SOURCE: “Usher, Poquelin, and Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic,” in The Georgia Review, Vol. 14, Winter, 1960, pp. 433–43.

In the following essay, Stone considers “A Rose for Emily” in the tradition of Southern Gothic fiction.

Some years ago Professors Brooks and Warren offered the suggestion in Understanding Fiction that we consider William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” as akin to Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” on the grounds that in both “we have a decaying mansion in which the protagonist, shut away from the world, grows into something monstrous. …” But to do so, as these critics more or less admit, is to point up as many differences as similarities. Granted that each is “a story of horror”: the gloomy corridors of Gothicism are too numerous for such a suggestion to prove more than initially instructive. Without losing sight of the possibilities it may offer, let...