A Rose For Emily By William Faulkner

Miss Emily was raised in the glory days of the South when traditional ideas and customs were a part of everyday life. After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Era, the atmosphere had changed and Miss Emily was now faced with a different social setting, one that was unfamiliar to her. As the culture of the South began to deteriorate, so did Miss Emily’s grasp on the life she once held to be true. The home of Miss Emily serves a symbol in this story, showcasing her life’s demise as well as the physical and cultural demise of the Southern lifestyle. Her “fallen

Emily’s father later passes away but because she has no one else, she held onto her father’s body for fear of being alone once she let him go. After three days of holding on, she finally allowed her father’s body to go out for burial. After her father’s passing, Emily refused to pay any taxes on the home, even when approached by the new city officials. Many years later, in her home, she told them, “See Colonel Sartoris, I

Through Emily Grierson, the author tries to convey the struggle against change. Emily herself is a tradition. Over the years, Emily does not change much even though the world around her is changing every day. Emily is entirely cut off from society to the point where she does not even leave her house. No one can understand why. Emily refuses to have numbers attached to the side of her house when the town decides they will be starting mail delivery. She also has not paid taxes in years, supposedly because her father lent money to the town and forgiving Emily’s taxes is the town 's way of repaying her. When the Board of Alderman comes to Emily’s house, explaining why she needed to pay taxes, her repeated response is “See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson” (79). Little does she know, Colonel Sartoris died ten years prior, which is just another example of how cut off from society she is.

“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. “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days.” While the corpse of her father remained in the house for three days while Miss Emily refused to accept the her father was dead and that she was now “left alone and a pauper,” she had no idea what to do now that she was alone. She did not know how to accept the fact that she could now make her own decisions. “So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.”

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 both William Faulkner’s, “A Rose for Emily”, and Kate Chopin’s, “The Storm”, the setting is a very vital part of the literary work. In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner introduces us to an older lady named Emily, who was very well known in her town. As we learn through Faulkner’s use of imagery and description, Miss Emily has a rather hard time letting go of people she holds dear to her. We learn that in her basement we have a very raunchy smell. The neighbors try to mask the smell by squirting lime juice, but little do they know it’s the body of her father. At the end of the story we are left in her bedroom with the rotting body of her once lover in her bed. Where there is a strange finding on the pillow beside him. In “The Storm,” we are introduced to Calixta, who is at home alone, doing her wifely duties when an unexpected storm and a visitor arrives. We soon learn that the visitor is a man named Alcee and they have an affair during the storm. When the storm is over and Alcee has left, Calixta’s husband and son arrive safely. We see that Calixta acts as if nothing happened, and assumes her role as the worried mother. They all sit down and have a good laugh while they eat dinner that night. Kate Chopin’s, “The Storm,” does a better job in creating the setting than Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” because Kate thoroughly depicts an image of Calixta’s house and bedroom. While Faulkner only describes the outside of Miss Emily’s home.

     The narrator, a random townsperson, illustrates very well the awe and fear the town held for Miss Emily. To them, she portrayed everything that they wished they could be, and all that they were glad not to be. They held a twisted form of respect for her. When she dies, she is referred to as a "fallen monument" whom the men went to see out of a "respectful affection," much like that of your child's pet, who you go through the funeral for, but will never really understand. The women of the town went "mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one…had seen in at least ten years." They had always wondered what she was like, but never really found out. It was not their place to speak with her, for she was a Grierson, albeit a fallen one. Miss Emily was aware of this class distinction, refusing to receive the townswomen into her home after her father's death. Miss Emily had to maintain her image of propriety that had been placed

Miss Emily is a young girl, who’s devastated after her father’s death, she is an object of pity for the townspeople. Since then, Emily hasn’t paid any of the property taxes because of past favors that her father had done for the town. After her father’s death, Miss Emily continued to portray herself as a very dignified woman. Even when she became ill she was determined to maintain her status in the community and the townspeople realized that she continued to demand their recognition of her as the last Grierson remaining in the town. “She carried her head high enough even when we believed that she was fallen.”

