Why Southern Gothic Authors Reuse Setting
Southern Gothic lingers impolitely in doorways. Forget theme; the genre itself is liminal, slouching somewhere between literary fiction and the h-word: lauded and discarded, high-brow and tawdry, praised and shamed. Tell about the South, right? But for all its liminality, Southern Gothic seems obsessed with physical location. Place becomes a character with its own moods and temperaments, a locus and repository of history. We’ll sum up an old man in one brutal line, then spend three paragraphs singing paeans to a run-down gas station. Of the top five “Best Southern Gothic Books” on Goodreads,1 all but one begin with setting description. The outlier, To Kill a Mockingbird, starts with setting’s kissing cousin, history.
For all its obsession with the liminal, or maybe because of it, Southern Gothic loves a scrap of earth. Authors have a tendency to imagine whole landscapes; some stake their tents and refuse to budge. As the genre’s capital, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha sprawls in northern Mississippi. South lies Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage,2 setting of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing and possibly Let Us Descend.3 Close by is Shelby Foote’s Jordan County, where he places four novels. Lewis Nordan has Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, and William Gay, Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Randall Kenan sets A Visitation of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, and If I Had Two Wings in Tim’s Creek, North Carolina. Rion Amilcar Scott places his works in Cross River, Maryland. The list could ramble for pages. Though characters and stories overlap, the books aren’t strict sequels.
My own Southern Gothic works take place in Lower Congaree, South Carolina, a small town in the fictitious Legare County (in bastardized Carolinian Huguenot, pronounced Luh-gree). In grad school, I set a novelette there. When I needed another Southern Gothic setting, Lower Congaree returned to me, green-bright, familiar as my sons’ voices: a rustbucket Gas N Go at the edge of the highway, breath-snatched dark without stars, roadside ditches of tea-colored swampwater lurking with gar or gators or catfish of appetites unknown. Of course I reused Lower Congaree. I knew that country, and it was mine. After three years of published and subbed work, from flash fic to full-length novels, I wondered why I refused to leave it. Why couldn’t I let it go? Why did so many of us keep to our particular scrap of earth? For so long, I’d invoked the white, literary grandfather-god and set it aside. Because Faulkner.
Because Faulkner wasn’t good enough. So I pestered Southern author and professor George Singleton. Not only did I invent Lower Congaree for an assignment in his seminar class, but Singleton also set most of his work in three imagined towns: Forty-Five, Gruel, and Calloustown, South Carolina. The Fellowship of Southern Writers declared him a member in 2015. If anyone could give me an answer, I figured, he could. Why’d you do that, George? I asked.
Singleton told me that once he read authors like Flannery O’Conner and Harry Crews, he started writing about a town like the one he grew up in, then kept doing it. “All in all,” he said, “I think I stick to these familiar (to me) places because, basically, I’m too stupid and hardheaded to change. Someone once wrote something like, ‘The smaller the Southern town, the bigger the secrets.’ Might be true.”
A typically Singleton, typically Southern answer. Self-deprecating and ironic, easily mistaken for flippancy. But Southerners wrap real honesty in layers, gesturing vaguely lest we fling bloody truth on the table. Creating Southern Gothic settings can demand enormous effort, and some authors are reluctant (read: hardheaded) to start from scratch. True, but deflection. Singleton hits the heart of the matter when he mentions small towns. Southern Gothic authors often continue settings over multiple works because we marry setting, character, and submerged history.
Understand that Southerners gotta be all up in everyone’s business—we know our neighbor down the road; we know her mama and her grandmama and what kind of cancer that grandmama got. We also know that grandmama once beat her husband half to death with a fireplace poker, and we know why. That’s true. That’s also what some authors need to create authentic setting. Each town cradles secret histories at its red, beating heart.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past, Faulkner says in Requiem for a Nun.4 That quote has become a Southern Gothic shibboleth for a reason, not the least of which is that non-literary folks don’t understand what the hell we’re talking about. Historical obsession, sublimated narrative, and return of the past (especially as trauma) define the Southern Gothic genre. Its characters find identity through and against historical narrative; battles about history and identity merge, blur. Therefore, characters exist not as disconnected entities, but amid webs of inextricable relationships. Identity becomes an interdependent concept: Quentin Compson isn’t Quentin Compson without the whole of Yoknapatawpha history. Like Faulkner says in Absalom, Absalom, “His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names . . . he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts.”
It’s an illustrative quote, but Faulkner’s obvious.5 Instead of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, venture to Tim’s Creek, North Carolina, where queer author Randall Kenan sets his novel, A Visitation of Spirits, as well as his short story collections, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and If I Had Two Wings. Visitation follows Black preacher Jimmy Greene and his second cousin, gay teenager Horace Cross, as they spiral through identity crises caused by the weight of history and societal expectation. Like much Southern Gothic, the novel’s postmodern structure emphasizes fragmentation of historical narrative and identity.
Horace can’t reconcile his queer identity with the communal identity/shared narrative Tim’s Creek has pinned on him as a brilliant Black teenager. He’s expected to become a preacher. The explosive incompatibility of these identities leads to Horace’s doom. This societal narrative stretches back much further than Horace, however—it goes back to his great-great grandfather Ezra Cross, who Kenan notes “had given the land on which the present First Baptist Church of Tim’s Creek stands. It was his dream that one of his own progeny would stand before the altar as His, and his, minister.” In The Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction, George Hovis says that Ezra Cross’s dream is “not unlike” Thomas Sutpen’s in Absalom, Absalom!.
