A Rose for Emily Analysis -essay

Introduction
Faulkner's most famous, most popular, and most anthologized short story, "A Rose for Emily" evokes the terms Southern gothic and grotesque, two types of literature in which the general tone is one of gloom, terror, and understated violence. The story is Faulkner's best example of these forms because it contains unimaginably dark images: a decaying mansion, a corpse, a murder, a mysterious servant who disappears, and, most horrible of all, necrophilia — an erotic or sexual attraction to corpses.

Body Emily Grierson, the object of fascination in the story. A 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.
Homer Barron one of the major character besides Emily is a foreman from the North. Homer is a large man with a dark complexion, a booming voice, and light-colored eyes. A gruff and demanding boss, he wins many admirers in Jefferson because of his gregarious nature and good sense of humor. He develops an interest in Emily and takes her for Sunday drives in a yellow-wheeled buggy. Despite his attributes, the townspeople view him as a poor, if not scandalous, choice for a mate. He disappears in Emily’s house and decomposes in an attic bedroom after she kills him.
Judge Stevens is the mayor of Jefferson. Eighty years old, Judge Stevens attempts to delicately handle the complaints about the smell emanating from the Grierson property. To be respectful of Emily’s pride and former position in the community, he and the aldermen decide to sprinkle lime on the property in the middle of the night.
Mr. Grierson , Emily’s father. Mr. Grierson is a controlling, looming presence even in death, and the community clearly sees his lasting influence over Emily. He deliberately thwarts Emily’s attempts to find a husband in order to keep her under his control. We get glimpses of him in the story: in the crayon portrait kept on the gilt-edged easel in the parlor, and silhouetted in the doorway, horsewhip in hand, having chased off another of Emily’s suitors.
Tobe is Emily’s servant. His voice supposedly rusty from lack of use, is the only lifeline that Emily has to the outside world. For years, he dutifully cares for her and tends to her needs. Eventually the townspeople stop grilling him for information about Emily. After Emily’s death, he walks out the back door and never returns.
Colonel Sartoris, the former mayor of Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris absolves Emily of any tax burden after the death of her father. His elaborate and benevolent gesture is not heeded by the succeeding generation of town leaders.
Narrator. The unnamed narrator of “A Rose for Emily” serves as the town’s collective voice. Critics have debated whether it is a man or woman; a former lover of Emily Grierson’s; the boy who remembers the sight of Mr. Grierson in the doorway, holding the whip; or the town gossip, spearheading the effort to break down the door at the end. It is possible, too, that the narrator is Emily’s former servant, Tobe—he would have known her intimately, perhaps including her secret. A few aspects of the story support this theory, such as the fact that the narrator often refers to Emily as “Miss Emily” and provides only one descriptive detail about the Colonel Sartoris, the mayor: the fact that he enforced a law requiring that black women wear aprons in public. In any case, the narrator hides behind the collective pronoun we. By using we, the narrator can attribute what might be his or her own thoughts and opinions to all of the townspeople, turning private ideas into commonly held beliefs.
The narrator deepens the mystery of who he is and how much he knows at the end of the story, when the townspeople discover Homer’s body. The narrator confesses “Already we knew” that an upstairs bedroom had been sealed up. However, we never find out how the narrator knows about the room. More important, at this point, for the first time in the story, the narrator uses the pronoun “they” instead of “we” to refer to the townspeople. First, he says, “Already we knew that there was one room. . . .” Then he changes to, “They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.” This is a significant shift. Until now, the narrator has willingly grouped himself with the rest of the townspeople, accepting the community’s actions, thoughts, and speculations as his own. Here, however, the narrator distances himself from the action, as though the breaking down of the door is something he can’t bring himself to endorse. The shift is quick and subtle, and he returns to “we” in the passages that follow, but it gives us an important clue about the narrator’s identity. Whoever he was, the narrator cared for Emily, despite her eccentricities and horrible, desperate act. In a town that treated her as an oddity and, finally, a horror, a kind, sympathetic gesture—even one as slight as symbolically looking away when the private door is forced open—stands out.
In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner does not rely on a conventional linear approach to present his characters’ inner lives and motivations. Instead, he fractures, shifts, and manipulates time, stretching the story out over several decades. We learn about Emily’s life through a series of flashbacks. The story begins with a description of Emily’s funeral and then moves into the near-distant past. At the end of the story, we see that the funeral is a flashback as well, preceding the unsealing of the upstairs bedroom door. We see Emily as a young girl, attracting suitors whom her father chases off with a whip, and as an old woman, when she dies at seventy-four. As Emily’s grip on reality grows more tenuous over the years, the South itself experiences a great deal of change. By moving forward and backward in time, Faulkner portrays the past and the present as coexisting and is able to examine how they influence each other. He creates a complex, layered, and multidimensional world.
Faulkner presents two visions of time in the story. One is based in the mathematical precision and objectivity of reality, in which time moves forward relentlessly, and what’s done is done; only the present exists. The other vision is more subjective. Time moves forward, but events don’t stay in distant memory; rather, memory can exist unhindered, alive and active no matter how much time passes or how much things change. Even if a person is physically bound to the present, the past can play a vibrant, dynamic role. Emily stays firmly planted in a subjective realm of time, where life moves on with her in it—but she stays committed, regardless, to the past.