The tale summons up the Emily’s through flashbacks of several points, much like every persons mind in life when recalling (Faulkner, pg 56). The speaker talks about how much of a trouble Miss Emily was to the township as a result of her old fashion ways. All through the story, we learn about Miss Emily’s partner standings and isolation. Her character is a very old fashion woman who still believed in the confederate period and was follower to those policies.

Towards the latter of her life, she had no friends, no close relations, and no co-dependency. During the years when Miss Emily was only attuned to her thoughts and emotions, it created an unhealthy environment in the way she thinked and lived. Take into account that year after year, she would sent back the notice of tax, unpaid. Her tenacity in not paying the notice decade after decade is so persistent that it makes sense why Miss Emily would resort to murderous methods to go against the judgments of the townspeople. This lifelong loneliness, “...it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized” (32). is an unhealthy factor to her mentality. When the townspeople witnessed a woman lose her father, they viewed it as “humanizing” instead of a tragedy and rejoiced in “pitying” her. The townspeople’s reaction was shallow, it lacked depth and understanding to Miss Emily, but it cannot be helped because Miss Emily made herself impossible to be understood by the

Early in the story, before the extent of her symptoms has become clear. Rather, it is her refusal to listen to aldermen at all that makes her more than just a stubborn town weirdo. There are two other incidents that are equally telling. When Miss Emily goes to the store to buy poison, she is described as lacking in emotions, withholding information from the pharmacist about the reason for her request. The other important episode, besides the obvious psychotic act of sleeping with a corpse, involves Miss Emily’s purchases of items for the man that the town believes is her husband to be who is dead and decaying in Miss Emily’s bed. Indeed, when the townspeople kick down the bedroom door years later, the narrator describes a scene that is “adorned and furnished for a honeymoon” frozen in time and covered with spider webs and tarnish (Faulkner 2165). It is obvious Miss Emily’s understanding of reality had slipped completely

Change is Miss Emily’s enemy. The world is changing around her and she completely refuses to accept it, whether that change is the death of her father, her home decaying, the arrival of tax bills, or even the beginning of residential mail delivery

Her house was the only house with cotton wagons, and gasoline pumps. The town described her house as an eyesore which meant that it hurt to look at it. Great reasoning behind why Miss Emily won’t change is, “Change is resisted because it can hurt. When new technologies displace old ones, jobs can be lost; prices can be cut; investments can be wiped out” (Ten Reasons People Change 1). Miss Emily knows she does not have anyone and that hurts her.

“A Rose for Emily”, written by William Faulkner in 1931, follows a series of peculiar events in Miss Emily Griersons life. Written in third person limited, Faulkner utilizes flashbacks to tell of the period between the death of Emily’s father and her own passing. Split into five short sections, the story starts out with the townspeople of Jefferson remembering Emily’s legacy and how each new generation of government officials dealt with the issue of her taxes. Moving on, the narrator describes the gradual downfall of Emily Grierson, due to complaints that begin to arise of a bad odor around her house. In the third section of this short story, the people of Jefferson begin to pity Emily for her involvement with a man beneath her social status, Homer Barron. Towards the end of this section, the community is convinced that she has gone crazy, following her purchase of arsenic from a pharmacist. At this point, there has been speculation that Emily would marry Homer, but he eventually disappears. The story closes with not only Emily’s aged body being found in her house, but the corpse of Homer being discovered in one of her upstairs rooms. Throughout this whole narrative, the name of the author is never revealed, but Faulkner leaves clues for the reader to make assumptions on who this person is that knows Emily Griersons story so well. In “A Rose for Emily,” although it is never directly

Emily behaves the way she does for numerous reasons. She is born into an aristocratic family. Emily is brought up as a Southern belle by her father and is placed on a pedestal by the townspeople. The Grierson’s are known in town for being extremely wealthy and having the nicest house in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County. Due to the fact that her father, Mr. Grierson, keeps her isolated and socially restricted as a child, she behaves abnormally. Emily feels as if she is pressured to live up to her father’s expectations. Because Emily is kept away from everything, she is not yet exposed to the real world.