Context
William Faulkner was born in New Albany , Mississippi Mississippi
In his writing, Faulkner was particularly interested in
exploring the moral implications of history. As the South emerged from the
Civil War and Reconstruction and attempted to shed the stigma of slavery, its
residents were frequently torn between a new and an older, more established
world order. Religion and politics frequently fail to provide order and
guidance and instead complicate and divide. Society, with its gossip, judgment,
and harsh pronouncements, conspires to thwart the ambitions of individuals struggling
to embrace their identities. Across Faulkner’s fictional landscapes, individual
characters often stage epic struggles, prevented from realizing their potential
or establishing their place in the world.
“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. Despite the earlier publication of several novels, when Faulkner
published this story he was still struggling to make a name for himself in the United States
Today, the much-anthologized story is among the most widely
read and highly praised of Faulkner’s work. Beyond its lurid appeal and
somewhat Gothic atmosphere, Faulkner’s “ghost story,” as he once called it,
gestures to broader ideas, including the tensions between North and South,
complexities of a changing world order, disappearing realms of gentility and
aristocracy, and rigid social constraints placed on women. Ultimately, it is
the story’s chilling portrait of aberrant psychology and necrophilia that draws
readers into the dank, dusty world of Emily Grierson.
Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the
Pulitzer Prize in both 1955 and 1962. He died in Byhalia , Mississippi
Plot Overview
The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the
narrator recalls the time of Emily Grierson’s death and how the entire town
attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for more than
ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emily’s house is the last
vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous
mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities to the town after her
father’s death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once
lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make
unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the
Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily
reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson
and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter.
However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her
servant, Tobe, to show the men out.
In section II, the narrator describes a time thirty years
earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town
leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from her
property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man
whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge
Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime sprinkled along the
foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of
weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly
reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity. The
townspeople have always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of
themselves, with Emily’s father driving off the many suitors deemed not good
enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is
still single by the time she turns thirty.
The day after Mr. Grierson’s death, the women of the town
call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily
states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days.
She finally turns her father’s body over for burial.
In section III, the narrator describes a long illness that
Emily suffers after this incident. The summer after her father’s death, the
town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks, and a construction company, under
the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is awarded the job. Homer soon
becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on
Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the town and increases the condescension
and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride
and becoming involved with a man beneath her station.
As the affair continues and Emily’s reputation is further
compromised, she goes to the drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison.
She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She offers no
explanation, and the package arrives at her house labeled “For rats.”
In section IV, the narrator describes the fear that some of
the townspeople have that Emily will use the poison to kill herself. Her
potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly unlikely, despite their
continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town insist that the
Baptist minister talk with Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what
happened and swears that he’ll never go back. So the minister’s wife writes to
Emily’s two cousins in Alabama
After the cousins’ departure, Homer enters the Grierson home
one evening and then is never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows
plump and gray. Despite the occasional lesson she gives in china painting, her
door remains closed to outsiders. In what becomes an annual ritual, Emily
refuses to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes up the top floor of
the house. Except for the occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing is
heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the servant is seen
going in and out of the house.
In section V, the narrator describes what happens after
Emily dies. Emily’s body is laid out in the parlor, and the women, town elders,
and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed, the door to a
sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by
the townspeople. The room is frozen in time, with the items for an upcoming
wedding and a man’s suit laid out. Homer Barron’s body is stretched on the bed
as well, in an advanced state of decay. The onlookers then notice the
indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer’s body and a long strand of
Emily’s gray hair on the pillow.
Analysis of Major Characters
Emily Grierson
Emily is the classic outsider, controlling and limiting the
town’s access to her true identity by remaining hidden. The house that shields
Emily from the world suggests the mind of the woman who inhabits it: shuttered,
dusty, and dark. The object of the town’s intense scrutiny, Emily is a muted
and mysterious figure. On one level, she exhibits the qualities of the
stereotypical southern “eccentric”: unbalanced, excessively tragic, and subject
to bizarre behavior. Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, such as
when she refuses to pay her taxes or state her purpose for buying the poison.
Emily also skirts the law when she refuses to have numbers attached to her
house when federal mail service is instituted. Her dismissal of the law
eventually takes on more sinister consequences, as she takes the life of the
man whom she refuses to allow to abandon her.
The narrator portrays Emily as a monument, but at the same
time she is pitied and often irritating, demanding to live life on her own
terms. The subject of gossip and speculation, the townspeople cluck their
tongues at the fact that she accepts Homer’s attentions with no firm wedding
plans. After she purchases the poison, the townspeople conclude that she will
kill herself. Emily’s instabilities, however, lead her in a different
direction, and the final scene of the story suggests that she is a
necrophiliac. Necrophilia typically means a sexual attraction to dead bodies.
In a broader sense, the term also describes a powerful desire to control
another, usually in the context of a romantic or deeply personal relationship.
Necrophiliacs tend to be so controlling in their relationships that they
ultimately resort to bonding with unresponsive entities with no resistance or
will—in other words, with dead bodies. Mr. Grierson controlled Emily, and after
his death, Emily temporarily controls him by refusing to give up his dead body.
