"I Don't Want to be a [White] Girl": Gender, Race and Resistance in the Southern Gothic

Miller, M (2009) "I Don't Want to be a [White] Girl": Gender, Race and Resistance in the Southern Gothic. In: The Female Gothic: New Directions. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. ISBN 978-0230222717

Abstract / Summary

This essay examines the use of Gothic narrative structures and generic tropes in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. These two works of the late 1940s, foundational to the genre which came to be known as Southern Gothic, perform a complex critique in which gender dissident protest is also a dissent from the violent history of race and its lasting effects on Southern culture. The essay asserts that the Gothic, a genre formed out of the context of violent history, is an inherently theoretical mode, produced as a mechanism for examining the relation between subjective experiences of identity and traumatic histories. Capote and McCullers redeployed the form especially to make use of these effects, marrying queer protest to an anti-racist literary aesthetic.

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