contextualization of the Southern Gothic in cinema because it is also a horror genre film.

Other films that can be identified as Southern Gothic are hardly ever associated with horror in the way that Texas Chainsaw Massacre does. For example, Cat on a Hot Tin

Roof is a cinematic drama and Night of the Hunter is a film noir. Film genre theory is important to keep in mind during this foray into the Southern Gothic literature tradition because films are inherently categorized through specific genres.

By keeping in mind the previous scholarship on film genre theory (which I will give an overview of shortly) and how the Southern Gothic has previously been written about, I hope to give a clear and concise analysis of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and how it fits within the framework set forth. Clearly I will not be able to analyze every part of

8 the Southern Gothic literary machine, but I do hope to extrapolate some prime examples of how it works when attached to cinematic narratives.

Literature Review

The construction of the Southern Gothic genre is unlike most literary genres in that those who were writing the fiction were the same ones naming the genre. The authors most associated with this literary tradition, Flannery O’Connor, William

Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, amongst others, all associated themselves with the grotesque, perverted, and underbelly of the romantic Southern identity. Themes of the Southern Gothic genre are described by sociologist Jennifer Lynn McCarthy in her book Southern Gothic Gets Odd:

Common themes in Southern Gothic literature include deeply flawed, disturbing or disorienting characters, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or coming from poverty, alienation, racism, crime, and violence. It is unlike its parent genre [American Literature] in that it uses these tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South, with the Gothic elements taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one. The Southern Gothic style is one that employs the use of the macabre, ironic events to examine the values of the American South.2 These tropes can be seen, for example, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The character ‘Boo’ Radley is mysterious, hides in shadows, and is seemingly “off.” The book also tackles racial inequalities and class differences while highlighting the grotesqueness of human nature. Stanley Kowalski from Tennessee Williams’s play A

Streetcar Named Desire is Southern Gothic in that he is also shrouded in a sense of mystery. He and his wife, Stella, rely on their innate hyper-sexuality to keep themselves going, all while living in a seedy apartment that is described as being dirty, old, and fading. Picking up from the description of the genre by McCarthy, Flannery O’Conner

9 states in the essay “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction” why freaks and the demented are inherently Southern. “When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque.”3 She continues with, “in these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.” The

Southern Gothic hero is often one who is insular in mind and an outsider to others.

O’Conner explains:

Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological… It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.4 Freaks, for O’Connor, come in all shapes and sizes, from children to old men, and whatever singles them out is the source of their freakish nature. O’Connor often writes about disability, immobility, age, economics, and education, all of which can play into the gothic mindset of her characters. It is, however, typically the “normal seeming” character which has the most freakish mind frame. The Southern Gothic tradition is also concerned with overgrown settings, rotting plantations, and especially grandeur lost. The settings for traditional works of Southern Gothic literature are typically hard fought battles, which amount as metaphors for human nature versus the environment.

Genre Theory

Literary genre and film genre cannot be easily compared due to the complication of authorship. In literature, the authorial presence is the overriding principle, and is

10 intimately tied to genre; for example Faulkner writes Southern literature, Raymond

Chandler writes hardboiled detective novels, and Phillip K. Dick writes science fiction.

Film genre cannot as easily claim a single entity as its origin due to film’s collaborative nature. In one of the preeminent genre film texts, Hollywood Genres: Formulas,

Filmmaking, and the Studio System by Thomas Schatz, the prototypical genre film is broken down and extrapolated through an examination of language, Hollywood economic politics, audience reception, and the thematic cores which make up the DNA of what audiences recognize as genre filmmaking. Schatz explains, “movies are not produced in creative or cultural isolation, nor are they consumed that way.” 5 The scholarly convention that the director of the film (or in some cases the writer or producer) is an auteur, and hence the creator of the singular piece of work, is complicated by the notion of a genre due to its production by a studio. “In a limited sense, any genre film is the original creation of an individual writer or director, but the nature and range of the originality are determined by the conventions and expectations involved in the genre filmmaking process.”6 The very core concept of a genre film is that filmic patterns are already in place and that audiences are versed in the iconography of the specific genre.

Schatz continues, “the genre film, however, is identified not only by its use of these general filmic devices to create an imaginary world; it is also significant that this world is predetermined and essentially intact.”7 When audiences pay to see a Western or a musical or a film noir, they have a certain number of expectations that are already in place before the opening credits roll.

Horror film, as a genre, fits perfectly with the conventions of genre theory. The horror film is easy to reproduce, relies on a number of predetermined tropes, and allows

11 for large box office revenue because of how cheap the films are to produce. It also follows the cultural milieu that genre films are required to provide: “in virtually any

Hollywood genre film, plot development is effectively displayed by setting and character: once we recognize the familiar cultural arena and the players, we can be fairly certain how the game will be played and how it will end.”8 What this means for horror film is that there is a predetermined system of icons that we are conditioned to recognize as horrific: the huge hunkering villain, the virginal female protagonist, the unfamiliar local, the sense of abandonment and confusion, and even the surrounding landscape which seems wild, untamed, and vast.

Scholarly works about the horror genre have, at least in my research, never quite come to a consensus of what key iconic tropes go into a horror film, and perhaps that is because of the genre’s psychological nature. In Kendall R. Phillips book, Projected

Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, the essence of the genre is grounded in major cultural anxieties. Phillips explains, “when the culture is in turmoil, for some reason audiences flock to the horror film. Perhaps during these times of great, generalized social anxiety, the horror film functions to shock its audience out of their anxiety.”9 The films that Phillips is most concerned with analyzing are those films which he believes are the defining moments in the genre’s history and, because of his theory that these films are products of a cultural phenomenon, films which have a lasting effect on moviegoers: Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), Night of the Living Dead (1968),

Halloween (1978), and Silence of the Lambs (1991), amongst others. The reliance on cultural phenomenons for the narrative meat of horror films is the biggest connecting element of scholarship on the genre. Film and gender scholar Carol J. Clover also talks

12 about this phenomenon in her book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the

Modern Horror Film. In the introduction of her book, Clover explains that the thesis of her study concerns the contemporary relationship between the audience (typically young men) and the subjects of rape culture horror of the Long 70s, films such as I Spit on Your

Grave (1978), Ms. 45 (1981), Videodrome (1983), Evil Dead (1981), and even Texas

Chainsaw Massacre. Clover, though, also emphasizes the morality tale nature and folkloric elements of the genre. She explains, “although many folklorists disown horror movies as products too mediated by technology, authorial intention, and the profit motive to be seen as folklore in any authentic sense, the fact is that horror movies look like nothing so much as folktales – a set of fixed tale types that generate an endless stream of what are in effect variants: sequels, remakes, and rip-offs.”10 There are, according to

Clover, a set of predetermined themes and motifs that are prevalent in horror films, a notion that is exemplified by the study of genre.

For the purposes of my thesis, a clearer understanding of how and what goes into a genre film will help to better illustrate how a literary genre can be understood within a filmic space. To illustrate this, I will go back to Schatz’s analysis of plot structure and mechanics of a genre film. He claims that there are four major elements to identify a genre film:

Establishment (via various narrative and iconographic cues) of the generic community with its inherent dramatic conflicts; Animation of those conflicts through the actions and attitudes of the genre’s constellation of characters; Intensification of the conflict by means of conventional situations and dramatic confrontations until the conflict reaches crisis proportions; Resolution of the crisis in a fashion with eliminates the physical and/or ideological threat and thereby celebrates the (temporarily) well-ordered community. These identifying principles are key in understanding how genre films work, especially as these genres morph and cross-pollinate. The established story and plot,

13 animation, intensification of action, and the resolution of the story are key thematic elements of any genre film, but are also ways to recognize the predetermined thematic elements of a literary genre. Clover explains, “students of folklore or early literature recognize in horror the hallmarks of oral narrative: the free exchange of themes and motifs, the archetypal characters and situations, the accumulation of sequels, remakes,

[and] imitations.”11 To identify a certain film’s genre as a critic or scholar, one must identify within that film a certain number of predetermined thematic key points.

