Southern Femininity Quotes

The narrator is an unidentified voice that seems to work as a collective voice for the townspeople. The narrator is unbiased and gives out the town gossip with no side note on his/her thoughts. The reader can then take the information and do with it what they please. The unbiased thoughts can bring us closer to Miss Emily. They let us hear her story from an outsider’s view and we as readers are making up our own thoughts and opinions on Miss Emily as we read through the flashbacks of the story. The narrator conveys his/her disgust in the way they look at Miss Emily through the opening line of the story. “The men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen

This is evidently on the grounds that the character of Homer Barron is a Yankee and Emily slaughters him. Nonetheless, it is hard to contend that Emily's inspiration in dating Homer is to slaughter him on the grounds that he is a Northerner. The most evident clarification for her eagerness to date a man outside of her social rank would be that she is essentially a forlorn lady. A more subtle, however in any case sensible, clarification for her association with Homer would be that is her method for opposing her dead father. Amid his lifetime, her dad kept her from having an "adequate" suitor. In this way, she revolts by connecting with a man her dad would have considered an outsider: a Yankee day-worker. There is truly little to propose that the story is a moral story of the Civil War other than the way that a Yankee is executed by a Southerner. Faulkner himself, in his address on the story at the University of Virginia, denies such an elucidation. He said that he accepted that an essayist is ". Excessively caught up with taking a stab at, making it impossible to make fragile living creature and-blood individuals that will stand up and cast a shadow to have sufficient energy to be conscious of all the imagery that he may put into what he does or what individuals may read into

According to her father, “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily”. Her father drove away all of Emily’s suitors throughout his life. After her father’s death, Emily meets Homer Barron, a day laborer from the north, after and with hopes of potentially marrying him. The townspeople viewed Emily’s courtship with Homer as part of her downfall into insanity calling her, “Poor Emily”, viewing Homer as beneath her. Faulkner writing, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." Emily’s father would have also disapproved of Homer because he was a workingman and a Northerner and did not come from wealth. Homer was in town to pave the sidewalks and did not think seriously of his courtship with Emily. Homer, “…himself had remarked - he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club – that he was not a marrying man’

An important aspect in “A Rose for Emily” is the narrator's gender is left a mystery; this allows the reader to openly interpret the story from a different aspect, more specifically, through the mind of a feminist. Emily is subtly portrayed as an admirable woman who defies society's expectations of gender roles. Faulkner's use of the nosy women and the respectful men at the funeral, without further inquiry, may seem like it is in favor of a patriarchal society. However, Faulkner's main goal was to encourage the reader to understand that a woman, Emily, was capable of controlling her own behavior without society's influence.

In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” it is clear how Emily’s gender affects how the individuals in the town perceive her. Emily’s gender particularly affects how men understand her. Throughout the whole piece Emily is seen as a helpless individual who is lonely and has suffered losses throughout her life. When the reader reaches the end of the story the actions that Emily has taken is unexpected because of the way she is perceived by the narrator. In the beginning of the story, when the whole town was at her funeral and the men were discussing her life, none of the townspeople ever say anything negative about Emily. The men went to the funeral because they saw Emily as a fallen monument to the town. The narrator discusses how the town felt that Emily had become a tradition for them to take care of her. The narrator even points out how she did not have to pay taxes. This clearly shows how women are perceived in this town. Women are seen as unable to take care of themselves and as innocent humans. The way the narrator talks about Emily gives the reader the idea that Emily could never hurt anyone, because of this idea the reader is shocked at the end of the story. The feminist view of Emily allows the reader to be shocked by the ending of the story and it also allows the reader to see the way masculinity is understood in this piece.

Emily is not the protagonist. Not once is the reader given any details about Emily or her motives in the story. Emily lacks the characteristics of a protagonist; a main character in a work of drama, fiction, of narrative poetry. She is a foil character;

     Emotional support also plays an important role of Emily’s well being. The idea mother suppose to care, support, and value their children needs. Emily needed this nourishment. She needed her mother to smile at her in order for her to feel a connection with the person that she supposed to be able to depend on. Emily’s mother did not know how to communicate with Emily. The mother-daughter relationship has an element of coldness, it lacks warmth. “There were years she did not want me to touch her” (Olsen 262). Emily’s mother inability to interact with her, leaves Emily unloved and in return, she shall not express any love toward her mother. Emily’s mother feels her “wisdom came too late” (Olsen 262). With this thought in mind, Emily’s mother shall never show communication or love to Emily, therefore the relationship shall continue to be doomed.

