英语阅读美文：A Rose For Marly
A-Rose-for-Emily-原文
A Rose for Emilyby William FaulknerIWHEN 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, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. 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.Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.They rose when she entered--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. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.""But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed byhim?""I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson.""But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--""See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.""But, Miss Emily--""See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."IISo SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket."Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old."But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said."Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? ""I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation."It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't. ..""Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad.At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.IIISHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- -without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."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. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her."I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said."Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--""I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--""Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?""Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--""I want arsenic."The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."IVSo THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because 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. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the NegroHe talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.VTHE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.The man himself lay in the bed.For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, andleaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.。
A_rose_for_Emily
A rose for EmilyThis story happens after the American Civil War, in Jefferson Town. It’s a story about an eccentric spinster named Emily Grierson whose marriage is totally manipulated by her father. Two years after her father’s death, poor Emily is acquainted with a northerner called Homer Barron, a day laborer and she falls in love with him. However, their relation is short-lived as Homer becomes tired of her and intends to get rid of her. In order to keep Homer at hand, Emily kills him with arsenic and “obtain” him, thus, she sleeps with his corpse for decades. This is the truth that villagers find after her death. From my own perspective, this masterpiece reflects the decline of the southern society and reveals the conflicts between the two different value systems and two societies after the American Civil War. Then, I will explain my opinions from the following three aspects: character, symbol and setting.Emily is an embodiment of the south, the old and tradition. At the very beginning of this story, the writer recounts the decoration of her house which is still 1870s style, isn’t change any more. Besides, she is also obstinate. When the new government compel the taxes on her，she refuses to pay the tax and even ridiculously mentions a colonel who has been dead almost ten years. Another example is that she prevents people from installing mail-box on the wall. She keeps the traditional views all the long，but resists to change anything. However, poor Emily is a determined woman. Regardless of people’s criticism, she insists on marrying a northerner whose social position is apparently lower than her. It is known that in that period of time, hierarchy is prevailing and deep-rooted through out the society. It particularly has a profound influence on marriage. When someone chooses a partner, he or she must consider the social position of the other party to the marriage. However, Emily chooses to disobey the convention and challenges tradition. Given this situation, her failure is quite expectable. However, she cannot get rid of the shackles of the Southern conventions. After all, she captures her lover in her own way and the love is treated with honor.Her father, the old Grierson, is also an incarnation of the South, patriarchy and tradition. He was very fastidious about her daughter’s marriage and drove away every manwho caught the fancy of her. “When she got to thirty and was still single”. Obviously, both her body and mind are enslaved by her father’s traditional concept. Therefore, she feels released when her father is dead, and there is no “trace of grief on her face”.In this novel, Emily symbolizes the South, old and tradition, the Yankee represents the North, new and modern. Both young guys might be interested in each other when they first meet. But they possess altogether different values or concept of lives. So they inevitably separated before long. The conflict between the two partners symbolizes the conflict between the South and the North. And the absurd murder aggravates the contradictions.The “Rose”, that is never mentioned in this novel, is always interpreted conventionally as a symbol of love. It might be used as the love Emily gets from her lover. But in my opinion the rose mainly represents decay and death. At the time the villagers went to her room and found the valance curtains of faded rose color and the rose-shaded lights in the room. Actually, the author plays a trick on Miss Emily. In fact, she doesn’t really get any love from any man whether it is from her lover or her father. Emily could have a favorable marriage but for her father’s interference. She could have got her deserved love from Homer. But on account of her obstinacy and pride, she receives tiredness and indifference, instead of affection---rose, from him. Thus, as an outsider, the author or the villagers, they give a rose as a tribute to Emily. Besides, the rose also stands for the author’s and villager s’pity, sympathy and lament for Emily, whose mind is imprisoned in the past and fails to adapt to the