In Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", we are presented with two women in rebelling against their communities. Though they differ in past treatment and general outlook towards life in a small town, the ways these two stubborn women relate to their communities are alike in their objection to what town expects of them.
             Faulkner's Emily Grierson is a "monument" of Southern gentility, an ideal of past values but fallen because she has shown herself susceptible to decay. She is such a mystery, that the whole town went to her funeral just to get a glimpse inside her fortress of a house. Emily is "a young girl that just wanted to be loved and to love and to have a husband and a family," yet could never please the town because they would never allow her to. Even in her courtship of Homer Barron, she failed to meet their standards by choosing a northerner, rather than a respectable suitor. They imagine that she will kill herself over her indecent behavior but she kills her lover instead. Her constant refusal to meet expectations and self-imposed seclusion put her in constant conflict with the town and insured that she would forever be a topic of conversation at the barbershop on Saturday morning, but also caused the seclusion that lead her to her lonely death.
             Jackson's Tessie Hutchinson, on the other hand, is a woman too comfortable in her town. She knows her place and is accepted in a way that Faulkner's Emily never could be. Though she is integral in her community, she is in unconscious rebellion of their way of life. Tessie's rebellion begins with her late arrival at the lottery, an oversight that raises suspicions of her resistance to the lottery. She explains to Mr. Summers that she was doing her dishes and forgot what day it was. The way in which she says this, however, implies a flip disregard for the danger the ritual processes. When he
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