Neil Bowen on
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of Gothic Literature that developed in America in the nineteenth century. Characteristics of the sub-genre include odd-ball, transgressive and misfit characters, madness, obsession and weirdly skewed desires, haunted, insular landscapes and sinister, decaying buildings and macabre storylines, all shot through an underlying and all-pervasive sense of decay, alienation and angst.
Twice Blanche mentions one of the most significant writers in the Southern Gothic tradition, Edgar Allan Poe, and Williams’ play certainly has shades of the Southern Gothic about it. Most obvious is outcast Blanche’s and her mental distress, her retreat into fantasies and her alcoholism. Her description of the loss of Belle Reeve in Scene 1 and the ‘long parade to the graveyard’ is distinctly Gothic. So too is the climax of the last scene, when Blanche’s distressed and disordered state of mind is projected as nightmarish noises and shadows. The eerie blind Mexican vendor with her flowers for the dead, is another obviously Gothic element.
The Southern Gothic ‘brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on the massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism and patriarchy’. As a faded and corrupted Southern Belle Blanche who tries to cover up her corruption, Blanche is a walking embodiment of the key concern of the Sothern Gothic.