The South In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” was written during the Reconstruction Period of the South. During this time, the North’s economy, education, and culture surpassed the weak South. Due to the abolition of slavery, the South’s economy deteriorated; therefore making the South’s social classes fade away. With Faulkner having Miss Emily’s father cling to the ideals of the old South, he’s conveying the South’s struggle to transition from a chivalrous, aristocratic society to a modern, capitalist society. After the Civil War, Northerners traveled to the South in search for economic gain by taking advantage of the reconstruction process. This phenomenon was known as carpetbagging. Homer Barron, an affable northerner, is introduced into the story after Miss Emily’s father dies. Miss Emily’s clinging to the ideals of aristocracy and the North, after it's exploitation of the South, illustrates man’s propensity for sticking to what they are comfortable with.
Miss Emily still
clings to the ideals of her father even though he has passed away. Her father believed in aristocracy even after the fall of the South. Because of this, he never approved of any of Miss Emily’s suitors: “We remembered all the young men her father had driven away” (Faulkner 1070). His turning away her suitors caused Miss Emily to lose a piece of her free will. Without her father she could do nothing else but “ cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (Faulkner 1070). Faulkner portrayed Miss Emily as one who would always cling to her father’s ideals. The townspeople pitied Miss Emily after her father’s death. She clung to her father, and the town people accepted it:“We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that” (Faulkner 1070). Faulkner uses Miss Emily clinging to her dead father to illustrate man’s tendency to continue to follow their role model even after that role model’s morals and/or actions are outdated:“as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die” (Faulkner 1073). Through her constant clinging to her father and his principles, Faulkner allowed the reader to pity Miss Emily.
Faulkner also uses the symbolic relationship between the North and the South and Miss Emily and Homer Barron to help depict man’s nature to stay with what they are comfortable with, even if it destroys them. After Miss Emily’s father’s death, Faulkner introduced Homer Barron: “a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice” who found an interest in Miss Emily (Faulkner 1070). Every Sunday, the townspeople would see Miss Emily and Homer Barron driving around town “in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (Faulkner 1070). In the story, we can compare Miss Emily to the South and Homer to the North. The North stripped the South of its former beauty by shaming it. By sleeping with Miss Emily, but not marrying her, Homer shamed Miss Emily. At first the town believed that Homer and Miss Emily were to get married, but then the town had to believe that she could persuade him to marry her because “Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men” (Faulkner 1072). Still, Miss Emily clings to him, something that destroyed her. Even though Miss Emily killed Homer Barron, she didn’t let him go, “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him”(Faulkner 1074). Faulkner wants the reader to feel some pity but also revulsion towards her because she killed a man that she was once with, but still clung to him as he decayed in her house.
Clinging conveys Faulkner’s attitude towards the idea that in some ways, the South embraced their past ideals even after the people saw that all they did was cause harm.
Rein Mulligan writes, “Slavery was a gateway for women to enhance their already elevated position in society by better allowing them to conform to the ideology of domesticity as well as marking them as higher in the white power structure of the South.” People in the South bettered their position in society by discriminating, harming, and enslaving other human beings. The South also clasped to ideals that impeded their advancement in society. Because the South had slavery, it didn’t need to work on upgrading their technology. After slavery was abolished, the South’s economy deteriorated; the South lost its main way to produce products. In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner was able to illustrate his thoughts on human nature and hanging onto the past. Ultimately, clinging to a comfort zone led to the fall of the old South and Miss
Emily.