On "Southern Gothic" by Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey’s “Southern Gothic” uses elements of the Southern Gothic subgenre to explore the history of race and racism in the American South and the impact of both on herself as a biracial American and her family. The poem is structured as one stanza with only three end-stops. The enjambment mimics the continuous nature of racism in the American South by not allowing the reader much time to pause and instead prods the reader to continue the line to its end. Both the title and the poem itself do an equal amount of work in reinforcing one another, by echoing the moods and tones of many Southern Gothic works such as the 1997 film Eve’s Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons), Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and William Faulkner’s fiction, for example. Trethewey’s poem embodies the themes of alienation, family and dread which are common tropes of the Southern Gothic subgenre.
The poem opens with the speaker “lying down into 1970” in what is later revealed to be a dream, but could also be a memory, about lying with her parents in their bed as a child. The speaker is clearly an adult woman sinking back into her child’s mind, but she still retains her adult knowledge and seemingly cannot help but foretell her family’s future like some kind of prophet or an oracle. Despite the relatively innocent image of a husband and wife sleeping together in bed, Trethewey’s speaker foreshadows the future the future of her parents’ doomed marriage:
I have lain down into 1970, into the bed my parents will share for only a few more years. Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other in sleep, their bodies curved—parentheses framing the separate lives they’ll wake to.
Trethewey sets the scene by giving the reader a year and time of day, both of which carry a certain weight in terms of history (regarding the year) and mood (regarding the time of day); however, she doesn’t reveal the time of year. If the poem is taking place during winter, then “early evening” would be quite dark; in contrast, if the poem is taking place during summer, then “early evening” would still imply some light. She sets the tone for the entire poem with the opening lines: “I have lain down into 1970, into the bed / my parents will share for only a few more years” (Trethewey 1-2). The enjambment here functions to keep the reader intrigued and then leave the reader with a sense of dread at the end-stop. The abruptness adds to a kind of matter-of-factness which then continues throughout the poem.
The enjambment in the following line adds to the foreshadowing: “Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other / in sleep, their bodies curved—parentheses / framing the separate lives they’ll wake to.” (Trethewey 3-5). The use of “yet” does ample work in helping to set the tone for the poem and offering mysteries for the reader: Why will her parents turn from each other? Why haven’t they done so yet? What will happen to them in the future? By comparing her parents’ sleeping bodies to parentheses, the speaker is essentially using them as a kind of framing device; not only are her parents “framing the separate lives they’ll wake to” (Trethewey 5) but they’re also framing the speaker and her lived experience as a biracial American woman born and raised in the South. Assuming the speaker lies in between her parents, she is quite literally caught in the middle in terms of her racial identity and her position in her family with her white father on one side and her black mother on the other.
Trethewey continues to build a sense of foreboding once she reveals the fate of her mother in particular:
....Dreaming, I am again the child with too many questions— the endless why and why and why my mother cannot answer, her mouth closed, a gesture toward her future: cold lips stitched shut. The lines in my young father’s face deepen toward an expression of grief.
The reader now knows the poem is taking place in a dream rather than a memory which doesn’t necessarily mean the poem is not a memory from the speaker’s childhood: “...Dreaming, / I am again the child with too many questions— / the endless why and why and why / my mother cannot answer, her mouth closed, a gesture / toward her future: cold lips stitched shut” (Trethewey 5-9). By characterizing herself as “...the child with too many questions” (Trethewey 6), the speaker creates a sense of relatability for the reader which is then interrupted by her mother’s future. The speaker’s questions go unwritten and unanswered in the poem. Even in dream, the speaker cannot escape the inevitability of her mother’s death. The imagery of her mother’s “...cold lips stitched shut” (Trethewey 9) significantly adds to the dread in the poem. The next lines read: “The lines in my young father’s face deepen / toward an expression of grief” (Trethewey 10-11). The emphasis on her father’s youth—and, by proxy, her mother’s youth—enhances the tragedy surrounding their marriage and their lives. She also alludes to her father aging while her mother remains the same. Time works strangely in the poem: the speaker has returned to the past but continues to dwell on the future. While the speaker should feel safe in her parents’ bed, she is instead riddled with tension and burdened by the knowledge of her family’s fate.
