Often criticized for its sensationalism, melodramatic qualities, and play on the supernatural, the Gothic novel has dominated English literature since its conception in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto until its "supposed" demise in 1820. "The genre took many of its intense images from the cemetery poets mixing a landscape of vast dark forest with vegetation that bordered excessive and hidden ruins with horrible rooms, monasteries and a desperate character who excels in melancholy” (Baldick, xx). Although it has lost some of its popularity, the Gothic realm has garnered the influence of a subgenre featuring many of the same unsettling themes and elements. If Gothic is a way of unearthing the past, Southern Gothic is a way of highlighting the social and cultural issues of the past. Much of the conflict in Southern Gothic is between what is valued and should be maintained as well as what is considered normal and superior. Thus, race and gender play a major role in these conflicts. In the following analysis, I will compare various works by Edgar Allan Poe, a prominent figure in the world of Gothic fiction, to William Faulkner's unique work: A Rose for Emily (1940). My reasons for choosing Faulkner in this analysis are because he is so directly associated with Southern Gothic fiction and his works affected and shaped the canon so severely. I chose her work, A Rose for Emily, because the comparisons between this tale and traditional Gothic elements are striking, and I think the Gothic theme of unrequited love leading to a woman's madness provides depth inherent. Additionally, I find that the way these themes function differently contrasts with their individual implications for what the Gothic and Southern Gothic genres addressed during the time they ruled the literary world. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay All of Poe's tales are in the first person. "As tellers of their own stories, they also follow their Gothic models in recounting the past through a veil of illness, overexcitement, or memory, often creating in the reader a sense of uncertainty as to the correct interpretation of the events” (Silverman, 112). Unreliable, distressed, and excited narrators encompass Poe's sensational tales, such as The Tell-Tale Heart and Ligeia. Narrators enveloped in their own alternate realities of rage and forgetfulness often recapitulate how past events were ruined, but they leave the reader in a cloud of uncertainty. A major component of Southern Gothic fiction are offbeat characters, among the most famous being John Singer in Carson McCullers's The Heart is A Lonely Hunter and the grandmother and the misfit in Flannery's A Good Man is Hard to Find O'Conner. Both writers are successors to Faulkner, himself known for his fanciful and often mentally ill protagonists. A rose for Emily is no exception. The madness Emily endures is excavated by a mysterious first person plural who uses a universal pronoun “we.” Through careful observation and omnipotent insight into details, the in-house team knows the details of the arsenic label and also knows that Emily's upstairs bedroom contains a secret. The mystery of Emily's madness is not misled by her mental illness, as it would have been if Poe had written the story. Instead, we are given the power of the narrator's calculative details and an outsider's point of viewon his unhealthy relationship with his father, which leads to his downfall. Emily's father constantly imposed himself between Emily and any suitor. “To use Freudian terminology, the father had prevented his daughter from transferring her libido to an external object, thus intensifying her libidinal dependence on him. It is therefore understandable that her death was an extremely traumatic event in her life, so traumatic that she could not consciously cope with it” (Scherting 399). “We didn’t say she was crazy at the time. We thought she had to do it. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that, having nothing left, she would have to cling to what had stolen her, as people do” (Faulkner, 325). Faulkner's work is part of the larger project of Southern Gothic fiction that often deals with the plight of those traditionally ostracized by Southern culture. Emily's story is told largely through a voice of disapproval and judgment. “She held her head quite high, even though we thought she had fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if he had wanted that touch of terror to reaffirm his impermeability” (Faulkner, 326) “We had begun to say, ‘Poor Emily’” (326) “So the next day we all said, ‘She’s going to kill herself’; and we said it would be the best thing (327) “Some ladies began to say that [her affair with Homer] was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to young children” (327). The use of the universal “we” allows Emily to remain at a distance and allows us to view her actions, which are reprimanded by her townspeople, through a veil of forced judgment rather than empathy. A Rose for Emily begins with the revelation of Emily's death in the first line, and the second concerns her house, the interior of which no one in the town had seen in over ten years. Emily herself is described as a "fallen monument" to her death, and it is obvious that this description applies to her house as well. Her house was once the center of an important and busy street in her town, but over time businesses and mills took over the houses, and her house is the only one remaining, "elevating its stubborn, flirtatious decadence to the above cotton carts. and gas pumps – a horror among horrors” (Faulkner, 322). Gothic fiction is typically concerned with ancient buildings as sites of human decay. “The Gothic castle or house is not just an old and sinister building; it