change. What’s more, the author, “William Faulkner objectifies his complicated and emotional involvement in the South and in the people who grow up and live there ever since”.The story teller begins his story when it is post-civil war. In Jefferson Town, in the South, which is defeated by the North, everything including concept and some sense of value is gradually replaced by the new concepts from the North. In this background, due to the restriction of the traditional ideas, some people are imprisoned in the past and ignore the passage of time. And Miss Emily is one of them. The whole story is set in Emily’s house. But the story has a time span of over two scores. Her house is depicted as old but grand. Seen from the outside, the house is really outdated and is not in accordwith other residential buildings—it’s really an eyesore. The house perfectly mirrors Emily’s isolation from the outside world. From the inner decoration of her house, everything is covered with dust and the air is humid. Besides，there is a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father. The description of the house paves a way for the development of scenario. As a reader, I might feel ghastly. Therefore, it’s conceivable that the spine-chilling story happens there. At the end of the story, out of curiosity, people go into her chamber，seeing faded rose color curtains, the rose-shaded lights and delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver. The whole room speaks the life Emily goes through and indicates the decay of the Southern aristocrat.。
A rose for emily
A rose for EmilyThis story happens after the American Civil War, in Jefferson Town. It’s a story about an eccentric spinster named Emily Greisens whose marriage is totally manipulated by her father. Two years after her father’s death, poor Emily is acquainted with a northerner called Homer Barron, a day laborer and she falls in love with him. Emily's world, however, was already in the past. When she was threatened with desertion and disgrace, she not only took refuge in that world but also took Homer with her in the only manner possible--death. Their relation is short-lived as Homer becomes tired of her and intends to get rid of her. In order to keep Homer at hand, Emily kills him with arsenic and “obtain” him, thus, she sleeps with his corpse for decades. This is the truth that villagers find after her death.From my own perspective, this masterpiece reflects the decline of the southern society and reveals the conflicts between the two different value systems and two societies after the American Civil War. Then, I will explain my opinions from the following three aspects: character, symbol and setting. Emily is an embodiment of the south, the old and tradition. At the very beginning of this story, the writer recounts the decoration of her house which is still 1870s style, isn’t change any more. Besides, she is also obstinate. When the new government compel the taxes on her，she refuses to pay the tax and even ridiculously mentions a colonel who has been dead almost ten years. Another example is that she prevents people from installing mail-box on the wall. She keeps the traditional views all the long，but resists to change anything. However, poor Emily is a determined woman. Regardless of people’s criticism, she insists on marrying a northerner whose social position is apparently lower than her. It is known that in that period of time, hierarchy is prevailing and deep-rooted through out the society. It particularly has a profound influence on marriage. When someone chooses a partner, he or she must consider the social position of the other party to the marriage. However, Emily chooses to disobey the convention and challenges tradition. Given this situation, her failure is quite expectable. However, she cannot get rid of the shackles of the Southern conventions. After all, she captures her lover in her own way and the love is treated with honor. Her father, the old Ryerson, is also an incarnation of the South, patriarchy and tradition. He was very fastidious about her daughter’s marriage and drove away every man 1 who caught the fancy of her. “When she got to thirty and was still single”. Obviously, both her body and mind are ensl aved by her father’s traditional concept. Therefore, she feels released when her father is dead, and there is no “trace of grief on her face”. In this novel, Emily symbolizes the South, old and tradition, the Yankee represents the North, new and modern. Both young guys might be interested in each other when they first meet. But they possess altogether different values or concept of lives. So they inevitably separated before long. The conflict between the two partners symbolizes the conflict between the South and the North. And the absurd murder aggravates the contradictions. The “Rose”, that is never mentioned in this novel, is always interpreted conventionally as a symbol of love. It might be used as the love Emily gets from her lover. But in my opinion the rose mainly represents decay and death. At the time the villagers went to her room and found the valance curtains of faded rose color and the rose-shaded lights in the room. Actually, the author plays a trick on Miss Emily. In fact, she doesn’t really get any love from any man whether it is from her lover or her father. Emily could have a favorable marriage but for her father’s interference. She could have got her deserved love from Homer. But on account of her obstinacy and pride, she receives tiredness and indifference, instead of affection---rose, from him. Thus, as an outsider, the author or the villagers, theygive a rose as a tribute to Emily. Besides, the rose also stands for the author’s and villagers’ pity, sympathy and lament for Emily, whose mind is imprisoned in the past and fails to adapt to the change. What’s more, the author, “William Faulkner objectifies his complicated and emotional involvement in the South and in the people who grow up and live there ever since”. The story teller begins his story when it is post-civil war. In Jefferson Town, in the South, which is defeated by the North, everything including concept and some sense of value is gradually replaced by the new concepts from the North. In this background, due to the restriction of the traditional ideas, some people are imprisoned in the past and ignore the