Horace also acts as “best boy” in Riding the Freedom Star, a mythologized, musical history of the white Cross family. Its (white) actors offer Horace an outlet for his frustrated sexuality. However, the play’s Black characters are “buffoons,” as Kenan says, played for laughs, emphasizing that the Tim’s Creek Black community, especially its church, have protected Horace’s identity even as they shackle it.
Horace’s second cousin Jimmy, minister of First Baptist and the high school principal, has taken a different approach to identity. A pillar of the community, Jimmy aligns himself with Ezra Cross’s dream rather than struggling against it. However, the weight of history and societal expectation have left him feeling like a failure. Hovis notes that, “in Kenan’s [fiction], individuals identify themselves with the community, which historically they have done out of necessity—for the sake of survival.” Characters share a sense of identity, existing not as themselves, but as part of a web threaded by place, religion, family, and history.
Familiar characters and complications thread through Kenan’s short stories. In the titular novella of Let the Dead Bury the Dead, Jimmy records the founding of Tim’s Creek by a formerly enslaved man named Pharaoh; Uncle Zeke recounts the tale with frequent interruptions by Aunt Ruth. The duo’s arguments occupy a large portion of Visitation, and Jimmy’s fruitless attempts to broker a peace between them signify his moral failings. History becomes both a touchstone binding the community together and a millstone choking each individual neck.
I could go on. It works like this in Jesmyn Ward’s books, and like this in Shelby Foote’s. This is how I did it. But why keep it up over multiple works? Why use the same place over and over? Singleton hinted that in Southern Gothic, setting and character twine with history, kudzu vines climbing a wire. That kudzu-twining creates narrative.6
Kudzu: The vine that ate the South. Lascivious and insatiable, kudzu gobbles land in lush, feral tanglings. It grows in red clay and sandy grit, in chalky kaelin and gluey mud. Kudzu will eat your dog if he sleeps too long. It’s a good metaphor for the savage tenacity of narrative. Like kudzu, narrative devours and consumes. Just as vine-swathed structures become hunched, unrecognizable shapes, narrative swallows and remakes what it attempts to delineate.
Similarly, the more literal space narrative is allowed—the more books it spans, the more stories it encompasses—the tighter those vines twist. Place, character, and history draw tighter, interwoven and inextricable. Beneath lurks a darkness unknown. Every Southern child knows better than to step in kudzu. Get your ass outta there! elders shout. D’you wanna get snake-bit? Tangling narrative obscures the banished and sublimated, the poisonous secrets official history attempts to bury. Traipse in, and risk their explosion to the naked light of day.
Humped kudzu vines are pretty, in an ominous sort of way, but Southern Gothic authors love snakes. Children who never listened, we dive beneath facades; we haul up the secret, the forgotten, and the unspoken. Using the same place through multiple works lets us plumb the darkness beneath our narratives. The three-novel span of Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage books examines pervasive poverty and cultural endurance/societal decay. Taken together, these novels investigate racial injustice more profoundly than a single book. While Ward’s characters exist within their own narratives, the comparisons to Faulkner’s often-problematic depictions of Black characters are inevitable; moreover, her oeuvre lets her speak with and against his works, particularly Absalom, Absalom in Salvage the Bones and As I Lay Dying in Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Other authors examine their own issues. Shelby Foote’s four-novel look at Jordan County deals with profound institutional and societal corruption. Randall Kenan’s three books about Tim’s Creek often cope with Black community, battles between matriarchy and patriarchy, reconciling Black and queer identities, and the suffocating strictures of Christianity. My own books in Lower Congaree examine the choking restrictions of Southern femininity, especially for queer women; class privilege; and the persistence of generational trauma. We all have our own snakes coiled beneath the vines.
As Matthew Wynn Sivils says in “Gothic Landscapes of the South,” these settings are “dynamic sites of haunting that reflect, and at times participate in, the South’s legacy of human and environmental abuse.” Land becomes a repository of history, a stage and a storehouse, and occasionally, even an actor. When setting twines with character and history, it creates a dark underbelly of those secrets Singleton mentions—subsumed histories, banished tales, sublimated identities.
Reusing those places lets authors investigate those depths in a particular locus and subjugates time to space. Instead of time, space becomes the universal invariant; time shimmers like sunlight on water. As Richie muses in Sing, Unburied Sing, “The history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness … show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once.” Narrative exists outside of time, and the past is never dead. Preoccupied with history, authors return again and again. We haven’t finished plumbing our particular heart of darkness.
1. Stunningly problematic. In order: To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (both William Faulkner), In Cold Blood (Truman Capote), and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt). One woman; one queer man; all white. Zola Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward authored foundational Southern Gothic texts. Morrison won a Nobel Prize. Do better.
2. Ward (b. 1977) has won two National Book Awards, for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). She is the only Black woman to do so thus far. Faulkner (b. 1897) also won two, for Collected Stories (1951) and A Fable (1955). However, Ward won both at a younger age than Faulkner.
3. In the novel, Annis is taken to a sugar plantation that may possibly be an earlier version of Bois Sauvage.
4. One day, I’ll write an essay about Southern Gothic without including that quote, but not today, Satan.
5. Also white, straight, problematic, etc. Loving Faulkner as a neurodivergent, bisexual woman committed to anti-racism is a mood.
6. Narrative is not story; story includes plot. That’s literary theory, and y’all go read some French philosophy if that’s your thing.
