The Reckoning

The Southern Gothic genre evolved from the European and American Gothic traditions. The Gothic genre first emerged in Europe and featured ancient buildings such as castles or abbeys. It fixated on a sense of darkness, isolation, mental illness, the grotesque and the irrational—especially as represented by the supernatural—and family secrets encompassing multiple generations. Thematic tension arose from the conflict between the reasonable and the irrational.

When the genre immigrated to the US, writers found themselves confronted with a dearth of ancient castles and abbeys. Beginning with Charles Brockton Brown, who set out to create a specifically American Gothic genre, writers of the genre instead used the darkness and isolation of the wilderness and all its potential for irrationality and grotesquerie—for example, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Later, American writers had access to enough big, old haunted houses to satisfy their needs, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

The American Gothic gave birth to the Southern Gothic. In fact, The House of Usher is commonly acknowledged to be the first Southern Gothic work. It employs the device of an ancestral home and a degenerate family, mental illness, incestuous relations, and tension between the rational protagonist and his irrational surroundings.

Where Poe is acknowledged to be the earliest writer of the genre, William Faulkner also established a strong presence within the category. Faulkner’s labyrinthine language mirrors the intricate and ornate architecture of the European Gothic. His work explores the economic and social upheaval of the post-Civil War South trying to restore a new and more rational order. Grisham acknowledges Faulkner's contribution to the genre when Joel Banning meets Faulkner. Much of the tension in The Reckoning stems from the conflict between the old and new order of the South. Racism is interwoven throughout the story and results in the deaths of three people and the ruin of a family.

The Reckoning explores the ways in which racism distorts justice and corrupts the individual. When Pete’s motive is exposed, the inevitability, the irrationality, and the injustice of Pete’s crime comes to light. The story takes the form of a tragedy in which the mistakes and failings of the protagonist lead to destruction. In this case, it is not just the protagonist who is flawed but his entire society. Like any other tragic drama, the audience experiences both pity and an implacable sense of justice. The catharsis lies in the inevitability of the protagonist’s descent into self-destruction.