A ROSE FOR EMILY

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer, a child of Mississippi and

Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest
writer with a series of novels that explore the South’s historical legacy. Faulkner's
work has been examined by many critics from a wide variety of critical
perspectives. Faulkner's work using other approaches, such as feminist and
psychoanalytic methods. Faulkner's works have been placed within the literary
traditions of modernism and the Southern Renaissance. From the early 1920s to
the outbreak of World War II, Faulkner published 13 novels and many short
stories. Such a body of work formed the basis of his reputation and earned him the
Nobel Prize at age 52. Faulkner's prodigious output includes his most celebrated
novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in
August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was also a prolific writer
of short stories. And “A Rose For Emily” was the first short story that Faulkner
published in a major magazine. It appeared in the April 30, 1930, issue of Forum.

The story opens with a brief first-person account of the funeral of Emily Grierson,
an elderly Southern woman whose funeral is the obligation of their small town. It
then proceeds in a non-linear fashion to the narrator's recollections of Emily's
archaic and increasingly strange behavior throughout the years. Emily is a member
of a family of the antebellum Southern aristocracy. After the Civil War, the family
falls into hard times. She and her father, the last two of the clan, continue to live as
if in the past; Emily’s father refuses for her to marry. Her father dies when Emily
is about the age of 30, which takes her by surprise. She refuses to give up his
corpse, and the townspeople write it off as her grieving process. The townspeople
pity Emily not only after her father's death, but also during his life when he
wouldn't let Emily marry. After her father's death, the only person seen moving
about Emily's home is Tobe- a black man, serving as Emily's butler, going in and
out with a market basket. Although Emily did not have a strong relationship with
her community, she did give art lessons to young children within her town. The
townspeople even referred to her as Miss Emily as a sign of the respect that they
had for her. With the acceptance of her father's death, Emily somewhat revives,
even changing the style of her hair and becomes friendly with Homer Barron. He
is a Northern laborer who comes to town shortly after Mr. Grierson’s death. The
connection surprises some of the community while others are glad she is taking an
interest. However, Homer claims that he is not a marrying man, but a bachelor.
Emily shortly buys arsenic from a druggist in town, telling him that it will be used
to kill rats. However, the townspeople are convinced that she will use it to poison
herself. Emily’s distant cousins are called into town by the minister’s wife to
supervise Miss Emily and Homer Barron. Homer leaves town for some time,
reputedly to give Emily a chance to get rid of her cousins, and returns three days
later after the cousins have left. Homer is never seen again. Despite these
turnabouts in her social status, Emily continues to behave haughtily, as she had
before her father died. Her reputation is such that the city council finds itself
unable to confront her about a strong smell that has begun to emanate from the
house. Instead, they decide to send men to her house under the cover of darkness
to sprinkle lime around the house, after which the smell dissipates. The mayor of
the town, Colonel Sartoris, made a gentleman's agreement to overlook her taxes as
an act of charity, though it was done under a pretense of repayment towards her
father to assuage Emily's pride after her father had died. Years later, when the next
generation has come to power, Emily insists on this informal arrangement, flatly
refusing that she owes any taxes; the council declines to press the issue. Emily has
become a recluse: she is never seen out of the house, and only rarely accepts
people into it. The community comes to view her as a "hereditary obligation" on
the town, who must be humored and tolerated. The funeral is a large affair; Emily
had become an institution, so her death sparks a great deal of curiosity about her
reclusive nature and what remains of her house. After she is buried, a group of
townsfolk enter her house to see what remains of her life there. The door to her
upstairs bedroom is locked; some of the townsfolk kick in the door to see what has
been hidden for so long. Inside, among the possessions that Emily had bought for
Homer, lies the decomposed corpse of Homer Barron on the bed; on the pillow
beside him is the indentation of a head and a single strand of gray hair, indicating
that Emily had slept with Homer's corpse. The main character of the story. Emily's
father kept her from seeing suitors and controlled her social life, essentially
keeping her in isolation until his death, when she is 30 years old. Her struggle with
loss and attachment is the impetus for the plot, driving her to kill Homer Barron,
the man that is assumed to have married her. Because no man has ever been able
to stay with her before, Emily poisons and kills Homer. She sees murder as the
only way to keep Homer with her permanently, and she treats him as if he is her
husband even after she kills him. This is shown by her keeping his clothes in the
room, keeping his engraved wedding items on the dresser, and even sleeping with
him, all act that normal married couples do. Her act of murdering Homer also
displays her obstinate nature. Emily deals in absolutes throughout the story. She
refuses to pay her taxes because she didn’t have to pay them when her father was
alive. She has her servant Tobe follow the same patterns, such as his grocery
errands. She kills Homer to ensure that he will never leave her. By the end of the
story, Emily’s story is seen as a tragedy rather than an atrocity because of what her
character has gone through. The object of fascination in the story. An eccentric
recluse, Emily is a mysterious figure who changes from a vibrant and hopeful
young girl to a cloistered and secretive old woman. Devastated and alone after her
father’s death, she is an object of pity for the townspeople. After a life of having
potential suitors rejected by her father, she spends time after his death with a
newcomer – Homer Barron – although the chances of his marrying her decrease as
the years pass. Bloated and pallid in her later years, her hair turns steel gray. She
ultimately poisons Homer and seals his corpse into an upstairs room.

