SOURCE: Burns, Margie. “A Good Rose Is Hard to Find: Southern Gothic as Signs of Social Dislocation in Faulkner and O'Connor.” In Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, edited by David B. Browning and Susan Bazargan, pp. 105-23. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Burns contends that Southern Gothic is a literary technique that both represents and hides the dehumanization of the South into perceived stereotypes. The critic analyzes works by Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner as examples of this technique.]

Between the simple backward look
and the simple progressive thrust
there is room for long argument but
none for enlightenment.

—Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

The topic of images of the South in the literature and media of the nation as a whole is rich in possibilities for cultural studies, for analysis of the processes of production, reception, and consumption of such images as they come to be formed and through which they are put to use. As anyone might recognize, cultural stereotypes about the American South are frequently projected as representations of objective reality; indeed, there exists an unanalytic habit, on the part both of the media and of canonical writers, to characterize the South through figural reification. In novels (both popular and canonical), in plays, film, and television, in periodicals, and in advertisements, versions of the same stereotypes recur, with a persistence both of form and of effect which suggests their organization by utility if not by intent. I would argue that these stereotypes both corroborate a deep-lying perception in the general consciousness, and solace an even deeper-lying doubt; without essential validity, they nevertheless fall into place with comforting neatness, to reaffirm the inferiority of the Other into which the American South has been transformed in the national consciousness. An enhanced critical consciousness, however, would perceive the political consequences of the ideological differences constituted by the various elements of the “Southern” image.

In general, the stereotypical perception of the South is organized around, literally, two classes of image: antebellum/magnolia/GWTW mythology, and cotton row/tobacco road/Baby Doll grotesquerie.¹ These two stereotypes embody what have been called the two greatest bourgeois perceptions of threat, the dichotomized but connected fears of a decaying “aristocracy” on one hand, and of a rebellious, primitive, “earthy” peasantry on the other.² The seeming triviality of these stereotypes, rather than serving to invalidate them, disguises their genuine utility—and destructiveness—in American culture. In my view, what is most illuminating about this polarized image is not the spurious distinction between its two terms but the underlying common denominators which provide the basis for the polarized image and sustain it. In this polarized construction, which is obviously a class construction and just as obviously a projection from the “central,” missing term of the self-identified “middle class,” the two categories correspond to two classes—upper and lower—a version of aristocracy and a version of peasantry. Furthermore, the two classes have, in these representations, three identifying characteristics in common: both are white (ironically), static, and unproductive. The gentleman of sorts lives in privileged idleness, and the redneck inhabits a Lower Slobbovia of equal idleness (although characterized as laziness rather than privilege). Both imagistic strata—the magnolia crowd and the tobacco-juice crowd—are primarily static—stuck—in the boonies, in ignorance, in prejudice, etc., with degenerate histories miring them down; neither group is “going anywhere,” except to proceed further downward in some melodrama of degeneracy. In the typically polarized picture of the Deep South, in short, there are virtually no figures of upward mobility, no successful or productive efforts either of individual or of collectivity—there is in this regard only a glaring void waiting to be filled by the faster-moving observer from whose perspective the picture is generated. Such a perspective fulfills the formulation of Pierre Bourdieu, that for the spectator even an observed activity becomes an object; the South as spectacle/object, whose people all apparently sit still, presents an intensification of the phenomenon.

Hence the chief point of the characterization is surely to assert a contrast to the non-South nation, where all the action is; the characterization of static versus mobile, stagnation versus dynamism, corroborates a self-legitimating view of the haute bourgeois as the ideal mean, a mediating principle between the too-high and the too-low to work, industrious as well as industrial—with the latter as evidence of the former. It is the vision of the Connecticut Yankee, Hank the Boss, without the ironic awareness of a Clemens behind it. The putative absence of productivity (symbolized by an absence of mobility), in other words, gives the image its social and economic usefulness—and a fairly complex and multivalent usefulness at that—in the historical actuality which surrounds the image. Indeed, the usefulness of the image, far more than any mimetic relation to social reality, has kept it alive; and its uses have been social and economic, beyond the scope of this essay to cover.

The typical discourse on the South as object at least partly resembles colonial production, a nativist discourse dictated by essentially colonialist interests, but it is also more broadly constitutive of ideological differences along class lines.³ Just as the trivialized stereotypes of Southern Women intensify a polarization projected onto women in general (good/sexually innocent versus bad/sexually experienced), so the sharply polarized image of two social strata in the South intensifies—crudely—its dichotomous inversion: the wish, projected from the missing term, the middle class, to lampoon or to obliterate an awareness of genuine class difference.

