These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. While Poe is a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897–1962) arguably looms the largest. Many of his best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) became the first Southern Gothic writer to fully explore the genre’s potential. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses grotesque characters dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day.
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