Poe and Faulkner: Southern Gothic Style Compared

Introduction: Poe, Faulkner, and the Southern Gothic

Despite the gap of a century or more between the periods when Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner were writing, both authors have been loosely considered representatives of the "Southern Gothic" style of fiction in America. Pioneering Faulkner critic Cleanth Brooks has noted that the connections with Poe's style would limit the way in which Faulkner has been received critically: Brooks is at pains to demonstrate that Faulkner's stories represent "more than an attempt to outdo Edgar Allan Poe, more than the prime example of what has come to be called modern Southern Gothic" (Brooks 15). With an emphasis on grotesquerie and on the spiritual journey of its characters — often a dark spiritual journey into consciousness of damnation, as in the heavily religious Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth century, or some form of the supernatural — "Southern Gothic" is considered a kind of poetic alternative to straightforward realistic fiction. This paper demonstrates some similarities between the methods of Poe and Faulkner by examining how two representative stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Barn Burning" respectively) utilize specific metaphors, patterns of imagery, and symbolism — along with differences in narrative style and tone — to show that, despite surface differences, both authors offer a profound vision of the darker side of human nature.

Narrative Style: Dramatic Monologue vs. Third-Person Narration

In terms of narrative style, this is the element that is most distinctly different between the two stories. Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is composed as a straightforward dramatic monologue — the story is narrated by its protagonist, and the revelation of his character (which turns out to be disturbed and criminal) constitutes the dramatic suspense of the story. This becomes unbearable just before the story's ultimate dénouement: having killed the old man who is his landlord, Poe's unnamed narrator invites the police in and offers them chairs directly above the site beneath the floorboards where he has hidden the old man's body. The police have heard a "shriek" and been asked to investigate, but they know nothing more than the "suspicion of foul play":

The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search — search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.

There is an element of dramatic irony here, because the reader (and narrator) know that the body is there while the police do not — they have no reason to suspect the narrator of anything, since he has given credible excuses for the shriek and the man's absence. This is Poe's real point: the story is meant to be an analysis of the narrator's psychology, and what happens is made subordinate, to some extent, to how the story is told.

Faulkner's narratorial style is far more conventional in "Barn Burning": although his prose is largely pleonastic and overwrought, in terms of narration and suspense it backs away from the immediacy of Poe's first-person voice. The description of young Colonel Sartoris Snopes at the story's climax is representative:

At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight and he did not know how far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My father, he thought. "He was brave!" he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: "He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris' cav'ry!" not knowing that his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty — it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.

Faulkner allows the story to follow and shape itself around the perceptions of the Snopes boy, granting us access to his psychology — reporting the transformation of "grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair" (which illustrates the pleonasm of Faulkner's style, similar to "truths and verities" in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech), while also permitting his detached third-person narration to convey the child's feelings and thoughts.

Tone and Immediacy in Each Story

This difference in narrative style accounts for the additional differences in tone between the stories: to a certain degree, Faulkner's is detached — narrating events that occurred in the past — while Poe's is immediate, narrating events that seem to be happening in the moment. It is within the central use of imagery, however, that Poe and Faulkner seem most alike in their strategies.

Imagery and Central Symbols

Both stories place a central object, which will play a crucial role in the plot, directly in the title — perhaps to signpost to the audience what to watch for. The sound of the heart is the central metaphor in Poe's story, a metaphor for the narrator's suppressed conscience, or else a symbol for the notion that "murder will out." As Kenneth Silverman notes, it is an image meant to show that "[w]hat has been hidden within the self will not stay concealed" (Silverman 208). At the same time, Poe has been careful to establish the old man's eye as a powerful and elusive symbol:

He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.

In giving us the old man's eye as the killer's motive, Poe intends us to read it as symbolic. The narrator connects the eye with "a vulture" and with his "blood [running] cold" — in other words, a bird that feeds on carrion, and a temperature best associated with corpses. The "pale blue" of the eye's color might suggest the summer sky, but in the narrator's chain of associations it suggests only death.

Conclusion: A Shared Vision of Human Darkness

Faulkner, by contrast, invites the symbol to be read in stages, building it up carefully. We know that Ab Snopes has a propensity for arson; we are then invited to see his attitude toward fire through his son's eyes, which views the campfires set by his father as "niggardly." This denotes parsimony, though it is possible Faulkner intends the repeated adjective to carry an echo that associates the Snopes family with the underclass. Faulkner then moves into outright interpretation of metaphor, offering us the meaning that the boy would one day understand: that "the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father's being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion." This makes the barn burnings an emblem of deep internal frustration and class resentment, but it also gives meaning to the story's ambiguous ending, in which Colonel Sartoris Snopes runs away from home and presumably never returns. By providing us with the interpretation that the boy would arrive at many years after the story's main action takes place, Faulkner uses the metaphor to hint at a kind of rapprochement between father and son — one that will occur when the son manages to understand the disconcerting events of his father's revenge on De Spain. In this way, despite their differences in narrative voice and symbolic method, both Poe and Faulkner ultimately direct their craft toward the same end: a penetrating examination of the darker forces that drive human behavior.

Works Cited

Brooks, Cleanth. "Faulkner's Short Stories." In Claridge, Henry. William Faulkner: Critical Assessments. Cornwall: MPG Books, 1999. Print.

Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning."

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1991. Print.