Essay about A Rose For Emily - In Memory Of Emily Grierson

Her unwillingness to change after the civil war was one of the reasons she was so isolated. The narrator tells us twice that Miss Emily is similar to an idol, probably because she was raised to think she was above others, and others were raised to look up to her as well.  She was stuck with the mindset that she was better than others, even when the community was changing she believed that she didn’t have to obey the law. She also kept to herself and no one knew anything about her. According to Faulkner, the quote “…A note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin flowing calligraphy in faded ink…” shows me in a symbolic way, that Emily is stuck in time. The story of Emily is old and dated itself. The author uses the words archaic, calligraphy, and faded. It took me back in time while reading these words, which is exactly what Emily is.

Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal

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.

Miss Emily was a dynamic character because she changed and became withdrawn from the people in her community over the course of the story. In the exposition, she is a prominent and active figure in her community. Her character changed as she encountered the tragedy of her father’s death. However, she still was spotted occasionally by the townspeople. Faulkner shows this by declaring, “She carried her head high enough- even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness” (Faulkner 36-37). After Homer’s disappearance, Miss Emily became a true introvert. The author supports this idea when he states, “After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all” (Faulkner 34). The townspeople noticed changes

Faulkner continues his southern gothic writing style when the story goes back to an earlier time in Miss Emily’s life. Faulkner

The Reconstruction Era pushes away the refinement of Emily’s time and leaves her obsolete in a culture where she feels foreign and ostracized. Because of the Civil War and the following Reconstruction Era, the transformation of society challenges Emily’s strength of character, but she stays true to herself and her upbringing. Out of desperation to preserve her way of life and yet acquire a husband, she attaches her affections basically to the first man who comes along and even murders him rather than risk losing him. Only after her death do the townspeople discover how truly impervious and perverse she has been in her total dedication to forever remain a genteel antebellum Southern belle even though it makes her an anachronism. William Faulkner utilizes his own understanding of the Old South from his Mississippi roots and the stories of the strong southern women in his family to create believable, memorable characters who could not exist in any other place or

Through Miss Emily, Faulkner conveys his perspective on the drastic changes the south went through post Civil War. Miss Emily is displayed in many forms that include her attitude, behavior, and physical image. She is depicted as a crazed, lonely woman who never came out of her house. Such descriptions gives us reasoning to believe that Miss Emily represented the South’s loss of power. Miss Emily gives us a personal aspect of the conflicts the South encountered.

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.

     The symbolism between the past and the present was also shown in the beginning of the story when Faulkner wrote, “…only now Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps – an eyesore among eyesores.” It was ironic that the same description “stubborn and coquettish decay” could be a description for Emily as well (71). As the house fell into decay, so did Miss Emily, “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that pallid hue.” Miss Emily was described as “a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head” (72). Traditionally, in the Old South people wore black while they were grieving the death of a loved one. The cane she used was a symbol of her physical weakness. The mystery of the descending gold chain was then revealed; “Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain” (72). This invisible ticking symbolized Emily’s unwillingness to recognize the passing of time. The house was set on “what had once been the most select street” (71). The fact that Emily never maintained

Her father was an authoritarian and protective figure, the only one who was ever able to subdue Emily’s inflexibility. No man was ever good enough for his daughter and he kept her safe in life and death as his portrait was a symbol hanging above the fireplace and, in the end, above her coffin. When he died, she wouldn’t let go of the body, but nobody thought her crazy because she had to cling on to the one who drove anyone else away. Tobe was her lifelong faithful servant and he was the only one who knew everything about her, but the story gives him no voice – he might have been the only source of the true events, yet no one managed to obtain information from him. Homer Barron was a lively character, a Yankee described by the voice of the town as ”a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face” (Faulkner).

In Faulkner's story, an onlooker tells of the peculiar events that occurred during Miss Emily's life. The author never lets the reader understand Emily's side to the story. Instead, the reader is forced to guess why Emily is as strange as she is. In the story, Emily had harbored her father's dead body in her house for three days (par. 27). The reader is told of how the town looked upon what Emily had done, but the reader is never able to fully understand Emily's actions until the end of the story.

In William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” Miss Emily Grierson holds on to the past with a grip of death. Miss Emily seems to reside in her own world, untarnished by the present time around her, maintaining her homestead as it was when her father was alive. Miss Emily’s father, the manservant, the townspeople, and even the house she lives in, shows that she remains stuck in the past incapable and perhaps reluctant to face the present.

In addition, Faulkner uses the skewed timeline to capture the reader. Since the reader is expecting a chronological tale, the reader pays attention to the use of time. As Faulkner begins with the death of Emily, the reader expects the upcoming events to succeed Emily. Faulkner uses the expectations of the reader to create the voyage by immediately shrouding the reader’s expectations with various, disruptive links to time such as “ in last ten years,” “that day in 1894,” and the “next generation” (Faulkner 668). This method leaves “a residue to be organized by the reader (Perry 36). As the reader becomes more involves, suspense follows inherently. If this story were told from perspective of Emily, it would make sense for her to tell the story chronologically. Unless Emily is stricken also with Alzheimer’s disease or another memory-losing ailment, it is illogical for Emily to tell the story in a distorted order. Even if Emily did have illness, this changes the nature thus providing that the story is untellable without the narrator. The suspense of this story comes with the presence of the narrator who is allowed to distort the story as he sees fit.

As the story continues, Faulkner beings to describe Miss Emily as a woman who has stayed true to her customs and strong ties to her family. Her family is much respected in her town, it is shown through an expected greeting. Miss Emily is also free from paying any taxes because Colonel Sartoris revoked her taxes after the death of her father. On page 1 Paragraph 8, she is asked by the city authorities to pay her taxes she owes and

Faulkner uses Emily’s character to represent the Old South in health and death. Her stubborn attitude and her decorum both reflect the characteristics of the Old South. When the men go to her home and confront her about her unpaid taxes and she asks them to leave, she represents that women in the Old South were not argued with and not questioned as not to insult them. The way that the people of the town treat her reflects this even further. The people of the town treat Emily as a monument just as they had seen the Old South. “It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.” They see her as something to observe and only interfere when she does something they do not like, such as dating a Northerner. Even in death The Old South follows her. “And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those August names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.”