The key points which make up a genre film are elements of a larger cinematic picture. For a genre film to exist, there needs to be more out there than that genre to contextualize it. Perhaps the best way to contextualize my thesis topic is to look at, briefly, the other kinds of texts which permeate the way in which audiences associate the

American South in film. Gone With the Wind is the quintessential film of the American

South, though not the only example of a fictionalized southern narrative in film. Other films depicting the American South begin with the origins of the medium, Birth of a

Nation (1915), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927) and The General (1926), which were all incredibly popular silent films. Other films like Jezebel (1938), Showboat (1951), The

Littlest Rebel (1935), and The Little Colonel (1935) were also popular and fresh in the

American audience’s conception of the American South in film. I argue that Gone With the Wind, however, is the most iconic of the melodramas depicting the American South and it intelligently plays with and formulates the iconography of the narratives of the region. Its protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, acts and reacts from her heart, is stubborn, and yet does whatever she needs to do to get herself and her family ahead. Scarlett and her plantation homestead, Tara, are metaphors for the post-reconstruction South in that they

14 are fiercely devoted to their land, to their family, and to creating a world in which hard work and determination win. Gone With the Wind is also the most popular book in

American literature, second only to the bible in most reader polls.12 It has tomes of scholarship written about its themes and motifs, and is still being looked at in a critical lens. What brings me to this film is its staying power, its aura, and its widespread identification as a work depicting a historical South and as a quintessential work of

Hollywood. Gone With the Wind will act as a control specimen for my argument of narratives of the American South.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not nearly as critically and intellectually acclaimed as Gone With the Wind. And yet, it remains in the canon of the greatest horror films, with scores of fans and devotees. When juxtaposed, Gone With the Wind and Texas

Chainsaw Massacre say something very important about how the South is depicted in film. Gone With the Wind does not have to be seen as a romantic epic, nor does Texas

Chainsaw Massacre have to be seen as a straight-forward horror film. Both films have deeper connections, including themes of survival, resourcefulness, and gumption, which are telling of the values of the genre of the Southern Gothic. The family in Texas

Chainsaw Massacre is grotesquely macabre, and yet their actions are understandable to a certain degree. Within their respective cinematic worlds, the family did what they did to survive. Scarlett, too, did what she needed to do to survive. Both Scarlett and

Leatherface put aside traditional values in favor of doing whatever it takes to keep themselves and their families alive, whatever the cost. For Scarlett it means that she needs to work in the field and deal with whoever stands in her way or threatens to undo her hard work. Likewise, in the world of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface

15 and his family figure that they must kill passersby to sell as roadside barbeque and for their own meals, using the only means they know how: like cows in an industrialized slaughterhouse.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, alternatively, has not been quite as scrutinized in the academic space, especially considering the amount of varied critical reactions the film received. Scholars, such as Carol J. Clover and Janet Staiger, have written chapters or sections of chapters on Texas Chainsaw Massacre in larger critical analyses of the horror genre. The majority of this scholarship deals with Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a reflection of the reader response theory, made popular by theorist Stuart Hall. In their respective works, Clover and Steiger concern themselves with audience reactions to the graphic nature of the film, and stemming from that, the sexual politics of the films violence, including an analysis of films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre portray (such as

The Last House on the Left (1972)). The sexual politics are complicated, according to these scholars, by the male gaze, and the majority of the narratives portraying women in violent situations and the mass appeal of horror as a genre. Other scholars, like Kendall

R. Phillips, Robin Wood, Greg Merritt, and John Beifuss write about Texas Chainsaw

Massacre in its relation to the other films (genre and non-genre) of its time. In these works, the scholars pit Texas Chainsaw Massacre against other films of either its generation (for example, Wood and the other exploitation Long 70s films), other independent films (such as Merritt’s analysis and films like Reservoir Dogs and The Blair

Witch Project), or other subgenres of horror (Phillips).

Only one scholar, John Beifuss, writes about Texas Chainsaw Massacre as being a film distinctly remarking on its regionality. For Beifuss, the location of Texas

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Chainsaw Massacre is integral to its horror, the rural Texas landscape is as much a character as any of the others. In a very short chapter in The New Encyclopedia of

Southern Culture: Media, Beifuss concerns himself with Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s inherent, if not always completely coherent, Southerness: “the Chain Saw family – a demented ‘cook,’ a childish hulk known as Leatherface, and a Charles Mansonesque

‘hitchhiker’ – was distinctly southern. This degenerate clan of murderers and cannibals took pride in the old-fashioned, hands-on method of killing that had been the family’s livelihood in the premechanized days of the slaughterhouse industry.”13 These values, according to Beifuss, were part of a southern tradition of the Deliverance-like mountain people, a strain of southerners who pride themselves in the past and thrive in the backwoods bayou or rural Texas landscape. In other words, the people and lifestyles described by Beifuss are the same as those in the Southern Gothic tradition.

In general, the genre film relies on a certain set of ideal principals. These signs and signifiers are how audiences understand what they are seeing as symbols of certain genres. Films of the Southern Gothic rely heavily on these identifiers to help portray the narrative of the film or as Schatz says, “…any genre’s narrative context imbues its conventions with meaning.”14 Examples of the signs and signifiers of the American

South in film are iconic: large plantation homes, lush gardens, mammy figures, southern belles, huge overhanging oak trees, etc. When audiences see the coded signs of the genre they automatically have a certain set of predetermined ideas of what kind of narrative they are about to experience. Southern Gothic identifiers turn the previously Southern film icons on their head. The signs of the Southern Gothic film are not planation homes, but worn down shacks, instead of lush gardens there are overgrown remnants of former

17 glory, and the Southern belle has now become a new woman, either sexually liberated or identified as white trash (or both). These same identifiers are part of the system of coded signs of contemporary horror. Gone With the Wind’s Tara plantation is now

Leatherface’s pre-fabricated home. The perfectly horticultured oak alleys of Twelve

Oaks are now a dense and impenetrable forest, impossible to run through to freedom, and the comfort of Mammy is replaced with Leatherface; the family is now inbred and dangerous.

Methodology

For this thesis, I will be utilizing primary research and textual analysis for the bulk of my research. Because the Southern Gothic is a textually based genre, it requires a certain framework to identify what consists within a Southern Gothic film. These clues, when added together, will sum up the genre into a series of metaphoric checkpoints. Not every Southern Gothic film will consist of exactly the same set of checkpoints, just as every literary work of the Southern Gothic does not, but they will give an overall explanation as to what the genre really consists of and how to identify it. The primary goal of the thesis is to understand how Texas Chainsaw Massacre works in this retelling of the literary genre of the Southern Gothic and how it can be seen as a template for identifying films which work in the vein of the literary genre. What I will attempt to do is present two major case studies of the Southern Gothic genre as they pertain to the films and extrapolate how these thematic elements are particularly notable when thought about in the context of the literary genre. The elements of the genre that I have chosen all

18 represent major parts of the Southern Gothic narrative and are also major elements of

Southern culture as best understood within a filmic space.

The primary methodology that I have chosen to utilize for my research is textual analysis, which means that I am relying on the text at hand to provide the necessary clues.

Jane Stokes explains this method by stating that it is a “primarily symbolic method”15 which requires a close analysis of the immediate media at hand: in this case the films and their content. I have chosen to look at the films in this way because textual analysis is the closest method to literary analysis that the film and media studies field has. Textual analysis is also the closest scholarship to cultural analysis, which is also a key component of my analysis of the two films. By keeping in mind the cultural context of the genre, I can apply the analysis to my study.

I will also utilize the genre theory to help ground Texas Chainsaw Massacre in film analysis as apposed to literary. This is an important distinction to make, as the way film genre materializes and literary theory materializes are very different. The films in which I will look into all belong to some kind of predetermined genre, so understanding how those genres work in context with the literary genre of the Southern Gothic.

The first case study will focus on the importance of Southern hospitality, an element of Old South and of the Southern Gothic tradition that imbue different meanings within the narrative space. For instance, Gone With the Wind’s strength narrative is founded on Scarlett’s resolve to “never go hungry again” and her determination to keep her family alive and thriving. Quite literally, the family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre also attempts to never go hungry again, after the decline of the slaughterhouse trade, and go to extreme lengths to keep themselves afloat. Even through the hardest times, the

19 family of Texas Chainsaw Massacre manages to keep up appearances through their portrayal of hospitality. In films categorized by Southern Gothic, hospitality and manners are formalities which permeate the characters who live within the stories. Some of the questions I will attempt to answer will include: why do hospitality and manners play such an important role in the characters lives in these stories? What is the historical precedence of Southern hospitality set forth by the stories of the Old South? How is

Southern hospitality racialized? What can be extracted from the structure of hospitality and how does it contextualize the actions on the screen?

The second case study will focus on the correlation and evolution of the Mammy figure within the Southern Gothic narrative space. Mammy in Gone With the Wind, is clearly overbearing and present in her placement within the domestic and familial space and is a key figure in the understanding of Old South narratives. This is indicative of the mammy figure as it is an iconic symbol of the films and literature of the imagined South.

