Look At A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Rose For Emily English Literature Essay

The short stories, “A Good man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner are rather horrifying; one tale is about a grandmother and her family brutally murdered by a coldhearted killer, and the other tale is about a lady who murders her lover and then sleeps beside his rotting body. Not only have O’Conner and Faulkner created similar plots in their respective stories, both authors criticize the Southern corruption through the distortion of the characters’ world view of reality.

The use of irony in the character’s social statuses and their miserable lives illustrate the authors’ criticism of the Southern social structure. The stories include insights into the families of the old south, and the older class system of wealth and nobility. Both the grandmother and the family that Emily comes from have very strict notions about the upper class society, and the expectation is for decent behavior. As a result, when the townspeople notice the disgusting odor from Emily’s house in “A Rose for Emily,” they begin to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily, claiming, “It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons”(Faulkner 2). Not only that, as Homer becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, it scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station. Even though Emily is from the high class family, it does not mean that she is living up to the pleasant lifestyle. As a matter of fact, she is actually living a gloomy and desolate life, which is essentially the opposite lifestyle expected for Emily’s rank in society by the townspeople. Although Emily once represented a great southern tradition centering on the landed gentry with their vast holdings and considerable resources, Emily’s legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” despite the grandmother’s apparent belief in her moral supremacy-which she expresses through her self-proclaimed identification as a lady and religious teaching-the grandmother is not a “good” woman. As a living monument of the past, she represents the high societal rank that people wish to respect and honor; however, she is also a burden who is entirely cut off from the outside world, having eccentricities that others cannot understand. Although the societal positions of the protagonists suggest that their lives are distinguished and full of pleasure, in reality, they end up living a forlorn and deprived life without being able to attain happiness.

Racism, which was evident in both stories, depicts the influence of Southern culture on the two protagonists. They are both prejudiced as anyone else living in this time of era, though slavery was officially not allowed anymore. In “A Rose for Emily,” Emily herself has a black servant, and is not surprised when “[the] Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn’t come back” (Faulkner 4). The drug store vendor makes the Negro to sell the lethal arsenic to Emily, so the vendor himself will not get into trouble. The arsenic she bought from the Negro is later used in Emily’s crime, which shows that Emily was so accustomed to looking down upon other human beings that she did not hesitate to kill her lover. From the incident, Faulkner criticizes Emily for being influenced by the racist view of Southern culture, which led her to commit murder. Similarly, in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother behaves in a condescending manner toward the black children as she claims, “Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do” (O’ Connor 546). The grandmother looks down on the blacks, which triggers her to be arrogant and haughty of her white race. The racial prejudice in the South manipulates the grandmother to hold supercilious attitudes toward others who she feels are inferior to her. Due to her conceited approach she has when trying to convince the Misfit to stop committing crimes, the grandmother ends up getting killed by the Misfit, who became repugnant to her reprimand. Thus, both Emily and the grandmother are criticized by the authors for participating in the act of racism, which was still evident in that time period in the South.

The grandmother and Emily live by their own moral codes that affect their decisions, actions, and perceptions which exemplify the perversion of morality in the South. In “A Good Man us Hard to Find,” the grandmother has created her own flimsy and inconsistent moral code on the characteristics that she believes make people “good.” For instance, the grandmother thinks Red Sammy is “good,” because he trusts people blindly and is wistful of the past. Also, she assumes that Misfit is “good” because she reasons that he will not kill a lady-a refusal that would be in keeping with her own moral code, as she claims to the Misfit, “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady” (O’Connor 555). However, her assumption proves to be false, because the Misfit ends up killing her. This incident typifies that the grandmother’s supposition of reality is not necessarily valid, due to the Southern corruption when people were unable to figure out what is good or wrong. Next, in “A Rose for Emily,’ Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, such as when she refuses to pay her taxes or assert her purpose for buying the poison. Emily also skirts the law when she rebuffs to have numbers attached to her house when the federal mail service is introduced. Her dismissal of the law eventually takes on more threatening consequences, as she takes the life of the man whom she refuses to allow abandoning her. Due to the Southern perversion of morals, the grandmother and Emily were unable to recognize what is truly good or bad.

Around the 1930s was a time of depression and corruption of Southern culture. Many Southerners’ visions of the world were significantly altered and were maneuvered to act iniquitously. Consequently, both authors of the short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “A Rose for Emily” criticize the characters’ nostalgia of the past, irony of social positions, manifestation of racism, and the perversion of morality as aspects of Southern corruption.