Though both Emily killed their husbands Emily was the only one who anticipated it. Emily had always been alone all of her life prior to her father’s death, until she met Homer Barron. Considering the fact that this relationship was her first it is unsure if the feelings in her “relationship” were mutual. It was believed that Homer was perhaps because bisexual. Faulkner stated, “ Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a marrying man.”

Emily 's father was set in his old fashion and overbearing ways unwilling to let her love and be loved was the reason why, she went crazy. To feel that special emotion between a man and a woman was what Emily longed for. We have to learn that we are in charge of our lives and the option to choose who we fall in love with can effect us forever. Emily, after all of her formative years of being held captive by her father, was driven to the point of murder when she found out the man she loved, didn 't love her back and he would eventually leave her just like her father had left her when he died…humiliated, empty, sad and alone forever.

In some ways it shows that Emily, is this kind of white southern woman, but for the most part she is portrayed as weak and fragile women who family are the last aristocrats and that Homer is beneath her, socially, according to the story's narrator. It is not the behavior one would expect of someone of her social standing, and yet Emily cares little for the social conventions of the day, doing what she wants. Taking Homer in to town and cleaning him up. She spent her money on this man and did not care of what the town people had to say behind her back. I believe that her aristocrat nurture left her with a weakness to make personal connections with people. Her family was the last of their kind, aristocrat, in the town, and the life style that she was used to be shared by no one else in her life. She was isolated from reality, and when her father died the idea of being alone build in her mind. Her new suitor Homer was merely a “thing” to

Burduck demonstrates the gender of the narrator is a female on account of the ladies’ emotional reactions toward Emily’s sorrowful situation. This empathy is only reflected “on a woman-to-woman basis”( Burduck, par.4). Correspondingly, when Emily goes to buy poison to exterminate rats, this is intrepeted as if she had in mind to intoxicate Homer so that he would never abandon her. Therefore, “Faulkner’s female narrator does not approve of Miss Emily’s methods, but she understands what prompted them: Emily’s weariness of being alone” (Burduck, par.5) Similarly, it is the loneliness that Emily has to live with that makes the ladies sympathetic toward her. After her father’s death, she was desolated, without her father and someone to love because

Without a man, she is lost. In the end of the story this situation comes up again. The man who Emily had a relationship with is found dead and decayed in an upstairs bedroom after her death. There is evidence that she would lay in the bed with the men after his death. This is another way that Emily is portrayed as needy and weak. She feels she needs a man so badly that she must keep her lover even after his death. I think most feminists would read this theme into A Rose for Emily.

In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, the relationship between Miss Emily and Homer Barron was ill conceived. To fully understand why the relationship was destined for failure you must consider the setting and chronology of the story. Miss Emily was born around the mid 1800’s and came from a white upper class family in the Southern US town of Jefferson. After the death of her father, Miss Emily became “a tradition, a duty and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (p. 142). This status is reaffirmed when the mayor invented a false calm that her “father had loaned money to the town” (p. 142) and therefore she was excused from having to pay taxes to the town for perpetuity. Miss Emily continued to live alone in her father’s

It is a fact, that the narrator makes judgments both for and against the protagonist and also present outsides observations when he stays “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition , a duty , and a care ; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town “(Faulkner,82) being this to emphasize the responsibility that the people of the town felt whit her and stays also his point pf view in the situation . The narrator is sympathetic to Miss Emily, never condemning her actions. Sometimes unabashedly and sometimes grudgingly, the narrator admires her ability to use her aristocratic bearing in order to vanquish the members of the city and an example is when she go to buy the arsenic and the druggist ask her to tell him for what she is going to use it ,and she just look him eye to eye and the man go and give her the arsenic without ask her anything else . As we could see it is hard to determine the gender of the narrative voice because is talking as the people and never use a word for describe himself . He uses the words “we” and “they” and changes it continuously because he does not want to be involved in all the things the community did and he is blaming the community for Emily’s behavior. Faulkner uses the perfect kind of narrator for develop his genre , a mysterious and creepy narrative voice to develop

To put it bluntly, Emily is an aristocratic Southern Belle and Homer is a sidewalk builder from the North. “The townsfolk view Emily simultaneously as an idee fixe and a bete noir whose cruising with Homer Barron they monitor” (Melczarek 240). The older folks would say that Emily, in the wake of her father’s death, was forgetting “Noblesse Oblige,” or nobility obligations (Faulkner 797). Of course Emily had had suitors more suited for her in the past, but she decided it was Homer she wanted. The narrator comments, “She carried her head high enough – even when we believed that she was fallen” (797). Then, when Homer prepares to go back North, the townspeople are suddenly in her corner and pity her when Homer disappears.