Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The story “A Rose for Emily” was William Faulkner’s first published and is one
of his most widely read stories. First appearing in The Forum in April 1930 (Brooks 7),
“A Rose for Emily” is a horror story regarded as one of the most “gothic” Faulkner ever
had written (Brooks 51). It is the story of a woman, Emily Grierson, whose life is
recalled by an anonymous narrator who represents the attitudes and ideas of the
community. When suppressed by her father until his death, she takes up with a Northern
laborer, Homer Barron. When she is faced with desertion from her love, she turned to
murdering him by poison. It was later discovered after Emily’s own death that Homer’s
rotting corpse was in a loving embrace from forty years before after the door was forced
open in the upstairs bedroom with an iron gray hair lying on the pillow beside him. By
examining Emily’s relationship with her father, her place in the community, and her
problem with distinguishing the present from the past, a lot is revealed about the
The Grierson family had a streak of general insanity along with an insane pride.
Miss Emily’s father, a selfish and dominating man, thought that none of the young men
who came courting her were good enough for their name. So he discouraged them –
really drove them away – and when he finally died, his daughter was still unmarried and
with little more left to her than the house itself. In a way, the narrator says, “People were
glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being alone, and a pauper, she had become
humanized” (Faulkner 244). Now she would know like other people, what it felt like to
count pennies.
Some have found in Homer, Emily’s suitor, his strong masculine presence and
see Emily’s crime as a second attempt to keep a father figure from deserting her. The
tragedy in the story was shown in Emily’s inability to escape the influence of her
Miss Emily’s relation to the small community is of great significance in the story.
Everyone had looked up the Grierson’s in the small community of Jefferson, Mississippi.
They held their heads high – some of the townspeople felt too high. The feelings of the
community towards Miss Emily are very complicated. For in the community’s eyes, her
story is no mere case history. It comes close to being called a legend, a fable, even a
Miss Emily is denied normal participation in the life of the community because
she represents a traditional aristocracy of a higher social class than most people. This
situation, created by her heredity, is accentuated by the community, which denies Miss
Emily a normal life by regarding her as their symbol of the past. Miss Emily is “a
tradition, a duty, and a care” (Faulkner 242); the town prefers that she remain intact
within her old house, an idol, “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse”
(247). She had become part of the history of the town. She was kind of a monument, a
honorable time; when Miss Emily dies, she becomes their “fallen monument” (Page 100).
The narrator in the story plays an important role also. He is clearly the
spokesman for the community and his story is about what Miss Emily’s life and death
meant to the community (Brooks 32). The nameless narrator uses phrases such as “We
believed”, “We knew”, and so forth, instead of “I believed”, or “I know.” He was
The narrator moves smoothly from the mention of Miss Emily’s funeral at the
beginning of the story to when, in 1894, Colonel Sartoris had used a flimsy reason to
remit her taxes. Then, he moves to the new generation of aldermen expecting Miss Emily
to pay her taxes like everyone else, and then he jumps back thirty years to when the awful
smell came strongly from Miss Emily’s house and Judge Stevens, a gentleman of the old
South wouldn’t tell her to her face that she smelled bad so he arranged a private clean-up
done at night with men throwing lime at the cellar openings of her house. “After a week
or two, the smell died away” (Faulkner 244). The smell gives the narrator an opportunity
to tell the readers that it was about this time that “people had begun to feel really sorry for
her.” (244)
When Miss Emily purchased the arsenic at the drugstore, the news spread rapidly
throughout the town. The townspeople believed that she meant to kill herself after the
disappearance of her beloved Homer, for an aristocratic lady would prefer death to
dishonor. But she does not kill herself, clearly though Homer Barron had not married
brought about a certain admiration from the community itself. But Miss Emily’s absolute
defiance of what others think, and her insistence to meeting life solely on her own terms,
ignoring custom tradition and law, ended in a horrifying deformation of her own psyche.
