A Rose For Emily: Fiction and Short Stories Analytical Essay

The short stories “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, written by Flannery O’Connor in 1953, and “A Rose for Emily”, written by William Faulkner are both excellent examples of Southern Gothicism. Southern Gothicism is a literary genre, which often involves disturbed characters doing rather disturbing things. The main characters in each of these stories are the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Emily Grierson, or Miss Emily, in “A Rose for Emily”. Both of these characters have their fair share of disturbing and isolated moments that are different from one another, but they also share some symbolism that is present in many Southern Gothic stories.

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “A Rose for Emily”, the grandmother and Miss Emily are viewed as a sort of attachment to the past. “A Rose for Emily” follows Miss Emily, but also follows the townspeople that view her as a relic of the past, with the townspeople saying “Miss Emily had been a tradition” (Faulkner 659). “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” involves the grandmother viewing herself as a relic of the past, making consistent references to how things were done in the past, even going as far as to have the narrator assume Red Sammy and the grandmother “discussed better times” (O’Connor 519). Not only are the grandmother and Miss Emily relics, or attachments, to the past, but the two characters also share roots in an aristocratic class or system of the past. Miss Emily in “A Rose for Emily” is not only the daughter, but also the caretaker of her father, a very well-known aristocrat. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” attempts to stay attached to signatures, a system that can be seen as aristocratic. Mitchell Owens, a literary critic, says,

“this woman has been struggling with the shift from the ante-bellum values of lineage and gentility to those of a cash-oriented culture, and with the implications this shift has for the assumptions that underwrite her vanishing system of beliefs…the grandmother’s handling of signatures, while clearly demonstrating the tension involved in this ongoing negotiation of adaptation and denial, also indicates that her difficulties arc related to her failure to recognize fully the arbitrariness of the sign…the grandmother’s value system is founded upon particular notions of aristocracy and heredity.” (Owens n.p)

Miss Emily and the grandmother are considered relics of the past and of a past aristocratic class, but they also both refuse to accept the present, often attempting to stay more comfortable in the past. Miss Emily denies her father’s death, leaving his corpse in their house for multiple days, but also becomes a recluse and doesn’t leave her house often. The grandmother, again, makes consistent references to the past and the way things worked in the past and makes it seem like she wants people to act the way they did in her day. These two main characters also have a similar encounter with a loss of potential money in their respective stories. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” recalls a time when a man, Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden, had courted her and brought her watermelons to eat. She later recalls that she could have married him and received a portion of his wealth, which was accumulated by purchasing Coca Cola stock early on. Miss Emily in “A Rose for Emily” was her father’s caretaker, but her father was a very greedy man. Miss Emily had received almost no inheritance from her aristocratic father, only receiving their house to her name.

The main characters in these stories have plenty of symbolism in common, but the ways that these symbols come about may show more contrast than similarity in these characters. Mental illness is a common theme between these two characters, but slightly differs between the two of them. An anonymous literary critic says, “creating worlds where tragedy and repressed behaviors come to the forefront, gothic writers explore the psychology of human existence on several unique levels” (Southern n.p). In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the grandmother is more than likely plagued with a mental degeneracy that results in memory loss, as she promises a plantation for the grandkids to see, but later finds out that she was incredibly wrong about the location. Miss Emily has some sort of an inherited insanity, becoming a recluse and murdering Homer Barron, among many other things. Miss Emily’s illness was inherited, whereas the grandmother’s mental degeneracy is a cause of her old age. In these two stories the main characters die at the end, the grandmother’s death being violent at the hands of an escaped convict and Miss Emily locking herself away to die in her house. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” attempts to redeem herself by preaching to the criminal and asking for him to perform religious acts. The grandmother, after having a lengthy conversation with the criminal, begins to question her faith and her religion as a whole. She never gets a chance to redeem herself before her untimely and violent death. Stephen C. Bandy, yet another literary critic says, “there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters. No wishful search for evidence of grace or for epiphanies of salvation, by author or reader, can soften the harsh truth of ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find.’” (Bandy n.p). The grandmother is never truly redeemed by her religious faith, finding herself questioning it and dying soon after. Miss Emily dies, locked in her house, with the corpse of Homer Barron. Miss Emily has gone insane, at this point, with the townspeople seemingly showing incredible amounts of pity for her. Her funeral was held, with a majority, if not all, of the townspeople seeming to come and pay respects to her.

Miss Emily and the grandmother are both plagued by mental illness, a loss of potential money, and what seems to be a desire for a return to the past. These stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “A Rose for Emily”, share the essential elements of a Southern Gothic piece of literature, with the main characters, the grandmother and Miss Emily, sharing similar character traits and symbolism.

Works Cited

1. ‘Southern Gothic Literature.’ Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 142, Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1410001028/LitRC?u=lincclin_mcc&sid=LitRC&xid=e49ce521. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019.
2. Bandy, Stephen C. ”One Of My Babies’: The Misfit and the Grandmother.’ Short Story Criticism, edited by Janet Witalec, vol. 61, Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420050919/LitRC?u=lincclin_mcc&sid=LitRC&xid=51859e45. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019. Originally published in Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 33, no. 1, Winter 1996, pp. 107-118.
3. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Norton Introduction to Literature: Shorter 13th Edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays, W.W Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 658-665.
4. O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Norton Introduction to Literature: Shorter 13th Edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays, W.W Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 516-527.
5. Owens, Mitchell. ‘The function of signature in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ (short story by Flannery O’Connor).’ Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 33, no. 1, 1996, p. 101+. Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19638482/LitRC?u=lincclin_mcc&sid=LitRC&xid=89e5ce38. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.