"A Rose for Emily" discusses many dark themes that characterized the Old South
and Southern Gothic fiction. The story explores themes of death and resistance to
change; they reflect the decaying of the societal tenants of the South in the 1930s.
Emily Grierson had been oppressed by her father for most of her life and hadn’t
questioned it because that was her way of living. Likewise, the antiquated
traditions of the south (often harmful, such as in the treatment of black people) had
remained acceptable, as that was their way of living. Once her father had passed,
Emily, in denial, refused to give his corpse up for burial - this shows her inability
to functionally adapt to change. When the present mayor and aldermen insist Miss
Emily pay the taxes which she had been exempted from, she refuses and continues
to live in her house. Miss Emily's stubborn insistence that she "pays no taxes in
Jefferson" and her mistaking the new mayor for Colonel Sartoris brings into
question whether her acts of resistance are a conscious act of defiance or a result
of a decayed mental stability. The reader is only shown Emily from an external
perspective, we can not ascertain whether she acts in a rational manner or not. The
death of Homer, if interpreted as having been a murder, can be seen in the context
of the North-South clash. Homer, notably a northerner, is not one for the tradition
of marriage. In the framework that his death was not an accident, but a murder on
the part of Emily, Homer's rejection of the marriage can be seen as the North's
rejection of Southern tradition. The South ends its relations with the North in
retaliation. Emily continuing to sleep next to Homer's body can be seen as the
south holding on to an ideal that is no longer feasible.