passage of time. And Miss Emily is one of them. The whole story is set in Emily’s house. But the story has a time span of over two scores. Her house is depicted as 2 old but grand. Seen from the outside, the house is really outdated and is not in accord with other residential buildings—it’s really an eyesore. The house perfectly mirrors Emily’s isolation from the outside world. From the inner decoration of her house, everything is covered with dust and the air is humid. Besides，there is a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father. The description of the house paves a way for the development of scenario. As a reader, I might feel ghastly. Therefore, it’s conceivable that the spine-chilling story happens there. At the end of the story, out of curiosity, people go into seeing faded rose color curtains, the rose-shaded lights and delicate array of her chamber，crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver. The whole room speaks the life Emily goes through and indicates the decay of the Southern aristocrat.When I finished reading the story, a sincere sympathy emerges in my mind. Emily is totally a tragedy of the old traditions. She is a prisoner of the past, of the social and moral taboos of the South. Not only because she is purely a woman, but also the stubborn conventions manacle her that result in her frustrated life. Even so，could have a better she life after her father’s death. However, she doesn’t get out of the tower her father built for her. On the contrary, she builds another one, and locks her soul. In our daily life, everything is changing everyday. As an individual, we can only adapt ourselves to the protean environment and should learn to accept new things. Only when we keep learning everyday can we survive in this world which is full of competition.。
a rose for Emily
A rose for EmilyAfter reading the story “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner, I am shocked so much at the end of the story. So I even suspect that if Miss Emily had murdered his father for sake of her freedom. If it is so, I can understand her purpose and the tough determination. Thus, Homer’s death becomes reasonable, and I really can’t help feeling the sorry towards her.Emily can hardly be described as having no life. First, her life was controlled by her father, and her love, life, freedom were limited by her noble family that lasting to the end. She couldn’t live a normal life as normal person. I should say I feel deeply sympathetic for her.Except her father’s great influence on her, we can discover that Emily was not only dominated by her father but also by the townspeople throughout her life time in the story. After her father’s death, the townspeople really had an effect on her rest of life, her behavior and the complexity of mind.Her family name and insanity make her held in high regard in the public eye. The townspeople described Emily as “a tradition, a duty and a care”. They knew her life through gossip. Thus they attended her funeral for different reasons “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”.At that time, Emily’s denial of her father’s death made the towns people think that Emily had unsteady mental problem. So Emily was concerned more by them, and become a hot topic from then on.When Emily fell in love with a labor, thy thought her behavior was beneath her dignity and she shouldn’t forget to keep the fame of her family. They regarded her as goddess, but we can find out the sometimes privilege may be a prison. Emily couldn’t choose her loved man, Homer Barron. Once the townspeople knew that, they were curious, exciting and started to talk about itcontinuously.When Emily bought the poison, they directly thought she would commit suicide. And they assured she was worth doing that because of her wrong love with the labor. The townspeople shaped her character further than anything else and she went loony in the end because of it.After Homer Barron’s disappearance, the townspeople also dealt with her when having dinner or supper each passing day. We can only see that what Emily could do was to keep silent, bear everything, and never speak out for herself, it leaded to Emily’s miserable life and destroy her. Living up to other’s expectations is not an easy thing to do. It can cost people’s whole life.Her father kept her alone during the first thirty years of her life, and the townspeople kept her alone again until her death. Eventually, Emily was dead at her seventies, and the need to pacify Miss Emily was gone with the changing of generations.In the end, we see through that a corpse lied on the bed of Emily’s house. He was the only man Emily loved, Homer. When she realized Homer would leave again, she made sure he would always be there by killing him. In his death, Emily found eternal love which was something that no could ever take from her. She became a woman at “seventy four...vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man”. But she still remained silent but faithful..The townspeople hold her in the highest of esteem as the grandest flower of all---Rose. We can see the comparison of Emily to a rose surrounded by thorns---the townspeople, where the rose must struggle to remain graceful and beautiful amid and ever changing with the environment. She and her lover rode around ion a flashy vehicle for all the thorns to see, but she failed. Despite of Protection for the rose, the rose is doom to be delicate and picked thus assuring its death. So, Emily, as a rose began to fade, faded to die.。
A Rose For Emily(中英对照版)
A Rose For Emily福克纳的短篇小说<纪念爱米丽的一朵玫瑰花>讲述的是一个孤癣、傲慢的南方贵族后裔的人生悲剧.从社会心理学角度分析其悲剧成因有二:一,南方贵族的末落和留给后裔的负担;二,未婚夫荷默·伯隆的背叛--贵族虚荣的彻底叛碎,进而试图论证爱米丽的去世是"倒下的南方贵族纪念碑"这一深远主题意义.作品同时隐含着对人类自身悲剧的深入思考和揭露,以及对人类未来的震憾和启发.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, which no one save an old manservant---a combined gardener and cook-had seen in at least ten years.It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But arages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedarbemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.爱米丽•格里尔生小姐过世了，全镇的人都去送丧：男子们是出于敬慕之情，因为一个纪念碑倒下了：妇女们呢，则大多数出于好奇心，想看看她屋子的内部。
A-Rose-For-Emily
• It reflects the decline of the southern society. In this background, due to the restriction of the traditional ideas, some people are imprisoned in the past and ignore the passage of time.