The community learns how horrifying only after her funeral when an exploration of the
upper rooms of the house is undertaken. The narrator is careful to note that they “waited
until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened” (247) the locked room
and the intruders discovered what was left of her lover from over forty years before. It is
as if the town recognized that she had earned a right to this extension of her hard-won
and bitterly maintained privacy to wait until she was buried before going through her
house.
Emily is a source of mystery and intrigue for the community part due to the
oddity of her behavior derived from her isolation and resistance to change, but there is
also a curiosity brought about by her class. As a member of one of the oldest families in
Jefferson, Emily embodies, for the community, the vision of the “lady” as incorporated in
the myths and the reality of the antebellum South. The community respects her position
while it also delights in her eccentricities and her fall from grace. In this context her
isolation, her assumptions about the power of class, and her increasingly bizarre behavior
suggests the dangers of clinging too closely to the past and refusing to accept change.
The principle contrast in the story is between past and present time. The past is
represented in Emily herself, Colonel Sartoris, the old Negro servant, Tobe, and in the
Board of Aldermen who accepted the Colonel’s attitude toward Emily and rescinded her
taxes. The present is depicted though the unnamed narrator, the new Board of Aldermen,
Emily was forced to become engaged in a defiance of time and reality. She
refused to live in the real world, ignoring the tax office, the post office, the law, and even
death itself. When her father died she refused to admit he was dead. After three days
and a lot of persuasion, she finally allowed the body to be taken out of the house
and buried.
Also, when the new Board of Aldermen came to explain that she had to pay taxes
on her property just like everyone else, Emily refused to admit she owed any taxes. She
denied the authority of the tax notice sent to her and she told the men to see Colonel
Sartoris. “ I have no taxes in Jefferson” (243). Colonel Sartoris had been dead for nearly
ten years. Cleanth Brooks states, “Had Miss Emily lived alone for so long that she had
not heard that he was dead? Or are the dead for her alive than the living?” (Brooks 9)
Just as Emily refused to acknowledge the death of her father, she also refused to
acknowledge the death of the Colonel. He had given her his word, and according to the
“old” view, “his word” knew no death. It was the past against the present – the past with
its social decorum, the present with everything set down in “the books.” Emily lived in
the past, always a world of unreality to the people in the present (West 68).
Miss Emily’s large Southern Victorian house also mirrored her resistance to
change as it gradually came to stand alone among the utilitarian structures of industry and
commerce that mark the neighborhood’s changing character. “The stubborn and
coquettish decay” of the mansions exterior, the dark shadows that pervaded its interior,
and the persistent dust are some of the signs in the story of the ever presence of death
(Page 102).
Emily was living behind barricaded doors, protecting herself from a world that
was too much for her. As Danforth Ross stated, “She had become a tiny island of the
past surrounded by the ocean of the present. Whenever the present lapped too high, she
hurled back the waves. Hence, “a rose for Emily” – an accolade for her.” (Ross 36).
Man must come to terms with the past and the present. For to ignore the past is to be
foolishly innocent, to ignore the present is to become monstrous and inhuman (West 73).
Emily’s place in regard to the specific problem of time is shown in the scene
where the old soldiers appear at her funeral. There we are told two different views of
time. The first being the world of the present in which time is viewed as a mechanical
progression in which the past is seen as a diminishing road, never to be ran across again.
The second view is the world of tradition where the past is viewed as a large meadow
where no winter ever quite touches, divided from the present by a narrow bottleneck of
the most recent decade of years. Emily holds the second view, but for her there is no
bottleneck dividing her from the meadow of the past (West 70).
In conclusion, Miss Emily Grierson is a victim of her own pride. Her mania is a
manifestation of her pride, her independence, and her iron will. She did not crumble
under pressures exerted upon her; she did not give in. She insisted on choosing a lover in
spite of the criticism of the town. She refused to be jilted. She was not to be scorned or
pitied. She led an idle and useless life. She was driven to criminal acts in desperate
attempts to stimulate something of love’s fulfillment. These acts were neither life giving
or redeeming; on the contrary, she was led into a life of frustration, perversion, isolation,
and decay.