The mammy figure is so important for the iconography of the genre that it never entirely goes away, even after false and fantastical depictions of African Americans go out of fashion, becoming instead twisted and misunderstood. Leatherface appears as the new representation of a mammy figure, the bizarre version of Hattie McDaniel’s character and is a representation of the Southern Gothic’s romance of freaks, deranged, and deformed characters. As the narratives of the American South evolve toward a Southern Gothic temperament, so too do the major figures of strength and safety, figures which carry more weight when they go wrong. What does it mean for the cinematic South when the mammy figure turns into a nightmare? How does domesticity get reimagined in the films of the Southern Gothic?

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My thesis project is largely textual, cultural, and genre analysis, so I will be looking at scholarship that focuses on culture and film, books on how domesticity works in the Southern film, food culture in film, etc. The project will culminate with a short conclusion, which, hopefully, will clear up any loose ends and tie the case studies together into a coherent argument.

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Chapter 2 Southern Gothic Hospitality

Conversation flows cheeringly, for the Southern gentleman has a particular tact in making a guest happy. After dinner you are urged to pass the afternoon and night, and if you are a gentleman in manners and information, your host will be in reality highly gratified by your so doing. Such is the character of southern hospitality.16 -Jacob Abbott

My first analysis of the Southern Gothic as it relates to cinema is a contextualization of the way in which meal time, manners, and Southern hospitality are presented in Gothic texts. Southern hospitality is ubiquitous -- a trait of the region so widespread in media that it is synonymous with the identity therein. While there are two major ways in which Southern hospitality is identified within the narrative structure

(through the romantic mythological South of Gone With the Wind and Song of the South and through the lower class, gothic, and hospitable to no end South of Texas Chainsaw

Massacre and Streetcar Named Desire) the South is roundly associated with hospitality and genteel temperaments. For the purposes of this paper, I will look into the way in which a traditional Southern hospitality narrative is presented within the Southern Gothic narrative structure. I will first, briefly, look into the historical context around the mythology of the hospitable south, with its origins in pre-Civil War aristocracy and rural plantation narratives. My next goal is to give some explanations of how hospitality is innately racialized in the South, a concept that is part of the larger Southern historical problem. Finally, I will look at how the mythos of Southern hospitality is presented in works of the Southern Gothic, paying the most attention to Flannery O’Conner’s short

22 story Good Ol’ Country People and the films The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My hope is that by the end of the paper, the reader will have a firm grasp on the answer to my research questions: why Southern hospitality is such an important trope in the narrative of the region, and how hospitality is imbued in the stories of the Southern Gothic.

Manners, customs, and rituals are all extremely important for families within the

Southern Gothic genre structure as hospitality hold a strong place within a historical, ritualistic, and societal South. These elements are what make up the term Southern hospitality, which is ubiquitous for a very specific reason, that being the reiteration of good breeding, high social standing, and innate prestige that being a Southerner (or at least a Southerner in the narrative sense) entails. The highly stylized and systemic ritual that surrounds southern manners and cannot go without exploring in the analysis of the

Southern Gothic genre structure due to their inherent connection to the mythology of

Southern ideology and narrative, and will be the first element of my foray into the

Southern Gothic hospitality. To explore how the Southern Gothic shows Southern hospitality in the narratives, I will look at various film and literature works of the genre paying closest attention to a non-Southern Gothic work in Gone With the Wind and a clear-cut Southern Gothic work in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Because Gone With the Wind and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are such vastly different kinds of stories and depict such different kinds of families, it is particularly interesting to see the commonalities that exist between the two and how, as laid out by stories of the Old

South, still permeates the more contemporary works of the Southern Gothic.

Southern scholar Diane Roberts explains: “in the popular imagination, ‘southern hospitality’ signifies both graciousness and excess, [for example] the barbeque at Twelve

23

Oaks, mouth wateringly depicted in Gone With the Wind.” 17 These two words, graciousness and excess, are important to keep in mind during this foray into the

Southern Gothic understanding of Southern hospitality. In nearly all cases, the permeation of the Old South excess still complicates the more modest Southern Gothic tradition. As the Southern Gothic is concerned with the underbelly of the South, excess comes at a higher cost to the characters depicted.

The clearest way to present why Southern hospitality should be looked at in greater detail is to understand how hospitality effects the perception of every reader and watcher on a daily basis. More important than the physical food southerners serve is the way in which that food is served, who is doing the serving, and the manner in which it is presented. These key points should be evident by the ritualistic manners and traditions of traditional stories of the Old South like Gone With the Wind and Song of the South, and also of Southern Gothic stories like Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Part of the draw of the Southern Gothic narrative is the performance of manners, rebranded in the region as Southern hospitality. Southern media scholar, Tara

McPherson explains, “Tradition and manners are repeatedly framed as the glue that binds the South together, distinguishing it from other regions. This is a familiar mantra, one linked to the ‘famous’ Southern hospitality capitalized on by many of the tourist attractions [in the region].”18 Plantation tourism, for example, highlights Southern hospitality as something that is unique to the region, something that cannot be replicated anywhere else but the South. Within the Southern Gothic genre, manners and hospitality are some of the most easily identifiable elements of the specificity of the region, and yet are also imbedded within the macabre elements of said stories. Clearly, Southern

24 hospitality is more than just dealing with food and lodging, as it pertains to just about every element of southern life, particularly rural southern life.

A History of Aristocracy

Historically, the concept of Southern hospitality has a large place in the development of the region. Aristocratic Southerners fancied themselves descendants of the aristocratic Europeans and hence modeled their homes and lifestyles from what they thought was a higher class norm. What it created, however, was a place where over-the- top lifestyles, ornate rituals, and grandiose living outplayed all sense of normalcy and actually separated themselves from a sense of community they may have felt with aristocratic Europeans. The scholarly and aristocratic lifestyle is most expressively shown in Gone With the Wind’s Wilkes family home “Twelve Oaks… with its huge and ornate staircases, crystal chandeliers, and impressive book-lined study presented a South of culture and refinement.”19 As plantations moved further into the frontier, plantation women developed a sense of communal hospitality. “The frontier was a very different force that affected the development of manners among early Southerners,”20 according to the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The frontier was a new beginning for southerners, and a place where a new name could be made for oneself, “on the frontier, manners could help an ambitious person create a persona with a well-bred background.” 21 This constructed well-bred background is a common trope of the Southern Gothic tradition

(see Thomas Supten from Faulkner’s classic Southern Gothic novel, Absalom, Absalom!) and how Gerald O’Hara made a name for himself in rural Georgia, and was able to create the lifestyle of a Southern plantation owner within his own lifetime. More

25 contemporarily, “Grandpa” in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is held to the esteem of the aristocratic Southerner. He is mythologized in such a way that his family look onto him as a sort of God-like figure. “Grandpa’s” hard work in the slaughterhouses is that of legend, and has built his family and their reputation upon that determinism.

To understand how hospitality works in contemporary stories of the South, one must understand the larger context in which Southern hospitality sits. The plantation homes of the South are spread far apart from one another to maximize the agricultural space. For many planters, the nearest neighbor lived a day or more away by horse and the nearest settlement was typically a few days at the very least. This meant that there was much time spent alone with whomever you lived with on the plantation to find things of interest to discover and practice. In his essay on hospitality in the Old South, Southern historian Eugene Alverez states, “it has been argued that, although the homes of the most planters were no larger or more richly furnished than their northern counterparts, the long days and nights spent on rural plantations led the planter class to practice its social life as an art.”22 If or when a plantation home had a visitor, the mistresses and masters of the house would bring out all of the stops so as to show the most hospitality, and also to show the abundance of goods that were surplus on the plantation. Alverez continues,

“Southern hospitality may have stemmed from a desire for companionship or a plentiful food supply which assured an easy accommodation of many guests.”23 The abundance of food and goods translates to well-to-do lifestyles and wealth, entities that assure the guests that they are to be taken care of.

In the same way that the Southern Gothic genre is built upon rural landscapes and values is the notions of traditional manners and hospitality. “What southerners see as the

26 special charm and generosity of the land below Mr. Mason’s and Mr. Dixon’s magical line may in fact be more a characteristic of a not-quite-post-rural society.”24 If Texas

Chainsaw Massacre can be seen as contemporary hospitality as compared to Gone With the Wind’s traditional hospitality, then the notion of a post-rural society is still prevalent.