• 门砰地一下踹开了，顿时屋里好像弥漫着灰尘。房间好像 曾是一间装饰一新旳新房，如今如坟墓一般发出淡淡旳、 呛人旳气味，到处渗透出阴森森气氛：褪色了旳玫瑰色窗 帘，阴暗旳玫瑰色灯光，梳妆台，一排精细旳水晶饰品， 还有白银底色旳盥洗用具，但是白银制品已经失去旳光泽， 连刻在上面旳笔迹也都看不清了。其中有一条硬领和领带， 好像是从身上取下来旳，然后提起来，在台面上留下淡淡 旳月牙形尘埃痕迹。椅子上挂着一套精心折叠旳衣服；椅 子下是两只寂寞旳鞋子，还有一双丢弃旳袜子。
【原文解读】
• 此段对爱米丽旳卧室环境进行了细节描写。文学 作品中一切环境描写都具有一定旳意图，此段描 写也烘托出一种悲情气氛，并点出小说旳主题： 玫瑰（—爱情—婚姻—死亡）(171)。此处是整篇 小说中玫瑰唯一出现旳地方。
A Rose for Emily 原文
A Rose for Emilyby William FaulknerIWHEN 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, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. 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.Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.They rose when she entered--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. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.""But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed byhim?""I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson.""But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--""See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.""But, Miss Emily--""See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."IISo SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket."Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old."But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said."Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? ""I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation."It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't. ..""Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad.At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.IIISHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- -without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."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. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her."I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said."Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--""I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--""Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?""Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--""I want arsenic."The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."IVSo THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because 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. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the NegroHe talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.VTHE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.The man himself lay in the bed.For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grayhair.。
A rose for Emily
A Rose for EmilyThis novel is a story about Emily who is an eccentric noble lady. When her father was alive, he was not willing to let Emily get married with lower-class men. So, she became a spinster. After her father was dead, she loved a northerner man called Homer Barron. But he did not want to stay in this town for Emily. However, Emily loves him so deeply that she kills him. Years later, the body of Homer Barron was found by the villagers when they went to Emily’s funeral.In this novel, the description is very exciting. For example, the description of Emily’s house’s structure and style shows that the house is broken but proudly. These words reflect Emily’s family’s pretentious from another side. When the new government compelled the taxes on her, the impression of Emily is that “fat woman in black……Her skeleton was small ………like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand”From the description of Emily, it shows her isolation and decadent ideas.Emily is an evader of social reality. She sticks to old rules and boycotts new things. From the detail that she alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. From this detail, we can know that Emily is stuffy. The section about the new government compelling the taxes on her can also reflect this character of Emily.Emily is the victim of southern society. Because of living in patriarchal society, Emily can not chase her own well-being. Her father drives away all lower-class young men who courted to her. So, Emily does not get marriage even when she is thirty years old. Under the southern women moral concept, every one thinks that Homer Barron, a northerner, is not assigned on her. Emily does not have the blessing from others when she is ready to get married with Homer Barron. All aspects result in that Emily can not live as a normal woman.Emily is a determined woman for love. Regardless of people’s criticism, she insists on marrying a northerner whose social position is apparently lower than her. “Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.”It is known that in that period of time, hierarchy is prevailing and deep-rooted through out the society. It particularly has a profound influence on marriage. When someone chooses a partner, he or she must consider the social position of the other party to the marriage. However, Emily chooses to disobey the convention and challenges tradition.Emily is a poor woman. At the end of story, “What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.” This sentence is punchline of the story. This sentence shows that Emily sleeps with the body every night. We can feel the huge sorrow in her mind.In short, Emily is a complex figure who is full of contradictions. Although she preserves old order, she disobeys the convention and challenges tradition to chase her love. She is a typical victim of the society.。
完整word版,A-Rose-for-Emily-完整版译文
一、爱米丽·格利尔逊小姐走了，全镇的人都去送葬：男人们是出于敬慕之情，因为一座丰碑倒塌了；女人们大多出于好奇之心，都想到爱米丽屋里看个究竟。
除了一个园丁兼厨师的上了年纪的男仆外，至少已经十年都没有人进去看过了。
那是一幢曾经漆成白色的方形大木屋，圆圆的顶阁，尖尖的塔顶，涡形花纹的阳台，尽显出浓浓的七十年代轻松愉快的风格。
房屋所在的街道曾经是全镇最为繁华之地。
但这里早已被附近的汽修厂和扎棉机侵占了，就连那些庄严的名字也被吞噬得一干二净；岿然不动的，只有爱米丽小姐的房子，虽有破败之势，却依然显得执拗不训，风韵犹存，与周围的四轮棉花车和汽油泵一样，太过碍眼了。
如今爱米丽小姐也进入了那些具有代表性的庄严的名字行列之中，他们长眠在雪松环拥的墓地里，那是南北战争时期杰斐逊战役中阵亡的军人之墓，有的是南方军人，有的是北方士兵；有的是高职位，有的是无名氏。
生前，爱米丽小姐代表着一个传统、一种职责；她既是人们关注的目标，也是全镇传承下来对她应尽的义务，这种义务是从一八九四年开始的，当时的镇长萨特里斯上校——还颁布了一道命令：严禁黑人妇女不系围裙上街——豁免了她各种税款；这种特惠政策从她父亲去世之日开始，一直到她不在人世之时为止。
这并不是说爱米丽爱占人们的便宜，而是萨特里斯上校编造了一套不清不楚的瞎话，说什么爱米丽的父亲曾贷款给镇政府，而镇政府，作为交易，以这种方式偿还。
这种瞎话，只有萨特里斯上校那一代人以及像他那样的脑袋的人才瞎编的出来，也只有女人们才会相信这种瞎话。
到了第二代人，他们当上了镇长和议员，思想更加前卫，便对这种免税约定产生了一丝不满。
那年元旦，他们寄给她一张纳税通知单，可是到了二月，依然没有回信。
他们给她发了一封公函，要她方便时到镇治安办公室去一趟。
一周后，镇长亲自书函一封给她，表示愿意登门拜访，或派车接她；镇长得到的回信却是一张便条，字是写在一张古香古色的信笺上，书法流利，字迹纤细，墨迹已干，大意是说，她根本不再外出。
ARoseforEmily原文
