William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” epitomize the Southern Gothic genre; both use irony and macabre to weave their tales and scrutinize the values of the American South. The protagonist Emily Grierson in “A Rose for Emily”, and the Grandmother, the protagonist in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are remnants of the “Old South” through their upbringing; and are at odds with social atmosphere and societies in which they live. Falkner’s affluent southern bell is discovered to have the rotting corpse of her fiancé in her bed forty years after his disappearance; O’Connor’s grandmother leads to the annihilation of her entire family at the hands of a serial killer. While Falkner
