A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily is a short story not very difficult to read, as there is no complicated relationship . And the plot is also very simple, which can be roughly summarized into one line sentence: a woman kills her lover and has slept with the dead body for 40 some years. It may sounds like a detective story. Yet the connotation is far more profound than literal expression. To understand the story A Rose for Emily better, I’ll introduce its author William Faulkner first.William Faulkner is the representative of the stream of consciousness literature in the United States. His most remarkable achievement is the creation of Yoknapatawpha genealogy, which contains 15 novels and dozens of short stories happening in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional location, from early 19th century to mid-20th century. In his works, the conservation of the South is juxtaposed with the advance of the North, and the old conventional system of the South becomes the source of crime.In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”. When delivering his acceptance speech, he said, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”A Rose for Emily is Faulkner’s first published short story. The heroine Emily, the daughter of a southern plantation master at the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, is the only noble remained in a small town called Jefferson town. Her father, the head of the household, deprives her happiness by driving off all her suitors to maintain rank orders when alive. Soon after the funeral of her father, Emily, despite of the censure from the town, falls in love with Homer Barron, a Northern laborer who comes to the town as a contractor to pave the sidewalks. But her resolution collapses as Homer claims that he would never marry her. In the depth of despair, Emily kills Homer and sleeps with the dead body for more than 40 years in her isolated house secretly until her death.Emily is, with no doubt, a tragic character. On the surface, the causes of her tragedy lie in her father’s over-protection and people in town. But just as Faulkner has said, it’s an inevitable tragedy which nothing can stop. To trace it to the sources, it’s mainly resulted from three factors: the Patriarchy under Puritanism, the old conventional system of the south, and her self-character.First of all, in the most extent, the southern society is that of Puritanism. The southern family with deep Puritanism entitles the father the highest authority as well as the greatest place. So the father can control and decide everyone’s destiny in his family.Emily’s father is so arrogant and overbearing that ,in his view, all the young man in town cannot match his daughter, or cannot suit her image of upper class. Therefore, he drives away all the pursuers of Emily one by one, grabbing her right to love and limiting her right of living as a formal woman.Here is a paragraph of description about Emily and her father from the original. Through this description comes alive a vivid image of a lofty father and an obedient daughter on our mind. No doubt Emily breaks down after her father dies. She has nothing but her father in her life before. Now her father, the one who has protected her for years as well as robbed her everything, dies, both of her emotional life and spiritual life are left empty.She has been hided by her father’s large shadow from beginning to the end, with no any regarding as an independent individual.When set free from her father’s control, the love-addled Emily, following her desire for marriage, accepts Homer Barron, in despite of their insurmountable gap of status. But her decision encounters stiff resistance from the people in town, who represent the old tradition of Jefferson town. To start with, we have to go back to the background of the story to explain it.After the Civil War, the feudal power declined when the bourgeoisie springing up. As a result, the southern economy of plantation gets attacked by the industrialization. The southern nobles, struggling against the reality of losing the fortune, the statue and the reality of agony and chaos, feel nostalgic for the old splendor times，in a large effort to impede the progress of the society. Now back to the novel. In the story, two paragraphs at the beginning has directly shown Emily’s significance in people’s minds. As the descendent of the noble, she has naturally become the soul of tradition, the one part of the past honor in the South. Whatever she does must follow the traditional order of morality. The people in the town can tolerate her resistance against tax，equipment of the door card and the postbox. But they can not bear her behavior in light of her own will，which will transgress the southern order. Once she has broken her identity as one of the upper class，and has discarded her duty and responsibility to the public，she will be remarked by all the townsfolk. Love between a southern lady and a northern laborer is definitely unaccepted in Jefferson town. Therefore, everyone living in Jefferson town is responsible for Emily’s tragedy, on account of the tremendous pressure exerted by them.Though confronting all the gossips everywhere, Emily indulges herself in the fantasy of love. And yet, her lover Homer, for whatever reason, never promises her the marriage she has been longing for throughout her life, which is the last straw that breaks Emily.On the one hand, in her blood flows her father’s blood of violence and overbearing. She is arrogant, cold, obstinate and unruly. Her conflict with the people in the town reveals that she is a rebellious female with a strong will, who dares to freely make choice and to undertake her responsibility as well as the aftereffect. Her loftiness won’t allow her to be a deserted woman. So she kills Homer to keep what she wants.On the other hand, as I’ve mentioned before, Emily is an upper-class lady with a background of traditional southern education, which is but a branch of Puritanism. According to the standards of morality and justice in southern society, women have to suppress their sexual needs to keepthemselves pure. The inhuman doctrine of woman loads on Emily’s mind as she turns into the valentine of Homer instead of wife. From this perspective, Emily’s crime is to defend her chastity as a southern belle.Reading the whole story through, few of us readers won’t be impressed and overwhelmed by Faulkner’s superb writing techniques. The symbolism and Gothic style writing are widely used in this short novel as well as the typical narrative methods.As a classic Gothic novel, A Rose for Emily evidently contains variety of Gothic features in the aspect of the characterization, images and narrative structure. Here I just take the environment description for instance. In the story, Faulkner uses several detail description to create a mystery and horrible atmosphere, which makes us readers feel curious about Emily and connects the novel and Gothic characteristic successfully.Another uniqueness of A Rose for Emily I want to mention is the narrative method. Faulkner adopts chronological disorder to narrate the whole story. The past and the present are integrated into a whole with meticulous design. This kind of montage technique not only leaves the reader a enormous imaginary space, but also gives us chance to have different interpretation about the novel.The last aspect I want to focus on the symbolism in the novel. There are affluent images in the story, and almost everything mentioned in the story has its underlying meanings. Through these symbols like the house, the clock, Emily’s hair, the author tries to illustrate many themes in the story: time, love, conflict, and death. The title of the story is A Rose for Emily, yet the fact is that no one has given rose to Emily in the story. As we all know, rose represents for love, which Emily has been longing for all her life but never gets. It may be safely assumed that the rose is given by William Faulkner himself to express his sympathy and lament.。