A Rose for Emilyby William FaulknerWHEN 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, which no one save an old man-servani-a bined gardener and cook-had seen in at least ten years、It was a big. squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select streel But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood: only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline punips-an eyesore among eyesores、And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bcmused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor-he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets wiihout an apron-remitlcd her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her falhcr on into perpetuityNot that Miss Emily would have accepted charily、Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying、Only a man of Colonel Sartoris* generation and thought could have invented it. and only a womanWhen the nexi generation,could have believed il、with its more modern ideas,became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfactionOn the first of the year they mailed her a lax notice、February came, and there was no reply、They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriffs office at her convenience、A week later the mayor wrote her himself offering to call or to send his car for her and received in reply a note on papcr of an archaic shapc・ in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink. to the effect that she no longer went out at aU. The tax notice was also enclosed, without meritsThey called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen、A deputation waited upon he匚knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier、They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell、The Negro led them into the p arlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked: and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow moles in the single sun-ra>\ On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father、They rose when she entered-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、Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in hcr^ She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless waler, and of that patlid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated (heir errand、She did not ask them to sit、She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling hah、Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain、Her voice was dry and cold、"I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explaincd it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves ”"But we have、We are the city authorities. Miss Emily、Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff signed by him?”*T received a paper, yes?" Miss Emily said、"Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff、、、I have no taxes in Jefferson、”"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the-*""See Colonel Sartoris、I have no taxes in Jefferson”"But. Miss Emily】"See Colonel Sartoris. ” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years、) have no taxes in Jefferson、Tobe!” Tlie Negro appeared"Show these gentlemen oui、“IISo SHE vanquished them, horse and foot just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell、Thai was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart-ihe one we believed would marry her -had deserted hci\ After her father's death she went out very little: after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro inan-a young man ihcn-going in and out with a market basket、"Just as if a nian-any man-could keep a kitchen properly. "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developedIt was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons、A neighbor, a woman, plained to the mayor Judge Stevens, eighty years old、"But whal will you have me do about it. madam?” he said、"Why, send her word to stop it/' the woman said、"Isn't ihcre a law? ”"I'm sure that won't be necessary?* Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard、ril speak to him about U."The next day he received two more plaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation、"We really must do something about it, Judge、I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do somethings ** That night the Board of Aidermen met-thrcc graybeards and one younger man. a member of the rising generation X "Il's simple enough?' he said、''Send her word to have her place cleaned up、Give her a certain time to do it in. and if she don'll .. ”"Dammil, sir.” Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emil/s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it. the light behind her. and her upright lorso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into ihc shadow of the locusts that lined the streets After a week or two the smell went away.Thai was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her、People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone pleiely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were、None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such、We had long thought of them as a tableau. Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door、So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have lunicd down ali of her chances if they had really materialized、When her father died, it got about that (he house was all that was left to her: and in a way, people were glad、At last they could pily Miss Emily、Being left alone, and a pauper, she had bee humanized、Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.The day after his death all ihc ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid. as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face、She toid them that her father was not dead、She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body、Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.We did not say she was crazy then、We believed she had to do that、We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her. as people will、IIISHE WAS SICK for a long time、When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows-sort of tragic and serene、The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began (he work、The construction pany came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee-a big, dark, ready man. with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face、The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in lime to the rise and fall of picks、Pretty soon he knew everybody in town、Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square. Homer Barron would be in the center of the group、Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from (he livery stableAt first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said. "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer. ” But ihcre were still others, older p eople. who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige-・without calling it noblesse oblige They just said. "Toor Emily、Her kinsfolk should e to her. ” She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no municaiion between the two families They had not even been rep resented at the funeral.And as soon as the old people said." Poor Emily/* the whispering began. "Do you sup pose