Gerald O’Hara, for example, relied on his rural homestead to build a name for himself, and thrived in the sprawling rural South by buying land for agriculture. The very core of

Gerald O’Hara’s nature is imbedded in the land, which is the means and ends of his position in society. His position in society is, in turn, identified through his hospitality and manners, or rather, who he surrounds himself with to convey the notion of traditional southern hospitality, including his well breed wife and their well brought up children.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s South is also a not-quite-post-rural society. The family rely on the land in the same way that the O’Hara’s do, and push back against technological advancements and modernization. The difference here is that Chainsaw is a story of the

Southern Gothic, not the romantic south, and thus must explore the more dark and dreadful elements of human nature and society. The Chainsaw family live far and away from settlements, towns, and supposedly even neighbors, which means that when they have a guest (like Sally) they jump at the chance to perform the rituals of good hospitality. Their solitude allows them to carry out their slaughters without interference, but also means that they can partake in a part of the greater hospitable society. As they are part of the Southern Gothic, their hospitable acts are more sinister and have ulterior motives.

The Southern hospitality that permeates Gone With the Wind does not begin and end with the white O’Hara family, instead the notion of southern hospitality carries over

27 to every single character in the film, regardless of their race or economic standing.

“Hospitality, as redefined by the magisterial Southern Living, is simultaneously heritage- based and aspirational (even the descendants of slaves can participate.)”25 Slaves, in this

Old South narrative, are hospitable towards their white masters, as evident by Mammy throughout the entirety of the story and Big John when he sees Scarlett on the street in

Atlanta. Red light district’s madams, including Belle Watling, showed their manners and hospitality to the women nurses and to their gentlemen callers. Tradition and manners are at the very core of Scarlett’s restlessness after she has become a young widow. She is urged to wear black and hold back her heated temperaments when her young husband dies, even when faced with the exuberance of Rhett Butler and his offer to dance at the gala (manners do not win in this case). These examples convey a mannered imagined

South that is looked upon as a norm even though the evidence of such is primarily in stories and narratives of the region and not in historical record. Sophistication and tradition were very much carried over to the rural South by Francophiles and Anglophiles obsessed with borrowing the most elegant elements of old world traditions. The South was a new place for poised aristocracy, and because of the nature of the South’s reidentification and capacity to create new people from the margins, it was also a place where those who act a certain way can pass and be accepted as one who is of higher standing than their breeding.

Within the narrative space, the traditional Old Southern hospitality is immensely important in creation of the Southern identity. In works of Southern literature and film predating the Southern Gothic era, hospitality is a key overriding principal of the white characters lives. Every planter man knew his gentlemanly place, somewhere between

28

Gerald O’Hara’s earnestness and Ashley Wilkes’ aristocracy, just as every plantation mistress knew her own, perfectly idealized through Ellen O’Hara. Continuing with the

Gone With the Wind example, the Wilkes’ take in the “visitor from Charleston, Rhett

Butler” because it would not be proper to show him anything but the utmost hospitality.

Even when Mr. Butler offends his hosts and their guests by insinuating that they do not have enough brains or brawn to win a war with the North, he is still treated with dignity and respect (albeit with much guffaw). This example of a steadfast and heavy-handed hospitality is part of how the American South became known as a place of higher politeness. Whether the stereotype is true or not of the American South as a place of hospitality, the understanding of how social graces work in the South is what permeates the American consciousness.

This means that for works of the Southern Gothic, politeness and social graces are still a value held by most of the characters. “The Cook” of Texas Chainsaw Massacre treats Sally and her friends with a kind of hospitality that is innate to the region. It is as if he inherently knows what to say and do without thinking, because of how present hospitality is (at least in the narrative space). He knows what is expected of him and acts in such a way as to fulfill his identity as a rural Southerner.

Racialized Aristocracy

Hospitality in the Old South is based upon the readiness of the planters to have guests in their rural homes. When guests arrive the plantation owners would wine and dine guests so that they could practice their learning of aristocratic manners. Who would not be allowed partake in the relaxation and festivities? The servants and slaves, both of

29 whom would be busy handling the busy action and labor that makes up the bulk of the hospitality. The labor that goes into the grand meals, liquor and drink preparation and maintenance, kitchen readiness, and extra domestic duties falls solely on the slaves within the household. This means that the perception of hospitality is more important than the actual labor. The plantation home must seem as if it is a place of ease and relaxation, but in reality is a bustling abode of hard work for those in the margins.

The narratives of the American South, on the other hand, is made up of two different kinds of hospitable labor: those stories where the labor is completely ignored or underemphasize (like that of Gone With the Wind and Jezebel) and those stories in which the labor is highlighted (like The Help, Driving Miss Daisy, and the literary works of

Ellen Douglas). The films that depict the labor of hospitality tend to ride the line of

Southern Gothic and Southern Realism, films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the book The Celluloid South, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. states of the narratives of the Old

South, “much of the modern misunderstanding of the region, by natives and outsiders alike, was the result of a persistent mythology willingly accepted by countless audiences.

[Gone With the Wind] and other films up until 1965 confirmed a predominance of a genteel Southern class of country squires who ruled a well-ordered, contented society devoted to an agrarian ideal and the courtly pursuits, and sustained by a large work force of adoring slaves.”26 The kinds of stories that counter this Southern mythology are constructed as a mutually exclusive element to the hospitality myth. For instance, as portrayed in advertising from the region, “thus whiskey advertisements set in the genteel

South, with docile blacks serving up the booze, convey a great deal about the history of the ruling class, slavery, and race relations.”27 Those racial relations that are understood

30 as the opposing forces to the Southern mythos is just as important, if not more important for understanding how hospitality works in the Southern Gothic narratives. Replace the slave labor with “trash” and low income whites and the hospitality mythos changes. For

Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor, the understanding of that labor is part of what makes up the backbone of the construction of the idyllic Southern hospitality myth. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for example, portrays the innate understanding of offering hospitality to their guest, and yet emphasizes the labor that goes into the hospitality by showing Leatherface butchering, cooking, and preparing the meal. This juxtaposition is a defining element of Southern Gothic narratives, it shows what goes on behind the scenes in the stories of the Old South.

Race in the Old South mythology and race in the Southern Gothic, however, play very different roles. Because of the predominance of the grotesque in characters of the

Southern Gothic, the racialized elements of traditionally “white” characters are called into question. Most predominantly is the racialization of Stanley Kowalski from A

Streetcar Named Desire. Part of his grotesqueness is in his otherness from the traditionally pure Southern belle Blanche DuBois. Stanley is portrayed as animalistic, sexual, overbearing, and brutish, all elements of his character that are associated with his being Polish. This related to hospitality in that Blanche depends on Stanley and his wife, her sister Stella, for their hospitality as she drops in on them indefinitely. Blanche, being a stereotype of a (fading) Southern Belle, assumes that her sister and Stanley will receive her with hospitality, as she would have treated a guest in her family’s plantation home.

Racism and hospitality for A Streetcar Named Desire are not elements that can exist

31 together. Blanche is challenged by her non-normative experience of Stanley, his way of life, and life outside the plantation setting.

The final point of the racialized understanding of the Southern hospitality mythos is to look at the opposite perspective of the aristocratic South. Jack Temple Kirby states, in his book Media Made Dixie, that “nature gave men virtually all [in the Old South]; little effort was needed. The ‘allurement’ of Dixie spread beyond physical aspects to produce inevitability a mental lassitude as well. Thus Southern laziness has long implied more than veranda-sitting (the gentry) and catfishing (blacks and white trash). It has meant the absence of thinking, too.”28 Laziness is the opposite side of the hospitality coin in this understanding of the Southern myth. Laziness is also a fraught term often associated with African American stereotypes. The negative connotations associated with laziness and black Southerners and the positive associations with relaxation and white Southerners is part of the larger schema of rewritten history on the behalf of the

Lost Cause Southern mythology. The semantics of the word ‘lazy’ proves to be a powerful key in holding the African American citizens back, particularly as it pertains to narratives of the American South.

