SOURCE: Donaldson, Susan V. “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic.”¹ Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 4 (fall 1997): 567-83.

In the following essay, Donaldson compares the portraits of women created by Faulkner and Welty, noting that while Faulkner's narratives reverberate with the effort to impose cultural ideas of femininity on his Southern characters, Welty's narratives present women that break out of the narrow confines of their worlds, “a carnival of gothic and grotesque heroines” who resist placement in traditional roles and themes.

By the time Eudora Welty published A Curtain of Green and Other Stories in 1941, the term “Southern Gothic” had become something very like a synonym—or a cliche—for modern Southern literature. Louise Bogan even titled her review of Welty's collection “The Gothic South.”² Other reviewers of A Curtain of Green tended to use the catch-all category of Southern Gothic interchangeably with the grotesque—or in the words...