献给艾米莉的玫瑰的主题

The Theme of "A Rose For Emily"

A Rose For Emily, written by William Faulkner, is a murder story, in which Miss Emily, the last heir of the degrading South Aristocrat family, Grieson, refused to keep in touch with the outside society at first, but suddenly fell in love with a yankee, and surprisingly, she murdered the man in the end an d slept with her dead lover for thirty years.

This story at first seems a tragedy of love, in which the eagerness for a rose eventually turned into insane desire. However, the story is more than that. Its theme lies behind the attracting and surprising plot, relating to the contemporary social background and the author himself.

William Faulkner was born in a descending south aristocrat family in Mississippi, and he experienced the social changes after the war and the hardship of life. His works were often about the south descending rich, expressing his sympathy to those families. However, he had to accept the reality, for no matter what those glory and nobility had already gone. In the story A Rose For Emily, he tactfully described how Emily somehow struggled to change but still could not get out of the “comfortable” zone, hiding in her high tower of the past Grieson glory.

. However the old people in the town were more worried than before. They did not think Miss Emily GRIESON should marry to some Yankee—especially that he was a day labor! One day Miss Emily suddenly appeared in the drug store for some arsenic. The shop owner requested to know why Emily wanted it, but he surrendered when Emily just” stare at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye”. It seemed that even she had moved onto a lover, Miss Emily was still stubborn and arr ogant. After a few days, Homer Barron came back to Miss Emily, but “that was the last we saw of Homer Barron”. Miss Emily seemed to be vanquished and “we” started to feel sorry for her again, an d that was when her house began to smell bad and she became again stubborn and arrogant to the to wn. Her struggle—we thought—failed, for her lover finally left her. Even until she died “we” kept f eeling sorry for her. She finally could not jump out of her family history and started her new life in c orrespondence to time and society. At this point, “we” discovered Homer Bar ron’s body in surprise, and the story came to a sudden halt at this climax.

In the whole story the author uses details to show the social environment in which the story took plac e. By describing her house with dim, dust, disuse, Faulkner demonstrates vividly Miss Emily’s reluct ance to change after the war; by repeating “See Colonel Sartoris” for several times, Faulkner sets up a figure that was stubborn—she stuck to Colonel Sartoris who has been dead ten years before instead