If these similarities in technique seem coincidental, consider the ways in which specific scenes in Taylor's story echo those in Faulkner's. Just as Miss Emily appears as a vision in white in the collective memory of the town--"We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, he

Furthermore, both stories contain a scene of the woman in conflict with the town over the death of a relative; in each case, the woman attempts, in some way, to keep the death to herself. Miss Emily refuses to admit at first that her father is dead, relenting and breaking down only when the town threatens to "resort to law and force" (2019). Miss Lenora, on the other hand, is the one who almost resorts to force herself when the body of her cousin is about to be retrieved from the pond in which the girl drowned herself.

r father a sprawled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip" (2019)--so Miss Lenora appears to the narrator.

Moreover, in both paired scenes, the romanticized vision in the first scene gives way to a very real drama involving the same elements in the second scene. Emily and her father as a tableau from a melodrama, with all its implications of forced spinsterhood as a death in life, turns into the very real scene in which Emily's dead father becomes the one guarded while Emily stands in the doorway. In "Miss Lenora," Lenora as a vision of a clothed Botticelli Venus seeming to rise out of the water becomes Lenora as a guardian of the dead Logan girl actually rising out of the water. The similarities are too strong to be coincidental, and the resonances of the Faulkner story add to both the texture and the thematic complexity of Taylor's.

Thomasville's betrayal of Lenora is more overt and complex, and yet she too is a symbol to the town rather than a person. As small towns often will, Thomasville judges Miss Lenora by the actions of her family rather than by her own actions as an individual. In this case, she is a symbol of the Logan family, which has impeded the town's progress from afar for generations. As the narrator explains

Some topics in this essay:
Miss Lenora, Homer Barron, Miss Emily, Botticelli Venus, Emily Grierson, Miss Leonard's, Emily Lenora, , miss lenora, Lenora Lenora, miss emily, public image, father's death, homer barron, force pulls miss, logan family, force pulls, grierson relatives, individual history, rat poison,