There are other episodes sprinkled throughout the story that indicate Miss Emily’s
compromised mental state. Early in the story, before the extent of her symptoms
has become clear to the reader, the narrator relates an episode in which Miss Emily
appears before town officials to insist that she does not owe taxes. She repeats
several times that she has “no taxes in Jefferson" and that the county’s Board of
Aldermen could speak with Colonel Sartoris if they felt otherwise. It is not the fact
that she said this that hints at her psychosis. Rather, it is her insistence against the
facts that they present and her refusal to listen to aldermen at all that makes her
more than just a stubborn town eccentric. There are two other episodes that are
equally telling. When Miss Emily goes to the pharmacy to buy poison, she is
described as lacking in affect and appears to be paranoid, withholding information
from the pharmacist about the reason for her request. Once again, the pharmacist,
representing the town as a whole, finds this request odd, but does not challenge it.
After all, Miss Emily is a special woman, “the last of a proud line,", and as such,
she is unassailable. The other important episode, besides the obvious psychotic act
of sleeping with a corpse, involves Miss Emily’s purchases of items for the man
that the town believes is her betrothed, but who is already presumably dead and
decaying in Miss Emily’s bed. Indeed, when the townspeople kick down the
bedroom door years later, the narrator describes a tableau that is “decked and
furnished as for a bridal" but frozen in time and covered with dust and tarnish.
Clearly, Miss Emily’s grasp on reality had slipped completely. If one agrees that
Miss Emily was schizophrenic, then naturally one might want to understand the
influences that precipitated her illness. Kinney has argued that Miss Emily’s
delusions, especially about her father’s death, develop as a defense mechanism, for
the death of her father represents “the death of the old order and of herself as
well". Staton adds that “Having been consumed by her father, Emily in turn feeds
off Homer….She has taken into herself the violence in him which thwarted her
and has reenacted it….". Some feminist critics interpret Miss Emily’s illness
differently. Appleton Aguilar, for instance, contends that Miss Emily “insists on
maintaining her own existence, which the townspeople continually refuse to allow
as they wish her to sustain her position as icon and memorial to the antebellum
South". While Miss Emily’s gender and her place, both literally and figuratively,
certainly exacerbate and may have even caused her condition, there is far too much
textual evidence to support the counterargument. Miss Emily is not merely trying
to assert an independent existence; rather, she has never been able to do so and for
that reason she has developed symptoms of schizophrenia as a maladaptive coping
mechanism. Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily" is a short story that is, at its heart, a
tale about the pressures of society and the ways in which they can wear people
down. Miss Emily lacked adaptive coping skills to help her manage substantial
stressors, and for this reason, she was vulnerable to the onset of mental illness.

Faulkner described his reasoning for the title "A Rose For Emily" as an allegorical
title; this woman had undergone a great tragedy, and for this Faulkner pitied her.
And as a salute, he handed her a rose. The word rose in the title has multiple
meanings to it. The rose may be seen as Homer, interpreting the rose as a dried
rose. Homer's body could be the dried rose, such as one that is pressed between the
pages of a book, kept in perfect condition as Emily did with Homer's body. The
"Rose" also represents secrecy. Roses have been portrayed in Greek legends as a
gift of secrecy and of confidentiality, known as sub rosa, introducing that the
"Rose" is a symbol of silence between the narrator and Miss Emily, the narrator
keeps Emily's secrets until her death. Control and its repercussions is a persistent
theme throughout the story. Emily's father was an intimidating and manipulative
figure, keeping her from experiencing life in her own terms. She was never able to
grow, learn, live her life, start a family, and marry the one she truly loved. Even
after Emily's father died, his presence and impact on his daughter was still
apparent. Discussing Emily and her father, the townspeople said "We had long
thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the
background, her father a straddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and
clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.".
Emily is portrayed as small and powerless, placed behind the overbearing frame of
her father. She wears white, a symbol of innocence and purity. Emily falls victim
to the ruling hand of her father and to her place in the society: she has to uphold
the noblesse oblige to which she was born into. In this way, her father's influence
remains after he has passed. This control leads to Emily's isolation, both externally
and internally imposed. Emily is alone, yet always being watched by the
townspeople; she is both apart from and a part of the community. Her position
prevents her from ever finding happiness. The power of death is a consistent theme
throughout the story. Emily herself is portrayed as a "skeleton" that is both "small
and spare" which is representative of the fact that she emanates death. When it
comes to death itself, Emily is in denial and most of that feeling has to do with her
loneliness. After her father dies, she keeps his corpse for three days and refuses to
admit that he is dead. The reader also sees this with the corpse of Homer Barron,
except she is the one who inflicts death upon him. She poisons him and keeps him
locked away in her room; she did not want to lose the only other person she had
ever loved, so she made his stay permanent. These examples show that the power
of death triumphs everything, including "poor Emily", herself.