Friday from the Archives: “Gothic Realism in Reynolds Price’s Kate Vaiden” by Peggy Dunn Bailey in NCLR 2009 and “Paul Green’s South: Gothic Modernism in The House of Connelly” by Tanfer Emin Tunc in NCLR 2015
By Kenly Corya, Senior Editorial Assistant
This week’s Friday from the Archives is inspired by the recent announcement of our 2027 feature: Southern Gothic in North Carolina Literature. Looking for inspiration as you prepare to submit? Here are two of our favorite Gothic-themed works from past issues.
Peggy Dunn Bailey offers readers a concise evolution of the Gothic tradition, and she notes that “Southern Gothic literature is characterized by obsessive preoccupations – typically, with blood and inheritance; racial, gender, and/or class identities; the Christian religion; and home – and a compulsion to speak (or write) of these preoccupations.” Bailey considers how “Reynolds Price is not consistently read as participating in the Gothic tradition that is an important part of the Southern – and American – literary heritage.” Despite Price’s arguable exclusion within Gothic discourse” but asserts that Price’s Kate Vaiden “owes much of its power to the Gothic.”
Like Bailey, Tanfer Emin Tunc reflects upon the Southern Gothic in North Carolina literature. In a 2015 essay, Tunc analyzes Paul Green’s use of the Gothic: “For Green, the gothic was a means of deconstructing traditional ‘moonlight and magnolia’ Old Southern romanticism, which includes chivalrous planters, demure Southern belles, and contented slaves.” Tunc assesses how Green’s Gothic resists “conventional ‘values’ of the aristocratic, antebellum world – racism, sexism, classism, violence, and moral corruption, all sugarcoated with a code of (questionable) gentility – undergirded the grotesque realities of the New South.” With thoughtful analysis of Green’s play The House of Connelly, Tunc determines Green to be “among the first modernist Southern writers, and probably the first modernist Southern playwright, to deploy the gothic to deconstruct the popular literary tropes of his region, expose the irrational nature of evil and violence, and highlight the grotesque, oppressive realities that still existed for women, people of color, the working class, and those who refused to live in the present.”
Interested in reading more? Visit our online store to purchase the back issues in this post or read Bailey and Tunc’s essays on Gale Cengage. Send early submissions, direct queries, and proposals for the 2027 special feature to the guest editor at barbara_bennett@ncsu.edu. Find formatting information and online submission instructions on the NCLR website submissions page.
