Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent Ginger nuts of horror review website

Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

Introduction

In the complex tapestry of Southern literature, the narratives surrounding womanhood often hinge on an agonizing dualism—women are either virtuous saints or fallen souls. This binary, deeply rooted in the historical and cultural soil of the American South, shapes not only literary portrayals but also the lived experiences of women today. Elizabeth Broadbent’s exploration into queer female Southern Gothic literature challenges this conventional framework, inviting readers to envision a third space where female identity and sexuality can exist outside of societal confines.

Broadbent’s work uncovers the haunting beauty and fierce struggle of women who refuse to be confined to archetypes. Through her compelling storytelling, she paves the way for a richer, more diverse representation of Southern womanhood, one that embraces complexity and defies simplistic labels.

Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

The paradigm of womanhood offers two options. We can be virtuous daughters, wives, and mothers, or we can be whores. In few places is that contradiction as stark as the American South. It derives, in part, through our unironic, twin literary obsessions with Alexander Dumas 1 and Walter Scott—our forebears made the crucial mistake of taking The Three Musketeers and Waverley as stellar life advice, and we haven’t been quite right since.

Mark Twain says in Life on the Mississippi that,

About Elizabeth Broadbent
Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

“Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for [it].” The chivalric ideals of Dumas and Scott cast women as creatures of remote and perfected virtue, or else fallen and doomed, grist for mill of high tragedy or comedy. Southern women have long chaffed under that yoke, both literary and spiritual. 

Witness Quentin Compson’s sadboi-ing in what most consider Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and The Fury 2. His beloved sister, Candice (Caddy), has sullied herself by getting knocked up out of wedlock. Just after Quentin reflects on how he attempted to lie to his father about sleeping with his own sister to save her from dishonor, his roommate Shreve calls women “little dirty sluts.” Quentin snaps back, “Did you ever have a sister? did you?”

It’s the same question that Caddy’s lover Dalton Ames asks him. Later, in the same chapter, Quentin reflects, “Did you ever have a sister? No but they’re all bitches. Did you ever have a sister? Bitches.” This dualism lies at the heart of the novel, and it’s the catalyst to Quentin’s eventual suicide. He’s unable to reconcile his image of Caddy’s virtuous Southern womanhood with her sexuality. 

What if we refuse this dualism?

What if Southern women enter an unimagined third space of sexuality, one in which pregnancy and traditional dishonor leave the building? This third space—a “queer” space in the literal sense of strangeness—becomes problematic in its own right. It’s a place Southern Gothic literature often tiptoes through. Our major works of sapphic Southern Gothic are few and far between.

There’s the character Mick Kelly in Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the relationship in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Idgie and Ruth in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café, and the heartbreak of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina 3 . There are indie horror authors working in the genre—2024 alone saw my Ink Vine, Emma Murray’s When the Devil, and Dori Lumpkins’ Antenora.

Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

It’s growing. But while Southern Gothic frequently queers masculinity—everything from Anne Rice’s popular Vampire Chronicles to the homosexual sublimation of the relationship between Henry and Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom!—the chivalric ideals of womanhood leave female sexuality in an-other realm. 

The terror and exhilaration of this third, othered space is what I tried to explore more explicitly in Blood Cypress. Lila (Candice Caroline) Carson’s budding sexuality stands at odds with her twin brother Quentin’s idea of her as a princess in a tower, or her brother Davis’s image of her as a whore. When she picks a third space instead, the consequences become disastrous: her sexuality has careened out of her brothers’ control. 

That’s the danger of that precious third space.
Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent
Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

When women step away from the virgin/whore dichotomy by owning their sexuality—gay, straight, asexual—we yank it away from men. And they always, always want it back. Your body, my choice. That’s the real horror story at the heart of Blood Cypress, and in post-Roe America as a whole. It’s an especially horrific tale in the red-state American South; I write the essay from Virginia, the southern reach of abortion on the Eastern Seaboard. 