it's really so?" they said to one another"Of course U is、What else could、This behind (heir hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop・clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor "She carried her head high enough-even when we believed that she was fallen more thanIt was as if she demanded ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch ofearthiness lo reaffirm her imperviousness、Like when she bought the rat poison. the arsenic、Tliat was over a yearafter they had begun to say "Poor Emily?' and while the two female cousins were visiting her、"I want some poison.” she said to the dniggisl、She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the tern pics and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighlhouse-keepefs face ought to look. "I want some poison」she said."Yes. Miss Emily、What kind? For rats and such? Td re-""I want the best you have、I don't care what kind、"The druggist named several、"Tliey'll kill anything up to an elephani、But what you want is-*""Arsenic?" Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?”"Is、、. arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want-"'"I want arsenic、”The druggist looked down at her、She looked back at him. erect, her face like a strained flag、"Why. of course? the druggist said、"If thafs what you want. But the law requires you to tcit what you are going to use it for、"Miss Emily just stared at him. her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye. until he looked away and wentand got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package: the druggist didn't e back. When she opened the package at home there was wrillen on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rais."IVSo THE NEXT day we all said. "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best things When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said. "She will marry him. ** Then we said. "She will persuade him yet/' because Homer himself had rcmarked-he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club-lhat he was not a marrying man、Later we said. "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy. Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace lo (he town and a bad example to the young people、The men did not warn to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister-Miss Emily's people were Episcopal- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day (he minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama、So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back lo watch developments At first nothing happened、Tlien we were sure that they were to be married、We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters B、on each piece、Two days later we learned that she had bought a plete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said. “They are married、" We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.So we were not surprised when Homer Barron-the streets had been finished some time since-was gone、We were alittle disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for MissEmily's ing. or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that lime it was a cabal, and we were all MissEmily's allies to help circumvent the cousins、) Sure enough, after another week they departed、And. as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town、 A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening、And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron、And of Miss Emily for some time、The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets、Then we knew that this was to be expected loo: as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulcni and loo furious to die、When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray、During lhe next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to lhe day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man、From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-paintings She filled up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris* contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in lhe same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate、Meanwhile her taxes had been rcmillcd、Then the newer generation became (he backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupHs grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good、When the town got free posial delivery. Miss Emily alone refused lo let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to il、She would not listen lo them.Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket、Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later unclaimed Now and then we would see her in one of lhe downstairs windows—she had evidently shut up the lop floor of the house-like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us. we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation-dear, inescapable. impervious, tranquil and perverseAnd so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her、We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro He talked to no one. probably not even to her. for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse、She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight、VTHE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at lhe front door and let them in. with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again、The two female cousins came at once、They held lhe funeral on the second day. with the town ing to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre: and the very old men -some in their brushed Confederate uniforms-on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps. confusing time with i(s mathematical pregression, as the old do. to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have lo be forced、They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened h、The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dusj A thiiL acrid pall as of lhe tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal; upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured、Among them lay a collar and tie. as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks、The man himself lay in the bed、For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparenily once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him、What was left of him. rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had bee inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the paiient and biding dust.Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head、One of us lifted something from it. and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a tong strand of iron-gray hair、。
A Rose For Emily 作文
