Analysis of A Rose For Emily
In A Rose For Emily, William Faulkner created a unassuming protagonist that, by the end of the story, is revealed to be anything but a sweet and gentle old Southern lady. It is a story of the macabre and, ultimately, a story of sadness and insanity. The story also shows how desperation and unrequited love are transformed in Miss Emily into the ultimate form of obsession. A common theme running throughout A Rose For Emily is that of decay tucked neatly into the highly ordered but friendly veneer of Southern culture. This culture was itself by this point in an advanced state of decay and ruin after the South's defeat in the Civil War. Quite early on, the reader gets the sense that something is wrong in the Grierson house but is, nonetheless, still surprised by how very wrong things are through the story's final shocking revelation.
Faulkner’s approach to A Rose for Emily is to tell the story in a disjointed order. Instead of a straightforward chronological story, Faulkner starts by dropping the reader into Miss Emily’s life near the end, and then uses a flashback technique to inform the reader about earlier parts of Miss Emily’s life. He also switches back and forth in the “person” that is speaking. Sometimes it seems to be in the first person, at other times he uses “we.” The use of “we’ seems to appear most often when Faulkner wants to emphasize that the various citizens of the town are engaging in gossip. In some ways, this gossip becomes a character in itself, apart from the individuals of the story.
The story begins with the reader being introduced to Miss Emily Grierson, an old southern spinster who has lived alone for many years as a recluse. For a brief time, she taught young people china painting, but this did not last, as fewer and fewer townspeople came to visit. The old house where Miss Emily resided was located in what was once one of the more prestigious and fashionable streets in town. It was her family home, passed down from her late father.
The decay of that part of the town and the house as described by Faulkner can be seen as a metaphor for the decay in Miss Emily's overall existence. She was a relic from another time and place. Time was moving on and leaving her behind, from the demand that she must pay her taxes by the “ the next generation” of city officials to the condition of her once stately home which “ smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell”(Faulkner 120).
Miss Emily, as well as the things around her, even her “negro” servant, were slowly fading away. Additionally, the description offered of her alludes further to this theme of decay “ She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue” resembled the description of a corpse buried and decaying” (121). Emily herself almost seems to be a ghost.
We also learn that mental illness runs in Miss Emily's family. “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” (122). So perhaps it could be easily argued that Emily's descent into madness was unavoidable.
In fact, Faulkner makes clear that Miss Emily has a long standing history of mental problems. The character’s predisposition to mental illness is not only alluded to by the revelation that a family member had previously gone insane, but also by her unwillingness to even acknowledge her father's passing. She refused to accept his death for several days before finally allowing for the removal and burial of her father's body. She appears to go beyond the normal expression of grief. In fact, she showed no grief at all, perhaps indicating that she saw little distinction between the two states of life and death. The implication may be that this is because she had always lived in between these two states, and never felt quite alive.
Yet, no matter how gruesome her actions, it is difficult not to feel, at least on some level, a sense of pity for Emily. As Faulkner makes clear, she is a woman who had been driven mad by an overbearing father and societal burdens that left her a shell of a woman, never really free to live a full and normal life on her own terms.
When, after her father's death, Miss Emily meets Homer Barron, she probably believes that, for the first time, she has a chance to experience love and happiness. Only later did she discover this was unlikely to happen. As the townswomen themselves allude to, “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.” Whatever love Miss Emily may have felt for Homer becomes twisted and unrecognizable as love through her desperate need to not be alone.
Perhaps the townspeople would have discovered that something was amiss before their finally ghastly discovery if not for the sense of “what is proper” in Southern society. For instance, when reports begin to come in about a terrible smell emanating from Miss Emily's house, the response is “Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?” (122).
There were certainly clues that something was wrong, from the terrible odor that several neighbors reported to the Judge to her unwillingness to tell the shopkeeper why she so badly wanted to purchase arsenic. Faulkner could have simply had her tell the shopkeeper that it was for rats, but she instead stared him down. Here, Faulkner shows Miss Emily counting on the fact that the shopkeeper would not press the issue because she was an old Southern lady.
While the town people felt little guilt over gossiping about Miss Emily, all under the guise of being concerned for her reputation or general well-being, they were unwilling to go too far. Indeed, it is clear that they felt a degree of disdain for the Grierson family who carried themselves too proudly by the estimation of most. Here, we see the Greek concept of “hubris” being applied to southern society.
At the same time, the ladies in town seemed most distressed when it appeared she was spending time with a man. Worst of all the man was “a Yankee” who was beneath her station, thereby dishonoring her and her family's good name.
Emily's father, who was a distinguished Colonel in the Confederate Army, clearly ruled over Emily's life with an iron hand, allowing her no room to set her own course, especially in terms of marriage. As the text states, “We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (124).
At her death, Faulkner further alludes to the ghosts that haunted Emily in life and the house that was for most of her life both a metaphorical and (as it turned out) literal mausoleum, “And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows” (127). It could be argued that Miss Emily was herself the walking dead, so to sleep with a corpse for many years was a “natural” act for her. After all, she had encased herself in a tomb, and was in virtually every way as dead as the man she once loved, in her own deranged way.
This ghost story is unusual in many ways. One of the most significant points about A Rose for Emily is that Faulkner manages to make a highly sympathetic and even pitiable character out of not only a murderer, but a murderer who was demented and committed acts most readers would find disturbing.
A Rose For Emily isn't the type of modern horror story that requires blood and gore to shock its audience. It is the story about a mentally ill women who, in her loneliness and desperation, murders a man who she saw as her last chance to be happy. The last paragraph of the story leaves the reader with a mental picture of broken down old woman, lonely and demented, sleeping in a bed next the corpse of a man that never could have loved her or saved her from herself.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. Collected Stories of William Faulkner New York: Vintage, 1977. Print
