Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic

PEGGY DUNN BAILEY Henderson State University Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina.: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic IN A 1994 INTERVIEW, CAROLYN E. MEGAN ASKED DOROTHY ALLISON, “What tradition do you see yourself as fitting into?” When Allison responded, “I belong to the tradition of iconoclastic, queer, southern writer,” Megan followed with a question that has generated essays and essay collections, books and multi-volume series, individual lectures and entire academic conferences: “How would you define the southern tradition of writing?” Allison’s response was both brief and provocative: “It’salyricaltradition.Language.Iconoclastic,outrageousashell,leveled with humor. Yankees do it, but Southerners do it more. It’s the grotesque.” Asked to identify her “role models in the southern tradition,” Allison responded, “On good days I claim myself in the same tradition as Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams” (“Moving” 81). With her definition of the “Southern tradition” as “the grotesque” and her identification of literary forebears (particularly O’Connor and Williams), Allison associates herself and her writing with the complex category of the Southern Gothic. While the Gothic as a literary form is typically understood to have begun in eighteenth-century England with Horace Walpole’s supernatural tale of usurpation and retribution, The Castle of Otranto (1764), by the end of that century, the enormously popular novels of Ann Radcliffe had done much to establish a non-supernatural form of Gothic fiction, one that depicts human beings, rendered grotesque by their extreme and incongruous passions and obsessions, as the ultimate source of horror. The first American Gothic novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; Or, the Transformation: An American Tale (1798) owes more to Radcliffe than to Walpole in its focus on the psychological, human origins of horror and its narration by a vulnerable young woman who is an intended victim of family-centered violence (a character type that Ellen Moers identifies as the Female Gothic Heroine). Beginning in 270 Peggy Dunn Bailey the nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe and his Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (1840) and continuing into the twentieth with the fiction of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers and the early work of Truman Capote, the literary grotesque functions as a distinctly American, frequently Southern, aspect of the Gothic. A significant element of the Gothic mode, the literary grotesque —which includes incongruous, abnormal, “monstrous” characters, situations, and events—is sometimes discussed, especially within the American literary tradition, as if it were a synonym for Gothic or, conversely, as if it were something entirely different from Gothic. In 1935, Ellen Glasgow coined the term “the Southern Gothic school” (360) to criticize what she saw as the “aimless violence” and the “Raw-Headand -Bloody-Bones”brandofprofessedrealismpracticedby“professional rebels against gentility” in her contemporary American South; she mentions specifically “the fantastic nightmares of William Faulkner” (357). Intriguingly, Glasgow conflates the Gothic and the grotesque when she critiques Southern Gothic writers as the originators of “goblins” and “Southern monster[s]” (357)—grotesques by other names—and then attempts to differentiate between Gothic and grotesque in her wish that the writer(s) she identifies with the Southern Gothic school stop practicing a form of literary miscegenation: “The Gothic as Gothic, not as pseudo-realism, has an important place in our fiction” (360). The Gothic has from its inception included grotesque characters that, despite their mere humanity (or because of it), are able to generate real horror. Glasgow’s complaint is, in part, that the writers of the Southern Gothic school are writing Gothic literature (with its frequent inclusion of grotesques) and, in part, that they are not writing “legitimate” Gothic literature (which would ostensibly provide readers with the comfort of knowing that the horror is not real). In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 1966), Leslie Fiedler highlights the realistic elements of American Gothic literature (a term he does not hesitate to embrace) and famously identifies American culture itself as essentially Gothic. In his preface to the revised (1966) edition, Fiedler observes, “Our most serious as well as our funniest writers have found the gothic mode an apt one for telling the truth about the quality of our life...