Analysis of “A Rose for Emily”

Submitted to:

Anelyn I. Songano

Emmanuel M. Naag LM6A TTH – 3:00-4:30PM

Biography of the William Faulkner (Author)

William Faulkner (1897-1962), who came from an old southern family, grew up in

Oxford, Mississippi. He joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force during the

First World War, studied for a while at the University of Mississippi, and temporarily worked for

a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper. Except for some trips to Europe and Asia,

and a few brief stays in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, he worked on his novels and short stories on

a farm in Oxford.

In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of characters

typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama in

Faulkner's novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost

a century and a half Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which

is the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Their theme is the decay of the old

South, as represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the emergence of ruthless and

brash newcomers, the Snopeses. Theme and technique - the distortion of time through the use of

the inner monologue are fused particularly successfully in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the

downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. The novel

Sanctuary (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished

southern family. Its sequel, Requiem For A Nun (1951), written partly as a drama, centered on

the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had once been a party to Temple Drake's debauchery.

In Light in August (1932), prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in

Joe Christmas, who believes, though there is no proof of it, that one of his parents was a Negro.

The theme of racial prejudice is brought up again in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which a

young man is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood. Faulkner's most

outspoken moral evaluation of the relationship and the problems between Negroes and whites is

to be found in Intruder In the Dust (1948).

In 1940, Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, to be

followed by two volumes, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), all of them tracing the rise

of the insidious Snopes family to positions of power and wealth in the community. The reivers,

his last - and most humorous - work, with great many similarities to Mark Twain's Huckleberry

Finn, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner's death.

Synopsis of “A Rose for Emily”

As a child, Miss Emily Grierson had been cut off from most social contact and all

courtship by her father. When he dies, she refuses to acknowledge his death for three days. After

the townspeople intervene and bury her father, Emily is further isolated by a mysterious illness,

possibly a mental breakdown.

Homer Barron’s crew comes to town to build sidewalks, and Emily is seen with him. He

tells his drinking buddies that he is not the marrying kind. The townspeople consider their

relationship improper because of differences in values, social class, and regional background.

Emily buys arsenic and refuses to say why. The ladies in town convince the Baptist minister to

confront Emily and attempt to persuade her to break off the relationship. When he refuses to

discuss their conversation or to try again to persuade Miss Emily, his wife writes to Emily’s

Alabama cousins. They come to Jefferson, but the townspeople find them even more haughty

and disagreeable than Miss Emily. The cousins leave town.

Emily buys a men’s silver toiletry set, and the townspeople assume marriage is imminent.

Homer is seen entering the house at dusk one day, but is never seen again. Shortly afterward,

complaints about the odor emanating from her house lead Jefferson’s aldermen to surreptitiously

spread lime around her yard, rather than confront Emily, but they discover her openly watching

them from a window of her home.

Miss Emily’s servant, Tobe, seems the only one to enter and exit the house. No one sees

Emily for approximately six months. By this time she is fat and her hair is short and graying. She

refuses to set up a mailbox and is denied postal delivery. Few people see inside her house,

though for six or seven years she gives china-painting lessons to young women whose parents

send them to her out of a sense of duty.

The town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, tells Emily an implausible story when she receives her

first tax notice: The city of Jefferson is indebted to her father, so Emily’s taxes are waived

forever. However, a younger generation of aldermen later confronts Miss Emily about her taxes,

and she tells them to see Colonel Sartoris (now long dead, though she refuses to acknowledge his

death). Intimidated by Emily and her ticking watch, the aldermen leave, but they continue to

send tax notices every year, all of which are returned without comment.

In her later years, it appears that Emily lives only on the bottom floor of her house. She is

found dead there at the age of seventy-four. Her Alabama cousins return to Jefferson for the

funeral, which is attended by the entire town out of duty and curiosity. Emily’s servant, Tobe,

opens the front door for them, then disappears out the back. After the funeral, the townspeople

break down a door in Emily’s house that, it turns out, had been locked for forty years. They find

a skeleton on a bed, along with the remains of men’s clothes, a tarnished silver toiletry set, and a

pillow with an indentation and one long iron-gray hair.

