Often criticized for its sensationalism, its melodramatic qualities, and its play with the supernatural, the Gothic novel dominated English literature from its conception in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto until his 'supposed' demise in 1820. “The genre drew many of its intense images from the cemetery poets who mixed a landscape of vast dark forest with vegetation bordering excessive and hidden ruins with hideous rooms, monasteries and a desolate character who excels in melancholy” (Baldick, xx). Although it has lost some of its popularity, gothic camp has sparked the influence of a subgenre with many of the same disturbing themes and elements. If Gothic is a way of exhuming the past, Southern Gothic is a way of bringing to light the social and cultural issues of the past. Much of the conflict in Southern Gothic is between what is valued and to be maintained and what is seen as normal and superior. Therefore, race and gender play an important role in these conflicts. In the following analysis, I will compare a variety of works by Edgar Allan Poe, a profound figure in the world of Gothic fiction, with William Faulkner's single work: A Rose for Emily (1940). The reason I chose Faulkner in this analysis is because he is directly associated with Southern Gothic fiction and his works influenced and shaped the canon so severely. I chose his work, A Rose for Emily, because the comparisons between this tale and traditional Gothic elements are striking, and I believe the Gothic theme of unrequited love leading to a woman's madness brings an inherent depth. Furthermore, I find that the way these themes work contrasts differently with their individual implications than what the Gothic and Southern Gothic genres faced in the times when they reigned over the world of literature. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay All of Poe's stories are told in the first person. “As narrators 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 about the correct interpretation of events” (Silverman, 112). Unreliable, distressed, and excited narrators comprise Poe's sensational tales, such as The Tell-Tale Heart and Ligeia. Narrators wrapped up in their alternate realities of anger and forgetfulness often summarize how past events have fallen apart, but leave the reader in a cloud of uncertainty. An important component of Southern Gothic fiction is larger-than-life characters, some of the most famous being John Singer in The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and the grandmother and the misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Conner . Both writers are successors to Faulkner, himself known for his bizarre and often mentally ill protagonists. A rose for Emily is no exception. The madness Emily endures is excavated by a mysterious first person plural that uses a universal pronoun “we.” With careful observation and an omnipotent view of the details, the inside team knows the details of the arsenic label and also that Emily's upstairs room 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 outside view of her unhealthy relationship with her father, which lead to her downfall. Emily's father constantly forced himself between Emily andany 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. Understandably, then, his death was an extremely traumatic event in her life, so traumatic that she herself could not consciously deal with it” (Scherting 399). “We didn't say she was crazy then. We believed it had to. 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 robbed her, as people do” (Faulkner, 325). Faulkner's work is part of the larger project of Southern Gothic fiction that often addresses the plight of those traditionally ostracized from Southern culture. Emily's story is told largely through a voice of disapproval and judgment. “She held her head quite high, even when we thought she had fallen. It was as if he asked more than ever for recognition of his dignity as the last Grierson; as if she wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness” (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 for the best (327) “Some ladies began to say that [her affair with Homer] was a disgrace to the city and a bad example to the little children” (327). The use of the universal “we” allows Emily to be kept at a distance and allows us to view her actions, which are chastised by her fellow citizens, 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 is about her house, which no one in town has seen the inside of for more than ten years. Emily herself is described as a “fallen monument” when she dies, and it is clear that this description applies to her home as well. His house had once been the center of an important and busy street in his city, but as time passed, businesses and factories had taken over the houses, and his house is the only one left, "elevating the his obstinate and flirtatious decay over the cotton wagons". and gas pumps: an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner, 322). Gothic fiction typically concerns itself with old buildings as sites of human decay. “The castle or Gothic house is not just an old and sinister building; it is a house of degeneration, even decay, whose living space darkens and contracts into the dying space of the morgue and the tomb” (Baldick, xx). Emily's house covered in dust, 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, solitary denial of time and change, but her archaic strengths condemn her too to decay. The obsession with the recreated, revived or rediscovered past also implies a negative reaction to 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 richly decorated with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of semi-Gothic and semi-Druidic devices” . (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 home for good, no longer wanting to care about the progressive society around her. “Then the new generation became the backbone and spirit of the city, and the painting students waxed and waned…. The front doorit closed on the last one and remained closed forever. When the town got free postal delivery, only Miss Emily refused to let them fix 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 remoteness that the Gothic conveyed with quiet, remote castles. Emily's house is remote, the neighborhood around it has been erased over the years. Emily herself, with no friends, no husband, and only a few distant cousins, is lonely herself. The fact that she is the subject of town gossip only ostracizes her further. The distance we witness, therefore, involves not only the traditional remote home but also the solitude of our protagonist. Faulkner was concerned with the cultural isolation Emily endures due to her spinsterhood, distancing himself from the settings and imposing this infliction on a character as a rather sad implication of the times in which she lived. If her home is anything to Emily, it is her imprisonment. Stubborn in his ways, he barely leaves his home for nearly a decade before he dies. Imprisonment is nothing new for the Gothic. The Pit and the Pendulum tells of a man in prison who wants to escape. The Tell-Tale Heart involved the imprisonment of the mind. 