Southern Gothic Hospitality

The best way to understand how overbearing the ideological concept of Southern hospitality is in narratives of the South is to conceptualize how it has developed in the rhetoric of the Old South, which we have already mapped out. This is to say that in outreaching genres of the narratives of the American South are all imbued with the values of the Old South, including hospitality and aristocracy. The Southern Gothic literary

32 genre is also grappling with hospitality and manners, and yet does so in a unique way involving the traditions and iconography of the genre. Instead of grandiose plantation homes spread far apart from neighbors, the homes of the Sothern Gothic are closer together, smaller, and teeming with neighbors, family members, field hands, and strangers. Similarly, welcoming a stranger with open arms and lavish hospitality, the characters in the Southern Gothic tradition welcome guests whole hearted but with a concerned eye, sometimes doubtful of their good intentions. As the genre is concerned with things grotesque, macabre, and demented, the way in which the characters live their lives are also imbedded in the values of the genre.

It is easy to misread the Southern Gothic tradition as that of the lower class and minority voices because of those characters’ prevalence in the stories. It is however, about all elements of Southern culture, which includes the upper, middle, and lower classes. The glue for these economic disparities is the essence of southernness; the sweet tea on the veranda, the sweltering days working in the fields, and the hospitality offered to guests and family. These elements are especially important for the minority classes in works of the Southern Gothic as they highlight the commonalities between seemingly disparate groups. In talking about lower classes in works of the Old South, according to

Edward Campbell, “when common folks were portrayed, it was nearly always disparagingly.”29 The Southern Gothic tradition changes that, offering instead a more realistic, grotesque, yet honest portrayal of the hardships of everyday life.

The strongest example of lower classes offering a different perspective of

Southern hospitality is with Leatherface’s family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Leatherface’s family lives off the grid, similarly to the planter and rural families of the

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Old South. Living in the rural areas of the south make for the residents to be able to be flexible to whatever may come their way. In Gone With the Wind, this means remaining resilient and well-mannered even during the post war famine. Regan says, “rigidity in following the rules is not prized as much as flexibility and resiliency that enables the well-mannered to handle any situation graciously.”30 In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this flexibility takes the resilience of the family one step further. “The Cook” of

Leatherface’s family forewarns Sally’s friends to stay away from people’s property and

“not poke their noses into other people business.” He is worried that the teens will stumble upon something that they should not, and that the secret of their lifestyle (and possibly other people like them?) would be released. However, when faced with Sally alive in their home, they adapt their manners to accept her as part of the family, or at least an honored guest. The family places Sally at the head of their table, give her a large portion of their dwindling food supply, and she is entertained as a guest, even though her demise is evident and looming above her. While this act of hospitality may be rooted in a macabre sense of humor, it is also an innate performance of rituals and Southern culture.

For Leatherface’s family, it is almost as if the premise of Southern hospitality is heavier than saving their nontraditional lifestyles, as they perform the common tasks of being the gracious hosts when they should probably be hiding their nature.

In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is clear that the concept of Southern hospitality is innate and unconscious. Why else would the family have treated Sally with as much hospitality as they did? What it means is that the mythos of the hospitable South has permeated even the most rural and backwards sections of the region. The family in

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are as different from the O’Hara’s in Gone With the Wind

34 as possible, and yet they treat their guests with the same amount of gusto as any aristocratic Old Southern family would.

The family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not unlike Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Joy/Hulga in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, Good Country People.31 Like

Leatherface’s family, Mrs. Hopewell welcomes a stranger into her home even at the risk of said stranger ruining her meek existence. Joy/Hulga fares the worst in this encounter with the frail looking bible salesman as he manages to take advantage of her disability

(disability being a major theme of the Southern Gothic) and cutting too close to her personal philosophies and first sight judgments of those she sees as ‘Country Folk.’

In works of the Southern Gothic, there is never a sense of security between guest and host, family or friends. Leatherface’s family show hospitality for Sally because they misjudge her resolve to live. Her struggle is part of why they offer their hospitality, she has resolve, much like the cows that they relied on for their former trade. However, Sally too misjudges the hospitality of the family. She runs for her rescue to the Cook at the gas station, only to be brought back into the web of the insanity of the family. No longer is there a sense of safety and relaxation when guests enter the abode. Mrs. Hopewell allows a man who she misjudges to become privy to her private information after she offers to feed him dinner and a place at the table with herself and her daughter.

This is to say that Southern hospitality and stories of the Old South and Southern

Gothic tradition are not utterly different from one another -- on the contrary. Instead, I would suggest that there is an evolution from one kind of story to the next. As Southern hospitality is more than a trope of literary structure and instead an element of the region’s

35 ideology, that means that the way in which hospitality is treated alters from one narrative form to another.

To conclude this foray into the Southern Gothic and hospitality, I will look only briefly into how food is directly correlated with hospitality. There is a familiar trope of overfeeding guests in a measured attempt to prove hospitableness. This concept is conferred upon in the narratives we have already looked into. After the main course at the barbeque at Twelve Oaks, the gentlemen enjoy bourbon and cigars in the parlor as a notion of camaraderie. When Scarlett gets back to Tara after the burning of Atlanta, the first thing Mammy asks her about is food. Even in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the first thing “the cook” offers the teens to tide them over during the wait for a gas truck is some of his home-cooked barbeque. What makes this important is the universal role that food and manners play across the span of films and literature of the Southern Gothic genre.

Southern Gothic film, Deliverance features old women offering comfort food to the weary travelers, traditional Old Southern film The Color Purple’s dinner table scenes are where the characters talk of their lives within a mannered space, and even contemporary

Southern story To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar sends off the town’s cherished drag queen guests with a grand buffet of comfort food and manners. In all of these examples, and the countless more, there is a sense of warmth, comfort, gentility, and traditional home style values in the offering of food. This may not be a uniquely

Southern quality in reality, however it is a uniquely Southern element of narratives within the Southern Gothic.

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Chapter 3 Mammies, Freaks, and Grotesque Bodies

The true freak… stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since, unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human parents, however altered but forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and mysterious, as no mere cripple ever is. 32 -Leslie Fielder, Freaks

For God’s sake let’s have a little more freakish behavior – not less!33 -Tennessee Williams

The Southern Gothic literary tradition is footed in the macabre, and those macabre elements of the stories permeate every element of what would traditionally be seen as normal society. The physical houses in narratives of the Southern Gothic are dilapidated or falling apart, the societies are at war with themselves over race and social class, and the people are deformed, deranged, disabled, conniving, or simple. This emphasis on the grotesque is, according to Flannery O’Connor, the key identifying factor of what makes a story Southern. O’Conner explains that if a story depicting the North has freakish characters, it is an anomaly; if that story is set in the South, it is expected. This grotesque nature is brought on by the outpouring of poverty after Reconstruction. This poverty struck every race and political leaning in the South but was not a unifying condition. The narratives of the Southern Gothic implied that the deranged and dilapidated sprung up from every corner of the South, that behind every embellished façade something was rotting underneath. In this chapter I will explore the margins of this society, the freaks and cartoonish characters which are a symbol of works of the Southern Gothic literature and film. These freakish figures have had similar bodies, temperaments, and positions

37 within their familiar and domestic space. My aim is to map out the consistencies of

Southern freaks through Old South stories and into the stories of the Southern Gothic.

The best way to identify these anomalies of society is to find out where the roots of the system of icons lay. As stated before, freaks are a major part of the Southern

Gothic tradition from Faulkner’s Thomas Supton to Mark Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson.

I would argue, though, that both the book and the film of Gone With the Wind also formulates a freak within its historical romantic setting. Mammy is described as being as freakish as that novel can conceive and sets the pace for the contemporary realization of freakishness in popular literature and film. With Mammy as an example of a 1930s

Southern freak (albeit not a Southern Gothic freak) we can look at other freaks and demented in the genre as they appear throughout the narratives and history. Gone With the Wind’s Mammy helps set the pattern and can be classified alongside the murderous slaves in Birth of a Nation, the sex-and-drink lusting Stanley Kowalski of Streetcar

Named Desire, the atheist preacher Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, and most importantly for this paper, Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Every one of these characters are grotesque and yet every one is also sympathetic. An exploration of how and why this kind of character exists in this genre will also shine a light on how and why this literature is telling of a region and its position within a culture and society. I will explore the two characters, Leatherface and Mammy, in the context of the Southern Gothic genre, identifying the most important elements of their character and the kinds of characters they represent.

