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Southern Gothic And Grotesque In Truman Capote's Short Stories

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As we have seen, the southern gothic and the grotesque go hand and hand. You can’t have one without the other. Like we saw in some of Capote’s short stories, a southern gothic setting can take many forms. The southern gothic doesn’t necessarily need to take place in the south and it can even take place in settings that are brightly lit and inviting. These versions of southern gothic settings come in all shapes and sizes, from a train in Moscow to a terrace in Fort de France; however, they all lead back to the same mysterious, southern gothic tone. This southern gothic tone that surrounds a setting is a clear indicator to the kinds of grotesque characters that show up in the settings’ context. These characters are all grotesque in their own
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Southern Gothic is a term used to describe the grotesque feeling of the South. When portraying “Southern Gothic” in photography we see the South in a way that others do not imagine. They include darkness, landscapes, churches, graveyards, moss and water; everything that makes up the south. These pictures depict the social issues and cultural character of the American South. There is deep history in the south that has stayed around to haunt the future.

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The novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” written by Shirley Jackson, closely follows the traditional tropes of an American Gothic. The main character of the novel, Eleanor, begins her journey to self growth after accepting an offer to live in a suspected haunted house for the summer. Moreover, Eleanor meets three other people that have an important effect on her development as a person. These characters slowly begin to question their own sanity due to the house’s destructive nature. Jackson appeals to fans of the American gothic through her particular description of the house and how the characters interact with it in order to show the environments foil of an absolute reality.

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Flannery O’Connor uses style, tone, and character to tell the story of a family and a band of misfits as they struggle with good over evil in the Southern Gothic short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). The style and tone of the characters are depicted in a way that makes it difficult to feel compassion or sympathy for them. The figurative language and style used by the author depicts characters with casual, informal, and extreme Southern stereotypes, diction and attitudes. The tone of the story is ironic in regard to both the characters and plot. O’Connor uses colorful language to describe the characters of the story in a way that allows the reader to vividly see the characters as cartoon like, grotesque, and exaggerated.

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This unsettling evokes some of the key features of the Gothic, such as the use of phantasmagoria, transgression, and excesses, all of which disturbed the reader by surrounding them with dark reflections of a reality portrayed through fiction. Pacts with the devil to obtain one’s desires, monks and aristocrats who revel in luxury — even if this means they must stain their hands with blood —, vampires and mad scientists: all corrupt one’s morals, all corrupt the false appearance of serenity. Likewise, the female vampires who torment Jonathan Harker disturb the harmony of the domestic sphere and unsettle the delicate balance between the private and the public domain. These vampiric women are marked by heightened sensuality and tacked to other fatal women that permeate art and European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In this novel, fear and desire are often confused, a clue modern anxieties surrounding desire toward sensuous but degrading bodies.

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Southern gothic is a unique style of writing that takes a certain finesse to utilize. Flannery O’ Connor does it splendidly in her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. She takes dark humor, a southern twang and combines them to bring that unique to her southern gothic style. O’Connor graduated from Georgia State College in 1945 and went on to earn her Masters in Fine Art at Iowa State University in 1947. She even went on to go on to win a National Book Award.

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A classic element of gothic fiction typically involves a threatening atmosphere and it is very important that this is not just part of the background, but forms a crucial part

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Most of the characters have broken personalities which are damaged and delusional. People, places, and events in Southern Gothic literature seem to be ordinary at first, but in the end, they reveal to be odd, disturbing and sometimes very gruesome. "A good man is Hard to Find" is a horrific tale about

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The theme in this narrative is supported by various gothic elements, such as the dim and derry setting and the supernatural aspect of this piece of literature. The gothic allusions’ a dark and gloomy setting and supernatural

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