Gothic Elements In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Introduction
William Faulkner is one of the eminent southern writer and the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1949. He is skillful in his “ stream of consciousness” and his Gothic style in his numerous short stories and novels. By applying Gothic techniques to his creation, he expresses his deep emotion toward his spiritual home, the American south, where he draws nutrition for almost all his writings. Grotesque and horrible in style, his Gothic fictions set up in Yoknapatawpha County impress reader with fearful picture and vivid southern life.
“A Rose for Emily” is one of the most famous short stories by William Faulkner. After the civil war, the defeated north abolished the slavery, but the old moral traditions and systems of the Old South based

Just as what William Faulkner said about the story: “it was an inevitable tragedy and nobody could stop it.”By employing the typical Gothic techniques in this story, Faulkner described the conflicts between the north and the south and expressed his own contradictory feeling to the southern civilization. He had realized that it was unavoidable that preservative southern values and traditions would gradually lost under the influence of capitalist culture and values. However, as a native, he felt anguished to witness its disappearance. Hence, through this story, Faulkner expressed his profound emotion for his “life-long home”, where he obtained the most of his direct materials for his

The Castle of Otranto (1764)by Horace Walpole was regarded as the first Gothic fiction in the world, depicting a frightening story about supernatural revenge. Later, there came forth a lot of similar works of Gothic style, which led to numerous commendatory and derogatory criticisms by critics. In 19th century, it influenced many American writers and stepped into a flourishing period in America, in which there were new branches of Gothic fiction with indigenous and native characteristics, like Southern Gothic fiction. Although the Gothic traditions extended in both English and American Literature, it was still the most distinguished in the American Southern Literature, with its own unique