As a traditionally Southern character, the figure of the Southern Belle has been used in literature to allegorize the purity

and distinction of the Old South in the antebellum period and, following the civil war and reconstruction, she was perpetuated into modernity as a cultural symbol embodying the white Souths sense of its own glorious past. The preservation of Southern Belles sexual purity and virtue was understood as a validation that the traditions of the Old South will endure as well. In A Rose for Emily and A Streetcar Named Desire authors William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams respectively, recognize that constructing Southern women as emblems of the Old South meant to prevent them from adapting to the social and political changes that have been at work in the South following the civil war. Likewise, by investing them with the burden This essay will argue that in the works of both Faulkner and Williams, the perpetuating presence of the past Confederate values impacts the character of the Southern Belle beyond burdening her with the traditional obligations of womanhood. In their struggle to overcome the traditional Southern norms and mentality in which they have been brought up and which bound them to that past, both Miss Emily and Blanche come to parallel the attempts of the Southern society to reconstruct itself and adapt to modernity. Likewise, in their failure to defeat the strong hold that the values of antebellum society has on them, both Blanche and Miss Emily become the embodiment of the South, and their failure is ultimately the failure of the South to successfully reconstruct itself socially and politically as it enters the twenty-first century. In A Rose for Emily William Faulkner divides the history of Miss Emilys life into three phases which directly parallel the history of her community and further, that of Southern society: her upbringing in the traditional, paternalistic Southern society which

deemed that the only acceptable path in life for a woman was marriage at an early age to a man pertaining to the same social class as herself (Southern aristocracy); Emilys Shor lived desire to escape the dead past (her father) by having an affair with a common Yankee and her apparent desire to adapt to modernity by cutting her hair short and dating; tempt to adapt to modernity and defy the paternal attitudes of society by cutting her hair short and dating and wanting to marry Homer Barron; thirdly, her ultimate regression into