In other words, the view of the South self-identified as the “national” or “American” view is basically a colonial romance, with the rest of the nation identified with the forces of light and the South with the forces of darkness. And this romance shares a salient characteristic of virtually all post-Romantic romance: in it, the polarization of social highs and lows in actuality metamorphoses into a polarization of psychological highs and lows as the source of conflict in the literary representations and other representations. Thus the haute bourgeois middle term is, of course, even more thoroughly obscured. The image of dark loci which map the terrain of the South in the popular imagination (and in the scholarly imagination) directly serves the ideology which produced it.

Nowhere is the ideology-constitutive character of this image more apparent than in the literary mode known as “southern gothic.”⁴ In this essay on the southern gothic—a term in widespread use, but one which almost nobody attempts to scrutinize—I consider two famous short stories by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor and argue that the southern gothic is a literary technique which both enacts and conceals the dehumanization of response to the South, by representing it as a dehumanization of response in the South.⁵ Needless to say, imaginative literature has played only one part in the construction of the South as an ideological Other for the nation as a whole. “Serious” imaginative literature has played an even smaller part; but the staggering blatancy with which these two works pursue their part in the construction justifies their analysis in postmodern critical practice.

II

Even the most casual survey of the literary mode called “southern gothic” would turn up Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” (1924) and O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1954) as premier examples. “A Rose for Emily” presents Emily through languorous, external flashbacks which leave her own consciousness opaque but gradually reveal that she poisoned her jilting lover and cohabited for decades with his corpse. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a worthless, déclassé southern family goes on a vacation, has a car wreck, and is thrown into the hands of a homicidal maniac (also southern) who kills everyone. The narrative presents the family's slaughter, moreover, as the result chiefly of its own idiocy and venality. Both short stories achieve their full horror through intense comedy, a black humor which largely accounts for the place of “southern” relative to “gothic”; if it happened anywhere else, it wouldn't be as funny. I contend that these narratives show how the consistent techniques of southern gothic mark the sites of social dislocations—phenomena conventionally regarded as nonliterary. In simplest terms, the gothic operates as a distancing: it mystifies the matter presented, removing it into an atmosphere detached from social actuality and engineering a response alienated and unsympathetic. This mystification has had consequences both within and outside the literature.

In the narratives discussed here, the most significant movements are concealment and entrapment. “A Rose for Emily” begins,

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house.

(489)

This single, wonderfully economical sentence immediately sets up the demarcation between a crypto-military context for men and a setting of house interiors for women, which is sustained throughout the narrative. It also establishes a progression—death, morbidity, a monument, and concealment behind a wall or facade—typical of southern gothic, in which the luridness of the terms distracts attention away from their true relationship. Here, the outside-inside demarcation becomes perversely conflated—a “monument,” which both blazons and conceals what it contains.⁶ Any awareness stimulated by the hint of very real violence, however, is displaced—trivialized—into typically “gothic” suspense and a (feminine) morbid curiosity.

Repeatedly the narrative describes/erects some wall or facade which simultaneously blazons and conceals. In one stunning example, the generation previous to Miss Emily's produced the “edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron” (489); I shall discuss this below. Similarly, the women whisper about Emily's sexual activities “behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon” (495). The facades thus erected ornament both persons and places with a dissolutely baroque prose; the Grierson house itself is

a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, … lifting up its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

(489)

Obviously, the old house is identified with Miss Emily (and perhaps with femaleness in general);⁷ the phrases “heavily lightsome” and “coquettish decay,” among others, anthropomorphize it, turning it into an old “eyesore” like Emily herself and suggesting a threatening, veiled sexuality in both edifices.

In a rich, curious paradox of combined limpidity and occlusion, each such verbal flourish throughout the story signals a social dislocation, an injustice. Examples abound:

And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

(489)

Here the nostalgic, antiquarian intrigue—“cedar-bemused” itself—obscures the deaths of nameless, ordinary soldiers. Other examples concerning Emily herself arise frequently; at an early point, Emily writes:

a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

(490)

The successful mystification of the town—a successful mystification, in more than one sense—allows Emily to escape, seriatim, from both death and taxes:

So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.

(492)

But while Faulkner's submerged joke on death and taxes gives some structure to the story, it also trivializes the fundamental conflict between Emily and the men—“horse and foot”—of the town. In repetitive detail, Emily is incessantly associated with the past, with the Civil War, with the burdens of history devoid of any understanding of history. Always, the odor of history is mystified, through her, either decayed into a stink or misperceived as the aura of nostalgia.⁸ And this diffuse mystification has a highly specific use; it transforms “history” into an intimidation serving the interests of a privileged class.

