Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

Rewriting American Borders: The Southern Gothic, Religion, and U.S. Historical Narrative

43 Rewriting American Borders The Southern Gothic, Religion, and U.S. Historical Narrative farrell o’gorman In approaching our common concern, I want to address what many believe to be the most potentially fruitful recent development in scholarship on the U.S. South: its turn to New World or Hemispheric American studies. Scholars working in this area are, I believe, quite right to have us looking south of the South in order to better understand the region’s history and literature alike. Nonetheless, in doing so we should pay more consistent heed to Caroline Levander and Robert Levine’s toobrief caveat that interest in developing an expanded “North-South” perspective in the American hemisphere should not blind us to vital “EastWest ” perspectives (14). In our enthusiasm for new geographical configurations , that is, we should never forget the fundamental relationship that the South and Latin America alike have historically borne—for better or worse—to Europe in particular. Furthermore, we must learn to pay closer attention to just how profoundly New World cultures and narratives of nationhood have been shaped in relation to religion.1 We must more insistently remember that the U.S. South and the Americas as we know them came into being in an era marked not only by conflicts between the colonial powers of Spain, France, and England but also by what Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall have rightly deemed “the most enduring and formative ideological conflict of modern European history,” that between Catholicism and Protestantism (216). 44 farrell o’gorman Baldick and Mighall make this characterization in order to remind literary scholars of the necessity of maintaining a proper historical perspective in approaching the genre I want to focus on here: Gothic fiction (that is, the fiction of horror, generally marked by supernatural or seemingly supernatural phenomena, originally featuring medieval trappings such as the monastery or castle and later the haunted mansion or simply the haunted family). In their authoritative overview of twentieth-century criticism of Gothic literature, Baldick and Mighall contend that too many scholars have tended to display a “de-historicising bias” in their analyses of the Gothic, favoring supposedly universal psychoanalytical readings or, more recently, readings particularly attentive to depictions of race and gender, all the while maintaining “an embarrassed silence upon the matter of early Gothic fiction’s anti-Catholicism” (216). Baldick and Mighall are primarily concerned with this critical error in regard to analyses of the British Gothic, which clearly highlighted national anxieties regarding religion in seminal classics such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)—all novels written by Protestant authors living in an ascendant imperial Britain (the Anglo-Saxon North), all set in a horrifically imagined and decadent Catholic Mediterranean world (the Latin South). I want to first examine this British literary tradition and how it was initially translated into Anglo-American form by Poe, Hawthorne, and particularly Melville; I will then explore how their antebellum texts were in turn responded to in major novels by William Faulkner, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. In doing so, one of my goals is to apply a broad historical awareness of religion’s complex role in American cultures in order to reconfigure our reading of these specific fictions and paradigms of the “southern” Gothic generally. But I also want to explore how these fictions are fundamentally concerned with historiography—as much significant Gothic fiction has been, originating as it did in an age marked by a perceived crisis of authority. Specifically, I will demonstrate how the Gothic and therefore profoundly ambiguous histories imagined in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Lancelot (1977), and Blood Meridian (1985) play on long-standing Anglo-American fears regarding Catholicism, a Catholicism which along the southern borders of the overwhelmingly Protestant South is seen as threatening to break down apparently rigid cultural bor- The Southern Gothic, Religion, and U.S. Historical Narrative 45 ders between innocence and guilt, white and black, mind and body, male and female, Anglo-American “purity” and Latin “impurity,” present and past. Ultimately, these Gothic texts write the confrontation with Catholicism in such a way as to deconstruct myths of Anglo-American exceptionalism which feature the South and the larger United States as somehow purifying or righteously escaping the tainted past. And while many historians might be inclined to prefer more obviously realistic forms of fiction than...