American Gothic: The Dark Side Of Individualism

American Gothic: The Dark Side of Individualism

After the real horrors of the Civil War, the popularity of Gothic writing dramatically decreased in the United States. The Romantic Movement that had spawned the Gothic tradition was replaced by realism. It was until the twentieth century that the Gothic tradition was revitalization. The revitalization of the Gothic spirit was particularly felt in the American South. Modern Southern writers including William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor made Southern Gothic unique and attracting to readers. These writers were often grouped together in the Southern Gothic tradition because of the gloom and pessimism of their fiction.

Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor wrote stories filled with grotesque characters, violence, and bizarre situations. O'Connor never tells the reader directly whether her characters are good or evil; she wants the reader to make his own judgment based on the characters' thoughts, words, and actions. She successfully uses this technique in The Life You Save May Be Your Own to guide and manipulate the reader's judgment about the characters. The story The Life You Save May Be Your Own is very much a part of Southern Gothic because the writing includes aspects of the Southern Gothic tradition.

Southern Gothic writing was populated with misfits, fanatics, and manipulative con artists obsessed with innocence and corruption, salvation a...

American Gothic: The Dark Side Of Individualism

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