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The American South is a perfect storm of extremely varied socioeconomic lifestyles, races, and historical backgrounds. In his essay, “What We Talk About When

We Talk About the South,” Southern scholar and “father” of studies of the New South,

Edward Ayers describes “the whole South appears to be a vast saucer of unpleasant associations.”34 The implications of the genre tropes of the Southern Gothic tradition upon the space within the narrative makes the South a complicated and convoluted location for characters. For example, characters of color that exist in the Southern Gothic tradition cannot exist without some kind of outside conversation about their race, be it explicit or implicit in the story. For any kind of narrative within the Southern Gothic tradition, race must be understood holistically and as it relates to the historicism and demographics of the region, and also of the economic and traditional standings of the characters within the space. For the purposes of this paper, Gone With the Wind cannot be looked at without addressing race, and similarly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre cannot be looked at without considering the absence of race. In both of the films, stress surrounds the construction of race, and this is especially important in its intersection of race and domesticity. However, just as race cannot be overlooked, the same goes for economics and economic standings, which play important roles in the position of where a character comes from and their reasoning behind certain actions and decisions. Contextualizing the characters by figuring out their positions within the domestic space, especially for

Leatherface and Mammy, plays an important role in understanding their standpoints. It also helps to identify how the other characters see Mammy and Leatherface within this narrative space. Identifying the socioeconomic standings of the characters in the

39 narratives helps to create a complex understanding of how these characters live and survive.

Other factors, such as physical appearance and size, are part of the immediate connections between these two characters in their position in the narratives. Leatherface and Mammy are recognizable for their size and gait, through Mammy’s quickness and booming presence or Leatherface’s running and chainsaw dancing, which is part of the fiber of their character. These two characters are part of the iconography of the Southern

Gothic genre as they are representations of the freakish nature of the South. Neither character can be ignored and yet both reside within a protected domestic sphere. As far as the position of the characters within the narratives, they both are indicative of how freaks, the demented, or the grotesque are innate elements of the fabric of the Southern

Gothic.

The Body

Margaret Mitchell’s Mammy character is as stereotypical in body, face, and form as a mammy figure in literature can conceive. She is heavy and tall, overbearing in stature, loud, opinionated, and yet still obedient to her white owners and absolutely committed to her “family.” Her appearance is reiterated in the film with the casting of

Hattie McDaniel, a physically large and very dark woman, juxtaposed against Vivian

Leigh’s petit frame and pale skin. Mammy is unlike the white O’Hara family in every physical sense, and that is important for the iconography of the film within a genre. The mammy figure is always going to be an outsider, no matter how the narrative constructs her, because of her body, her skin color, and her domestic position. Tara McPherson,

40 describes Mammy in her book Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the

Imagined South by saying:

Mammy enters the story, ‘shining black, pure African’ with a ‘lumbering tread,’ ‘huge…with the shrewd eyes of an elephant’ (15). She is consistently described as either old and gnarled, as gigantic, or as animalistic, all images that portray her as unfeminine and desexualized. She is not, of course, ever called a ‘lady;’ rarely is she even designated ‘woman’ although she sometimes serves as a source of maternal comfort… She is often like ‘an old ape’ (70) or a ‘restless bloodhound’ (15); her ‘mountainous figure’ waddles and quakes (701); she wears huge men’s shoes, and her ‘shapeless body overflows’ into the space it inhabits. Mammy is figured via ‘metaphysical condensation,’ which, in the words of Toni Morrison, ‘allows the writer to transform social and historical differences. Collapsing persons into animals prevents human contact and exchange.’35

Mammy, as mentioned in the above quote, is not considered to be a human, she is something else. This dehumanizing language of her physical appearance is also significant in her position within this narrative society; Mammy is not a part of the family and it is impossible for her to ever be because she is so physically different. Mammy’s description and appearance is what makes her a grotesque caricature of the Gone With the

Wind narrative; a stain in the otherwise perfect white domestic world.

This description of Mammy in many ways could also be the description of Texas

Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, with the easy exchange of pronouns. However, even with the pronouns, the description is interchangeable because of Leatherface’s ambiguous sexuality and habit of sounding like an animal and treating other humans as animals. He could easily be described similarly as Mammy, huge and lumbering, yet quick and loud

(with his chainsaw howling). Leatherface also preps the food for the most important part of the conceptions of the imagined Southern home: the huge dinner feast. He too wears different masks depending on his placement within the domestic space, albeit literal masks. With every role Leatherface takes on, his face, hair, and clothing change to fit the necessary position. Just as Scarlett identifies Mammy to be the metaphor for home, so

41 too is Leatherface for his family. Similarly, Scarlett’s hypothetical reaction to the prospect of Mammy leaving her would be the same if Leatherface was to leave his own.

In both cases they represent the rock and core to the family unit, symbolizing strength and normalcy in the face of strife.

In terms of the preexisting horror genre, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s iconic killer has the familiar gait and look of the classic horror and slasher film villain. The origin of the large, stalking villain is easily traced to the very beginnings of the horror genre, including Frankenstein’s Monster and Der Golum (from the 1920 film of the same name) and continues throughout the 40s and 50s including Val Lewton’s Cat People, and the Ed

Wood cult classic Plan Nine From Outer Space. Moreover, Leatherface stalks heroines in the night, has a sentimental heart and slow mind, all of which are common tropes of the monsters of the genre. He is massive, like Frankenstein’s Monster or the

Swampthing, and seems to embody a familiar inhumanness that makes the iconography of his character more palatable and connects him to his similarly foreign predecessors.

However, where the singlemindness of the classic lumbering villain ends, the essence of

Leatherface’s character takes off, connecting him more so to the iconography of the

Southern Gothic than classical horror tropes.

Leatherface’s sentimentality is a darker one; he is not simply a misunderstood creature. Instead of the slow stalking of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead zombies,

Leatherface never seems to be too far behind the virginal girl he chases through the woods. Even when he finally catches up to his prey, he digresses. Because of his connection to his family, Leatherface easily slides into the position of a sympathetic character. He hunts and kills to feed his family, not because he is vengeful or psychotic.

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He also hunts to protect what little amount of normalcy his family retains. He has been indoctrinated in a way of life where “you don’t go poking around in other people’s property.”36 Leatherface does what he thinks is best for protecting his family and what he has been trained since birth to do.

The audience never sees Leatherface’s actual face, as he wears the skin of one (or more) of his victims over his own. This element of Leatherface’s character is notable for many reasons; like Frankenstein’s Monster before him, Leatherface does not retain his own unique identity, his face is literally composed of other people. His mask is or appears to have been from a female victim, and he changes masks to evoke his mood or manner. When Leatherface is killing and preparing the meat, he wears a plain or work mask. Alternatively, when Leatherface is cooking for the family or caregiving for his invalid grandfather he wears a mask with lipstick and eyeshadow, or one that is more traditionally feminized. This face might be considered to be more pleasant if it were still attached to a female, and yet its position on Leatherface makes it all the more grotesque.

According to Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s writer, Kim Hinkle, “Leatherface is one of those characters who is what he wears – his character changes according to the face he puts on.”37 Leatherface’s masks are the outward projection of his internal turmoil, and literally wears his placement within his domestic space on his face.

It is easy to identify Leatherface as a freak as his physical body and appearance are freakish and appalling. However, Leatherface’s freakish nature is more closely aligned with his treatment and ideology of his family. His family are what makes

Leatherface a killer, a butcher, and a cook. Their appearance may be normal on the outside, but their ideology has permeated their position in society in such a way that they

43 no longer “fit in.” Leatherface does the most natural thing he can do, which is protect his family.

Leatherface’s body is similar to Mammy in many ways; it is his size that is what makes him matronly. Leatherface’s body can also be seen as a spectacle much like the spectacle of the black body, an anomaly that is picked apart and viewed as different than everyone else. The difference, however, between Mammy’s size and Leatherface’s, is that he uses his to a different kind of advantage, one for the effect of horror. He frightens his pray by simply being himself. He quite literally fills out an entire doorway in the first shot in which the audience (and the teenagers whom he kills) sees him, giving the impression that there is no getting past him.

Language

This inequality between the classes and races is coded in Gone With the Wind, particularly through Mammy’s vernacular, which is heavy and at times hard to understand. Mammy is identified as an outsider through her hulking body and also through her language and voice, both of which make it impossible for her to blend in and be an official part of the O’Hara family. She is a shadowy member of the household, shining a light on the inequalities of the time. Mammy, Pork, and Prissy, the three main slave characters in Gone With the Wind all follow a strict vernacular; a language which is created by the filmmakers for the means of separation.