She ultimately transfers this control to Homer, the object of her affection.
Unable to find a traditional way to express her desire to possess Homer, Emily
takes his life to achieve total power over him.
Homer Barron
Homer, much like Emily, is an outsider, a stranger in town
who becomes the subject of gossip. Unlike Emily, however, Homer swoops into
town brimming with charm, and he initially becomes the center of attention and
the object of affection. Some townspeople distrust him because he is both a
Northerner and day laborer, and his Sunday outings with Emily are in many ways
scandalous, because the townspeople regard Emily—despite her eccentricities—as
being from a higher social class. Homer’s failure to properly court and marry
Emily prompts speculation and suspicion. He carouses with younger men at the
Elks Club, and the narrator portrays him as either a homosexual or simply an
eternal bachelor, dedicated to his single status and uninterested in marriage.
Homer says only that he is “not a marrying man.”
As the foreman of a company that has arrived in town to pave
the sidewalks, Homer is an emblem of the North and the changes that grip the
once insular and genteel world of the South. With his machinery, Homer represents
modernity and industrialization, the force of progress that is upending
traditional values and provoking resistance and alarm among traditionalists.
Homer brings innovation to the rapidly changing world of this Southern town,
whose new leaders are themselves pursuing more “modern” ideas. The change that
Homer brings to Emily’s life, as her first real lover, is equally as profound
and seals his grim fate as the victim of her plan to keep him permanently by
her side.
Judge Stevens - A 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 - Emily’s servant. Tobe, 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 - A 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.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
Tradition versus
Change
Through the mysterious figure of Emily Grierson, Faulkner
conveys the struggle that comes from trying to maintain tradition in the face
of widespread, radical change. Jefferson is at
a crossroads, embracing a modern, more commercial future while still perched on
the edge of the past, from the faded glory of the Grierson home to the town
cemetery where anonymous Civil War soldiers have been laid to rest. Emily
herself is a tradition, steadfastly staying the same over the years despite
many changes in her community. She is in many ways a mixed blessing. As a
living monument to the past, she represents the traditions that people wish to
respect and honor; however, she is also a burden and entirely cut off from the
outside world, nursing eccentricities that others cannot understand.
Emily lives in a timeless vacuum and world of her own
making. Refusing to have metallic numbers affixed to the side of her house when
the town receives modern mail service, she is out of touch with the reality
that constantly threatens to break through her carefully sealed perimeters.
Garages and cotton gins have replaced the grand antebellum homes. The aldermen
try to break with the unofficial agreement about taxes once forged between
Colonel Sartoris and Emily. This new and younger generation of leaders brings
in Homer’s company to pave the sidewalks. Although Jefferson
still highly regards traditional notions of honor and reputation, the narrator
is critical of the old men in their Confederate uniforms who gather for Emily’s
funeral. For them as for her, time is relative. The past is not a faint glimmer
but an ever-present, idealized realm. Emily’s macabre bridal chamber is an
extreme attempt to stop time and prevent change, although doing so comes at the
expense of human life.
The Power of Death
Death hangs over “A Rose for Emily,” from the narrator’s
mention of Emily’s death at the beginning of the story through the description
of Emily’s death-haunted life to the foundering of tradition in the face of
modern changes. In every case, death prevails over every attempt to master it.
Emily, a fixture in the community, gives in to death slowly. The narrator
compares her to a drowned woman, a bloated and pale figure left too long in the
water. In the same description, he refers to her small, spare skeleton—she is
practically dead on her feet. Emily stands as an emblem of the Old South, a
grand lady whose respectability and charm rapidly decline through the years,
much like the outdated sensibilities the Griersons represent. The death of the
old social order will prevail, despite many townspeople’s attempts to stay true
to the old ways.
Emily attempts to exert power over death by denying the fact
of death itself. Her bizarre relationship to the dead bodies of the men she has
loved—her necrophilia—is revealed first when her father dies. Unable to admit
that he has died, Emily clings to the controlling paternal figure whose denial
and control became the only—yet extreme—form of love she knew. She gives up his
body only reluctantly. When Homer dies, Emily refuses to acknowledge it once
again—although this time, she herself was responsible for bringing about the
death. In killing Homer, she was able to keep him near her. However, Homer’s
lifelessness rendered him permanently distant. Emily and Homer’s grotesque
marriage reveals Emily’s disturbing attempt to fuse life and death. However,
death ultimately triumphs.
Motifs
Watching
Emily is the subject of the intense, controlling gaze of the
narrator and residents of Jefferson . In lieu
of an actual connection to Emily, the townspeople create subjective and often
distorted interpretations of the woman they know little about. They attend her
funeral under the guise of respect and honor, but they really want to satisfy
their lurid curiosity about the town’s most notable eccentric. One of the
ironic dimensions of the story is that for all the gossip and theorizing, no
one guesses the perverse extent of Emily’s true nature.
For most of the story, Emily is seen only from a distance,
by people who watch her through the windows or who glimpse her in her doorway.
