The Southern Gothic genre helps to highlight a particular time period and mindset found in the South, which contributes to American Literature and History as a whole. Southern Gothic authors use disturbed personalities and macabre situations, focused on race, social class, violence, unrequited love, being an outsider, and/or good vs. evil, to exhibit the moral blindness that is found in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s, Shirley Jackson’s, and William Faulkner’s short stories portray Southern Gothic qualities through the creation of disturbed characters and situations that highlight the moral blindness found in the South.
Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, is about a family who goes on a vacation to Florida recently after a prisoner escapes, and inevitably, they run into the convict after having a car accident. In this story, the grandma is the embodiment of Southern moral blindness. In the beginning of the story, O’Connor describes how the grandmother dresses to show the social standing. “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once
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Miss Emily comes from an upper class family. She shuts herself off from her community and hides the fact that she lived with her dead husband for years. Faulkner characterizes Miss Emily as a “monument” and as “a tradition, a duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation”. Miss Emily comes from an upper class, and because of this people allow her to do things uncommon to the normal man, such as not having to pay taxes. In addition to her social status, Miss Emily isolates herself. She didn’t leave her house for years on end and keeps everyone at bay, and then in the end of the story her hair is found on a pillow beside her rotting, dead husband’s body. Faulkner vividly exhibits the Southern Gothic traits of a disturbed personality and macabre situations in “A Rose for