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Southern Gothic Characteristics

Decent Essays

What is Southern Gothic Literature? Southern Gothic Literature is a style of writing found in the Southern region throughout music, film, and literature. Southern Gothic traditions shaped American Literature because of regionalism of the South. The traits offered in this genre are disturbed personalities, macabre situations, moral blindness, violence, unrequited love, and class structure. Three stories that exemplify Southern Gothic are, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor,“The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson”, and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. The traits of Southern Gothic are clearly portrayed through personalities being disturbed in each short story.
O’connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” talks about a selfish grandmother -Bailey's mom- …show more content…

It’s almost as if Miss Emily is rejecting change. Miss Emily is a deranged lady with mental issues, that tried to buy Homer’s love. Then one day she decided to go to the store and get rat poison and she killed him, which can be categorized as a macabre situation. Miss Emily doesn’t believe in change which is why she is described as a “fallen monument” in the short story. While the world is becoming more industrialized, Miss Emily is stuck in the “archaic age”. For example, Miss Emily refused to cooperate with the new tax bill and the new mailing system, because she didn’t want change, and that’s why she's labeled as an outsider. Throughout this short story, it’s very obvious that Miss Emily personality was disturbed. Miss Emily acted outside the norm. “...Then we noticed a second pillow was the indentation of a head…”. Usually, after a death, the family buries the body, but Miss Emily laid next to Homer’s dead body and continued to do so until it turned into a skeleton. Lying next to a decayed body indicates that she has a serious problem. She’s emotionally unstable, which causes her personality to be

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