A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving chinapainting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the Old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

(490)

In such an atmosphere of more than adequate oppressiveness, it is hardly surprising that the men should fail in their mission to exact money from Miss Emily, or that they should be vanquished by the single, cryptic utterance: “‘See Colonel Sartoris.’ (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years)” (491).

Since some vague concept of “history” is often associated with outmoded ornamentation—forgetting the spareness or angularity of any artistic styles before the “modern”—the same mystification which works on Faulkner's characters has often worked on his readers. It is easy, reading Faulkner's gothic labyrinthine prose, to get lost in the style. The tremendous artistic achievement represented by this phenomenon has invited more than its share of critical commentary in strictly literary terms; Warren and Wellek might say that the outer form of the narrative corresponds to its inner form (140, 241); metacriticism would emphasize the self-reflexivity which connects plot and style. What I wish to emphasize, however, is how the narrative both blazons and conceals its mystification of history, outside the story and in it; these are lush imaginary gardens with real structures of privilege in them.

Like an X-marks-the-spot, each high-Victorian decaying narrative curlicue instances a form (literally) of concealment, partly because the ornateness of the language distances the reader, but partly because the action presented is Byzantine:

Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

(490)

What might be called “gothic finance” here instances Emily's exemption from paying taxes—a privilege of her class; simultaneously, however, it also marks her inability to understand or to control her business affairs, the limitation of her sex. Emily's life includes no option of financial self-sufficiency; hence the fate worse than death when Homer Barron disappoints her and, earlier, the sense of betrayal when her father died and “it got about that the house was all that was left to her” (489). Even the rather detached narrator makes the betrayal explicit:

We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

(489)

The decorative flourish, which is a neat synecdoche, signals Emily's economic limitation in that she tries to earn an income by giving lessons in chinapainting.

The preeminent flourish in the narrative, however (aside from its title), occurs at the ending, in the lavish descriptive decay of the room which contains the corpse:

A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valence curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monograph was obscured.

(500)

Fulfilling previous images which identified the house with Emily, the rose-colored curtains and rose-shaded lights (these are the only roses in the story, unless one counts “they rose when she entered”) create a stereotypically “Freudian” image of female enclosure. The dusty vulva, the “bridal” chamber—like Marvell's “fine and private place” the tomb's savage travesty of the womb (or the travesty of the latter on the former, in more misogynistic perspective)—reveals the bitter turning to dust of all the camp swampiness and swampy campness of Faulkner's other ever-prevalent allusions to feminine loci of forsythia/magnolia/genitalia. “Rose, thou art sick. …” The symbolically enclosed rose or hortus conclusus turned to desert rounds off the period of the story; as the title says, it is the story; and the story as an ironic rose, presented with a bow and a flourish to Emily, both advertises and dissimulates what it does to Emily Grierson and to all the other Emilys, egregiously pretending not to do exactly what it does: “‘Dammit, sir,’ Judge Stevens said, ‘will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?’” (492).

With humorous, self-disclosing hypocrisy, the fondly superficial narrator presents Emily's image: “thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse” (499). The word “inescapable” provides the operative hint on Emily's status; at her death—which begins the story—the narrator says, “alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (489).

In simplest terms, Emily resembles a curse—a war debt imposed by the Civil War on the surviving South, sphinx-like creature into whose house people go and either don't escape or barely escape, the labor pursuing original sin. A selective gyneolatry projected around her image suggests the quasi-theological:

a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol.

(493)

When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.

(494)

She fitted up a studio … where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five cent piece for the collection plate.

(498)

Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows … like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which.

(499)

On one hand, this cluster of images suggests a quasi-deification of Emily—the projection of a stiffnecked people who have deified class privilege. From another perspective, however, it should make apparent Emily's rigid isolation, her loneliness—the punishment of her sex. Emily's strenuous repulsion of intruders forms a refrain in the story—when she repels various deputations concerning her father, her courtship, “the smell,” her taxes, a mailbox, etc. But this centrifugal force, generated by a male author and a male narrator, actually conceals its dialectical opposite—the men's desire to escape the enclosure which Emily represents. Emily repels, but the men run, “vanquished”: her father dies, the Baptist minister wilts, Homer Barron jilts her, deputations fade away. And when Emily herself dies,

The Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, … and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

(499)

Obviously, the alternate intrusion-and-repulsion of one perspective has a sexual rhythm, culminating in a grisly climax when the town forces open Emily's room. In another perspective, a deeper pattern emerges: Emily does not get out, and the men do not get in (and survive); ultimately, the narrative prohibits any exchange between outside and inside, for a woman. Men possess the outside world and women the interior, and sex privilege separates the two in sempiternity.

