Matthew Hochstetler 2011 Essay Writing December 5, 2011

An interpretation of A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

While William Faulkner s A Rose for Emily is the account of certain morbidly interesting events in the life and death of Miss Emily Grierson, it is more importantly about the way she is watched and perceived by the townspeople of Jefferson. Miss Emily Grierson s house is like a pedestal or stage upon which she moves about over the audience of the town she seems to have little interest in. With the town as a backdrop and the life and death of the last surviving member of an august family as the focal point, Faulkner is in a good position to contextualize truly human elements of his dear South that reflect universal characteristics in mankind at large. The story s narration is a key factor in seeing what Faulkner wants to say, especially since it is not completely clear who the narrator is. It is clear that the narrator is at least a contemporary of the events and is very often an eyewitness to the accounts that are described. He1 most definitely sees himself as a member of the community when he says that our whole town went to her funeral And he establishes himself as Jefferson s representative in expressing expectation, the one we believed would marry her, presuppositions, We had long thought of them as a tableau, and memory, We remembered all the young men her father Yet while deeply connected to the town spirit the narrator is one step removed from it. The use of we seems to bring the reader directly into the story as though also part of the whole but we is readily interchanged with they and the town creating more of a distance in certain events. This removed first-person we helps to create an atmosphere where not only Mississippians or Southerners can place themselves into the story but anyone can understand and view Emily from the Jefferson community s point of view. Through the narrator Faulkner describes many aspects of Jefferson life that could be understood as the story s focus. He spends some time describing the ruinous economic condition in which Emily Grierson s estate is in, explaining that when her father died the house was all that was left to her, reflecting the changing economic conditions in the South that came with emancipation and the industrial encroachment of garages and cotton gins. He shows racial prejudice, especially in the older generation, when Judge Stevens refers to
It could be argued that the narrator is one of the female citizens of Jefferson but he will be used to refer to a genderless narrator.
1

Emily s black manservant as that nigger of hers and when the town sees Homer Barron s niggers and mules and machinery. Emily s connection to the old Southern upper class can provide insight into its corruptions and suppression, and a look at her mental state and how she can relate to the dead corpse could be an interesting psychology experiment. However interesting all these points may be in themselves, they are best seen together as the environment in which a town accepts as a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation a woman who isolates herself from them, and who seems so little in touch with reality that she eventually kills her lover. The defining point in Emily s life seems to be when her father dies. He was all that she had, and any more that she could have had was withheld by him. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily so the house was all that was left to her. In the context of Southern culture, family and marriage were of great importance to both men and women socially as well as financially. Joel Williamson describes this mindset to require of the men to be protectors both physically and materially of their ladies and of the women to be pious and pure, domestic and submissive. Marriage was the wide gate through which boys and girls became adults and entered society 2 and Emily was never able to do this. She re-appears to the town like a girl and innocent after her father s death as though to emphasize what she has not achieved, robbed of the opportunity by her father. And since, as Williamson puts it, family and clan necessarily led to community she is left alone after he died. So she clings to him to avoid the truth of her condition. She denies that he is dead for three days and believes it so convincingly that there is no trace of grief on her face. This could have been some indication of some madness in her but the town accepts it as something she had to do, having been left with nothing, in a fallen state. That is why when Homer Barron and Emily are seen together the town is glad that Miss Emily would have an interest. With Homer, Emily seems to feel like something is in place again. Even when the older people believe Homer Barron to be entirely below her position, a Northerner, a day laborer, and begin to say Poor Emily, she carried her head high enough demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson. She meets no small resistance in her attempt to have some sort of relationship with Homer. He himself claims that he [is] not a marrying man; and the ladies of the town seem to think their connection so disgraceful, possibly because it is not progressing toward marriage, what everyone wants, that Emily s cousins from Alabama are called in to intervene. During their stay it appears wedding arrangements are made, making the town really glad. But marriage in the traditional sense is not what Emily appeared to be doing. During this same period she also buys arsenic which the town fears she will use to kill herself. In the story, the wedding preparations and the buying of the arsenic are separated by the story of

