Promoting the Gothic South

In the early spring of 1870, journalist Thomas Bangs Thorpe traveled to Florida's Ocklawaha River to gather material for an article on the South commissioned by New York magazine Appletons' Journal. Thorpe's mission was simple. He was to persuade the magazine's mostly middle-class northern readership of the pleasures to be found steaming down this swampy river not far from Jacksonville. Yet, far from delivering a conventional piece on bucolic retreats into unspoiled nature, this seasoned writer turned in an article that read more like a passage from a cheap gothic novel. "No imagination," he wrote, "can conceive the grotesque and weird forms . . . as the light partially illuminates the limbs of wrecked or half destroyed trees, which, covered with moss, or wrapped in decayed vegetation as a winding sheet, seem huge unburied monsters, which, though dead, still throw their arms in agony." Thorpe described entering "what appears to be an endless colonnade of beautifully-proportioned shafts." The trunks ran upwards at least a hundred feet, roofed "by pendant ornaments, suggesting the highest possible effect of Gothic architecture." The "delusion" of the medieval, claimed Thorpe, was only increased by "waving streamers of Spanish moss . . . which hang down like tattered but gigantic banners, worm-eaten and mouldy, sad evidences of the hopes and passions of the distant past."1 Of course there is nothing faintly medieval about a Florida swamp; even Spanish moss is not Spanish. Nonetheless, with his gothicized landscape, Thorpe tapped into a powerful need felt by his normally staid Victorian readers. Long before the gothic Souths of William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor, travel writers like Thorpe conceived of certain southern scenes, mainly swamps but also the ruined plantations evocative of grand, lost civilizations, as "gothic," that is, medieval, melancholy, and slightly grotesque. Thorpe and others created these scenes because they believed that their northern readers would find them irresistible, for both the ruined landscapes of the mythic past and the strange vegetative growths of the swamp fed off the same impulse: the northern need both to praise and marginalize the region. As writers lauded the chaotic profusions of [End Page 33] southern semitropical scenery, they also marginalized the region by contrasting these southern "aberrations" with the calm, pastoral, and seemingly "normal" landscapes idealized in the North. In linking the ruined plantations with medieval manors gone forever, travel writers satiated their audience's demand for a mysterious Old World atmosphere close to home. It was compensation, in part, for an America where "there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight."2 Click for larger view Figure 1 "No imagination can conceive the grotesque and weird forms… as the light partially illuminates the limbs of wrecked or half destroyed trees, which, covered with moss, or wrapped in decayed vegetation as a winding sheet, seem huge unburied monsters, which, though dead, still throw their arms in agony." Photograph courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service.