Symbolism in the story includes: Emily’s house and the strand of hair.
Emily’s house, like Emily herself, is a monument, the only remaining emblem of a dying world of Southern aristocracy. The outside of the large, square frame house is lavishly decorated. The cupolas, spires, and scrolled balconies are the hallmarks of a decadent style of architecture that became popular in the 1870s. By the time the story takes place, much has changed. The street and neighborhood, at one time affluent, pristine, and privileged, have lost their standing as the realm of the elite. The house is in some ways an extension of Emily: it bares its “stubborn and coquettish decay” to the town’s residents. It is a testament to the endurance and preservation of tradition but now seems out of place among the cotton wagons, gasoline pumps, and other industrial trappings that surround it—just as the South’s old values are out of place in a changing society.
Emily’s house also represents alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the living past, and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she preserves the man she would not allow to leave her. As when the group of men sprinkled lime along the foundation to counteract the stench of rotting flesh, the townspeople skulk along the edges of Emily’s life and property. The house, like its owner, is an object of fascination for them. They project their own lurid fantasies and interpretations onto the crumbling edifice and mysterious figure inside. Emily’s death is a chance for them to gain access to this forbidden realm and confirm their wildest notions and most sensationalistic suppositions about what had occurred on the inside.
The strand of hair is a reminder of love lost and the often perverse things people do in their pursuit of happiness. The strand of hair also reveals the inner life of a woman who, despite her eccentricities, was committed to living life on her own terms and not submitting her behavior, no matter how shocking, to the approval of others. Emily subscribes to her own moral code and occupies a world of her own invention, where even murder is permissible. The narrator foreshadows the discovery of the long strand of hair on the pillow when he describes the physical transformation that Emily undergoes as she ages. Her hair grows more and more grizzled until it becomes a “vigorous iron-gray.” The strand of hair ultimately stands as the last vestige of a life left to languish and decay, much like the body of Emily’s former lover.
Faulkner details the loneliness and selfishness of a poor woman, Miss Emily. Miss Emily is unable to grip the idea of death and suffers great deals of denial. After the death of her father, the townspeople expected her to be in a state of grief but alas she is not. Instead she proceeds to say that her father is very well with her, alive. William Faulkner’s idea of grieving is clear in this story because he shows his audience that it is better to accept death than to ignore it through the accounts of Miss Emily’s journey. William Faulkner’s story takes place in the South, during a time period of racial discrimination and major political change.
The hidden message that William Faulkner tried to convey in the story was the themes of death and change. Death looms through the story from the beginning right on through to the end as the narrator begins describing the beginning of Miss Emily’s funeral. Miss Emily herself chooses not to accept the fate of death when her extremely controlling father passes away. “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed` as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead” (Faulkner). This quote from A Rose for Emily clearly shows how Miss Emily tried to defy death by holding on to her father’s corpse and treating it as if he were still living and how fearful she was of change. She later killed Homer to ensure that he would never leave her. Miss Emily continually tried to prevent any sort of change through death or other means from occurring in her town. She was so frightened of change that she wouldn’t allow the city to put numbers on her house for mail. “Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them” (Faulkner). Through this quote one can see the struggle that Miss Emily had to maintain her traditions and her attempts to force the town to remain at a standstill.
The South was once known for its extreme prejudice and racism. William Faulkner’s attempts to convey this racism is made clear in “A Rose for Emily”. “They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow” (Faulkner). This use of the derogatory term “negro” clearly shows the author’s intentions. Mr. Faulkner truly conveys the experience of the African American in the time period that this story was written because he is able to show how stripped of their identities they were. By using the terms “negro” or “nigger” to describe African Americans, people were stripping them of their human qualities. This was so severe that in some cases African Americans became “property” to some, which Mr. Faulkner was able to convey. Mr. Faulkner’s use of these derogatory terms also helps to explain the prejudices suffered by African Americans in the South. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor –he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity” (Faulkner). One can clearly see that Colonel Sartoris’s intentions were to enforce rules in which African Americans were to be seen as workers, not people who socialized. This strongly prejudice of not allowing African Americans to be seen outside of labor as human beings is clearly seen through the story.
Mr. Faulkner explains the roles of women in the South and how they were seen through the eyes of men. “When Miss Emily Grierson died the whole town went to her funeral: the men out of respectful affection for a fallen monument and the women mostly out of curiosity” (Faulkner). One can clearly see that through the opening sentence of the story, the narrator is stating that women gossip while men are caring and serious. This is only one of many passages that show that Mr. Faulkner is attempting to make men the stronger gender. “Only a man of Colonel Satoris’s generation could have invented it and only a women could have believed it” (Faulkner). Colonel Satoris is described as being an ingenious man but in this sentence, Miss Emily’s name isn’t even mentioned when the two are compared. Colonel Satoris is made to be an almost godly figure that is described as being more supreme than the entire female gender. The statement made in this story is that men are the better gender.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many aspects that were incorporated into “A Rose for Emily”. William Faulkner was able to create a story involving many ideas about society and how it functioned in a specific time period in the South. “A Rose for Emily” is an important element in literature due to examination of the effects of change created in the olden South. This story serves a good example for future generations.