In Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Chekhov’s The Lady With the Pet Dog, we are treated to two different kinds of love stories. However, as much the love affairs in each story is unique there are similarities between them. For example, Miss Emily commits a horrible crime because she has been jilted by Homer. Obviously we could say that she was obsessed with her love for him to keep him lying upstairs dead in bed. Likewise, Gurov and Anna develop a romantic relationship but he poeticizes her and eventually the love turns to obsession for him “she…now filled his whole life, she was his sorrow and joy, the only happiness that he now desired for himself; and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, of the miserable local violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed” (Chekhov 427).
Anna and Miss Emily share other qualities. Neither of them can transcend their environment and era enough to be happy in love. Homer obviously jilted Miss Emily. She is a woman who represents the old South in all its glory and antebellum splendor. In fact, she has become rather like an old revered monument much like the description of her in the beginning of the story when people come to her funeral “the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house” (Faulkner 489). Miss Emily has clung to the manners and customs of the old South despite the development and changes that will eventually erode that era for a modern one. The modern one is one rejected by Miss Emily as surely as Homer rejected her. Polite southern ladies were not able to tolerate such injustices by presumed gentleman. Therefore, Miss Emily, we assume, has never been happy since her jilting but she refused to let Homer get away with his ungentlemanly act.
Likewise, in The Lady With the Pet Dog, Anna cannot transcend her moral upbringing in order to
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