In the past and even today, many people relied on their family name or social status in a community to gain them respect. “According to this system, there is a superior class of people, in which one can locate certain finer qualities” (Owens 1). William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor there are characters to which these attributes apply.
In “A Rose for Emily,” Emily is from a proud, aristocratic family only then that had made through the Civil War era; Miss Emily used to live with her father and servants, in “a big squarish frame house, decorated with cupolas” (Faulkner 82). The town’s people conspire unconsciously to protect both Miss Emily Grierson and the community from shame and Emily’s unusual behavior after her father’s death. This was a devastating loss for Miss Emily.
The setting in “A Rose for Emily” is post civil war Jefferson, a small town in the south where the Confederacy is a thing of the past. The people within “this class and its attributes cannot be separated from each other by a change in outward appearances” (Owens 1). Miss Emily ‘s behavior influenced by her own expectations of herself and the townspeople’s lack of authority over her years after “Colonel Sartoris invented the tale that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town” and “remitted her taxes” (Faulkner 82). The narrator leads the reader to believe the Griersons had always thought very highly of themselves; after her father’s death Emily is the last Griersons. Therefore, the responsibility of upholding the family name now lay with Miss Emily; “these qualities are fixed in blood and are passed directly from one generation to the next” (Owens 1). There is no doubt Miss Emily shares the same opinion as did her belated father; “she carried her head high even when others believed she was fallen” (Faulkner 84).