is a house of degeneration, even decay, its living space darkening and shrinking in the dying space of the morgue and the tomb” (Baldick, xx). Emily's dust-covered house, shrouded in darkness, suggests that her relationship with the outside world, with reality, is hindered. And Emily herself is a relic, almost heroic in her stubborn and solitary refusal of time and change, but her archaic strengths also condemn her to decline. The obsession with the recreated, revived, or rediscovered past also implies a negative reaction toward the Gothic past itself, as we read in Poe's Ligeia. Lady Rowena is imprisoned in a room with a large Gothic stained glass window where "the ceiling of a dark-looking oak was exceedingly high, vaulted and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of semi-Gothic devices and semi-druidic.” » (Poe, 167). Here, Gothic and Druidic have become shorthand for a bizarre and disturbing reality, not the fantasy world we thought it was. Soon, Emily disappears into her house for good, neverwishing to care more about the progress of the society around him. “Then the new generation became the backbone and spirit of the city, and the painting students grew up and disappeared…. The front door closed behind the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them attach the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She didn’t listen to them” (328). Emily and her house also channel the feeling of solitude and estrangement that the Gothic conveyed with quiet, isolated castles. Emily's house is isolated and the neighborhood around it has disappeared over the years. Emily herself, with no friends, no husband, and only a few distant cousins, is alone herself. The fact that she is the subject of town gossip only ostracizes her further. The distance that weThe testimony therefore implies not only the traditional isolated dwelling but also the solitude of our protagonist. Faulkner was concerned with the cultural isolation that Emily endures due to her singlehood, removing herself from the settings and imposing this isolation on a character as a rather dark implication of the times in which she lived. If her home is anything to Emily, it is her imprisonment. Stubborn in her ways, she barely left her home for nearly a decade before she died. Imprisonment is not new to the Gothic. The Pit and the Pendulum is about a man in prison who wants to escape. The Tell-Tale Heart involved the imprisonment of the spirit. In Ligeia, Lady Rowena is locked in a room. Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher is buried alive in a catacomb, and Emily is imprisoned in the house by her father's austerity. He fights his potential suitors with a whip and by the time he dies, Emily is now too old to marry. "For the Gothic effect to be achieved, a tale must combine a frightening sense of legacy in time with a claustrophobic sense of confinement in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression nauseating descent into disintegration. Typically, a Gothic tale invokes the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and superstition) with such weight that it stifles the hopes of the present (the freedom of the heroine or hero) in the dead. -end of physical incarceration (the dungeon, the locked room, or simply the confinement of a family home closed in on itself). (Baldick, 19th). In this case, Emily's father represents the tyranny of the past, Emily the hope of the present, and his physical incarceration as a dead end. Emily's impasse is her inability to be independent because her father died when she was well past marriageable age without allowing her to marry. In fact, the only legacy he left her was the house she locked her in. We can even see Emily's physical confinement in a house as a notion to consider; she is trapped in a domestic space. “The prison house of Gothic fiction has from the beginning been that of patriarchy, both in its earlier and expanded feminist sense. While the Gothic's existential fears may concern our inability to escape our decaying bodies, its historical fears arise from our inability to finally convince ourselves that we have truly escaped the tyrannies of the past” (Baldick, xxii). The house also buries two others, more literally. Emily guards the bodies of her father and her lover, Homer Barron, after their deaths. Emily's preservation of her father's body, and then that of Homer, testifies to her inability to live without the male presence. In both cases, she attemptsto impose one's own notions of reality and time in the face of death. The story ends with the revelation of Homer's body, which has been decomposing in the upstairs bedroom for forty years. “A fine and acrid veil like that of a tomb seemed to extend everywhere over this room decorated and furnished as for a bride: on this valance, curtains of a faded pink color, on the lights shaded with pink, on the dressing table, on the delicate a set of crystals and men's toilet objects covered with tarnished silver…” (Faulkner, 330). The last line reveals Emily's "long lock of iron-gray hair" on the pillow next to Barron. Emily slept next to him until he died. Faulkner addresses the patriarchal implications of the situation in a more developed way; it may be that at the time he wrote this story we were increasingly concerned about the injustice with which women were viewed by society. Faulkner's views may not have been progressive, but the narrative seemed to sympathize, even parody, the mental and physical confinement of women of the time. By addressing the theme of death in his stories, Poe brings out the element of mourning which brings depth and sensitivity to his works. A Rose for Emily also seems to continue this theme. Unable to cope with the death of her dear father, Emily “told them