The narrator refers to her as an object—an “idol.” This pattern changes briefly
during her courtship with Homer Barron, when she leaves her house and is
frequently out in the world. However, others spy on her just as avidly, and she
is still relegated to the role of object, a distant figure who takes on
character according to the whims of those who watch her. In this sense, the act
of watching is powerful because it replaces an actual human presence with a
made-up narrative that changes depending on who is doing the watching. No one
knows the Emily that exists beyond what they can see, and her true self is
visible to them only after she dies and her secrets are revealed.
Dust
A pall of dust hangs over the story, underscoring the decay
and decline that figure so prominently. The dust throughout Emily’s house is a
fitting accompaniment to the faded lives within. When the aldermen arrive to
try and secure Emily’s annual tax payment, the house smells of “dust and
disuse.” As they seat themselves, the movement stirs dust all around them, and
it slowly rises, roiling about their thighs and catching the slim beam of
sunlight entering the room. The house is a place of stasis, where regrets and
memories have remained undisturbed. In a way, the dust is a protective
presence; the aldermen cannot penetrate Emily’s murky relationship with
reality. The layers of dust also suggest the cloud of obscurity that hides
Emily’s true nature and the secrets her house contains. In the final scene, the
dust is an oppressive presence that seems to emanate from Homer’s dead body.
The dust, which is everywhere, seems even more horrible here.
Symbols
Emily’s House
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
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 and the Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a literary tradition that came into its
own in the early twentieth century. It is rooted in the Gothic style, which had
been popular in European literature for many centuries. Gothic writers
concocted wild, frightening scenarios in which mysterious secrets, supernatural
occurrences, and characters’ extreme duress conspired to create a breathless
reading experience. Gothic style focused on the morbid and grotesque, and the
genre often featured certain set pieces and characters: drafty castles laced
with cobwebs, secret passages, and frightened, wide-eyed heroines whose
innocence does not go untouched. Although they borrow the essential ingredients
of the Gothic, writers of Southern Gothic fiction were not interested in integrating
elements of the sensational solely for the sake of creating suspense or
titillation. Writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman
Capote, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, Erskine Caldwell, and Carson McCullers were
drawn to the elements of Gothicism for what they revealed about human
psychology and the dark, underlying motives that were pushed to the fringes of
society.
Southern Gothic writers were interested in exploring the
extreme, antisocial behaviors that were often a reaction against a confining
code of social conduct. Southern Gothic often hinged on the belief that daily
life and the refined surface of the social order were fragile and illusory,
disguising disturbing realities or twisted psyches. Faulkner, with his dense
and multilayered prose, traditionally stands outside this group of
practitioners. However, “A Rose for Emily” reveals the influence that Southern
Gothic had on his writing: this particular story has a moody and forbidding
atmosphere; a crumbling old mansion; and decay, putrefaction, and grotesquerie.
Faulkner’s work uses the sensational elements to highlight an individual’s
struggle against an oppressive society that is undergoing rapid change. Another
aspect of the Southern Gothic style is appropriation and transformation.
Faulkner has appropriated the image of the damsel in distress and transformed
it into Emily, a psychologically damaged spinster. Her mental instability and
necrophilia have made her an emblematic Southern Gothic heroine.
Time and Temporal Shifts
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.
The 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.
Important Quotations Explained
1. Alive, Miss Emily
had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town . . .
This quotation appears near the beginning of the story, in
section I, when the narrator describes Emily’s funeral and history in the town.
The complex figure of Emily Grierson casts a long shadow in the town of Jefferson Jefferson family, and the
townspeople feel that they have inherited this daughter of a faded empire of
wealth and prestige, for better or worse.
The order of Faulkner’s words in this quotation is
significant. Although Emily once represented a great southern tradition
centering on the landed gentry with their vast holdings and considerable
resources, Emily’s legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an
obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order. The town leaders conveniently
overlook the fact that in her straightened circumstances and solitary life,
Emily can no longer meet her tax obligations with the town. Emily emerges as
not only a financial burden to the town but a figure of outrage because she
unsettles the community’s strict social codes.
2. 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.
These lines end the story. Emily’s secret, finally revealed,
solidifies her reputation in the town as an eccentric. Her precarious mental
state has led her to perform a grotesque act that surpasses the townspeople’s
wildest imaginings. Emily, although she deliberately sets up a solitary
existence for herself, is unable to give up the men who have shaped her life,
even after they have died. She hides her dead father for three days, then
permanently hides Homer’s body in the upstairs bedroom. In entombing her lover,
Emily keeps her fantasy of marital bliss permanently intact.
Emily’s excessive need for privacy is challenged by the
townspeople’s extreme curiosity about the facts surrounding her life.
Unsatisfied with glimpses caught through doorways and windows, the townspeople
essentially break into the Grierson home after Emily’s death. Convincing
themselves that they are behaving respectfully by waiting until a normal period
of mourning has expired, they satisfy their lurid curiosity by unsealing the
second-floor bedroom. There is no real moral justification for their act, and
in light of their blatant violation of Emily’s home and privacy, Emily’s
eccentric, grotesque behavior takes on a layer of almost sympathetic pathos.
She has done a horrible, nightmarish thing, yet the confirmation of the
townspeople’s worst beliefs seems sad, rather than satisfying or a cause for
celebration.
