A Comparison Of Gothic Fiction In 'A Rose For Emily'

“This is not written for the young or the light of heart, not for the tranquil species of men whose souls are content with the simple pleasures of family, church, or profession. Rather, I write to those beings like myself whose existence is compounded by a lurid intermingling of the dark and the light” B. E. Scully said this as a description for Gothic fiction. Two writers, who focused on American Gothic, were William Faulkner and Charlotte Gilman. William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in the South in Mississippi, in 1897, and lived there until he left high school to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1918. He met a fellow author named Sherwood Anderson while he lived in Louisiana, who encouraged Faulkner in his writing. Before Faulkner's success as a writer, he worked in New York bookstore as a clerk, writing poetry in his spare time. He wrote many stories with recurring characters in a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha, which represented his opinions and feelings of the south that he lived most of his life in, and earned the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. “A Rose for Emily” is one part of Faulkner's collection of stories featuring recurring characters, set in a fictional town called Yoknapatawpha. It focuses on a woman named Emily who has isolated herself

Emily, from “A Rose for Emily,” and Jane, from “The Yellow Wallpaper,” both were affected by and experience these elements in similar ways. “A Rose for Emily” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are both time-honored and admirable examples of American Gothic fiction. Both short stories possess the classic elements of a Gothic story and show them in distinct ways and through very different yet similar characters. Throughout these short stories, the authors express their feelings and opinions toward the American stereotypes and ideals of the times through characters of their own