Only one man partly breaks the rule and survives repeated entry into Emily's house: Emily's black manservant. And the exception, of course, proves the rule—or in this case reveals its deeper structure—because one function of race privilege, reflected with staggering honesty in Faulkner's narrative, is to triangulate class privilege and gender privilege. Only a Negro man can mediate between Emily, signifier of class privilege, and the men of the town, signifiers of gender privilege, as though he somehow combines attributes acceptable to both. A single incident recapitulates the pattern of the whole story. When Emily purchases arsenic, the druggist asks why she wants it:

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye of eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back.

(496)

A black man provides the escape valve, allowing the white man to evade overt responsibility for the murder—and to evade an emotional confrontation with a woman. Thus race privilege allows class and gender privilege to coexist, despite all their potential conflicts, cementing them in a lasting, necrophiliac embrace.

Predictably, the object of all three operations, the person who receives their brunt, is what might be called the fourth-box case, the missing term, the character who does not appear in this story: the black woman.

Colonel Sartoris, the mayor, … fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron.

(489)

The edict keeps the woman of color indoors by referring her ceaselessly to her labor: if you take your apron off, you must stay indoors (the narrative does not mention church services, holidays, etc.); if you stay indoors, you can take your apron off (cf. Pip's sister in Great Expectations). But any suggestion of repose indoors is spurious, because the woman's work occurs indoors anyway. Again the narrative thrusts forward a dual advertisement and obfuscation, penning the black woman behind her apron and behind walls (incidentally falsely implying, in its insistence that she must work, that white women do not have to work).

In this series of dual facades, a key signifier appears in the description of Homer Barron, whose brief characterization presents him as the embodiment of masculine vitality and the antithesis of Emily: a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee—a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face (494).

It was this detail of eyes lighter than the face, employed in both “A Rose for Emily” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which first drew my attention to the connections between the two stories. The highly particularized detail (one of very few in Barron's description) of eyes lighter than his face suggests in Homer Barron an element of complexity—whether in the man himself or in his situation. Another discrepancy, it marks the intersection and thus the potential conflict of race and class privilege: Barron was not born dark; he just got that way because he works outdoors. The shadow, so to speak, rests only on the surface of this carpetbagger. Compare Emily, who looks

bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of the pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough.

(491)

Notwithstanding this reassurance—as hinted by the occasion for reassurance—the eyes-lighter-than-skin image can be sinister. It suggests a hidden energy (= power) and vision (= knowledge), a knowledge or power shadowed and unreadable, behind a facade.⁹ Clearly, black skin conveys something of the same threat; so does Emily's black dress:

They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt. … She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

(491)

Perhaps the humor involved in this intimidation of the townsmen—conveyed in details such as the unutterably sinister “invisible watch”—comes partly from a sympathy for Emily, on the part of the narrator. But always the covering darkness itself, the shadowed vantage concealing a watchful gaze, is sinister—as with the whispering behind jalousies, or The Misfit's sighting the car wreck from off the highway, etc. It suggests a consciousness hidden, on the other side of a wall, which can know (you) but not be known; and of this darkness, the light eyes set in dark skin constitute a physical sign: if those eyes were closed, one might be safer in some sense—but one might also be fooled. The threat of eyes lighter than skin conveys reassurance, but the reassurance also conveys a threat, along lines of class and race conflict, resolvable only on the high ground of gender privilege: Barron is a “real man.” However, the conflicts between gender and race privilege are not as effectually cemented over as those between class and gender privilege. Barron, who works like a black man, still has many of the privileges of the white, but the manhood of a black man would not be equal protection from the operations of privilege, nor would the race of a poor white woman.

III

Sadly enough, the successful real-life operations of privilege in Faulkner's era—successful in producing the South of thirty years later—can be read in O'Connor's writing. Arrestingly, O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” employs the same sign noted above in Faulkner: Sammy Red Butts's wife, hard at work in the roadside food joint, is described as “a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin” (762). Like a hinge, this motif of eyes lighter than the skin connects the two narratives, separated by World War II. But the terrain has changed significantly since Faulkner, and so has the image under discussion. Barron's tan shows that although he labors, he has mobility: he can go outdoors, with the privilege of his gender. In contrast, Emily's dead-white skin, accentuated by her dark eyes, shows that her class privilege of exemption from labor only partly compensates for her gender oppression, being kept indoors. O'Connor's signifier, however, exhibits two differences from Faulkner's, and both differences achieve the same effect: in O'Connor's narrative, the character described is a woman, and she has not only eyes but also hair lighter than her skin. Like Homer Barron, Sammy Red Butts's wife works—and is in consequence “burnt brown”—but unlike him, she cannot fool anyone, and she cannot get away. Where the detail of light eyes in a dark face, alone, would suggest mystery, exoticism, the hint of ancestral Crusader in the face of a Turk, the added detail of light hair just suggests a cracker.