that her father was not dead. She did this for three days, with the ministers calling her and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body" and finally "she collapsed and they buried her father quickly (Faulkner, 325 ). The characters who appear in Poe's tales are reanimations, reincarnations, and reiterations of characters from the past lives of deceased characters. It is clear that Poe was concerned with the essential unity of two individuals or their perceived opposites, notably in The Fall of the House of Usher, in which a twin prematurely buries his sister, only for her to return from the grave and fall upon her . his brother, dying together. “This interest of Poe's explains in part the reanimation or reappearance of lost loved ones in a distinct but similar bodily form. It also gives insight into Poe's perpetual and tenacious desire to find the one whose death is mourned” (Hutchisson, 52-53). In Poe's short stories, Ligeia, Morella and Berenice, the theme of reincarnation is addressed. In Ligeia, the narrator mourns the death of two of his wives, the second of whom he desperately tries to resurrect. She dies, but is then reincarnated as his first wife. In Morella, the narrator's deceased wife is reincarnated as their child, who then dies after his identity is revealed. “Poe's main fictional concern is an insistent questioning of the finality of death. Is this the end? Do we lose our identity in death? Death is either treated as an illusion or as an error” (Hutchisson, 52). Emily keeps Homer in his bed, he has a “fleshless smile”, his body “lying in the attitude of an embrace” (Faulkner, 330) gives the illusion that he is still alive. We know she killed him with poison because she was too old to marry him, and that's why she keeps him in her custody. She tried to do the same thing with her father's body several years ago and was unsuccessful. So it may be that Emily's act of murder/marriage was due to an unresolved complex with her father's death. His father's need was transferred, after his death, to a male surrogate: Homer Barron. Those who attended Emily's funeral saw her father's pencil portrait on a tarnished gold easel in front of the fireplace, "reflecting deeply" (Faulkner, 329) over his coffin. It is obvious that his father's presence is still asdeep. Emily's act of mourning, a kind of rebirth from death and an inability to accept change, is the organic unity of the Gothic. Obsessions with the past, with questions surrounding death, and the inability to repair and move forward, are concerns shared by Poe and Faulkner. The use of relics and ruins is believed to be preserved as an act of remembrance, and Poe originated many of the features of his tales in this Gothic tradition. The use of ruins, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, draws on the Gothic's intriguing and strange taste for dramatic, ruined towers and abbeys, the "...strange outgrowths in the landscape which told of a fictional past , an imagined story. and the feeling of a rather artificial continuity with the land on which they were built. A ruin is a momento mori, a reminder of the vanity of human ambitions, the fragility of human powers, and the transience and mutability of things. Like tombstones, they allow us both to sympathize with the poor and outdated past to which they bear witness, and to imagine our own disappearance…” (Bloom, 26). At the end of the story, Usher's house splits in two and sinks into the tarn, a symbol of the harsh reality of the false continuity of the present. Poe uses the Gothic formula to construct a sort of jeremiad on the “vanity of human ambitions and the fragility of human powers”. Emily acts much the same way; she hides the bodies of her loved ones to maintain the false continuity of the present. "As a rose is proof that love once bloomed, so is looking at and holding this preserved flower. The rose is a means of rekindling precious memories, just as Homer Barron becomes such a symbol for Miss Emily. Reality and symbol are gothically confused. She keeps it hidden in a rarely used pink room which can sometimes be opened to allow the memories of her love to erase her loneliness” (Elizabeth, 40 years old). act of remembrance, and the title of Faulkner's story is also a kind of remembrance of Emily, of the past that she has tried so desperately to cling to, but which no longer has any material presence in the past . world. Emily dies with no heir and no one to leave her house, so it is implied that her inheritance ends here. Even her servant who had stayed with her all her life "walked through the house and out." the rear and was never seen again” (Faulkner, 329). Homer will finally be buried. The decrepit house will be demolished to become a new building or mill, as were the houses around his. It is not the dramatic sinking of the house that we witness in Usher, but the idea is essentially the same: the homes which carry the family's heritage are destroyed upon the death of the last member. Faulkner seems to carry the torch of what Poe had declared a century before. History is an illusion, a story that we have fabricated to bring logic to what we do not understand, and therefore it allows for continuity. Furthermore, there is unease with the memory because it arouses so much worry; he invents visions of our own inconsistency, that we too will one day die and fear that we will one day be forgotten. Poe is arguably one of the most important and influential figures in the Gothic genre. It is almost impossible to discuss the Gothic genre without at least a brief dedication to its works. The surface of Gothic fiction—dark interiors and dilapidated exteriors, reincarnated lovers, premature burials, and bodily decay—can be found in much of Poe's work. However, due to these.