Abstract
Truffin examines the geography, history, culture, and literature of New Orleans, Louisiana and characterizes the city as a ‘Gothic capital.’ She argues that geographical isolation, environmental vulnerability, and man-made peril all contribute to New Orleans’ Gothic image and that New Orleans is routinely depicted as a transgressive, alien space with distinctly Gothic traits: a foreign Catholic heritage, a tendency to emphasize aesthetic over moral values, and a habitual disregard of order, control, and taboo that is simultaneously frightening and liberating. Truffin attributes New Orleans’ prominence as a Southern Gothic space to its image as a culture of excess, masquerade, trickery, madness, and disorienting juxtapositions, and she argues that Gothic texts portray the city as the site of frightening transformation or dark self-discovery. She concludes that Gothic tropes persist in post-Katrina literature that portrays the city as resilient but haunted by its past and perpetually poised for environmental or cultural apocalypse.
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Notes
- 1.
See Asbury’s The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (Basic Books, 2003) and Moore’s Black Rage: Police Brutality and African-American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
- 2.
Madame Lalaurie is frequently referenced in New Orleans literature and even appears as a character played by Kathy Bates in the third season of the television series American Horror Story (2013), which features a coven of witches whose ancestors had been expelled from New England and found a home in New Orleans.
- 3.
African American folkloric magic syncretized with Protestant Christianity rather than with Catholicism, as in voodoo.
- 4.
Named after Robert Tallant, who wrote a largely discredited but still popular study of New Orleans voodoo in 1946.
- 5.
The original name of the French Quarter.
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Further Reading
Dixon, N. (Ed.). (2013). N.O. Lit: 200 years of New Orleans literature. New Orleans: Lavender Ink. Dixon’s anthology of New Orleans literature features a diverse range of works selected to illuminate the city’s history and culture.
Kennedy, R. S. (Ed.). (1992). Literary New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. These ‘essays and meditations’ examine New Orleans’ impact on the life and work of writers like Grace King, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy.
Kennedy, R. S. (Ed.). (1998). Literary New Orleans in the modern world. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. This sequel to Literary New Orleans emphasizes local New Orleans literary history and extends the work of the first volume to include modern writers like John Kennedy Toole and Shirley Ann Grau.
Starr, S. F. (Ed.). (2001). Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. The impressions, sketches, editorials, and studies of New Orleans from journalist Lafcadio Hearn (1877–88) contributed much to the city’s image as a place of authenticity, mystery, beauty, and decay.
Sublette, N. (2008). The world that made New Orleans: From Spanish silver to Congo Square. Chicago: Laurence Hills Books. Sublette’s history of New Orleans’ first century explores the colonial conflicts and world revolutions that shaped the city, emphasizing the development of a unique Afro-Louisiana culture.
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Truffin, S.R. (2016). New Orleans as Gothic Capital. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_15
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