So what is between Canadian Gothic and Southern Gothic?

 While reading Monstrous Things, which discusses Alice Munro's personal life and her writings, I followed a link to The Ordinary Terrors of Survival: Alice Munro and the Canadian Gothic by Katrin Berndt and published by The Journal of The Short Story in English. The following are from the abstract; ideas sticking to me like burs.

I do not think of myself as well-versed in gothic lit, even though I have read Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. 

Gothic writing, which evolved as a branch of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century as a response to the cultivation of reason in the Enlightenment, addresses metaphysical and preternatural aspects of life. It relates to the darker side of human existence, encompassing insanity, fear, cruelty, violence and sexuality. In the nineteenth century, writers like Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy used Gothic elements to challenge the Victorian preoccupation with utilitarianism and the civilizing progress. They exploited Gothic themes of mystery, suspense, and domestic abuse in their fiction in order to raise ethical questions about the human potential for violence.

Poe, I put into "Chasing Ashes" for what I think of as a cornerstone of American culture. Probably, I could have done the same with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who I think is as lurid or even more so than Poe, without being as well-known as Poe. I have read a bit of Welty and Flannery O'Connor,  and much more of Williams and Faulkner. When I think of Southern Gothic, I think of Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" or "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Across the Atlantic, a similar tradition emerged in the United States. The short stories of writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving exhibited Gothic-folklorist patterns (Sucur 2007: 4) such as supernatural tendencies, insanity, and domestic terrors. Poe's tales especially relied upon the grotesque, and also “aligned [...] themselves with the idea of the Gothic upon each reading, with their ambiguities and 'undercurrent[s] of meaning' (Poe's own phrase)” (Sucur 2007: 5). In the twentieth century, the legacy of the US American Civil War inspired yet another sub-genre of Gothic writing, the so-called 'Southern Gothic' associated with authors like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. Concerned with the impoverished society of the defeated US American South, their fiction relies on grotesque characters and situations to analyse such cultural attributes as self-righteousness and racial bigotry. According to Tennessee Williams, the Southern Gothic style is informed by an “emotional and romantic nature” that expresses the “underlying dreadfulness in modern experience” (Tischler 1961: 301-302).

This gave me an insight into what gothic means, and maybe how to use it. That might even be on that trail. 

If the Gothic is indeed concerned with the exploration of the fears which enlightened, rational understanding fails to comprehend, rather than with spooky medieval castles, its relevance for a Canadian poetics becomes apparent. After all, Canadian authors have addressed such anxieties as the fear of the unknown, and the terror that a natural surrounding perceived as hostile induced in European settlers. In her path-breaking study on Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood even suggests the use of the “multi-faceted and adaptable idea”” (Atwood 1972: 32) of survival as the central symbol for Canada. 'Staying alive' is one of the major themes of Canadian writing, often rendered as persistence when confronting a malevolent nature.1 According to Canadian critic Northrop Frye, the very inception of Canadian poetry is a response to the vast wilderness of the Canadian land, whose “terrors” produced the “garrison mentality” (Frye 1977: 342) of the settlers who dared to challenge “the riddle of the unconscious in nature” (Frye 1977: 355).

I understand the idea of climate's/weather's impact on culture is not in good standing. Well, I am one of those who do think weather influences culture. It could be my being stuck in a blizzard back in 1978 influences my thinking. It could be the tornadoes that have flattened Indiana towns in the past. Out here, we know the weather can kill you. We know hailstorms or an early frost or a drought can drive a farmer into bankruptcy. This affects a person's thinking.

While physical survival tends to be a prominent topic in early Canadian texts, the spiritual survival that concerns subjective terrors or “elements in [a person's] own nature that threaten him from within” (Atwood 1972: 33) has become a motif that has informed much of Canadian writing in the past decades. It seems as if some horrors prefer to unleash themselves in small towns rather than in the uncivilized wilderness. One of the writers concerned with surviving self-inflicted terrors in a rural, seemingly civilized surrounding is Alice Munro. Beverly Rasporich relates directly to Gothic notions of fear and the unknown when she explores the small-town settings of Alice Munro's stories (Rasporich 1990: 136), settings whose seemingly intact civilization ought to provide refuge and safety from the terrors of the wilderness, but usually turn out to have contrived genuine horrors of their own. Munro's writing combines the Canadian motif of survival with the concealed ambitions and passions that threaten her characters in a physical as well as metaphysical sense.

And here my eyes opened, the gears in my brain started clanking: 

In the context of my discussion, I define the Gothic mode as addressing the indeterminate, obscure, and subconscious spheres of life. It stresses the hidden, ambivalent meanings, expresses fears beyond logic and rational understanding, and reminds its readers that such anxieties may lurk beneath the surface of everyday, ordinary experience. This awareness distinguishes the writing of Alice Munro. Several of her stories portray the Ontario region in Canada with regard to the cruelties and horrors that hide behind the façade of a rigid, Calvinist morality. Consequently, her texts have been labelled as “Southern Ontario Gothic.” In an interview with Graeme Gibson, Munro describes the affinity between rural and small-town existence in the American South and South-Western Ontario as “the mood of suppressed violence in a hard-working and insular rural community” (Cox 2007: 3), in what may well be defined as a Gothic atmosphere. She claims to have been influenced by Southern Gothic writers like Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, and insists that “the part of the country where I come from is absolutely Gothic” (Gibson 1973: 248).

What fears we have are of insularity: of changing morals, of changing economics, of being left behind by the rest of the country.

There is much of the Calvinist morality free-floating through Indiana. Anderson is the headquarters of the World-Wide Church of God. In our small towns, we find different flavors of Baptists and a lot of Methodists, too. I think the Disciples of Christ headquarters are in Indianapolis. In the factory towns, you will find descendants of Kentuckians and Tennesseans who moved north for the work. They brought their religious views with them.

We have a history of violence in Indiana. Before the Klan came along a hundred years ago, we were known for our lynchings. White people, of course, such as the Reno Gang (the perpetrators of the first successful train robbery in America). Even before then, we removed the Indians from Indiana. Marion, Indiana, has the distinction of being the site where the last African-American was lynched north of the Ohio River. 

And the brain is working - on things that I have been moving towards are getting a better shape.

It dawns on me just now that Toni Morrison is from Ohio, and there she set her novels Sula and Beloved. Are they not gothic novels?

What lies between Canadian Gothic and Southern Gothic? The American Midwest.

sch 9/6