Symbolism

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The scapegoating and mob frenzy that takes place in “The Lottery” seem to clash violently with the contemporary New England village setting. This graphic juxtaposition makes a strong statement about senseless violence and mindless social evil in modern times. As literature, “The Lottery” is a fine example of “sunlit horror,” a nightmare story that takes place in broad daylight. “The Lottery” begins with sunlight and child's play, and ends in ritualized murder (Nebeker, 100).

A final permutation on the conflict between social systems and individual impulses is represented by “The Tooth.” Clara Spencer's toothache forces her to take a bus to New York City to see a dentist, leaving her husband and children for a day or two. As in other stories, the small town and family she leaves represent a familiar and ordered world, but also repression and self-denial, while the city offers the possibility of personal freedom at the risk of becoming uprooted (like the symbolic tooth) and losing touch with reality. A similar character in “Pillar of Salt” observes with terror, and eventually succumbs to, the phenomenon of “People starting to come apart” in the city; by the end of her story, Clara Spencer abandons her social role and slips into a fantasy world with a mysterious stranger named Jim (Harris, one assumes). As Richard Pascal explains in his insightful reading of “The Tooth,” “the sin of feeling solipsistically happy and free, it might seem, is punished by the damnation of madness.”

Although these issues are of central importance to women's literature, they are also significant for all human beings. As critic Donna Burrell has observed, Jackson “explored not only the division of the community's tasks, but also the network of roles available to each gender, the justification, if any, for these divisions, and the problems which occur if a person of either gender does not fit his or her role.” Jackson's view of human nature is essentially a pessimistic one—none of her stories offers anything like a traditional happy ending for her characters—but also a challenging and fascinating one, dramatizing the tension inherent in the effort to maintain both an individual and a social identity in a series of striking psychological parables.

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

Miss Emily's story is certainly bizarre, suspenseful, and mysterious enough to engage the reader's attention fully. She is a grotesque, southern gothic character whose neurotic or psychotic behavior in her relationships with her father, her lover, and her black servant may elicit many Freudian interpretations. For example, her affair with Homer Barron may be seen as a middle-aged woman's belated rebellion against her repressive father and against the town's burdensome expectations. That William Faulkner intended her story to have a much larger dimension is suggested by his choice of an unnamed citizen of Jefferson to tell it (Rovit, 50).

Miss Emily is then symbolic of the religion of southernness that survived military defeat and material destruction. The children of Colonel Sartoris's generation are sent to learn china-painting ...