I. PLOT

A. Exposition

The exposition of the story would be when the author introduces her father and we

see his personality and her background. We know the characters involved and the

conflict. Emily is too good for any man, according to her father, so he keeps her from

dating/marrying. Then he dies, which is another conflict for her--being alone. This

carries on throughout the story. She does not want to be left.

The rising action involves most of the rest of the storyline including the town's

attitude towards her and her fling with Homer. Even the part where she buys the

arsenic and the house smells something awful. The town even spreads lime around

the house to help keep the smell down.

B. Complication

All literature involves conflict of some kind. Without conflict, there is not much of a

story. There are four types of conflict. Most works will involve more than one. In “A

Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner employs all four. The types of conflict are:

Man* v. Man

Man v. Nature

Man v. Society

Man v. Himself.

*Note: “Man” refers to both men and women.

Man v. Man

There are two primary man v. man conflicts in the story.

Emily v. Her Father

Emily’s father deliberately keep his daughter single by chasing away

all of her suitors:

None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and

such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure

in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground,

his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the

back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we

were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she

wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

(II.25)

Emily v. Homer

There are both class conflicts and social conflicts between Emily and

Homer. Emily is of Southern aristocracy while Homer is a day laborer. Emily is

desperate for marriage while Homer is not ready to settle down.

So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be

the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had

said, “She will marry him.” Then we said, “She will persuade him yet,” because

Homer himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with

the younger men in the Elks’ Club—that he was not a marrying man. (IV.43)

Man v. Society

When an individual’s values and needs conflict with society’s values and

needs, conflict results. There are three types of “man v. society” conflicts in “A

Rose for Emily.”

Emily v. Aldermen

When Emily’s father was alive, he paid the property taxes on their home;

he arranged for his friend, Colonel Sartoris, to continue paying the taxes after his

passing on behalf of his daughter. However, after the colonel’s death, the younger

generation was no longer interested in maintaining their “hereditary obligation.”

For her part, Emily feels no sense of duty about paying the taxes herself.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors

and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of

the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply.

They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her

convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send

his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin,

flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all.

The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment. (I.4)

Emily vs. Public Acceptability

There are two areas of Emily’s private life encroaching on the public, and

the public finding her choices unacceptable.

The first is her outings with Homer. The town views her suitor as beneath

her:

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the

ladies all said, “Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a

day laborer.” But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief

could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige—without calling it noblesse

oblige. They just said, “Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her.” She had

some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the

estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication

between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

(III.31)

The second is the smell that begins wafting from her home and becomes

increasingly intolerable:

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came

in diffident deprecation. “We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the

last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we’ve got to do something.” That

night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a

member of the rising generation.

“It’s simple enough,” he said. “Send her word to have her place cleaned

up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don’t . . .”

“Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of

smelling bad?”

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and

slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and

at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with

his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door

and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. (II.21-24)

Man v. Nature

At the turn of the twentieth century, an unmarried woman past the age of

thirty had very few chances of ever finding a husband. Aging is not helping

Emily's prospects, and whatever slight beauty she may have had is fading fast.

Here is a description of her appearance when the aldermen pay her a visit:

They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin

gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an

ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps

that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in

her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of

that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small

pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to

another while the visitors stated their errand. (I.6)

Man v. Himself

For Emily, the entire story is one large internal conflict. She has suitors

and seems interested, but her father chases them away. She must experience

some conflict when she dates Homer, a man well beneath her social station. But

the most obvious conflict she has is whether or not to let the man with whom she

has fallen in love go or keep him with her. Forever.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and

fleshless grin. 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. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the

nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him

and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding

dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head.

One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible

dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

C. Climax

The climax is not until the last few lines of the story when we find Homer's body

and one of her gray hairs on the pillow next to his corpse. We realize that she had

poisoned him so he wouldn't leave, (and that was the awful smell earlier) and that she

has been lying with him ever since.

D. Denouement

Speculations arose, but nobody knew for sure what exactly happened, since Miss

Emily had died.

E. Ending

The narrator is describing the state of Miss Emily's house after her death. The

townspeople, particularly townswomen, have gone in to clean out the house in the

wake of Emily's passing. This is the first time in years that anyone has been inside

the house, with the exception of Miss Emily's servant.

