Subtle Kinds of Violence: Poverty and Prejudice in "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee and “Dry September” by William Faulkner
Southern Gothic is a violence-ridden genre. Its subject matter, characters, and imagery are often disturbing and transgressive. However, this mode of writing does not necessarily rely on shock value, or our primal attraction to the repulsive. Some of the most successful Southern Gothic works offer multi-layered, contextualised depictions of violent behaviour, which should not be conflated with physical brutality. Southern Gothic authors more or less consciously describe in their works a full range of non-physical aggression which emanates from structural violence. There has been an ongoing semantic shift in the usage of the word “violence” itself. Due to sociocultural forces, its reference has expanded to include acts of aggression that cause harm via other means than physical force used face to face; for instance, World Health Organisation in its classification of violence includes also sexual and psychological attacks, as well as “deprivation or neglect” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 6...