While Trethewey doesn’t explicitly explain, answer, or identify the speaker’s “...endless why and why and why...” (Trethewey 7), she does hint at the potential root of her questions when the poem shifts away from the domestic scene and begins to meditate on race and racism:
....I have come home from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us in this small Southern town—peckerwood and nigger lover, half-breed and zebra—words that take shape outside us.
The speaker likely wants to know why people in their small Southern town call her and her father slurs. She could also want to know why her family looks so different from other families. The speaker has “come home / from the schoolyard” (Trethewey 11-12) with these new words in her metaphorical pocket which suggests that she has likely heard these slurs from other children, or perhaps even teachers. It is interesting to note that Trethewey doesn’t refer to any of the slurs that would be used against her black parent specifically; however, the slurs hurled at the speaker and her white father come from their proximity to blackness. Her father is condemned as a “nigger / lover” (Trethewey 13-14)—in lines which include a great use of enjambment—for marrying a black woman while the speaker is condemned as a “half-breed” for being the child of a white man and a black woman. Her black mother, unfortunately, is the root cause of their condemnation in their town as well as their subsequent isolation as a family. By describing these slurs as “words that take shape / outside us” (Trethewey 14-15), Trethewey introduces the larger sense of alienation which plagues her family and serves as a callback to the Southern Gothic subgenre.
The final lines of the poem further paint the scene, add to the building dread, and emphasize the Southern Gothic aesthetic of the poem:
....We’re huddled on the tiny island of bed, quiet in the language of blood: the house, unsteady on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper into the muck of ancestry. Oil lamps flicker around us—out shadows, dark glyphs on the wall, bigger and stranger than we are.
The enjambment in the following lines forces the reader’s eyes to follow without taking a real break or pause: “...We’re huddled on the tiny island of bed / quiet / in the language of blood: the house, unsteady / on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper into the muck of ancestry” (Trethewey15-18). The “tiny island of bed” (Trethewey 15) brings to mind an image of a bed floating alone in the middle of the ocean with no land or ship in sight which reinforces the sense of isolation the speaker likely felt as a biracial child growing up in the South in the 1970s.
The “house, unsteady / on its cinderblock haunches” (Trethewey 16-17) serves as a metaphor for the precarity of the speaker’s family and the “muck of ancestry” (Trethewey 18) (i.e., her mother’s blackness) which keeps them on the outskirts of acceptance, tradition, and community. The diction here only emphasizes the sense of dread permeating throughout the poem. The last lines of the poem continue: “...Oil lamps flicker / around us—our shadows, dark glyphs on the wall, / bigger and stranger than we are” (Trethewey 18-20). There is no reprieve anywhere in the poem; there is no hope to be found. The matter-of-factness of the poem only adds to the eeriness. What truly makes the poem unsettling is that Trethewey is working with facts: her parents’ divorce, her mother’s death, Southern history, and racism.
The shadows becoming “bigger and stranger” (Trethewey 20) seem almost tongue-in-cheek: here lies the speaker and her otherwise normative family, transformed into something to fear and/or condemn by history and the outside world, and there are their shadows on the wall who could seem like monsters, but are ultimately just something everyone carries around with them, like ancestry. Perhaps the speaker takes some relief in finding something stranger than herself and her family in the eyes of the outside world.
By using words like quiet, blood, muck, shadows, and dark, Trethewey creates a similar kind of fear in the reader that she and her family likely felt in their small Southern town. A family should at least feel safe in their own homes; however, the speaker’s family does not even have the illusion of safety in their own house, town, region, or country. The speaker and her family are not safe from the outside world or the words, stereotypes, history, and racism that surrounds them because when they leave their home, they become a provocation instead of a family.
Work Cited
Trethewey, Natasha. Native Guard. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company, 2007. Print.
Thank you for this insightful review of Trethewey. Coincidentally, I received my copy of "The House of Being" last week, which will be the first Trethewey I'll read.