Southern Gothic Literature Analysis

Southern Gothic literature was conceived in post-antebellum 19th century America upon the yarns of Samuel Clemmons; known to his followers by the pen name “Mark Twain”, the master comic distortion of his contemporary society. Twain wove the instinctive world into absurdity, unattractiveness, and parody by Henry Clay Lewis. The birth of Southern Gothic literature wouldn’t come to full radiance until the 20th century upon the concepts of Dixie humor, dark romanticism, and literary naturalism; forming a new force in social judgment. The characteristics of Southern Gothic Literature are direct descendants of the American Gothic and its distant cousin, the European Gothic style. However, the representative setting of Southern Gothic is distinctively

By definition, a moral code is a set of beliefs a person follows to live a fulfilled life. “One cannot deny that the concerns of this story are the basic concerns of Christian belief: faith, death, salvation. And yet, if one reads the story without prejudice, there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters” (Bandy Stephen 1). Particularly significant, the word moral is not synonymous with good; it is simply a code of conduct; the righteousness of a person’s morals remains subjective. From the beginning, we see that the morals of Misfit are misguided, in comparison with the flexible morals of the grandmother. The grandmother placed great significance on ladylike character, emphasizing that appearance was, in fact, a higher priority than substance. Simultaneously, she persistently deceives her family; presenting a lack of modern awareness. Despite her Christian ideology, she remains unable to pray during times of extreme adversity, ultimately leading her to question her

Illustrating this point, the grandmother criticizes the children’s mother for their upbringing and compares the mother’s face to a cabbage. She also takes liberty to criticize others within her world, yet never analyzes her own selfishness or hypocritical actions. Unlike the grandmother, who simply assumes that she is morally superior to everyone else, the Misfit seriously questions the meaning of life and his role in it. “But as in all of O’Conner’s stories, the violent surface action only begins to suggest the depths and complexities of meaning embedded in the story” (Desmond, John 1). When the Misfit murders the family, the grandmother never begs him to spare her family. She does, however, plead for her own life because she can’t imagine the Misfit being willing to kill a lady. As the grandmother faces death at the hands of the Misfit, she realizes where she has gone wrong in life. Instead of being superior, she realizes that she is flawed; evidenced as she tells the Misfit that he is “one of her own