SOURCE: Christophersen, Bill. “‘Jean-ah Poquelin’: Cable's Place in Southern Gothic.” South Dakota Review 20, no. 2 (summer 1982): 55-66.

In the following essay, Christophersen praises Cable for the success with which he appropriates the English gothic tradition to an American landscape, noting that he grounds the grotesquery of his story in the realism of the socio-economic reality of his country.

Ernest Stone, in his article entitled “Usher, Poquelin, Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic,”¹ renders a previous comparison between Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Faulkner's “A Rose For Emily”² suddenly meaningful by broadening it to include George W. Cable's story “Jean-ah Poquelin.” Faulkner's story, by virtue of its plot alone, resembles Cable's story much more than it does Poe's. Cable's story and Faulkner's are, in fact, suspiciously similar.³ Stone compares the two in detail, noting, finally, that both stories present

… a central conflict between a proud...