“A Rose For Emily, written by William Faulkner, is a short story about the life and death of Miss Emily Grierson. The story mainly tells that an old maid of the nobility in the town, killed her lover with poison because her love turned into hate, and lived with the dead body together all her life, and because that, she don’t associate with other people, finally ,she died lonely in her house.I have read this story at least three times because I don’t know what the story said. After I read it seriously, I just understand that this story just a suspenseful but also miserable love story. The protagonist is so pitiful and abnormal. In the passage end, we can know that she lived with her lover’s dead body all the time, which is not a normal man could do that. But her crazy behavior is thanks to her father. When her father is alive, she couldn’t choose her lover because no one could approach. In the passage part II, “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.” ,her father didn’t allow anyone approach her. So, it made her feel lonely and empty, which is not a normal man could think. And it is the main reason that made her become crazy.Emily is also pitiful. When she meet her Mr. right, she might think that they would live together with happiness. But the fact is cruel. Homer Barron, her lover, refused to get marry. So, she bought arsenic and killed him because of her blind love. In the part IV, “ And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron.”, we can know that Homer Barron had been killed. Emily just wanted to lived with her lover happily, but it came true by the dead. It is so miserable and pitiful.In fact, Emily is romantic, but is just with some scare. It is good thing for someone to fall in love with an other one. But we should keep calm down, and love others with correct way. Or, it could be a funeral of love.。
A_Rose_for_Emily带生词版
8. A Rose for EmilyIWhen 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, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores. 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.Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairwaymounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished玷污gilt镀金，表面的装饰ADJ镀金的easel画架黑板架before the fireplace stood a crayon 蜡笔，V.用蜡笔画portrait of Miss Emily's father.They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony 乌木，黑檀木ADJ黑檀木色的cane甘蔗，藤手杖，V.以杖击with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated发胀的，膨, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid苍白的，煞白的hue色调，色彩，面色. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges 岭，脊，田埂V.培土of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.""But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?""I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff. . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson.""But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see. We must go by the—""See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.""But, Miss Emily—""See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."IISo she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after herfather's death and a short time after her sweetheart—the one we believed would marry her—had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity 鲁莽，蛮勇to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man—a young man then—going in and out with a market basket."Just as if a man—any man—could keep a kitchen properly," the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming 浇铸，丰富的world and the high and mighty Griersons.A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old."But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said."Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law?""I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it." The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation弃用. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met—three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation."It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't . . .""Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso 躯干，胴体motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts洋槐，蝗虫that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough forMiss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau画面; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette轮廓，画侧像in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated平反; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper穷光蛋，贫民ADJ穷的, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.IIIShe was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene安详的，宁静的.The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman 领班，工头，老板named Homer Barron, a Yankee—a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss 坏话，家伙the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because theladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige—without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned V.伸长了脖子，N.起重机，吊车，绞车silk and satin缎子，缎布ADJ缎子的behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."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抗渗. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her."I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty 傲慢，高傲，亢black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said."Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom—""I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is—""Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?""Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want—""I want arsenic砷."The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on thebox, under the skull and bones: "For rats."IVSo the next day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because 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. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies百叶窗as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy越野车, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister—Miss Emily's people were Episcopal主教—to call upon her. He would never divulge 透漏what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit 旅行装备of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married. " We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.So we were not surprised when Homer Barron—the streets had been finished some time since—was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal阴谋V策划阴谋, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent规避the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime石灰，灰，酸橙, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted阻挠Prep横过ADJ横的her woman's life so many times had been too virulent 剧毒的and too furious to die.When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper胡椒粉，胡椒-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and