Southern Gothic: Haunted Houses

Abstract

Davison offers a socio-historically contextualised, generically detailed overview of the haunted plantation house featured in Southern Gothic literature since the early nineteenth century. Discussing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Nelson Page, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Jim Grimsley, Davison analyses the haunted plantation house as a type of mortuary, a site ‘haunted by history’ and, more specifically, the slave-based economy that produced it. This chapter reveals this popular Gothic locale to be a fertile contact zone between racialised and gendered bodies—living and spectral—in which are staged uncanny encounters between the past and the present, the familiar/foreign, and domestic/imperial, rendered in order to advance a variety of cautionary messages about racism, misogyny, and homophobia, and to grant visibility and voice to those who were usually excluded, silenced, and invisible.