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Comparing Faulkner's A Rose For Emily And Barn Burning

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Southern Literature was focused on the significance of the role of family loyalty, southern history, and both social and racial class within the southern plantation traditions in the late-nineteenth century. The destruction of plantation tradition is the subject of Faulkner’s southern literature. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the characteristics that show the “southern myth” both in attitudes towards history and social class. The characteristics of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” are a perfect illustration of “southern Literature” in its glory days. After the Civil War, southern aristocrats, the people that worked for them, and the surrounding communities had a difficult time removing themselves from …show more content…

The story is written in the southern plantation narrative as told in gossip form through flashbacks by an unknown narrator who serves as collective voice for the town. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house.” (998). In the period after the Civil War, Emily Grierson embodies the culture of the white, elitist Southerner that can’t seem to accept that the old south is dead, or at the very least on its death bed. For most of her life, Emily was dominated by her father and never questioned it because she had to uphold the noblesse oblige to which she was born into. She epitomized the stubborn refusal to submit to, or even acknowledge, the inevitability of change. The narrative shows how broken the south was and how the “southern ladies” and “southern gentlemen” constantly contended with the loss of their stature. The entire region was licking its wounds and in denial so much that no one knew how to act in the aftermath of the south’s downfall. The town is trying to figure out its legacy from the Griersons, and what the plantation myth means in their future, and what it owes to its past. Miss Emily was a “Lady” …show more content…

Emily is the aristocratic elite, she has a negro servant, lives in a big fancy house and people defer to her whims. Whereas Abner is among the lowest of the low class, on the same level as the freedmen/slaves. The Grierson family exemplify plantation class that drove the southern plantation narrative far after it had died off. Even after the world around them had embraced the views and moral traditions of the new south, Miss Emily and the locals continued to cling to the old class order and keep her above everyone around her. Miss Emily, who is the last in her family, represents the end of the ruling class of the South. “Alive, Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (998), which shows that they held to the old traditions. “In 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron...” (998), Colonel Sartoris wanted to safeguard the proper class etiquette was practiced in public, while further degrading the status of the “negro” community. Tobe is disrespected and dehumanized in many parts of the story, Judge Stevens refers to him as, “…that nigger of hers…” (999). This shows the dehumanization of blacks in the old south era, Tobe’s identity is taken from him by the use of such a derogatory slur. Earlier in the story Faulkner wrote that her father was an elitist, an

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