【正文】 contradictory beliefs of past and present. “On one level, she exhibits the qualities of the stereotypical southern eccentric: unbalanced, excessively tragic, and subject to bizarre behavior” (SparkNotes Editors). Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, when she refuses to pay her taxes or state her purpose for buying the poison. Emily also ignores the law when she refuses to have numbers attached to her house when federal mail service is instituted. “Her dismissal of the law eventually takes on more sinister consequences, as she takes the life of the man whom she refuses to allow to abandon her” (SparkNotes Editors). The narrator portrays Emily as a monument, but at the same time she is pitied and often irritating, demanding to live on her own terms. The townspeople cluck their tongues at the fact that she accepts Homer?s attentions with no firm wedding plans. After she purchases the poison, the townspeople conclude that she will kill herself. Emily?s instabilities, however, lead her in a different direction, as revealed in the final scene of the story. She is a traditional woman, although she had conflicts. Unable to transfer into a “new” one, she remained as a monument. 11 Compared with Joy and the grandmother, Emily has every main feature to make her a “momument” of tradition, controlled by her father, in an aristocratic family, indifferent to the ordinary and laws, which reflects Emily39。s unyielding persona caused by her father39。s treatment when she was young. The Religious Element and the Application of Gothicism Religious motifs of violence and death are prevalent in Flannery O?Connor?s short fiction. For Flannery O?Connor, violence and death go shoulder to shoulder for a character?s mental clarity, religious grace and redemption. O?Connor once remarks: “Man has fallen irretrievably, so humanity can achieve consummate only through God?s grace and sympathy instead of helpless personal effort” (Fitzgerald 232). Flannery O?Connor described violence in her short fiction to help people search for a best solution from sinners to return to believe in God. Since Flannery O?Connor is a devoted Roman Catholic, she firmly believes in the doctrine of original sin. In O?Connor?s religious point of view, people are living in the darkness of sins unconsciously. They lose their religious belief and live in a wasteland of religious crisis. According to O?Connor, only violence can rescue them from the spiritual hungers. O?Connor claims that: I suppose the reason for the use of so much violence in fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their head are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is implicit in the Christian view of the world. (Magee 98) Therefore, her use of violence and death is a highly symbolic, impressive religious tool used as the key point of her works. The grandmother is a piety Godbeliever. But grandmother asked Misfit to pray again and again, while she didn?t pray. Joy is an atheist, while she believes a Bible salesman?s righteousness. Although their problem 12 seems to be relevant to religion, think twice, the true rub lies in their false faith. Plus, as a sinner, we can only receive salvation through extreme, violent and grotesque actions. “Her fictional world where people, distorted and degenerated by modern religion, have developed grotesqueness and perversion in their behavior, relying on only divine force to save their soul at the moment of death, because they cannot satisfy their spiritual hungers”(536). As a great writer in Southern Gothic Literature, O?Connor frequently uses Gothic style in shaping the climax, characters and settings. Many of her stories fall into this catalog. Gothic characters typify many of her work, including the insane Misfit and evil Manley. So do horrible climax and bloody setting. While to Faulkner, his utilization of Gothicism may only be perceived between lines, such as the mysteriously figure—Emily, like a sculpture, that appeared for a very short time and then disappeared, and more importantly, the final part of the story, when the towns people found Emily had been sleeping beside Barron?s skeleton for several years. If readers felt astonished after finishing O?Connor?s works, they may find it quite tranquil when reading Faulkner?s. As for the religious concerns, Faulkner didn?t depict directly. Instead, he melted it into the whole work, for it is one part of the southern central values. For Emily, we may not know that whether she believes in God or not, but as a conservative aristocrat in the southern states, she must be a Christian. For other works of Faulkner, there exist the clear traces of religious concerns, though not obvious in A Rose for Emily. Reasons That Make Females Tragic A Rose for Emily— faith in tradition Her tragedy is in her position—under Patriarchy, maintenance of the traditional values against her will—from which she can never escape. Mr. Grierson controlled Emily, and after his death, Emily temporarily controls him by refusing to give up his dead body. Totally under the rule of her father, she is weak and submissive, even being physically sick because the only person in her life has left her. She ultimately transfers this control to Homer, the object of her affection. To physically get better, 13 Emily has to be under another man?s dominance, and, when he would leave Emily as her father did, Emily keeps him by poisoning him. Even after Homer?s death, she sleeps next to his dead bod