David O. Selznick hired Margaret Mitchell’s friend, Susan Myrick, a local southern historian and journalist, to oversee the historical accuracies of the film. Myrick was also tasked with overseeing the authenticity of the southern accents, paying close

44 attention to Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable (who eventually chose to opt out of doing any kind of accent). Part of overseeing the authenticity of the accents was also overseeing the vernacular of the slave characters. Originally, the scripts for Gone With the Wind had every character’s lines written in vernacular to make it clear where the accent distinctions were.38 However, this was changed eventually because the actors were speaking the lines differently than they would be if they were just focusing on the accent. Myrick decided, though, that the black vernacular needed to remain written to make it clear the distinction between black and white, slave and master. Myrick would write long line-by- line notes on script development to develop the ‘true’ slave dialect. An example of one such memo follows:

“p.79 Sc.200: Big Sam and negros speak. One says ‘Good-bye Ma’m.’ Change ‘Ma’m’ to ‘Mistis.’” “p.135, Sc.402: Pork’s phrase ‘bahnyahd valet.’ This phrase seems inconsistent to me. The Southern negro of Pork’s type would scarcely know the word “valet’ and I sincerely doubt if the phrase ‘bahnyahd valet’ would ever occur to him. The phrase seems Harlem to my Georgia ear.” “p.135, Sc. 403: Mammy says ‘Mist’ Gerald, de pail.” I note that in several phrases in the script you changed the phraseology of the negros, according to former suggestions of mine, to make the characters say ‘Marse Gerald.’ I suggest that this phrase be used throughout. The Georgia negro scarcely knows the word ‘pail.’ Mammy would say ‘bucket.’” “p. 203, Sc. 573: Mammy’s second speech. ‘Don’ you dare drap it!’ I suggest the phrase would be more Southern if Mammy merely said ‘Don’ you drap it.’ Mammy’s third speech. ‘Dat’s whut Ah is.’ Mammy would say ‘Dat’s who Ah is.’ Mammy’s fourth speech. ‘You kin polish his feet, and etc.’ I suggest the phrasing be changed to have Mammy say ‘You kin wash his foots and shine 39 ‘im wid de curry-comb ‘an put ‘im in brass harness, and etc.’”

The dictation of language between the white characters, who are often corrected on content of their speech instead of specific words, and the black characters is hugely important in the way that the black characters function within this space. By separating

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Mammy (and Prissy and Pork) from the white characters through the spoken word, the filmmakers, Selznick, and Myrick are making a decision for her to represent something else. Her physical body is not enough, nor is her position as servant and slave, she must speak in a different language as well.

Mammy’s vernacular is the coded signifier of her position within the domestic space. Her language sets her apart from, not only the O’Haras, but the rest of the hegemonic white community in which she is an outside member of. The way that she speaks is the irreconcilable difference between society and herself.

Leatherface’s language, on the other hand, signifies the separation between himself and society even further. He does not and cannot speak, with the exception of a few whines, snorts, and screams, all of which sound more pig-like than human. Instead of asserting himself within the domestic space with language, he does so with his chainsaw and masks, providing the evolution of the othering of the kind of character

Leatherface and Mammy represent. Leatherface’s lack of language is just one more way for him to be the feminized character in the film. He cannot talk, and so he cannot assert himself.

This does not mean to say that Leatherface goes unnoticed. He is far from forgettable, as he is a considerable giant and makes his presence known by his tool of choice. As mentioned before, Leatherface is similar to Mammy in size and gait, and uses his physical size as a position of center of the homestead. Mammy is often noted as being abundant in size so that she can physically represent the home and hearth, her body is the metaphoric center.

Domesticity and Family Structure

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Leatherface’s and Mammy’s size are more notable in function than simply being a connecting tissue between the films. Their size is a commentary on the kind of character they represent within the Southern Gothic narrative and their all-present position within the domestic sphere. Mammy and Leatherface never seem to be too far from the protagonists and are in nearly every scene that takes place within their respective houses, and often in scenes outside the house. They both hold a tempered position of power, reflecting the kind of domestic power structure that freaks and grotesque members of the family commonly depicted within the Gothic South (see Joy/Hulga in O’Connor’s Good

Country People or Clytie in Absalom, Absalom!). They run the home, and without them the domestic sphere would fall apart. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett implies that there is no home or Tara without Mammy. This means that Mammy holds the position of consistency that is imperative for a Southern household. She is the representative of order, semblance, and position within the hierarchical domestic space. Moving forward with the Southern Gothic’s progression, Leatherface’s family would completely fall apart without his housekeeping, protection, and food preparation. He is the only sense of order in the chaos of his domestic situation. Additionally, Mammy and Leatherface are thrifty and handy. Mammy can whip up a gown from an old pair of curtains when Scarlett is in need of one. Leatherface’s whole home is reimagined pieces of furniture and art made from the parts of the bodies that they cannot eat; there is human skin for lampshades and bones sit in for wooden chairs. Mammy and Leatherface both deal with the cards in which they have been dealt in similar ways, by continuously innovating to keep the order and control of the domestic space.

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The final form of domestic deviation that connects Mammy with Leatherface is their relationship to white trash. Mammy is utterly disgusted by the white trash characters within the film (of which, there are very few compared to the book). Those characters that are present (like the Slattery family) are positioned lower on the hierarchical food chain than the house slaves. McPherson explains, “each of the tale’s ‘white trash’ women functions as a degraded third term that holds the novel’s black-white equation in place. Emmie Slattery’s description as an ‘overdressed, common, nasty piece of poor white trash,’ serves as a nightmare image underscoring the effect on the social order of not maintaining clear distinctions between black and white.”40 The white trash characters cannot be ignored, and yet, they are easily cast aside because of the dichotomy of black and white. In Gone With the Wind, being a slave is the horror, and white trash, though not clearly extrapolated, are positioned similarly as the slaves (perhaps that is an oversimplification, but they are positioned low because they are white, and therefor should act and appear a certain inherent way). Mammy, therefore, understands the complicated dynamics of blacks and whites within this literary and metaphoric space, and has no patience for whites who don’t uphold their end of the hierarchical totem pole.

Leatherface and his family are, in many ways, the definition of white trash. They are of a lower economic position -- uncultured, probably inbred, and utterly uneducated.

They are a family that gained their position through the hard work and skilled labor of the slaughterhouse, and are left with no reserves when the industry grows faster than they can keep up with, rendering them obsolete. The evolution of white trash, in the Southern

Gothic narrative, is that the position goes from being an unignorable anomaly to the terror of reality. The texts which represent the Southern Gothic style are deeply

48 imbedded and invested in ‘trash’ because it is part of the emphasis on freaks and the grotesque; trashy characters often times outnumber those who are not or are hard to discern from anyone else. In the world of the Southern Gothic, traditional education is demeaned, those who attempt to rise above their social rank become freakish in their ambitions. Those who remain in their lower economic position are no longer freakish, but they are still grotesque. Leatherface’s resourcefulness is not an anomaly in

O’Conner’s definition of the Southern Gothic in that it is indicative of a form of progression. However, Leatherface’s resourcefulness is Southern Gothic or grotesque when conventionalized as part of the narrative of the South.

Why is it important to understand how these characters function within these stories and within the genre of the Southern Gothic? Those characters, which would normally be hiding in the shadows, are brought to the forefront of narratives of the

Southern Gothic. Instead of pushing aside anomalies, the Southern Gothic relishes them.

Alternatively, that which is usually the norm (the lovely plantation home, the well-to-do family) is turned on its head. No longer is the plantation home the philosophical and narrative norm as the texts depicting the region have moved toward the macabre. In the

Southern Gothic tradition, the anomaly is the grandiose home, and the stories come from the margins. Moreover, characters like Leatherface and Mammy are heightened in their position within the narrative. This means that the role of domestic work is made to be more important, the breadwinner is either missing, deranged, dead, or invalid. By focusing on the freakish nature, bodies, and language of the grotesque characters, we can understand how the “real” world of the South functions.

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Chapter 4 Conclusion

The American South is portrayed in a multitude of ways, and each has a fiber of truth and a sliver of mythology. The Southern Gothic literary tradition is deeply connected to truth and mythology but is also connected to the mythology that it precedes.

This is also to say that films depicting the South are part of a “Southern” genre and also a part of whatever predetermined genre it most closely relates. For the Southern Gothic, in particular, predetermined genres are the first identifying elements of the story: Chainsaw is a horror film, Deliverance is an adventure. In these cases, their connecting tissue is not just that they take place in similar regions, but that those regions are implied to be permeated with darkness. The Southern Gothic is also aware of the elements of Southern culture that literature and the arts has mythologized as parts of the identity. Scarlett

O’Hara and her family are the picture perfect icons of the Old Southern temperament: strong, resilient, and proud. Leatherface and his family are the picture perfect icons of the Southern Gothic; they too are resilient and proud, but they are also demented, which undermines their existence.

