Southern Gothic Elements In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner were authors who wrote in the style of Southern Gothic. Southern Gothic is “a style of writing practiced by many writers of the American South whose stories set in that region are characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents.” Some of themes used in writing Southern gothic include irony, social issues, violence, race, outsiders and southern settings. The stories had flawed characters and often have dark humor. They illustrated the social and moral shortcomings of southern culture in America. Reading O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” I found it to be a shocking experience. It starts out with what seems to be an almost comic mood. The family is planning a road trip and is disagreeing over where to go. There are smart mouthed kids, a detached father, a seemingly absent mother and a strong-willed grandmother, who is the main character. The grandmother is stuck on the ways of the Old South. She believes that ladies should always be …show more content…
Emily is the typical Southern woman who cared for her father until his death. Emily was raised a proper Southern lady, who is proud, protected and attached to her father. The trauma of her father’s death seemed to make her mentally unstable. She takes a lover, Homer, who is a Northerner, working on a construction project. This action alone goes against all that proper Southern ladies believe. It almost seems that she thinks of herself as above others and the law, she refuses to pay her taxes, she insists the pharmacist give her the arsenic. When Homer attempts to leave her, she murders him and keeps his body in the house with her. Many years later when she dies, it is discovered that she has been sleeping with Homer’s corpse. This is the most shocking, unexpected and gruesome part of the