Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: From Belles to Bayous: The Fall of the South on Screen
- Section One The South in the Cultural Imaginary
- Section Two Gothic Visions, Southern Stories
- Section Three The Southern Gothic on Screen
- Section Four Case Studies: Toys in the Attic and Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
- Conclusion – Fading, But Never Faded
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Television Series
- Songs
- Video Games
- Websites
- Index
3 - Ghosts Fierce and Instructive: The South as Haunted Terrain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: From Belles to Bayous: The Fall of the South on Screen
- Section One The South in the Cultural Imaginary
- Section Two Gothic Visions, Southern Stories
- Section Three The Southern Gothic on Screen
- Section Four Case Studies: Toys in the Attic and Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
- Conclusion – Fading, But Never Faded
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Television Series
- Songs
- Video Games
- Websites
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Southern author Flannery O’Connor once noted that the shadows cast by ghosts of the South are both “fierce and instructive” (1984, 45). In this chapter the South will be explored in the context of its construction as haunted geographical and cultural terrain, beleaguered by its history of slavery, civil war, and the subsequent dismantling of the myths of the Old South. As an incessant and long-standing affliction, this spectrality has been understood as having manifested most markedly in fictional contexts where it is seen as an expression of the anxieties and insecurities around the inescapability of historical inheritance.
Keywords: Haunting, Modernity, Industrialization, The Civil War, The Difficult Return, Nostalgia
Myth, as Barthes asserts, is not constructed to deny things, but on the contrary, its function is “to talk about them” albeit in ways that turn reality inside out (1972, 142). Such concepts as the “sunny South,” and “southern hospitality” indeed talk about the South, but only by reorganizing the South into a nostalgic site of myth expunged of its troubling history. In the late-nineteenth century, as industrialization and urbanization became established across the northern states of the U. S, and the rise of mass consumerism and mass culture led to cultural anxieties about encroaching modernity, many Americans felt an antipathy towards the modern world and longed for a return to the pastoral ideal (Cox 2011, 1). While this seemed elusive in the context of rapid progress and development in the North, the dream of a simple life still seemed possible in the South (Cox 2011, 3). A renewed discourse about the South, one that “talked” about the South in a way that employed the “moonlight and magnolias” image, thus emerged as a sentimental pining for the past. Consequently, this backward-looking pastoralism was exploited within the rising marketplace of consumer goods, with advertisers linking their products – everything from Aunt Jemima's pancake flour to Avon fragrances inspired by the femininity of the southern belle – to idyllic images of the antebellum South (2011, 4; 54). As Karen Cox says, these icons of southern nostalgia,
[G]ave national advertising agencies a treasure trove of stories and characters and an identity with which to sell products, and as advertising became more sophisticated so too did the imagery.
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- Information
- The American Southern Gothic on Screen , pp. 67 - 82Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022