This paper is an attempt to use Conceptual Metaphor Theory to interpret social and cultural issues coming from a comparative literary and cultural study named "Provincialism, Gothic, Grotesque: Davies's 'Fifth Business' and McCullers's 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’" The subject novels of the study have a set of common issues that can be connected by the fact that they are "products" of the two southern communities presented in these novels, one belonging to Southern Ontario and the other to the Southern States of the USA. Therefore, a cognitive semantic analysis of the concept of SOUTH contributes to the understanding of the problematic issues we meet in the novels. The paper begins with a general introduction and the discussion of the term SOUTH. After this, a semantic approach is proposed and SOUTH is connected to the concept of DOWN, which allows it to be subjected to further analysis. What follows is a set of illustrations coming from the previous analysis of the two novels – they illustrate links between DOWN and other concepts as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in "Metaphors We Live By."