Uneasy in conflict, the different forms of privilege wish ultimately to bond into one indistinguishable upper-class- and white- and male-oriented force. And here the two narratives display a definite progression (of sorts): where the Faulkner narrative shows the different forms of oppression still, to some extent, in conflict, the O'Connor narrative shows oppression successful and beyond conflict, lifted to the level of an omniscient narrator and an infallible taste, with conflict confined to poor whites. Black adults of either sex are absent; whites of both sexes labor; the author herself is a woman; and class privilege has been subsumed into the monolithic gaze of the invisible, impersonal narrator—and thus foisted off onto the reader.

Thus while the narrative explicitly refers to economic pressures, and the grandmother even links them explicitly to race—“Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do” (761)—they are no longer a first, conscious, concern, “the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less” as in Faulkner's narrative (489). In the thirty years separating the South of the two stories, amenities purchasable by poorer white families increased: the sports section, baby food in jars, Queen for a Day (television), cars, comic books, peanut butter, olives, Coca-Cola, tap dancing lessons, vacations, and Hawaiian sports shirts—as memorialized unlovingly by O'Connor. It is one of the paradoxes of southern gothic literature that such accurate details—accurate in reflecting social actuality, or parts of it—serve not to bring the reader closer to the characters, but to alienate the reader further from the characters. We don't even want to see these people, except from the safe distance of an interstate highway (compare Mayor Koch's comments about Georgia). Indeed, such details tend rather to validate and to justify what happens to these people: the minor indulgences exemplify the characters' inability to defer gratification on the road to success. Nor does the narrative explore causality sufficiently to question why such indulgences should be offered to poor families when larger benefits, such as education, have clearly not been offered.

In short, O'Connor displaces the marks of class privilege so that they are less perceivable in differences of income or of possessions and fully perceivable only in differences of taste.¹⁰ Faulkner's narrator, whose taste certainly distances him from much that he describes, nevertheless manifests his taste only within the limits of his persona, a Ratliff-like observer, modestly situated in the town—though perhaps representative of a modest collective (“we”). O'Connor's narrator controls a third-person universe, subsuming the reader's perspective in an alienation beyond which the reader is powerless to envision. So the story asks the reader to acquiesce in the family's deaths—gothic rather than tragic—basically because good taste demands these killings, from the instant of learning that the mother had “a face as broad and innocent as a cabbage” (760), or that the children are named John Wesley and June Star.

Taste particularly demands alienation and a privileging of the narrator/reader above those two examples of debased gentility—most threatening to entrenched taste in their own pretensions to the same quality—the grandmother and The Misfit:

the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

(761)

He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look.

(765)

Only the grandmother and The Misfit express any pretensions to intellectual curiosity:

“You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to East Tennessee.”

(760)

“My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘you know,’ Daddy said, ‘it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything.’”

(766)

But such pretensions only obviate the possibility of genuine intellection among the characters.

Situating the reader behind the gaze of supercilious taste, O'Connor's narrative places the reader in an invidious position. But in so doing, it conforms to a respectable modernist aesthetic, transferring the dynamics of the story from the characters' experiences to the reader's, and bringing the reader closer to the narrator than to the characters. While such a perspective can heighten the sense of social actuality in the literary work—Ambrose Bierce's “The Boarded Window” touches a stunning note of realism on “pioneer history”—it more often results in alienation. Only once in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” does the narrator seem detached from the matter described:

She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

(761)

Not the meanest nor even the most superior of these characters sparkles, however; even the briefly painterly description quoted here just reinforces the impression of a place where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. Predictably, therefore, the landscape itself metamorphoses, as though in a Gresham's Law of debased values: “Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth” (765). The landscape itself turns gothic; anthropomorphized only to become monstrous, more human only to be more alien, it reverses the pathetic fallacy, neither extending nor allowing human sympathy. In short, it “tells the story” itself, synecdoche for the terrain of the narrative; like the characters and the South—both in literature and in the mass media—it neither extends nor invites human response.¹¹

In a humorous bit of self-parody, O'Connor has her characters learn about The Misfit by reading a newspaper, and the naturalism and detached perspective of the narrative resemble newspaper accounts. Again, however, characteristics which might heighten the realism of the writing just distance the incidents and characters further (that's-the-way-things-happen-down-there). Familial and social pressures, emotional discorders, and violence are all engineered to prevent sympathy and to produce distaste and detachment instead.