When the women go into Miss Emily's bedroom, they find the skeleton of a man

that has been long dead. They also find the toiletry kit of the man that has been

etched with the initials "HB". This confirms that the dead body is that of Homer

Barron, Miss Emily's beau from long ago. The townspeople had believed that Homer

had left Miss Emily because he suddenly stopped being seen. They had even

believed that Emily was going to commit suicide, because she had purchased arsenic

at the time of his disappearance. However, this body tells us that Emily had used the

arsenic on Homer, killing him and keeping his body in the house - which explains the

smell from the house that the townspeople had been concerned about years before.

Beside Homer on the bed is a strand of iron-gray hair - Miss Emily's hair. She

was so attached to Homer that not only did she kill him to prevent him from leaving,

but she also lay in a bed with his dead body.

.

II. Characters

Narrator: Never named, the narrator of the story is a member of the town and

has known Miss Emily much of her life. Some critics have suggested that the

narrator is the town itself.

Miss Emily Grierson: The protagonist of the story, Miss Emily, as she is

known and referred to by everyone, is the town matriarch.

Colonel Sartoris: In 1894, Colonel Sartoris, who was then the mayor of the

town, remitted Miss Emily’s taxes, for unknown reasons, “in perpetuity.”

Tobe: A Negro “manservant” of Miss Emily’s, Tobe is the only person who

has entered Miss Emily’s house for years.

Judge Stevens: Eighty-year-old Judge Stevens is approached by townspeople

about the smell on Miss Emily’s property.

Old Lady Wyatt: Miss Emily’s great-aunt, Old Lady Wyatt, had become

senile and was remembered by the townspeople.

Homer Barron: Miss Emily’s boyfriend who is described as a “big, dark,

ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face.” A Northerner, he

has come south to Jefferson as a foreman helping to pave the sidewalks.

The Druggist: Miss Emily orders the local druggist to sell her arsenic, even

though she refused to tell him what the poison is for.

Miss Emily’s Cousins: At the request of the Baptist minister’s wife, cousins

from Alabama arrive and move in with Miss Emily, presumably to help her

out.

The Town Ladies: A contingent of women from the town are the first to arrive

at Miss Emily’s following her death, and they are the last to see Tobe.

III. Setting

Intrinsic to the development of both character and conflict, the setting of "A Rose

for Emily" is Jefferson, the county seat of Faulkner's fictional kingdom that he named

Yoknapatawpha county, a county in which Colonel Sartoris is an important figure.

Devastated by the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War, the South was

inundated by Northern opportunists, known as carpetbaggers. Against the Northerners

who had no code of conduct, the newly-poor plantation owners retained their

aristocratic arrogance. And, the code of chivalry of such men as Emily Grierson's

father protected the women against encounters with men such as Homer Barron. This

code of chivalry keeps Colonel Sartoris from taxing the poor spinster and Judge

Stevens from confronting Emily about the smell emanating from her house.

However, the new generations of the South are removed from these antiquated

ways, and it is this conflict between twentieth century and antebellum ways that is

presented in Emily's character.

IV. Theme of the Story

Miss Emily’s story is certainly bizarre, suspenseful, and mysterious enough to

engage the reader’s attention fully. She is a grotesque, southern gothic character

whose neurotic or psychotic behavior in her relationships with her father, her lover,

and her black servant may elicit many Freudian interpretations. For example, her

affair with Homer Barron may be seen as a middle-aged woman’s belated rebellion

against her repressive father and against the town’s burdensome expectations. That

William Faulkner intended her story to have a much larger dimension is suggested by

his choice of an unnamed citizen of Jefferson to tell it.

The narrator never speaks or writes as an individual, never uses the pronoun “I,”

always speaks as “we.” As representative of the townspeople, the narrator feels a

compulsion to tell the story of a woman who represents something important to the

community. Black voices are excluded from this collective voice as it speaks out of

old and new generations. Colonel Sartoris’s antebellum generation is succeeded by

one with “modern ideas”: “Thus, she passed from generation to generation.”

