A Rose For Emily : A Tale Of The Clash Between Generations

In “A Rose for Emily”, Charles Faulkner used a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing to tell Miss Emily’s story. Miss Emily is an interesting character, to say the least. In such a short story of her life, as told from the prospective of a townsperson, who had been nearly eighty as Miss Emily had been, in order to tell the story from their own perspective. Faulkner set up the story in Mississippi, in a world he knew of in his own lifetime. Inspired by a southern outlook that had been touched by the Civil War memory, the touch of what we would now look at as racism, gives the southern aroma of the period. It sets up Miss Emily’s southern belle status and social standing she had been born into, loner or not.

“At last they could pity Emily” (453) or at least that is what the community thought they could do when Emily lost her father and became “humanized” (453). Emily is one of the most prominent people of her time and is even recognized through a story all written about her. This analytical essay of “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner without doubt, uses symbolism to portray change and decay throughout the story by using Emily’s home, Mr. Grierson, and herself.

“Garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner 52). With the small town of Jefferson growing into a modern, more commercial area, Miss Emily’s traditional ways and unchanged house leave the town in a critical situation. They must choose to move forward or continue to live in the ways of the past. In William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” he embraces the theme, tradition versus change, in an effort to display that traditions are important and should be honored, however they can also hold you back and separate you from the

The most inevitable aspect of time is that it continues to move on, and it forces people to move with it. In his story “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner illustrates the passage of time as it affects the southern hometown of Miss Emily Grierson. The narrater relates the town’s recollections of Emily’s life—the unmarried daughter of the late mayor who does not want to pay her property taxes—and eventually her death. The Gothic and horror elements of the story add to the sensational tale of an unstable spinster and her morbid secrets. On the exterior, the story seems to be the product of the townspeople’s general curiosity of an estranged and lonely woman; it takes on the character of a gossip story or a folk tale. However, a closer look at Faulker’s treatment of Emily in relation to the rest of the town indicates that the story has a larger purpose. Emily becomes a fixture in a town that continues to adapt, and her refusal to change with it leaves her classified as archaic and isolated. While an initial reading of “A Rose for Emily” would suggest that that the story is about the eccentrics of Emily Grierson, Faulker’s perspective and use of temporal shifts reveal that the story in fact illustrates the tension between the past and the present, and ultimately displays the danger of refusing to accept the passage of time.

William Faulkner has done a wonderful work in his essay “A Rose for Emily.” Faulkner uses symbols, settings, character development, and other literary devices to express the life of Emily and the behavior of the people of Jefferson town towards her. By reading the essay, the audience cannot really figure out who the narrator is. It seems like the narrator can be the town’s collective voice. The fact that the narrator uses collective pronoun we supports the theory that the narrator is describing the life of “Miss Emily” on behalf of the townspeople. Faulkner has used the flashback device in his essay to make it more interesting. The story begins with the portrayal of Emily’s funeral and it moves to her past and at the end the readers realize that the funeral is a flashback as well. The story starts with the death of Miss Emily when he was seventy-four years old and it takes us back when she is a young and attractive girl.

William Faulkner is a well-known author, whose writing belongs in the Realism era in the American Literary Canon. His writing was influence by his Southern upbringing, often setting his stories in the fictional Southern town, Yoknapatawpha County. “A Rose for Emily” was one of Faulkner’s first published pieces and displays many of the now signature characteristics of Faulkner’s writing. The short story provides commentary through the use of many symbols. In William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily”, the author uses the townspeople as a representation of societal expectations and judgments, Emily and her house as symbols for the past, and Homer’s corpse as a physical representation of the fear of loneliness.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a complicated and controversial tale that, since its publication in 1930, challenges social norms. The story is about the unfortunate life of an aristocratic woman, Miss Emily Grierson, whose decrepit demeanor and eccentric behavior make her the town’s subject of scrutiny. After a series of odd events, Miss Emily dies and, upon her death, the townspeople discover that her seclusion led her to harness the heinous powers of arsenic to murder Homer Barron, the lover that attempted to desert her. Miss Emily kills Homer Barron because the town’s incessant gossiping, recognition of her gender, and acute awareness of her status create a toxic environment of isolation that drives her to insanity and, ultimately,

