Idealized, Demonized Image of Women:

¶ … idealized, demonized image of women: Poe, Faulkner, and Lawrence

Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, and DH Lawrence all create grotesque images of women in their short stories and poems. Rather than real, psychologically complex characters, their female protagonists tend to be idealized representations of perfection, such as Poe's poetic Annabel Lee or demons in disguise, like Faulkner's obsessed Emily in "A Rose for Emily." Even DH Lawrence's Mabel of "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" functions as a generalized example of female sexual repression rather than as a real woman. While all three men are classified as great authors, all tend to use women as symbols rather than give women an independent intellectual 'reality.' Women are not viewed as positive actors, but as signifiers, often negative ones, of male issues of self-worth and class. "Male writers [have] used women as symbols of lightness and darkness" in literature, to illuminate the psychological conflicts of male protagonists or to symbolize social injustices rather than to bring to light the issues particular to the females in question (Maschke 108).

At first it might be protested that most of Edgar Allen Poe's most dastardly characters are male. It is true Poe's short stories like "The Cask of Amontillado" often focus upon the evil of men. But the appearance of more positive feminine images created by Poe lie in the fact that his stories feature few substantive female protagonists. Women represent the "soul" or the "ideal" that the male protagonist strives for in his (usually failed) quest to establish a sense of self (Maschke 108). For example, in the "Fall of the House of Usher," the female protagonist Madeline Usher is depicted as merely an extension of her brother, Roderick, and the house that eventually collapses upon and kills the Usher family. Thus when Poe did write about women, it was in always in relation to their family or social role in a male-dominated context. "Poe considered women capable of great poetry (since the sense of beauty, he said, is 'in its very essence, feminine')" or rather to 'be' an embodied form of poetry but he seldom showed women as active subjects crafting their own destiny (Silverman 496). Poe's women exist to provide men with "comfort, approval, and affection" and "emotional sustenance" and are mourned for their inability to do so when they die, not because they are capable and worthy of their own stories (Roderick 17). "Annabel Lee" is perhaps Poe's classic female protagonist -- a lost love of the speaker who never even exists in the poem, other than as a memory.

When compared with the lack of the female character in Poe, Faulkner's

"A Rose for Emily" may initially seem much more focused upon the female protagonist in a realistic fashion. But Faulkner's tale is even more grotesque in its unfolding than many of Poe's short stories. "A Rose for Emily" tells the story of a well-respected woman in a fictional Southern town. Emily belongs to the one of the town's most prominent families. From the beginning of her life, her father subjected Emily to stringent expectations about how to dress and conduct herself in public. Emily is dominated by men, first by her father, then by the man she loves, Homer. Emily structures her life around the male presences in her life. Without a sense of male identity she is nothing, as is revealed in the opening anecdote of the story, in which Emily refuses to pay taxes to the town because of her status as a daughter of a powerful man. Her father still lives on in her memory and controls her actions, even after death. Emily's only social imperfection in her eyes was remaining unmarried, and to remedy that when she could not possess Homer Barron, she murdered him. The loss of her father is replaced by an obsession with another man. Emily literally cannot live without a man, even if she must become a kind of "threatening" and murderous harpy to have a husband (Clarke 6).

Faulkner's Emily lives for love. She follows the expectations of society in a perverse fashion: she kills a man so she will not lack a male presence in her life. In the story, there is no self-expression and freedom to live outside of social constraints and the expectations of how a woman must act. Love is not liberating. Emily is a symbol of a vengeful woman, and an outdated form of false Southern gentility. She seems to have no existence beyond the need for male approval. Although both men and women in Faulkner's stories are obsessed with the dead, in "A Rose for Emily," dead men define the woman's character -- without men, Emily would have no sense of self (Fowler & Abadie 275). Emily symbolizes a stultifying, aging society and as a woman, she has no character or motivation outside of her role as a daughter or a jilted woman.