Burial Grounds and Dead Lovers: Places of Interment in the Gothic Modernism of the American South

Abstract

In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach speculates that “Modernity itself might be understood as a new way of handling (and thinking about) the dead” (1996: 48). Roach (following Foucault) argues that a whole array of rationalized spatial practices emerged during the Enlightenment designed to enforce policies of segregation and hygiene, demarcating the social and metaphysical lines that were necessary to distinguish black from white, civilization from nature, citizen from foreigner, past from present, reason from supernatural or folk forms of knowing, and—ultimately—living from dead. In this sense, “gothic” romanticism represented the development of a sort of unnatural chiaroscuro effect, whereby such boundaries and lines of distinction became blurred, where dead flesh becomes re-animated, where corpses risen from graves come to contaminate the spaces of the living. In contradistinction to formations that “view the dead as hermetically sealed off from contemporaneous life, quarantined into the past,” gothic cultural productions, as Eric Anderson et al. have argued recently in Undead Souths, reveal “how the dead contain cultural vibrancy in the present” (2015: 2). This essay, rethinking traditional understandings of “Southern Gothic” by emphasizing the world-making power of the dead, explores texts about burial grounds by modernist writers from the American South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Frances Newman’s Dead Lovers are Faithful Lovers (1928). En route, I consider Freudian and other understandings of mourning from a spatial perspective, focusing on variously abortive or failed funereal dramas of interment and burial.