Williamson. 365 66

how the town saw Emily and Homer s courtship, not allowing an easy connection to be made to Emily s plot to use the arsenic to hold on to her lover, dead or alive.3 Williamson points out that in the Southern world To not marry was to live one s life in an incomplete state, more or less tangential to the social circle. Emily, with a predisposition to madness from her great-aunt and a social order that thought without marriage suicide would be the best thing, takes matters into her own hands to establish her place in society. She does this with a tranquility and imperviousness that is seen when she orders the arsenic from the druggist, as though she is less girlish and more a determined woman with her newly found position. Emily s actions with Homer Barron are difficult to understand, and are most grotesque if they are not seen in light of her circumstances and the way the community sees her. She is distanced from the town each time her social order is jeopardized: After her father s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. But what is it that drives this frame of mind in the first place? What has Faulkner said about Southern society that allows for this way of thinking? Faulkner emphasizes specific things that Southerners view as essential; these are described by Charles P. Roland as family, history, race, religion, and a sense of place, concreteness and the imperfectability of man. 4 Each of these things is touched on in A Rose for Emily, but a sense of place, concreteness, and the imperfectability of man are highlighted. Faulkner describes in Emily a person who is rooted in a very specific place during a specific era with a distinct character and past. Both Emily and the spirit of the town hold on to idealism, about the way things should be but are never removed from realism, the way things concretely are. This is what some theologians have called the tension of the now and the not yet, where heaven and Christlikeness (Biblical perfection) are something to be imitated but something not at all attainable. Glenn C. Arbery, in writing about the South s ontological splendor, quotes Flannery O Connor, another Southern writer, as saying the South has absorbed from the Scriptures a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured. 5 The characters in A Rose for Emily live in this tension in the same way the Protestant Southerners do. Faulkner is faithful to this idea even though the setting in Jefferson is fictional as Robert Drake points out: Faulkner s reporting is always rooted in a commitment to Mississipi and the people and places who make it up 6 But Emily and her town do not take their starting point in the concept of what is ideal; they begin with the reality of the way things are. Faulkner shows this by making his characters concrete, as has been said, rooted in a specific place, time, and past. His
3 4

Brooks. 153 Gerster. 164 5 Arbery. 41. Full quote: What has given the South her identity are those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation: a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured. 6 Drake. 419

descriptions of Emily, her house, and the townspeople establish their being and make them real both physically and historically; before Emily does anything she exists: her father, family, and town, her black eyes, the shape of her body, and her movements and actions. In this sense A Rose for Emily could be compared to Flannery O Connor s Good Country People. Hulga s wooden leg becomes the subject of much attention in the story and O Connor explains later that without ceasing to appeal to [the average reader] and without making any statements of high intention, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience, by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning. 7 O Connor focuses on the things themselves and then draws lines to other levels of meaning as Arbery explains. Emily s concrete obsession with marriage and with her lover and the towns hopes for her are a witness to an idea that things are not quite right, the way they should be. Drake uses Brooks analysis to show that Emily is a tragic, even heroic figure who does hold her lover and does impose her will on the community, let it think what it will not as a case study but as real person doing real things. The details and the grotesque for Faulkner are a focus on the things themselves, and no matter how Emily tries to fall in line with what should be she witnesses to the imperfectability of man. Her community does not see her as horrid, wicked, or a murdering outcast. They went to her funeral through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the men at least. She was crazy, yes, but also dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse. Faulkner brings out of the grotesque the human, and the town agrees with this in the chorus of narration. This is the essence of A Rose for Emily. When Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 he said that his work brought into focus the struggle of the human spirit, his eternal value, and truths of the heart, 8 and it is clear that this short story is no exception. Emily does, after all, as people will.

7 8

Arbery. 42 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html. Dec. 5, 2011.

Bibliography

Arbery, Glenn C. 2011. Ontological Splendor: Flannery O Connor in the Protestant South. The Intercollegiate Review, spring, 41 50. Bredvold, Louis I. 1964. The World as Yoknapatawpha. Modern Age, Fall issue, 429 30. Brooks, Cleanth. 1990. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. 1978; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Drake, Robert. 1978. In and Out of Yoknapatawpha. Modern Age, Fall issue, 418 20. Gerster, Patrick and Nicholas Cords (eds). 1989. Myth and Southern History, vol 2. 1974; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Link, Arthur S. and William B. Catton. 1974. American Epoch: A History of the United States Since 1900, vol III, Fourth Edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Williamson, Joel. 1993. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html. Dec. 5, 2011. Nobel Prize in Literature: Faulkner s banquet speech.