A Rose for Emily: Short Fiction

"A Rose for Emily," written by William Faulkner, is a short fiction about the life and death of Miss Emily Grierson under the background of Southern United States’s decay in 19th century. “ Miss Brill” is Katherine Mansfield’ short story about a woman’s Sunday outing to the park, revealing her thought about others as she watches a crowd from a park bench. Seemingly very different in the imagery and language, portray of the main characters and plot, the two fictions all show out two elderly women who live lonely in the past, not accepted by the environment and have tragic fate.

The most obvious difference between “A rose for Emily” and “Miss Brill” is the imagery and language Faulkner and Mansfield Used in the two fictions. “A rose for Emily” features the imagery and tone of dark, gloom and depression. At the beginning of the story , the unnamed narrator give details of Emily’s death and funeral and says that her house”no one save an old man-servant had seen in at least ten years”, which evoke an tone of sad and terror. With the development of the story, the author explores Emily’s life with dark and gloom language. The house Emily lived, once delicate decorated, “smelled of dust and disuse---a close, dark smell”, “the leather cracked” and “a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray”. Emily, who used to be young, slender and energetic, “looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue”. These sentences vividly descript the dark and depression of Emily’s life. And the story comes to its climax when people find the rotted body of Homer Barron in the locked room, with “faint and invisible dust dry and acrid” and “a long strand of the iron-gray hair’. The language of the story is filled with dark, groom and desperation. On the contrary, the tone of “Miss Brill” is brilliant, joyful and idealism. Miss Brill use language such as sweet, dear and fascinating to describe things