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 due to her father's austerity. She fights her potential suitors with a horse whip and by the time she dies Emily is too old to marry. “For the Gothic effect to be achieved, a tale should combine a fearful sense of legacy in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration. Typically a Gothic tale will invoke the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and superstition) with such weight as to stifle the hopes of the present (the freedom of the heroine or hero) in the dead. -end of physical imprisonment (the underground cell, the locked room or simply the confines of a family home that closes in on itself).” (Baldick, XIX). In this case, Emily's father represents the tyranny of the past, Emily the hope for the present, and her physical incarceration as a dead end. Emily's dead end is her inability to be independent because her father died when she was well past the marriageable age without allowing her to marry. In fact, the only legacy he left her was the house in which he locked her up. One can also see Emily's physical confinement in a house as an idea worth considering; she is trapped in a domestic space. “The prison house of Gothic fiction has from the beginning been that of patriarchy, both in its original and expanded feminist sense. While the Gothic's existential fears may be about our inability to escape our decaying bodies, its historical fears stem 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 keeps the bodies of her father and her lover, Homer Barron, after their deaths. Emily's preservation of her father's body, and then Homer's, speaks to her inability to live without a male presence. In both cases he attempts to impose his own notions of reality and time in the face of death. The story ends with the discovery of Homer's body, which has been rotting in the upstairs bedroom for forty years. “A cloakthin and acrid, like that of a tomb, it seemed to spread everywhere over this room decorated and furnished as if for a bride: on the valance curtains of a faded pink, on the pink-tinged lights, on the dressing table, on the delicate assortment of crystals and objects from men's toilets covered in 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 his death. Faulkner addresses the patriarchal implications of the situation in a more developed way; it may be that around the time she wrote this story, we were becoming increasingly concerned about the unfair way women were viewed by society. Faulkner's views may not have been progressive, but the narrative seemed to empathize, even parody, the mental and physical confinement of women of the time. By addressing the theme of death in his narratives, Poe brought out the element of mourning which brought depth and sensitivity to his works. A rose for Emily also seems to carry forward this theme. Unable to deal with the passing of her dear father, Emily “told them that her father was not dead. She did this for three days, while the ministers called her and the doctors tried to convince her to let them dispose of the body” and finally “she collapsed and they buried her father quickly (Faulkner, 325). The figures that appear in Poe's stories are reanimations, reincarnations, and reiterations of figures in the previous lives of characters who had died. It is clear that Poe was concerned with the essential unity of two individuals or perceived opposites, particularly in The Fall of House Usher, in which a male twin prematurely buries his sister, only for her to return from the grave and fall on top of him. his brother, dying together. “Partly this interest of Poe's explains the reanimation or reappearance of lost loved ones in a distinct but similar corporeal form. It also gives an idea of ​​Poe's… perpetual and tenacious desire to be reunited with the one whose passing is mourned” (Hutchisson, 52-53). In the stories of Poe, 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 then is reincarnated as his first wife. In Morella, the narrator's dead wife is reincarnated as their daughter, who then dies after her identity is revealed. “Poe's main imaginary concern is the insistent question of the finality of death. Is this the end? Do you lose your identity with death? Death is treated as an illusion or as a mistake” (Hutchisson, 52). Emily holds Homer in her bed, he has a "gaunt smile", his body "lying in the attitude of an embrace" (Faulkner, 330) gives the illusion that he is still alive. We know that she killed him with poison because she was too old to marry him, and therefore keeps him in her care. She tried to do the same with her father's body many years ago and failed, so it's possible that Emily's act of murder/marriage was due to an unresolved complex with her father's death. Her 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, "pondering deeply" (Faulkner, 329) over his coffin. It is clear that his father's presence is still just as profound. Emily's act of mourning, of a sort of rebirth of a 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 byPoe and Faulkner. The use of relics and ruins is believed to be preserved as an act of remembrance, and Poe originated many specific features of his tales from 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 growths in the landscape that told of an imagined past, an imagined history and the sense of an entirely false continuity with the land on which they were built. A ruin is a moment mori, a reminder of the vanity of human ambitions, the fragility of human powers and the transience and mutability of things the tombstones allow us both to sympathize with the poor and outdated past of which they bear witness, and to imagine our own end…” (Bloom, 26). pond, symbol of the harsh reality of the fake continuity of the present. Poe uses the Gothic formula to build a sort of jeremiah on the "vanity of human ambitions and the fragility of human powers". hides the bodies of loved ones to maintain the false continuity of the present. “As a rose is proof that love once bloomed, as watching and holding on to the one preservedRoses are ways to revive precious memories, so Homer Barron will become a symbol for Miss Emily. Reality and symbol merge gothically. She keeps him hidden in a rose-colored, rarely used room that can sometimes be opened to allow memories of her love to sweep away her loneliness” (Elizabeth, 40). We bring flowers to the graves of our loved ones as an act of remembrance, and the title of Faulkner's story is a kind of remembrance of Emily too, of the past that she tried so desperately to hold on to, but which now has no material presence in life. world. Emily dies with no heirs and no one to leave her home to, so it's implied that her legacy ends there. Even her servant who had remained with her all her life “walked through the house and out the back and was seen no more” (Faulkner, 329). Homer will finally be buried. The decrepit house will be demolished in a new building or mill as were the houses around his. It's not the dramatic collapse of the house we see in Usher, but the idea is much the same: the homes that carry the family's legacy are destroyed when the last member dies. Faulkner seems to carry the baton of what Poe had declared a century earlier. History is an illusion, a story we invented to give logic to what we don't understand, and therefore allows for continuity. Furthermore, there is a discomfort with the memory because it causes so much worry; it creates visions of our own incoherence, that we too will die one day, and we fear that we will one day be forgotten. Poe is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential figures of 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 – bleak interiors and decadent exteriors, reincarnated lovers, premature burials and bodily decay – is found in much of Poe's work. However, because of these characteristic inclusions, it is arguable that the most fundamental fixation with practitioners of Gothic fiction is that of the past, a theme that was close to Poe's heart. Gothicism created an atmosphere for Poe's works, which mainly included his philosophical speculations on death and reality. William Faulkner used Gothic atmosphere in much the same way, but unlike Poe, his fundamental fixation was a universal primary concern in the Southern Gothic genre: the historical and cultural past that.