Comparing William Faulkners Short Stories, A Rose for Emily and Dry Se

Comparing William Faulkners Short Stories, A lift for Emily and Dry SeptemberThree key elements link William Faulkners cardinal short stories A Rose for Emily and Dry September sex, death, and women (King 203). Staging his two stories against a backdrop of stereotypical characters and a southern code of honor, Faulkner deliberately withholds alpha details, fragments chronological times, and fuses the past with the present to imply the characters act and motivation. The characters in Faulkners southern society ar drawn from three social levels the aristocrats, the townspeople, and the Negroes (Volpe 15). In A Rose for Emily, Faulkner describes Miss Emily Grierson in flowing, descriptive sentences. Once a slender figure in white, the last descendent of a formerly affluent aristocratic family matures into a small, fat woman in black, with a thin cash chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head (Faulkner, Literature 25-27). Despite her diminished financial status, Miss Emily exhibits her aristocratic demeanor by carrying her head high as if she demanded more than ever the credit entry of her dignity as the last Grierson (28). In an equally descriptive manner, Faulkner paints a written portrait of Miss Minnie Cooper in Dry September. He portrays her as a spinster of comfortable people - not the best in Jefferson, but good enough people and still on the slender array of ordinary looking, with a bright faintly haggard manner and dress (Faulkner, Reader 520). Cleanth Brooks sheds considerable insight on Faulkners view of women. He notes that Faulkners women are the source and sustainer of virtue and also a prime source of evil. She can be ... ...uth. Works Cited Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner Visions of Good and Evil. Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Prentice-Hall, 1983. ---. upstart Critical Views. New York Chelsea House,1986. Faulkner, Will iam. Dry September. The Faulkner Reader. New York random House, 1954. ---. A Rose for Emily. Literature An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. New York Harper Collins, 1991. ---. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Ed. Joseph Blotner. New York Random House, 1977. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life. Boston Little Brown Company, 1973. King, Richard H. Modern Critical Views. New York Chelsea House, 1986. Reed, Joseph. Modern Critical Views. New York Chelsea House, 1986. Volpe, Edmond. A Readers Guide to William Faulkner. New York Octagon, 1974.