Hence the prevalence of certain loci in southern gothic settings—all secretive enclosures: darkened rooms with drawn blinds and wisteria crawling over their windows, New Orleans-style wrought-iron grillwork sheltering yet-undescribed Creole mysteries, shadowy verandas and backyards behind massed azaleas, distant woods at the edges of fields of stubble, and so forth. These loci, darkened little inner rooms of the psyche, actually signify their dialectical reverse, turned like a chevril glove inside out: what they actually express is not something “interior,” but an exteriorization—a pushing away, a shunning, in which the pain and horror of real events are dislocated into imaginary gardens. Like the invisibility of Emily's consciousness in her story, what looks like seclusion represents an actuality of repudiation. So the southern gothic narratives here discussed reflect an actual social phenomenon of human response boxed off from human events; the forbidding closed doors and gingerbread decades signify barriers of Other-ness, the unthinkable exile of human beings to the unprestigious hinterlands of Dixie.

What is being discussed here is the production of a mystique, and a tenet of this essay is that the mystique has uses which help explain its production (like other mystiques). At least three historical uses can be posited for the mystique behind Southern gothic: (1) as an atmosphere of bemused languor projected onto the South, it rationalizes the bustling shopping malls and “strips” of exploitation by real-estate developers and others; (2) as a canny stance for some southern authors, selling the South—in effect—it discourages poaching on home preserves by non-Southern authors; and (3) as a seemingly nonpolitical and therefore safe treatment of southern history, it perpetuates oppression and the sufferance of oppression. This paper deals with the third point.

In both Faulkner's short story and O'Connor's, the single figure of an elderly woman characterizes the whole terrain of the story. Economically dependent and superfluous and personally objectionable, each “lady” is charged with the demoralization of her society and then dispatched (although not soon enough). Underscoring the suggestion of things put away, Emily and the grandmother should be put away; the poor old women are closet killers—indirectly in O'Connor's story, with its subliminal references to an “old cat” and the like. Incidentally, despite the submerged references to The Mikado—the cat named Pitty Sing; making “the punishment fit the crime” and making both “a source of innocent merriment”—I think the allusions constitute a tribute less to Gilbert and Sullivan than to Dorothy Sayers, another woman Catholic writer, also master of submerged puns, whose work also contains frequent references to Gilbert and Sullivan.¹² In displacing a situational problem onto two destructive but personally ineffectual individuals, the narratives hint at something destructive and ineffectual in their general context, a hidden motive force only too pertinent to the terrain they cover. This hidden motive force must have to do with race privilege. The old flowers of decayed femininity in these two stories, characterized as an eternally “feminine” essence without any sign of fruitfulness, surely signify the authors' recognition of a draining problem we have always with us, its causes only partly examined even by the literature which exploits it as a motive force.

The very concept of examining causes, however, introduces what I feel—borrowing Balmary's luminous formulation—to be the most important distinction between Faulkner's narrative and O'Connor's: where the Faulkner short story deals at least partly with causes, O'Connor's deals only with mechanisms. Whatever one thinks of an “Electra complex” as theory,¹³ Faulkner at least uses it to provide Emily with a somewhat understandable motivation—understandable by inference: Emily's compulsive possessiveness has its source in her father's.¹⁴ What lies behind the deaths in the O'Connor narrative is chiefly a Rube Goldberg sequence: kid kicks basket, cat leaps out, car goes into ditch.

This example could be multiplied a number of times. Where Faulkner's characters “know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less,” O'Connor's characters maunder about far-distant monomyths:

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right.

(763)

Where Faulkner's narrative refers to the burden of history, O'Connor's includes history only as nostalgia: “Gone With the Wind. Ha. Ha” (761). And the nostalgia is only cliché, imperfectly implied, at that—cliché already mocked in Faulkner's earlier narrative: “the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms … talking of Miss Emily … believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps” (499). One wonders what the old gentlemen said about their putative closeness to Emily when the dreadful bedroom is opened up. Where the Faulkner narrative deals with the problems and ironies connected to upholding tradition, the O'Connor characters sustain only debased traditions which they cheapen even in synthesizing them, such as the treasure hunt for the nonexistent secret hiding place and its Confederate riches.

These differences between the two narratives are all homologous with the main difference: while each narrative places in the foreground a character who proves more symptom than cause—Emily and the grandmother—at least the earlier narrative goes back one generation farther. That is, “A Rose for Emily” partly scrutinizes patriarchy, where “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” does not (despite its title); and the best way to turn scrutiny away from patriarchy, as Balmary illustrates, is to turn it toward “Oedipal” conflicts. Thus the O'Connor story relies on several touches of Oedipal conflict. The father in the story is the father only of small children, less a father than the grandmother's son; helpless when confronted with The Misfit, he travesties authoritarian fatherhood, any genuine authority leached out of him by the generations of “progress” culminating in his Hawaiian shirt. The grandmother herself has no parent mentioned (nothing explains how she got that way), but The Misfit had, as mentioned four times:

It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it.