Even though Miss Emily was a child during the Civil War, she represents to

generations past and present the old Deep South of the Delta cotton-plantation

aristocracy. She is a visible holdover into the modern South of a bygone era of

romance, chivalry, and the Lost Cause. Even this new South, striving for a prosperity

based on Northern technology, cannot fully accept the decay of antebellum culture

and ideals. Early, the narrator invokes such concepts as tradition, duty, hereditary

obligation, and custom, suggesting a perpetuation in the community consciousness of

those old values. The community’s sense of time is predominantly chronological, but

it is also like Emily’s, the confused, psychological time sense of memory. Like many

women of the defeated upper class in the Deep South, Miss Emily withdraws from

the chronological time of reality into the timelessness of illusion.

Miss Emily is then symbolic of the religion of southernness that survived military

defeat and material destruction. The children of Colonel Sartoris’s generation are sent

to learn china-painting from Miss Emily in “the same spirit that they were sent to

church.” It is because “we” see her as resembling “those angels in colored church

windows” that her affair with a Yankee makes her “a bad example to the young

people.”

Given the fact that the Yankee colonel who made the deepest raid into Rebel

territory was named Grierson, Faulkner may have intended Emily’s family name to

be ironic. The insanity of clinging to exposed illusions is suggested by the fact that

Miss Emily’s great-aunt went “crazy” and that Miss Emily later appears “crazy” to

the townspeople. Ironically, even within aristocratic families there is division; her

father fell out with Alabama kinsmen over the great-aunt’s estate.

Immediately after the narrator refers to Miss Emily as being like an “idol” and to

her great-aunt as “crazy,” Faulkner presents this image, symbolic of the aristocracy:

“We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in

the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her

and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.” Her

father’s rejection of her suitors is like the defeated aristocracy’s rejection of new

methods of creating a future. Emily’s refusal to accept the fact of her father’s death

suggests the refusal of some aristocrats to accept the death of the South even when

faced with the evidence of its corpse. Perversely, “She would have to cling to that

which had robbed her, as people will.” However, the modern generations insist on

burying the decaying corpse of the past.

Miss Emily preserves all the dead, in memory if not literally. “See Colonel

Sartoris,” she tells the new town fathers, as if he were alive. The townspeople are like

Miss Emily in that they persist in preserving her “dignity” as the last representative of

the Old South (her death ends the Grierson line); after she is dead, the narrator

preserves her in this story. The rose is a symbol of the age of romance in which the

aristocracy were obsessed with delusions of grandeur, pure women being a symbol of

the ideal in every phase of life. Perhaps the narrator offers this story as a “rose” for

Emily. As a lady might press a rose between the pages of a history of the South, she

keeps her own personal rose, her lover, preserved in the bridal chamber where a rose

color pervades everything. Miss Emily’s rose is ironically symbolic because her lover

was a modern Yankee, whose laughter drew the townspeople to him and whose

corpse has grinned “profoundly” for forty years, as if he, or Miss Emily, had played a

joke on all of them.

V. The Style of the Author

Flashback: When Miss Emily died, the townspeople narrated some important

highlights in her life by means of flashbacks.

Foreshadowing: When I read the part where Miss Emily bought rat poison, but

there was no mention of rats prior to that, I thought that it was for something very

important in the story. Thus, I read on with the close attention to what that poison was

really for.

Symbolism: After re-reading a few times, I strongly believe that the house, the

watch, the poison, and the matrimonial bed symbolize important things in the story. The

house symbolizes Miss Emily’s being a noble person who became a pauper, just as the

elegant house became a prison cell of some sort. Then, the watch symbolizes the timeline

of the highlights or vital events in Miss Emily’s life. Meanwhile, the poison symbolizes

death, and the matrimonial bed found in the locked room symbolizes Miss Emily’s

thoughts about marriage despite what the townspeople thought of her.

The flashback is really helpful for the readers to understand the story. The

townpeople characterize Emily using it, her life, her behavior, how Emily socializes to

her neighbors and how Emily makes her life mysterious.

The foreshadowing is not really clear for me especially for the poison part that

Emily bought poison and she said she will use it for the rats, however, where are the rats? Or it

says that, “who is the rat?”. The poison she bought is used to kill Baron Homer, so I think, he is

the rat for Emily.

Symbolism makes the story logical, if you’ll read the story, there is something

hidden or secret that the readers need to solve within the story of it. Some part of the story

slightly confusing but if you really understand the story, you will able to know the symbols or

signs in the story. But all in all, the story is great, very meaningful and you’ll get some lessons.