Southern Gothic Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert K. Martin

Critical Essay by Robert K. Martin

SOURCE: Martin, Robert K. “Haunted by Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner.” In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, pp. 129-42. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Martin examines the themes of gender and race in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, and notes that the issues raised in the novel are mirrored in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! However, Faulkner's novel, while dealing with many of the same issues, presents a more complicated picture of the world, replacing Hawthorne's happy ending with a vision that is ultimately nightmarish.

In his now somewhat outdated but still influential formulation, Harold Bloom argues for an agonistic relationship between the “strong poet” and his predecessors. The task for the belated writer is simultaneously to express admiration and filiation and to mark off difference. The model does not...
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