A suspenseful tale of tradition versus change is told with the help of literary elements in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. Foreshadowing and symbolism develop Emily’s tragic fate in a way the reader is exposed to how deeply death and sociatal change have effected Miss Emily. Faulkner displays how effective these elements are for a short story to truly have an impact on the

In the short story “A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner escorts the reader through the peculiar life of the main character Miss Emily Grierson. The gloomy tone of the story is set by the author beginning his tale with the funeral of Miss Emily. During course of the story, we are taken through different times in Miss Emily’s life and how she was lost in time, with the town around her moving forward. Through the use of southern gothic writing style, narrator point of view, and foreshadowing, Faulkner aids the reader in creating a visualization of Miss Emily and the town in which she lives while also giving an insight into her sanity.

In “A Rose for Emily, the quiet town of Jefferson is inhabited by a living monument of time, Miss Emily Grierson. Miss Emily inevitably lived in the only house left on her street, with everyone else overwhelmed with Emily’s presence. William Faulkner demonstrates a theme of traditional values overpowering a changing society by his use of conflict and symbolism. Following the division of the North and South in the United States, the Civil war molded many people, including protagonist Emily Grierson, into an idealistic view of what they once were, and created a barrier between old values and new values. Without opposition from the outside world, Miss Emily Grierson suppressed herself into a “time capsule” within her own home.

In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, Emily is a woman out of time. Faulkner creates both a temporal and spatial setting for the story, allowing it to be in two dimensions: the old times and the modern times. Emily lives somewhere in between those two periods of time. Even though she is an outcast, she is still influenced by the culture and traditions in her society.

In 1930 William Faulkner published his very first story, “A Rose for Emily.” The story emerges with the funeral of Emily Grierson and discloses the story out of sequence; Faulkner brings into play an anonymous first-person narrator thought to be the representation of Grierson’s municipality. Miss Emily Grierson’s life was read to be controlled by her father and all his restrictions. Grierson was raised through her life with the thought that no man was adequate for her. Stuck in her old ways, Grierson continued with the Old South’s traditions once her father had passed. Awhile following her father’s death, Emily aims to put the longing for love to a stop and allows Homer Barron to enter her life. Faulkner portrays the literary movement of Modernism utilizing allegory through the post-bellum South after the American Civil War. In the short story “A Rose Emily,” William Faulkner uses a series of symbols to illustrate the prominent theme of the resistance of the refinement of life around Miss Emily.

Faulkner illustrates time bottled and swirling around by focusing on the circular, repetitive aspect that he emphasizes by the non-chronological structure of “A Rose for Emily”. Society, even through changing times, remains the same. As time passes, her father “thwarted” Miss Emily with his racist and egotistical ways (140). After his death, Miss Emily became “humanized” to the people, and she eventually began to lash out against her father’s strict rules by having “relations” with a “Yankee” (137, 140, 138). After dabbling with the future of America, the innovation and freedom of the North, Miss Emily chose to remain in the past following the footsteps of her father because of the principles he instilled.

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…” (Faulkner 391). “A Rose for Emily,” written by William Faulkner, is about a woman named Miss Emily Grierson living in the small southern town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Set in the late 1800s, the story takes the reader inside the private and mysterious life of Miss Emily-a woman of tradition. Much like Miss Emily, William Faulkner was a private man. However, as Faulkner’s fame grew larger, he began to receive unwelcoming scrutiny from the public (Padgett 1). Similarly, the townspeople closely watch Miss Emily throughout the short story trying to unveil the secrets she is hiding. In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner uses theme, symbolism,

In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” the story is revolved around the character Emily Grierson. The story is told by the townspeople where Emily lives. These people are attending her funeral and pitching in memories and tales they remember from Emily’s life. It is through the collective voices and opinions of the crowd that the reader is able to interpret Emily’s struggles. With Emily Grierson’s choices the reader can tell that she is a dependant woman, with psychotic tendencies, and does not take the thought of change and rejection lightly.