Southern Wastelands: Alas, Babylon, The Road, and the A-Bomb in the Garden

The U.S. South has often been depicted as the closest incarnation of an American Eden. From John Smith’s works, through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, to W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, the southern states elicited comparison with a luxuriant natural paradise and an ecological (and, after Jefferson’s treatise, democratic) utopia. Southern Gothic destroyed the South’s pastoral pretensions on a socio-anthropological level, but not until recently this region was used as an overtly post-apocalyptic locale that replaced the image of the garden with that of a barren deathscape. Even if works such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Omar El-Akkad’s American War, and Frank Owen’s South don’t openly address nuclear scenarios, they evoke an imagery that, through the death of the biosphere, climatic disaster and the destruction of the status quo, re-inscribes and updates Cold War terrors into ecologically, existentially and politically conscious narratives that, inspired by atomic aftermaths, investigate the collapse of the U.S. South’s Edenic imagination, and of American society at large. Situated at the intersection between post-apocalyptic culture, social criticism, and environmental issues, this essay will analyze contemporary literary depictions of the U.S. South as a dystopian wasteland.