【正文】 or her handicap. In A Rose for Emily, the setting and figures are somewhat different. The family is aristocratic, which belongs to the conservative catalogue—tradition. Emily is a woman that belongs to the past yet inevitably changes with the times, getting caught in the 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。 a crumbling old mansion。s work provides a bloody and violent situation. The usual pattern is the protagonists, often weak, twisted, having to face the sudden violence to be saved. Her work features bewilderment, unclearness and subtlety. At first glance, the grandmother seems to be “good”。s most anthologized stories. “Drawing on the tradition of Gothic Literature in America, particularly Southern Gothic, the story uses grotesque imagery and firstpersonplural narration to explore a culture unable to cope with its own death and decay” (Schoenberg). Miss Emily Grierson, an alienated spinster living in the South in the late nieenth or early twentieth century, is the representation of the old southern traditions and values, and yet felt conflicted when she 2 fell in love with Homer Barron, the very man who has brought to the town the northern innovation. Finally, after she was abandoned by Homer, she got him killed and slept just beside his skeleton for more than thirty years, which was only revealed to the public after Emily?s death. To the town?s people, Emily is a monument of the old values, living under the influence of her father for eternity. Brief Introduction of Protagonists in O’Connor’s Works A Good Man Is Hard to Find is one of the most famous examples of Southern Gothic Literature. The grandmother is introduced trying to change a planned family trip to Florida with her son, Bailey and his family. It is the night before the trip, and grandmother is“seizing at every chance to change Bailey?s mind” (537). The grandmother is the central character of the story, and the family is rather a bland, generic family. At last, she was killed by Misfit. The family is a typical nuclear family of the fifties, whose members appear to be disconnected not only to each other, but also to any form of family values. One of Flannery O?Connor?s most successful and frequently anthologized stories, Good Country People was published in her first collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in 1955. Similar as many of her works, Good Country People addresses motifs of good versus evil, redemption achieved through an encounter with violence, and the foolishness of intellectual pretensions. The protagonist, Joy, has changed her name to Hulga only because it is the ugliest name in her mind. As a child in a hunting accident, Hulga has a wooden leg—her most valuable possession because it is a mark of her difference. She embraced this because she considers herself more intellectual than all of the “good country people” around her—especially her mother, their neighbors, and finally Manley Pointer, a Bible salesman. Manley steals her leg after seducing her, although it is Joy who intends to seduce Manley. Importance of Women Images Novels and stories are posed of characters and settings. The images of figures carry out the great significance of themes and intentions of authors. Due to such reasons, 3 in literary works, the studies on protagonists have been a usual way to trace the even slightest evidence, probe into the intentions of the authors, either due to their own favors, or under the influence of age and great events. Women, the special group of characters in literature, are sentimental, delicate, sometimes evil and hysteria, which can date back to the image of Eve in Bible—the image of a fool, and who needs redemption for the original sin. However, through centuries, the woman image has undergone an obvious change. 4 Chapter Two SIMILARITIES OF WOMEN IMAGES IN SHORT STORIES OF FAULKNER AND O’CONNOR Frequent Usage of Indirect Depiction In Faulkner?s novels and stories, multiple perspectives and psychological analysis are the familiar methods, together with the time and temporal shifts. In A Rose for Emily, the subtle arrangement of time and space, the Gothic atmosphere and the psychological analysis are the very features that put the masterpiece subtle to understand. Faulkner doesn?t set Emily?s disposition through direct words. Instead, he uses her antagonist?s promises in taxes, poison, mail service, her houses and