Over spring break, I traveled throughout the American South. I was particularly interested in visiting locations of literary importance. I originally planned to write about diversity in Southern Gothic literature. After visiting William Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, and Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, comparing the two made me deeply consider Lee’s place in Southern literature.
Before continuing, I should define what Southern Gothic literature is. The genre is hard to nail down due to its breadth. Nonetheless, Southern Gothic work carries similar themes, motifs, and character archetypes. In particular, setting remains a contentious debate among writers. For example, can we consider Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s book Mexican Gothic, set in Mexico City and Baja California, a part of the Southern Gothic genre? I would argue yes, as it taps into one of the genre’s most crucial themes: cursed soil.
So, what is cursed soil and how does it relate to the literary genre? Southern Gothic literature attempts to answer why the American South finds itself in cycles of poverty, violence, and “backwardness.” While much of that language is problematic, it addresses the fundamental truth that the South consistently ranks the lowest for life expectancy and earnings, and ranks high in rates of child poverty (for further information, see this corroborating Washington Post article).
Southern Gothic literature offers an answer for this state of backwardness: that the South has cursed soil – literally and figuratively. In its dirt, it holds the United State’s original sin: slavery. Much of this language dates back to the Civil War.
Union soldier Howard Stevens of Illinois lost a brother at the battle of Raymond, Mississippi. In a letter to his uncle, Stevens indicates his frustration over his brother’s burial in “a traitorous land.” Ultimately, he concluded the South was the best place for his brother to lie. “[T]he blood of our fallen heroes will purify and place an indellible [sic] stamp of true patriotism upon this curssed [sic] soil and every hero that falls will be as a nail driven in a sure place rendering the Union one and inseparable forever hereafter.” Some believed that the Civil War’s bloodshed could purify the South, but the failure of Reconstruction and subsequent violence in the region demonstrated that assertion to be false. Then, Southern Gothic literature emerged to document the ongoing curse across the South emerging from racism. From the tradition, William Faulkner and Harper Lee flourished, chronicling the curse and its effects on Southern life. Faulkner’s style and work are emblematic of the Southern Gothic tradition. His fictitious Yoknapatawpha County is the setting of well-known works such as “As I Lay Dying” and the Snopes trilogy (“The Hamlet”, “The Town”, and “The Mansion”), as well as lesser-known works such as “Soldiers’ Pay.” Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” describes Thomas Sutpen, a man born into poverty in antebellum Virginia, who moves to Mississippi to become wealthy and found a dynasty of planters. Sutpen acquired land from Native Americans in Mississippi, built a large plantation, and forced enslaved persons to tend to the land.
Sutpen’s story speaks to a broader movement occurring in the United States at the time. As the soil of the Tidewater states of Virginia and Maryland became exhausted, plantation owners moved west to continue their cycles of exploitative farming. Sutpen’s story points out the inherent unsustainable nature of the plantation economy; it is a system relying on the exploitation of land and people. After a series of family difficulties and the Civil War, Sutpen’s plantation was reduced from 100 square miles to one square mile. Ultimately, Sutpen’s legacy is the decrepit remains of his mansion. Even his family line ends with his daughter, an enslaved woman, killing his white son in a fire. Cursed by the twin evils of slavery and theft of indigenous lands, the very soil destined Sutpen’s plantation to fail. Harper Lee’s book “To Kill a Mockingbird” is more legible and well-known than any of Faulker’s titles (those two facts are likely correlated). Upon visiting her hometown (the self-described “Literary Capital of Alabama,” due to its relation to both Lee and Truman Capote), I realized that “To Kill a Mockingbird” has much more in common with Southern Gothic literature than I initially expected. Though the work is not prototypically Gothic, its story of racism’s harm, told through Scout, a child narrator, fundamentally roots itself in cursed soil. The Ewells are stereotypical caricatures of poor, backward Southerners, and it is their intolerance that ultimately destroys them, much like Sutpen. The townspeople condemn them as “white trash,” as Bob Ewell dies attempting to exact revenge on Atticus Finch for “humiliating him.” The irony is, of course, that Atticus was not attempting to humiliate the Ewells. Rather, he was illustrating the truth of who they, and by extension the townspeople of Maycomb, were.
Faulkner’s book discusses the lead-up to and aftermath of the Civil War, and Lee’s is semi-autobiographical, inspired by the murder of Emmet Till and the sham trial of the “Scottsboro Boys.” In their own ways, both authors condemn the South for bringing about its own woes. For his part, Faulkner cares more about how slavery hurts and humiliates the white people who practice and benefit from it. In comparison, Lee takes a broad approach, pointing out that racist bigotry hurts its victims and perpetrators in the first order, and the South – as a whole – suffers the second-order harm of association. What I learned the most from thinking about the two books in connection is that Lee not only writes in the Southern Gothic tradition, but she writes in the same vein as Faulkner, ultimately concerning herself with the consequences of growing up and living on the cursed soil.
