William Faulkner: Southern Gothic Literature

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Recommended: The study of Gothic literature

Southern Gothic Literature Southern gothic literature is made up of many characteristics that make it different from other type of writing. What makes Southern Gothic literature stand out is that it contains violence, social issues, and Bible pushing.
Most of southern gothic writings are considered to be southern and focus on an emotionally damaged character. It is also “a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents” (Southern gothic). One of the best southern gothic writers was William Faulkner he was born September 25, 1897 and died July 6, 1962. William lived in New Albany, Mississippi were he began to write poems and soon …show more content…

“At first reading, the gothic horror of the tale will likely rule out a heart-lifting experience” (Stranburg). Emily suffers with a mental illness disease throughout the story as she is one of the last members of her family that is still living. When she was a child her father wouldn’t allow her to have social contact. When her father dies he leaves her the house but no money and it sends her into a depressed downward spiral and she refuses to accept his death for three days. "She met the ladies at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them her father was not dead. She told them that for three days" (Faulkner 3). Emily’s response shows the readers how much she has convinced herself that he’s not dead and how bad mental illness can really be. The neighbors do not see anything wrong with her at this point, they just believe she taking the loss of her father hard. Soon she meets Homer who is in town working on a construction project. Shortly sometime after Emily falls for him and they began dating. Homer decided to leave and then comes back and that is the last time he is seen in the story. Emily is so sick and twisted she is willing to kill the people that she loves most, because the fear of being alone is so haunting to her. After she kills Homer the neighbors start to wonder about the stench coming from her house and start to get …show more content…

In A Rose for Emily the novel is focused mainly on her mental illness and her social issues. The way Emily ignores most of the people in her town is strange and unhuman like, and when she keeps her dead father corps in her house because she doesn’t want to let go is unhealthy. She has also proven to be a sick women by the way she killed her love Homer. In the other novel A Good Man is hard to find it has more violence as Misfit murders his family and more Bible pushing from the grandmother as she tries to change who Misfit is by pushing him to be a better man. The grandmother wants the best for her family and its irritating when they don’t take her advice. In the novel Good Country People in contains a hint of the Bible pushing from Manly as he uses it to convince people that he is a good Godly man. The novel takes a creepy twist we readers find out who Manly really is. He is a smooth talker, a manipulator and uses trust to take advantage of women. The three main characters Emily, Misfit and Manly are all struggling with emotional damage and all have a mental illness that they can’t control. With their characteristics it makes the stories easy to determine if it is southern gothic or not. These three stories contain violence, mental illness, and Bible pushing and those are the characteristics that make these novels southern

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