The conflict of any story plays a key role in the characterization of a protagonist, mostly because it helps to build and shape the character’s personality and mindset throughout the story. As a matter of fact, the development of the plot moves along with the growing nature of the conflict and the protagonists’ reaction to it. The short stories “The Story of An Hour,” by Kate Chopin and “A Rose for Emily,” by William Faulkner show a very interesting correlation between the characterizations of the protagonists (ideologies, culture, and belief) and their reactions toward the conflicts present in the stories. The sequence of events in “The Story of an Hour” takes place in an hour; whereas, the story “A Rose For Emily” develops over the course of several decades. The protagonists of these two stories (Louise Mallard and Emily Grierson respectively) deal with the conflict of constrain under very different circumstances. Although they both deal with constrained love their personalities gives rise to two opposite approaches to overcome their struggle. In other words, the psychology of the characters clearly determines the outcomes of the conflict in these two stories. In the first place, it is important to determine the nature of the conflict in both stories. As mentioned above, both of them deal with constrained love, yet the circumstances differ greatly. In the story “The Story of an Hour” Louise Mallard is a married woman who has a “heart trouble” (Chopin, 278). This condition refers to both physical and emotional damage caused by her displeasing marriage as she is married to a man who “she had loved sometimes” (Chopin, 279). Evidently she feels oppressed by her marriage. On the other hand, the story ”A Rose for Emily” shows an aristocratic woman who is inhibited from loving someone by her father as “none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such” (Faulkner, 302). As seen previously, Louise and Emily are restricted from achieving what they desire; instead they have assimilated to the conditions they are oppressed by. Consequently, they have shaped their personalities and characters under such conditions. According to Lawrence Berkove in her essay “Fatal Self-Assertion in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of