Reburial of the Mother and the Horror of the Feminine in Southern Gothic Fiction

Abstract

This article focuses on the portrayal of women, especially mothers, in the works of Southern gothic authors Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Charlaine Harris. The works of Rice and Brite imagine the South as a white, male-coded space. Nonetheless, a few strong female characters in their works challenge the patriarchal order but end up paying with their lives. Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles presents strong nonwhite matriarchs and excavates matrilineal lineages only to rebury them in favour of white patriarchs and patriarchal heritages. In Brite’s Lost Souls, in contrast, independent young women who express their sexuality are deemed promiscuous and punished with unwanted pregnancies and death at childbirth. Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries has a female protagonist, Sookie. However, in this series, too, Adele, the matriarch, is killed early, and more importance is given to the patrilineal heritage. Another young mother, Crystal, meets the same fate as the women in Brite’s novel. All the mothers who die in the works of these authors allow for the mixing of races. This article argues that although these authors give strong women a voice and place, they do so only to take the agency away from the women in favour of a patriarchal order. These works display matrophobia, a fear of becoming one’s mother and of motherhood. Moreover, matrophobia is used to instill fear of miscegenation, control women’s reproductive function, and preserve gender and racial divisions.