University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2015 Southern Gothic Fiction and New Naturalism: Toward a Reading of New Naturalism Jeremy Kevin Locke University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Locke, Jeremy Kevin, "Southern Gothic Fiction and New Naturalism: Toward a Reading of New Naturalism. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2015. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3508 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Jeremy Kevin Locke entitled "Southern Gothic Fiction and New Naturalism: Toward a Reading of New Naturalism." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Mary E. Papke, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Thomas F. Haddox, Bill Hardwig, Carolyn Hodges Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Southern Gothic Fiction and New Naturalism: Toward a Reading of New Naturalism A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Jeremy Kevin Locke August 2015 DEDICATION To Alana. Were it not for your encouragement, I would have never finished this degree. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Doctors Tom Haddox, Bill Hardwig, and Carolyn Hodges, for their support and feedback. I would especially like to thank Doctor Mary Papke for believing in me from the beginning of my career at the University of Tennessee. Without her patience, insight, and dedication, there’s no telling what would have become of me as a graduate student. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the intersections of American naturalism and the Southern Gothic by seeking to demonstrate how William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West revise key elements of fin-de-siècle naturalist fiction in a manner that enables them to create a new naturalism that they use to shed light upon the tendency of the sociocultural narratives that give meaning to the traditional conception of the Southern community to entrap characters within predetermined identities. Of particular interest to this dissertation are these texts’ revisions of the figures of the naturalist narrator and the naturalist protagonist. Moreover, by calling attention to the revision of literary naturalism that occurs in these three novels, I argue further that their engagement with naturalism contributes to current understandings of the Southern Gothic mode and offers new directions in naturalist studies that will lead to a greater understanding of the conventions and techniques of new naturalism. Specifically, I contend that placing emphasis on the Southern Gothic’s naturalist features allows readers to gain greater insight concerning questions of what happens to the Southern Gothic protagonist following his realization that he “has been ‘divested of the illusion of transcendent significance for either his social or personal existence and so finds himself an ‘alien, a stranger,’ ‘an exile,’ in the world that had once been his home” (Rubin xiii). It pushes beyond this observation by arguing that while the Southern Gothic characters’ lives unfold within the parameters of sociocultural narratives and structures that seek to determine their identities in a manner reminiscent of first-wave naturalism, these characters, unlike the unthinking naturalist brute, are conscious of the alienation and determinism that he or she experiences. This consciousness enables them to act as new naturalist characters that resist the deterministic environments that threaten to entrap them by creating narratives of self with which to combat the claims of the prevailing sociocultural narratives in which they have become inscribed and that will determine them should they not resist by conceiving of themselves as existing outside of their influence. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction……………………………………………………...1 II. The Southern Gothic and the Failed Naturalist Narrator in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying…………………………….24 III. Naturalism and the Southern Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.............................................................105 IV. Reimagining the Naturalist Protagonist and the Exhaustion of Hard Determinism in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian……………………………………………………….143 V. Conclusion…………………………………………………….219 Works Cited………………………………………………….. 223 Vita……………………………………………………………230 v I. INTRODUCTION In Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary, Anthony Dyer Hoefer offers a reading of several works that might be read as belonging to the Southern Gothic tradition but “deliberately (and strategically) avoid[s]” identifying them with the term “Southern Gothic” (14). He does so because he believes that the “idea of the ‘southern Gothic’ has been deployed so frequently and so widely to any work of art tinged with the uncanny that, at least for me, it no longer offers any critical utility” (14). He states further that he intends for Apocalypse South to create “a new conceptual language to address many of the same literary phenomena [associated with the Southern Gothic] and a means by which they can be locating [sic] within the context of cultural practices and beliefs rather than the conventions of a particular genre” (14). Hoefer is correct in that the overuse of “Southern Gothic” as a descriptor of literature and film has caused it to become, in many instances, a vaguely-defined catch-all term for works that focus on the South or Southerners and that seek to create an ominous mood tinged with dread, one of the hallmarks of the Gothic tradition; however, to claim that this has divested it of “critically utility” is an overstatement. Nevertheless, such a response is understandable given that the too-frequent application of “Southern Gothic” is largely a result of its use in the context of popular culture and not in the context of literary studies. Thus, Hoefer’s desire to discuss the Southern Gothic in terms of “cultural practices and beliefs rather than the conventions of a particular genre” appears to be a move in the right direction where studies of this phenomenon in Southern literature are concerned. While Hoefer’s strategy allows him to remove his readings of the texts that he analyzes in Apocalypse South from any restrictions that might be imposed by the generic conventions of the Southern Gothic, it disregards the fact that the conventions that he seeks to avoid emanate from 1 and respond to the cultural practices and beliefs on which he focuses. As a result, his avoidance of “Southern Gothic” allows him to shift focus away from the problems that he believes stem from the excessive, and perhaps wrongful, application of this term but only at the expense of avoiding a larger issue that has posed difficulties to assessments of the mode from the publication of Ellen Glasgow’s “Heroes and Monsters” to the present, the failure to consider thoroughly its engagement with and revision of American literary naturalism. To address this issue, this dissertation explores the intersections of American naturalism and the Southern Gothic by seeking to demonstrate how William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West revise key elements of fin-de-siècle naturalist fiction in a manner that enables them to create a new naturalism that they use to shed light upon the tendency of the sociocultural narratives that give meaning to the traditional conception of the Southern community to entrap characters within predetermined identities. Of particular interest to this dissertation are these texts’ revisions of the figures of the naturalist narrator and the naturalist protagonist. Moreover, by calling attention to the revision of literary naturalism that occurs in these three novels, I argue further that their engagement with naturalism contributes to current understandings of the Southern Gothic mode and offers new directions in naturalist studies that will lead to a greater understanding of the conventions and techniques of new naturalism. Specifically, I contend that placing emphasis on the Southern Gothic’s naturalist features allows readers to gain greater insight concerning questions of what happens to the Southern Gothic protagonist following his realization that he “has been ‘divested of the illusion of transcendent significance for either his social or personal existence and so finds himself an ‘alien, a stranger,’ ‘an exile,’ in the world that had once been his home” (Rubin xiii). It pushes beyond this 2 observation by arguing that while the Southern Gothic characters’