(767)

At precisely the moment when, in a travesty of human contact, the grandmother identifies The Misfit as her son and reaches out to touch him, he shoots her.

“A Rose for Emily” could almost have been written to post-Lacanian specifications or to specifications for susceptibility to postmodern analysis; in it, old sins have long shadows. Its hidden fault results in defensive gestures—in both the plot of the narrative and the stylistic flourishes of its prose—which “protect and encrypt the site of incorporation” (Balmary 174), thus ensuring an ignorance of their sources. The reader looks in vain for the ordinary names in the cemetery; the townspeople might look in vain for Emily's sources of support; Emily herself might look in vain for any explanation of her own emotional state. With regard to Emily's father, to her dead lover, to Emily herself, and to racial privilege in the South, a spectral remnant of a loved object is preserved, but “only at the price of self-division” (Balmary xix). Perhaps obviously, Emily partly embodies the South, reflecting historical processes in which the South has often been projected as an American “Other,” homologous with the town's projections of Emily. “We propose the following formulation: The dominated carries out the repressed of the dominant,” says Lacan, following Freud (Balmary 34); “one's desire is always the desire of the Other” (Balmary 1). Homer Barron comes carpetbagging and is devoured; Emily's dead father's possessiveness metamorphoses into a ghoulish, mystified disrelish for Emily by later generations; the history of slavery fetters the South. Throughout the narrative runs the trope of a fault, a hidden history with long shadows, which manifests itself in modern dislocations which simultaneously proclaim and conceal it in postmodern criticism.

In O'Connor, the sins are still there, but their shadows are missing; there is no way to track them to their sources. In the vein of pop horror films and sensationalist journalism, the roots of The Misfit's evil (and of the family's ignorance) remain unexplored. While the history beyond Faulkner's narrative may be partly objectified by the narrative into a personalized and consciously psychological “love-hate,” the history in O'Connor's narrative is even more irrevocably objectivized—as “atmosphere,” lost history, inaccessible history—by fearful loathing and gallows humor. What series of forces and influences contributed to the effects visible in the grandmother's family? We never know, because they have been subsumed in the glaring synchronicity of the omniscient narrator's gaze. Thus the difference between the two stories extends to their narrative voices. Where Faulkner uses a man for his narrative persona, O'Connor does not use a woman or indeed any identifiable individual; any personal circuit between reader and narrative is completed only in the invisible glare of taste. Even this limited circuit is broken by the car accident, which ambushes the reader almost as thoroughly as it does the family. The film-like limpidity of O'Connor's prose, the silent void surrounding the grandmother, the absence of names for the mother and grandmother all create a shock different in degree and kind from that shared by the narrator in Faulkner's story. The sudden shock, the reader's alienation from the characters, the strict linearity of the plot which excludes any participation in reconstruction by the reader—all contribute to reduce the reader's sense of control. The absence of fathers, sources, history, and narrators creates a disembodied power of taste, floating in a kind of papal immunity from any purposeful scrutiny.

Despite all the humor in Faulkner's narrative, I think that “A Rose for Emily” still remains more of a yarn, a story, than “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; O'Connor's narrative more resembles a joke, and a joke whose punch line is eschatological: “‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’” (768). In this line, the most famous in the story and one of the most famous in O'Connor's writing, the narrative calls attention with a stunning limpidity to what it does, demonstrating the short-circuiting of any potential examination of causes by a subsummation into eschatology (as in the several christological allusions scattered throughout). On more than one level, and perhaps in some ways unintentionally, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” demonstrates short cuts that don't work out. The refusal to defer gratification which contributes to—and characterizes—the family's social status; the wrong road taken, leading to an imaginary buried treasure and the family's deaths; The Misfit's version of ethics—all these are intentional illustrations of misdirected short cuts, like the grandmother's implicit valorization of class above life: “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (761).

So, too, is the earlier anecdote of the watermelon, as narrated by the grandmother:

she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T.!

(761-62)

The ignorance and greed which snatch at immediate gratification constitute a joke in O'Connor's narrative, the joke in both The Misfit's line and the child's eating the watermelon, according to the grandmother: an ignorance of any transcendental signification in what is offered them or in what they do. A larger and less-funny twist in and beyond the narrative, however, suggests that transcendence itself might be another inadequate short cut, away from genuine analysis and genuine history. The imaginary gardens provide no escape from real oppression and pain, because they offer no real change: “‘Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. ‘It's no real pleasure in life’” (768).

Notes

1. For further discussion on the plethoric stereotypes/myths surrounding the image of the South, see the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles R. Wilson and William Ferris (U of North Carolina P, 1989), especially the section titled “Mythic South,” 1097-1145, by George B. Tindall.

