46 pages • 1 hour read
Kami Garcia, Margaret StohlBeautiful Creatures
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Southern Gothic
Garcia and Stohl draw on elements of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, which is influenced by the culture and history of the American South. Southern Gothic mixes elements of the Gothic literary tradition, such as hauntings, dark family secrets, and supernatural events, to explore themes such as isolation, depression, and guilt. The Southern Gothic tradition takes these Gothic elements and combines it with Southern culture and history to examine issues about the American South. The genre emerged after the Civil War as Southern authors examined the bitterness and fear that developed in the South after the Confederacy’s defeat. Southern society rebuilt and tried to form a sense of identity after the war.
Southern Gothic literature often focuses on racism and the racial divide in the South after the Civil War. Garcia and Stohl emphasize this divide by focusing on Ravenwood Manor. The Gothic castle is a common element of Gothic fiction and emphasizes important discoveries for the protagonist. In the Southern Gothic tradition, the crumbling plantation, exemplified by Ravenwood Manor, mirrors the Gothic castle. It serves as a reminder of slavery and oppression, even if the South wants to forget. At its core, Southern Gothic dispels the myth of a South free from violence or oppression, as novels in the tradition revolve around families hiding the horrors of their past behind a veneer of Southern hospitality.
Literary Context: Young Adult Paranormal Romance
Beautiful Creatures was published in 2009, at the height of the young adult paranormal romance trend of the early 2000s. The novel stands apart from some of the other paranormal romance books published at the time, such as the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyers, in that the narrative is told through a male perspective.
Whitney Young examines the prominence of paranormal romances in her paper “Monsters in My Bed: Accounting for the Popularity of Young Adult Paranormal Romances.” She argues that most young women are drawn to paranormal romances because they promise to fulfill the dream that society tells young women: that they will fall in love with someone unique who will take them away from their boring lives. As she writes,
I believe the supernatural gives the readers an escape from their disappointing reality and that this storyline is an avenue for them to put the narratives they have built their lives around into context. In other words, it allows the readers to take the adult world—which is not what they were expecting according to the narrative they believe—and make sense of its strangeness” (Young, Whitney. “Monsters in My Bed: Accounting for the Popularity of Young Adult Paranormal Romances.” Georgia State University, 2013).
In this tradition, Beautiful Creatures supplies a level of escapism as young women enter adulthood. The novel features a common motif in YA works about the supernatural, in which a teenaged girl is misunderstood and bullied. However, unknown to her antagonists, she is special and faces the bequeathing of powers that will change her life. Young female readers may especially find escape through Lena’s journey from ordinary high schooler to Caster. They may hope that, like Lena, they are special beneath their ordinary exterior.
However, the book doesn’t feature every element of the YA paranormal genre. Ethan is the narrator rather than the female protagonist. Lena, instead of addressing the reader through an intimate first-person account, is filtered through Ethan’s gaze. This keeps her somewhat at a distance.
