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1.1 A brief introduction of William Faulkner and his A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner is one of the most distinguish writer in American literature. He was born and lived in the South, which influenced him greatly, therefore, most of his works described the people and their lives in the South. As the appearance of Faulkner, the South appeared the literary glories of “the South Renaissance”, which ever was called “the literary desert."(Yu Jianhua, The Second Prosperous of American Literature, 460).

He invented a county and a town in his imagination, and he wrote about the society in the South by inventing families which represented different social forces: the old, decaying upper class; the rising, ambitious, unscrupulous class of “poor whites”; and the Negroes who labored for both of them. His major works included Sartoris, The Unvanquished, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Town and A Rose for Emily (Laurence B.Holland, The Norton Anthology of American Literary ,534-537).

Published in 1930, A Rose for Emily was one of the best known and the most widely read novel among William Faulkner’s short stories. The story took place in a mythical town that William Faulkner called Jefferson, Mississippi. The story happened at the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the town was learning to live with South’s loss in the Civil War and the consequent dismantling of the slavery-based society that had preceded it. Because of the loss in the Civil War, people in the south led a poor life. Especially the white people, their life suddenly become poor because most of the slaves went to the north to work for the northern industry，so the white people couldn’t get accustomed to the life change in a short time, but they still pretended to be noble and kept their family’s dignity (Howard Clin cotton, American history, 30).

The story described a white woman, Emily’s tragic life under the South’s loss in the Civil War. Emily’s life was strongly dominated by her father, and she had no right to date with males and choose her lover. After her father’s death, she could only date with a northern worker. But to her disappointment, the worker refused to marry her, and the refusal drove her to kill him by using poison, and she let his body company her. After Emily’s death, the town people discovered a skeleton in the house, and found out that the poor Emily was a murder, and people were shocked by the discovery.

Thematically, this short story is not as simple as it seems. The conflicts in the story can be interpreted on different levels. On the superficial level, it was a murder story with gothic characteristics. It described an eccentric woman who lived in her old decaying mysterious house that other people had not visited for decades, and, of course, a dead body in the house finally was discovered after so many years. On another level, the story can be read as a conflict between the South and the North with Emily representing the declining South and Homer Barron representing the North. On a deeper level, the story explores the inner world of a human being, or the inner struggle in the human heart.

1.2 Introduction of the Gothic Characteristics in Literature

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