2. This argument—my own reduction of the stereotypes to a fundamental schema of two (upper and lower)—is part of the thesis of a book-length study in progress, tentatively titled Insignificant Other: Representations of the American South in American Media and Literature.

3. The perspective on colonial production in this essay has been influenced by the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Edward Said, among others. Unusual though it might seem to apply the concept of colonial production to the American South, the mode of analysis is broadly that of, and logically proceeds from, cultural studies, as in the work of Stuart Hall.

4. I am using the term southern gothic in the readily recognized sense in which it is understood in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, especially 1125-1127; see also 876 (on Erskine Caldwell), 917-918 (on Tennessee Williams); cf. “hogwallow politics and abnormal neuroticism.” See also The History of Southern Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Louisiana State UP, 1985), especially 442, 475, 484, 487, and 532; also Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot (Columbia UP, 1988), 1139-1140; also Fifty Southern Writers after 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Joseph M. Flora, and Robert Bain (Greenwood P, 1987), 102.

   Surprisingly, given the relatively widespread currency of the phrase (and concept) “southern gothic,” the concept itself has received remarkable little direct scrutiny. There are no works of literary criticism currently in print on southern gothic fiction (despite the existence of many works on southern writers, southern writing, and the gothic novel in general); “southern gothic” is not in use as a Library of Congress subject index term; there is neither a book nor an article, so far as I know, on the “southern gothic” in its across-the-board applications in both popular fiction, film, and television, and canonical literature. This lacuna indicates that few literary critics writing today have drawn extensively on abundant materials available in recent writing about the American South by historians and sociologists; to write about the “southern gothic” as a distancing of social actuality requires, of course, some study of the social actuality.

5. The psychological process identified here is, obviously, Freud's “projection.” The application of psychoanalytic terms to the activities engaged in by a society, or by the dominant mode of scrutiny within that society, is among the tools of analysis used by Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Marie Balmary.

6. This dual movement or signification of both blazoning and concealing is discussed by Balmary in a very different context, with a partly Lacanian orientation to the analysis; it becomes relevant to Faulkner's writing in many more passages than discussed here.

7. Space prevents any detailed listing of items in a continuing tradition of the “room” as symbolic of woman; this story represents in some ways a final joke, grotesquely inverted, on the room-of-one's own continuum.

8. The relationship between, or antithesis of genuine history and a commodified “nostalgia” prevalent in the mass media has been discussed by, among others, Adrienne Rich, in a lecture at Delta State University, Cleveland, Mississippi, April, 1982.

9. See John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, whose strangely light eyes belie the apparent simplicity suggested by his beach-bum tan. Precisely this image of light eyes in a blackened face is employed by Time, in a cover story (with special section) called “The Curse of Violent Crime,” March 23, 1981; illustrations 17, 19. The illustration features a black-face map of the continental United States looking outward through two white, eye-shaped gaps; the effect, intentionally or otherwise, is certainly racist.

10. The historical uses of “taste,” barely touched on here, were suggested to me first in a seminar conducted by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Teaching Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, summer, 1983.

11. Fully to document the stereotypicality of the “southern” would require a booklength study, at least. Citing only relatively modern examples, however, one might include almost any mention of the South in popular novels from Tobacco Road (Erskine Caldwell, 1932) to Women's Work (Anne T. Wallach, 1982); in plays from—of course—Tennessee Williams on; and in notable films such as Easy Rider (1969) and Deliverance (1972). For testimony to the longevity of the destructive-old-southern-lady motif, see Andrew Hacker's article on the E. R. A. in the resurrection issue of Harper's Magazine; also the popular two-actor play, Greater Tuna.

12. Interestingly, Sayers also has her chief female character (Harriet Vane) speculate, on the grounds of Oxford University, about possible modes of partnership between Catholicism and Freudian psychoanalysis, a synthesis which O'Connor also toys with in this story and others.

13. The idea of a pure “Electra complex” is, of course, Freudian analysis oversimplified; Freud conjectured about the possibility but never developed or applied it as extensively as the Oedipus complex, and subsequently arrived at the belief that children of both sexes form an early attachment to the mother, which they must later overcome.

14. The important contrast here, as developed in the discussion, is not a contrast between an “Electra complex” and an “Oedipus complex,” but a contrast between a willingness to scrutinize the position of the father and a refusal to do so, as discussed in another context by Balmary, following (in part) Lacan.

Works Cited

Balmary, Marie. Homme aux statues. Tr. Engl. Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father. Tr. N. Lukacher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Portable Faulkner. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1946.

O'Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories. Ed. James H. Pickering. New York: MacMillan, 1978.

Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.