In ‘A Rose for Emily’ the central character is arguably the narrator. William Faulkner uses ‘we’ – the first person plural - to tell the story, and this anonymous narrator is the town itself almost telling us the dramatic events of Emily Grierson’s life. There is only a single very important moment when Faulkner changes for deliberate effect from ‘we’ to ‘they.’ Overall, when we come to the conclusion of the story, we understand that Faulkner uses this highly unusual and little-used narrative device to mock the townsfolk and to condemn the attitudes of the citizens.
Emily Grierson lives as a recluse by the end of the story and has done for many years. Her family were once influential and rich. Because of her family background, .the townspeople like to gossip and speculate about what she is doing and with whom. The pluralized narrator comes across as prying and intrusive, and seems to know all the very private details of her life. It is little wonder, then, that she has become a recluse in a town where she can get no privacy at all and where even her love-life is the subject of idle gossip and petty speculation.
Her father is presented by Faulkner as the most important person in her life. The “crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father” is first referred to on page 49, but is mentioned several more times in the story, and at her funeral it is positioned on the top of her coffin (58). The narrator asserts as fact that her father has “driven away” all “the young men” (52) who had tried to court Emily, because he felt none of them were good enough for her, given the importance of her family – or so we are told by the narrator. The first indication of her eccentricity is seen on the death of her father. The townswomen go to her house to give her their sympathies, but “She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days” (52). Shortly after the death of her father “her sweetheart – the one we believed would marry her – had deserted her.” (50) The narrator sounds very confident about what the town knows – “the one we believed would marry her” – but only seems to value Emily herself in-so-far-as she provides a good subject for entertaining and diverting gossip. This prying, inquisitive obsession with Miss Emily’s private life worsens as the story progresses. For example, everyone in the town is aware that she has bought some arsenic and it is assumed that she will commit suicide – but not a single person does anything at all to help her, despite what they think are her intentions, because they find it much more fun to gossip and talk about her: she provides them with vicarious entertainment.
Homer Barron’s apparent courtship of Miss Emily causes further opportunity for the town to engage in prying gossip. “We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece.” (55) “We learned” because everyone is talking about her. The narrator’s true character is shown when Homer Barron simply disappears: the narrator says, “We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing off” (56), clearly because a “public blowing –off” would have been very entertaining for the town to witness and then talk about endlessly. However, Homer comes back to town after three days, and Emily becomes, from the moment of his return, a virtual recluse.
At end of the story Miss Emily dies, and, again out of prying, intrusive inquisitiveness, the townsfolk go through her house, breaking into an upstairs badroom which is locked. In the bed on one side they discover the putrefying corpse of Homer Barron, poisoned with arsenic by Emily so that she would never lose him and he could never leave her again. The presence on the pillow nest to his head of one long, gray hair suggests very strongly that Emily has sometimes slept alongside her murdered lover. It is here at the very end of the story that Faulkner suddenly changes from “we” to “they” (58) when he describes the decision to break open the door to Miss Emily’s bedroom. This change in the narrative perspective may suggest that it is wrong to intrude on Miss Emily’s privacy. Even more disturbing is the revelation that “We knew that there was one room in that region upstairs that no-one had seen for forty years.” (58). How on earth does the narrator know about this room? Have the townsfolk interrogated Miss Emily’s servant about the house and her behaviour? Have they always believed it possible that Homer Barron had been murdered by Emily? Faulkner does not tell us. But what is made completely clear is that Emily Grierson has committed murder while the townsfolk have seen her as a diverting and entertaining subject of idle gossip rather than a woman who desperately needs their help.
Work Cited
Faulkner, William. ‘A Rose for Emily.’ Pages 47 -59 in Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner. 1930. New York: Random House.
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