“Where the paths forked”: The Southern Chronotope in Caroline Gordon’s “The Forest of the South” and “The Ice House”
As suggested by the titles of the two short stories analyzed in this article, Caroline Gordon cannot dissociate Southern places from several perceptions of Time which can be cyclical, linear, historical, or “uneventful”—a denial of the passing of time itself. “The Forest of the South” (1944) deals w...
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| Gepubliceerd in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Hoofdauteur: | |
| Formaat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Taal: | Anglais |
| Gepubliceerd in: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| Online toegang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Samenvatting: | As suggested by the titles of the two short stories analyzed in this article, Caroline Gordon cannot dissociate Southern places from several perceptions of Time which can be cyclical, linear, historical, or “uneventful”—a denial of the passing of time itself. “The Forest of the South” (1944) deals with Yankee occupation and the courtship of a Southern Belle, Eugenie Mazereau, by a Union soldier. The trauma of the Civil War can be read in the scarred landscape and the falling architecture of the mansion, which both reflect the young woman’s psyche. The topography is described through the perspective of the Northerner who can perceive the juxtaposition of different Southern topoi: the Clifton garden, the Villa Rose inhabited by the Mazereaus and the Macrae place, reminiscent of Southern Gothic, where Frank Macrae, the ghostlike Confederate soldier, is hiding before being betrayed by his cousin Eugenie. What used to be a kind of “middle ground” between nature and civilization is a dying and ruined landscape, despite the fertility of Nature and its cyclical regeneration. Before the war, the garden of the South used to exemplify the chronotope of the idyll in the pastoral tradition as well as the South’s fallacious hope of escaping the progression of time. This arrested time is present in “The Ice House” (1931), for ice usually conveys the image of rigidity and petrifaction. The ice house was turned into a communal grave for Union soldiers, and two young Southerners are paid by a “Yankee” contractor to put the unburied soldiers’ bones into coffins. In the two short stories, Gordon thus gives pride of place to landscape and pays attention to gates, thresholds, balconies or vistas, as well as to natural details and to the boundaries between Nature and so-called civilized space. Her treatment of the temporal dimension relies more on her symbolic treatment of landscape than on a sophisticated handling of chronology or narrative technique. This contribution analyzes the mosaic of spaces associated with different perceptions of time, namely a kaleidoscope of chronotopes that merge into a Southern Gothic chronotope triggering defense mechanisms such as laughter and debunking any petrified image of the South. |
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