The juxtaposition of these two characters and families highlights the differences between genres, be it literary or cinematic. Gone With the Wind is not a horror film and

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a historical epic, and yet they both take on some of the themes of a film of the Southern Gothic. I do not want to suggest, though, that Gone

With the Wind is part of the same literary tradition of the Southern Gothic, because it is very much a part of a different, more traditional and romantic, literary tradition. Gone

With the Wind was a bestselling historical romance novel before it was a box office

50 success, and so acts as a precursor to the literature that is best identified as Southern

Gothic. In fact, the year Gone With the Wind was published and received the Pulitzer

Prize for American Literature, Faulkner published his Southern Gothic epic Absalom,

Absalom!, a book which is better received in academic and critical circles as well as being a part of Southern Gothic literary canon. Historical romances in literature have been a popular genre since the invention of the printing press, and so it is no stretch of the mind that it would cross over so well into American literature and cinema.

As Southern Gothic literature is a richly dense tradition, spanning from William

Faulkner to Flannery O’Conner and to Tennessee Williams, there is a huge reliance in the film genre on the previous works set forth in literature. For example, adaptations of most of the pillars of the literary genre exist, including O’Conner’s Wiseblood (1979),

Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). This is not to say, though, that there is not original films which hit on all of the high points of the genre. Films such as Southern

Comfort (1981), The Young One (1960), and more recently George Washington (2000) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) are all cinematic narratives whose origins are in the screenplay and yet are dealing with the identification of the Southern Gothic tradition.

These films are part of a larger picture of what it takes to be a film of the Southern

Gothic. It should go without saying that a film does not have to have been a literary work previously to be identified with the Southern Gothic.

There are certain elements of Southern Culture that are part of the Southern

Gothic and there are other elements that are unique to the subgenre. Some of these Old

Southern elements are Southern hospitality and close knit family structures, while the

51 elements that are purely Gothic are the emphasis on the freakish characters and the psychological turmoil that the characters face. I hoped that my two examples in chapters two and three are just tips of the iceberg of these elements of the Southern Gothic.

Southern hospitality is one of those intangible elements of Southern culture that is difficult to pinpoint and yet is clearly identifiable when performed. As far as cultural identifiers go, Southern hospitality is as Southern as sweet tea and rebellion. The important way in which Southern hospitality is identified is through its performativity within a non-normative narrative like those in the Southern Gothic. Because the

Southern Gothic’s emphasis is on the macabre and deformed parts of society, the hospitality that is portrayed is also backwards, insincere, and demented. Quite literately, the characters will take one in and give them a warm meal right before they attempt to smash their heads in with a hammer.

Perhaps the most iconic element of the Southern Gothic genre is its interest in freaks and the demented. In this case, the Southern Gothic tradition breaks away from the traditional Old Southern lineage so that it can explore the darker underbelly of what common people sweep under the rug. In many stories of the Southern Gothic there are characters with developmental problems, disabilities, and freakish personalities (for example, in order: Leatherface, Joy/Hulga, and Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). In all of these stories, the freaks shine, making the narratives multifaceted in their command of the

Southern identity. Historically, the freakish nature of characters is swept under the rug, but with the Southern Gothic those characters are brought out of the shadows.

It is my aim to have a more complex understanding of how the Southern Gothic genre works outside of the literary context. The Southern Gothic is more than a black

52 and white literary genre. It may not need to be said, but I need to make it clear that the

Southern Gothic genre IS spread out amongst other mediums and is not a singularly literary based genre. Film is simply one of many ways in which the Southern Gothic is portrayed, as it appears in television, art, music, and even fashion. The basis of my argument is, though, that the Southern Gothic tradition has its origins in literature, and hence is based in the traditions therein. With that literary tradition identified, then we can see how the genre had spread to other mediums with success.

I would like to claim that there is a need for a pre-identified Southern Gothic cinematic genre, but that may not necessarily be the complete truth. I have reiterated that there are multitudes of other genres at play in the Southern Gothic tradition, and so there should be a subcategory of works that fit within the confines of the Southern Gothic and whatever else they might be identified. The Southern Gothic is less a cinematic genre with iconic tropes and more a psychological effect put upon preexisting narratives: a tinted view of something else.

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Works Cited

1 "Quentin Tarantino: Brad Pitt Does Not Smoke Pot While Acting; I Don't Smoke While Directing." NY Daily News. NY Daily News, 13 Feb. 2010. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.

2 Southern Gothic Gets Odd, Jennifer Lynn McCarthy p 6

3 Fitzgerald, Sally, and Robert Fitzgerald. "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction."Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. By Flannery O'Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. 40. Print.

4 Fitzgerald, Sally, and Robert Fitzgerald. "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction."Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. By Flannery O'Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. 44, 45. Print.

5 Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Preface, vii. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Print. Preface, vii

6 Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. 13. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Print.

7 Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. 10. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Print.

8 Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. 30. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Print.

9 Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Print.

10 Clover, Carol J. Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: BFI, 1992. Print.

11 Clover, Carol J. Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: BFI, 1992. Print.

12 McNerney, Tracey. "The Bible Is America’s Favorite Book Followed by Gone with the Wind." The Bible Is America's Favorite Book Followed by Gone with the Wind. Business Wire Magazine, 08 Apr. 2008. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.

13 Graham, Allison, and Sharon Monteith. Media. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 2011. 69. Print.

14 Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. 10. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981. Print.

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15 Stokes, Jane C. How to Do Media & Cultural Studies. Second ed. London: SAGE, 2003. Print. p.132.

16 Abbott, Jacob. New England, and Her Institutions. 1835. Pg. 223. Web Search.

17 Wilson, Charles Reagan; Roberts, Diane. Myth, Manners, and Memory. “Hospitality.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. 234.

18 McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. P.150

19 The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. p3

20 Wilson, Charles Reagan. Myth, Manners, and Memory. “Manners.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. 97.

21 Wilson, Charles Reagan. Myth, Manners, and Memory. “Manners.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. 97.

22 “Southern Hospitality as Seen By Travelers:1820-1860” Studies of Popular Culture. Eugene Alverez. Vol. 2, No. 1. (Spring 1979). P. 25

23 “Southern Hospitality as Seen By Travelers:1820-1860” Studies of Popular Culture. Eugene Alverez. Vol. 2, No. 1. (Spring 1979). P. 25

24 Wilson, Charles Reagan; Roberts, Diane. Myth, Manners, and Memory. “Hospitality.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. 236.

25 Wilson, Charles Reagan; Roberts, Diane. Myth, Manners, and Memory. “Hospitality.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. 236.

26 The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. p14

27 Media Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination. Jack Temple Kirby University of Georgia Press. P. xviii.

28 Media Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination. Jack Temple Kirby University of Georgia Press. P.79

29 The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. p15

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30 Wilson, Charles Reagan. Myth, Manners, and Memory. “Manners.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006. Print. 96.

31 O'Connor, Flannery, Yoshie Itabashi, and Miyoko Sasaki. "Good Country People." The Complete Works of Flannery O'Connor. Kyoto: Rinsen Book, 1992. N. pag. Print.

32 Fiedler, Leslie A. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. Print.

33 Tennessee Williams, “introduction: Something Wild,” in Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One Act Plays (1945) 34 Ayers, Edward. "What We Talk About When We Talk About the South." (n.d.): 63-82. Print.

35 McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Pg. 52

36 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. By Kim Henkel. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Perf. Gunner Hansen, Marilyn Barnes. Vortex Films, 1974. DVD.

37 Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Print. Pg. 117.

38 Harry Ransom Center. David O. Selznick Collection. Box 412. Folder 1.

39 Harry Ransom Center. David O. Selznick Collection. Box 412. Folder 1.

40 McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Pg. 57

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VITA

Hallie K. Reiss was born in Austin, Texas and grew up in San Francisco,

California and Ogden, Utah. After completing her work at Ben Lomond

High School, Ogden, Utah, in 2003, she spent several years dancing in various ballet companies throughout the United States. In 2006, Hallie entered Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California and earned her

Associates Degree, after which she transferred to the University of

California, Santa Cruz. She received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz in August 2010. During the following years, she became certified in patisserie and baking from the

California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. In September, 2012, she entered the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin to pursue a

Master’s degree in Media Studies from the Department of Radio, Television, and Film.

Permanent Address:

2225 20th St Apt 2

Santa Monica, CA 90405

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This thesis was typed by Hallie K. Reiss.

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