This real-life horror adds more urgency to the need for third-space, “queer” female Southern literature—works that show other ways of being a woman in the South. The grand dame Southern Gothic herself, Flannery O’Connor, refused to exist within the prescripted space of Southern womanhood (not a shock, really, since neighbors were passing Wise Blood over the fence in brown paper bags, and one neighbor bragged of having burnt it in her backyard).

While no evidence points to her being a lesbian, Flannery O’Connor insisted on being referred to as “the masculine singular pronoun”  in her contract with Harcourt for The Violent Bear It Away. She says in a letter to longtime correspondent (and lesbian) Betty Hester that, “[I] never think of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine.” While she remained a staunch Catholic, O’Connor seems to have sought to erase gender binaries in a way that was different from their usual passive acceptance among Southern women of her time. 

Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

We need this. We need Lady Chablis from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, who certainly shows us another way of being a woman in the South with her iconic, “Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it” line—whether she says it in the book or the movie I’m not sure; I heard it often enough during her bright-light drag shows in Columbia. We recently lost Dorothy Allison, who, though she moved North, remained a strong voice for alternative Southern sexuality all her life. We need to recognize that Southern womanhood comes in more flavors than country club wife and trailer park mama. 

In a world of Promisekeepers, when the government is demanding access to period-tracking apps and prosecuting women for miscarriages, we need alternative tales of Southern female sexuality: lesbian, straight, bisexual, transgendered, asexual. Walter Scott sold us on the idea of chivalric masculinity and passive feminism. Two hundred years on, it’s time to speak up and save ourselves. 

  • 1 The irony of Dumas’s Blackness, of course, was completely lost on them. 
  • 2 They’re wrong; his real masterpiece is the gothic stunner Absalom, Absalom! and this is the hill I will die on, along with Moby-Dick’s co-equal status as the Greatest Horror Novel Ever Written 
  • 3 There’s a great argument for the queerness of Judith Sutpen and Clytie in Absalom, Absalom! that I’m not touching, since it gets dissertation-level complex. There’s also a lot to argue about with Drusilla’s othered, complex  sexuality in The Unvanquished. 
Blood Cypress by Elizabeth Broadbent
Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent
Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

No one cares when Lila Carson’s ten-year-old brother Beau disappears. He can’t speak. He throws tantrums. He’s a useless Carson, one of those kids in a broken-shuttered house that lost its glory when his father died. When the sheriff and his good ol’ boy deputies show up to investigate, they eye up Lila and call her twin brother, Quentin, names. A closeted bisexual girl in the South, she’s terrified.

Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment: Don’t go in that swamp. But as the long night drags on, it’s clear Beau disappeared behind those ancient trees. The sheriff’s deputies won’t risk going back there.

Lila might not have a choice.

What They’re Saying

“With echoes of Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Eliza Broadbent’s southern gothic, Blood Cypress, seethes with swamp-rot and small-town prejudice. Dark and lush and deeply, deeply disturbing, it’s an exquisite tale of grief and trauma, solidifying Broadbent’s place as a champion for the outsider. A revelation.” —Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

About Elizabeth Broadbent

The Heart and Soul of Horror Review Websites Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent
Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

Elizabeth Broadbent escaped the swamps of South Carolina for the Commonwealth of Virginia, where she lives with her three sons, two cats, two dogs, flock of crows, and a very patient husband. She’s the author of Ink Vine (Undertaker Books), Ninety-Eight Sabers (Undertaker Books), and Blood Cypress (Raw Dog Screaming Press), as well as the upcoming The Swamp Child (Undertaker Books, 2025), Bluefeather (Undertaker Books, 2026), Tigers of Greater Antarctica (Sley House Publications, 2026), and Breaking Neverland (Sley House Publications, 2026). As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared in places such as The Washington Post, Time, Insider, and ADDitude Magazine.

GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223194725-blood-cypress

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Why We Need More Queer Female Southern Gothic by Elizabeth Broadbent

Author

  • Jim Mcleod

    Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.

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