Southern Culture in American Short Stories

Each of the authors in the three short stories, Andreas Lee's "Anthropology," Alice Walker's "Roselily," and William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" use a Southern background to show how people are ingrained to their past, and fearful of change. They each use Southern culture to show how it develops the personalities and inner feelings of the characters. Each story shows the fear and struggle of people who have made a change, or who would like to make a change, but are afraid of what change will mean to their lives and culture as they know it.

In Anthropology, as the word implies, you see the physical, social, material, and cultural developments of human beings who have risen above their "place," after having been born black in the South.

Andrea Lee, portraying herself, in a conversation with her cousin, shows the feelings of the classes of people in the South. She feels that where you come from gives you an identity. In her childhood home, Ball County, North Carolina, her cousin, to offend, reminds her that "everyone knows everyone's place." (Lee 180) He adds insult to injury when he reminds her "It's not your place to tell them who they are," referring to her calling the family "black" in a magazine article she had written. (Lee 179)

Two years prior to this visit with her cousin she had decided to visit her Great Aunt Noah in Ball County, North Carolina on an impulse. She was prompted by a writer's vague instinct that there was a thread of be grasped. (Lee 178) "You wanted to investigate your roots" her cousin insinuated flatly." (Lee 178)

Though she has changed her position in life, and wanted to remember her childhood, she feared what others may think of her may cause her to change how she feels about herself. She a...

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...nthropology), now a successful woman in the North, fears facing her Southern background. She is afraid that it will be different than she wishes to remember it. She is proud of her heritage, but remembers how her faired skinned, white-black family refuses to accept that they are black. Though she is secure in her attitude about herself, she subconsciously fears what "place" or "class" others will put her in. Alice Walker's (Roselily) feared that she would be trading oppression in the sewing factory in the South for the bondage of Islam, as a wife of a Muslim, in the North. William Faulkner's (A Rose for Emily) Emily Grierson held tightly to her family's affluent past. She was reluctant to make any changes in her life for fear that change would rob her of her past.

Each story shows "class" struggle, a longing for change, but a fear of change. Strive expectations