grand-daughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries同辈ADJ现代的，当代的were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped哈腰，俯N门廊, 佝偻，弯腰going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows—she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house—like the carven torso身，胴of an idol in a niche壁龛, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, imperviousADJ抗渗, tranquil 宁静的，安宁的, and perverse丧心病狂的，横的，乖.And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering 老态龙钟Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with acurtain, her gray head propped 撑，扶持，扶植，拥戴on a pillow yellow and moldy发霉的，腐臭的with age and lack of sunlight.VThe negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushedV嘘N沉默, sibilant ADJ嘶嘶声的N嘶嘶声voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought 牛圈，活结，活扣，弯曲flowers, with the crayon蜡笔V用蜡笔画face of her father musingN沉思ADJ沉思的profoundly above the bier柩and the ladies sibilant and macabre可怕的; and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but, instead, a huge meadow草地which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall盖棺布，乌云as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked 装饰，打扮（deckN甲板，阳台，仓面，覆盖物）and furnished as for a bridal新娘的: upon the valance 帷幔curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished 玷污，污蔑，污辱N污辱silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar衣领，项链，颈间and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent 新月ADJ镰刀状的in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute 无声的，哑的N哑子，默音字母，弱音器V弱音shoes and the discarded socks.The man himself lay in the bed.For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin微笑，露齿笑N露齿笑. The body had apparently once lain inthe attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace鬼脸V做鬼脸of love, had cuckolded 戴绿帽子的丈夫V给...戴绿帽子him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable分不开的from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating 表皮，涂层，涂料，衣of the patient and biding dust.Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation N缩进，凹槽of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.。
(完整版)A Rose for Emily 完整版译文
一、爱米丽·格利尔逊小姐走了,全镇的人都去送葬：男人们是出于敬慕之情，因为一座丰碑倒塌了；女人们大多出于好奇之心，都想到爱米丽屋里看个究竟。
除了一个园丁兼厨师的上了年纪的男仆外，至少已经十年都没有人进去看过了。
那是一幢曾经漆成白色的方形大木屋，圆圆的顶阁，尖尖的塔顶,涡形花纹的阳台，尽显出浓浓的七十年代轻松愉快的风格.房屋所在的街道曾经是全镇最为繁华之地。
但这里早已被附近的汽修厂和扎棉机侵占了,就连那些庄严的名字也被吞噬得一干二净；岿然不动的,只有爱米丽小姐的房子，虽有破败之势，却依然显得执拗不训，风韵犹存，与周围的四轮棉花车和汽油泵一样，太过碍眼了。
如今爱米丽小姐也进入了那些具有代表性的庄严的名字行列之中，他们长眠在雪松环拥的墓地里，那是南北战争时期杰斐逊战役中阵亡的军人之墓，有的是南方军人,有的是北方士兵;有的是高职位,有的是无名氏。
生前，爱米丽小姐代表着一个传统、一种职责；她既是人们关注的目标，也是全镇传承下来对她应尽的义务,这种义务是从一八九四年开始的，当时的镇长萨特里斯上校——还颁布了一道命令：严禁黑人妇女不系围裙上街-—豁免了她各种税款；这种特惠政策从她父亲去世之日开始，一直到她不在人世之时为止。
这并不是说爱米丽爱占人们的便宜，而是萨特里斯上校编造了一套不清不楚的瞎话，说什么爱米丽的父亲曾贷款给镇政府，而镇政府，作为交易,以这种方式偿还。
这种瞎话，只有萨特里斯上校那一代人以及像他那样的脑袋的人才瞎编的出来，也只有女人们才会相信这种瞎话。
到了第二代人，他们当上了镇长和议员，思想更加前卫，便对这种免税约定产生了一丝不满。
那年元旦，他们寄给她一张纳税通知单，可是到了二月,依然没有回信.他们给她发了一封公函，要她方便时到镇治安办公室去一趟.一周后，镇长亲自书函一封给她，表示愿意登门拜访，或派车接她；镇长得到的回信却是一张便条,字是写在一张古香古色的信笺上，书法流利，字迹纤细，墨迹已干，大意是说，她根本不再外出.随信附还的还有纳税通知单，但不见任何评述。
(完整版)A_Rose_for_Emily_完整版译文
A Rose for EmilyWilliam Faulkner【故事梗概】爱米莉•格瑞尔生死了，镇里的人都参加了她的葬礼。
男人们出于敬慕，而大多数女人则出于好奇，她们想进死者生前的屋子里去看看，因为那屋子除了一个黑人男仆外，至少已经有10年没有任何人进去看过了。
30年前，爱米莉小姐的父亲去世，当时，爱米莉小姐已三十出头。
当年夏天，镇里要铺人行道，负责该项目的工头是个北方佬，名叫荷默•巴隆。
荷默来后不久，每个星期天，人们都可以看到他和爱米莉小姐一起，驾着轻便马车出游。
镇上的妇女们认为，爱米莉小姐的行为是全镇的耻辱，给青年人树立了不良榜样。
后来，有人说爱米莉小姐去过首饰店，买过全套男装和卫生洁具。
于是，镇里的人传说他们要结婚了。
再后来，有人看见爱米莉小姐去过药店，卖过砒霜。
人行道铺设竣工后，荷默离开了小镇，后来又回来过一次了。
那是一天黄昏时分，有人看见是黑人男仆为荷默开的门。
不过，那是人们最后一次见到荷默。
从那以后，有好长一段时间，人们再也没有看到过爱米莉小姐。
等镇里的人再见到她时，她已经发福，头发也灰白了。
此后，爱米莉小姐很少外出，家里只有一名男仆帮她收拾房子。
不久，她家向外散发着一股难闻的气味，左邻右舍都在抱怨。
最后，参议员和镇里的几位长者召开会议，决定派几个人到她家消除气味。
黑夜里，这些人像夜盗一样，在她家住宅周围四处撒石灰。
从此以后，难闻的味道是没有了，但人们却很难见到爱米莉小姐。
年复一年，那黑人仆人的头发也白了，腰也弯了。
他依然提着购物蓝进进出出。
镇里每年12月份向爱米莉家寄税单，但总是被退回来。
人们只是偶而在楼下的一个窗口看见过爱米莉小姐的身影。
74岁那年，爱米莉小姐在楼下的一个房间里去世了。
黑人男仆在前门迎接前来送葬的第一批女子，随后他穿过屋子，从后门走了出去，从此不见了踪影。
人们知道楼上有个房间，但40年来从没有人进去过。
爱米莉小姐下葬后，人们撬开了楼上房间的门，发现里面到处是灰尘。
英语阅读美文：ARoseForMarly
英语阅读美文： A Rose For MarlyIt was one week before high school graduation when I found the note. I didn 't know it then, but by the end ofthat week, my life would be changed forever.I had been cleaning out my locker, looking through old papers and taking down all the pictures I had taped to the door. Everything seemed to hold memories from the past year, so I was careful not to throw away anything with sentimental value. I found the note on the top shelf of my locker, laying on top of my biology book. It had my name , Marly, printed neatly at the top, and though I didn 't recognize the handwriting, I thought that it was probably from one of my friends. But as I read it, I realized that it couldn't be. It was signed, 'from a secret admirer.' I knew I shouldn't take it seriously, but I couldn't stop my heart from beating fast or my face from turning red.I kept thinking that it was just a prank. But who could've written something so sweet and touching just for a good laugh? I heard laughter from the end of the hall, but when I looked down there I saw that those laughing were paying no attention to me.That evening I kept replaying the words of the note in my head. I reread it so many times during my last hour class, I almost had it memorized.We never spent any time together, it said, but in my mind we did... In my mind we shared so much... from our first kiss to popcorn at the movie theater on our first date. We laughed at inside jokes that no one else got, you taught me how to dance in my backyard. Of course, none of those things really happened...I only imagined them. Outside of my mind we never existed as a couple, you never even knew my true feelings for you. And I'm afraid you never will if I don't tell you now. Please meet me Friday night after the prom, in the park.I spent that entire evening thinking about the note and who could've written it. It wasn't every day I got a note from someone who had been admiring me from afar.The next day at school, I showed the note to my best friend, Christy. We sat down by our lockers, musing over who the mysterious person could be. Every time a boy walked by I contemplated the question ：Could it be him? I tried to act like it wasn't important to me. After all, it could just be a cruel joke someone was playing on me and I would look stupid if I made a big deal out of it.By the end of third hour, everyone knew about the note I had received. At noon, a crowd had gathered around my locker. Some wanted to see the note but I was cautious of who I let read it. I guarded it as if it were some great treasure, and to me, it was."What if its him?" Diane Johansen said, pointing in his direction and laughing. She started doing a dead-on impersonation of Jimmy. I couldn't help but laugh as Diane talked with a stutter and shook, as Jimmy often did. I instantly regretted it. I looked at him. I didn't see love or admiration in his eyes, I saw pain.Throughout the rest of the day I kept thinking about Jimmy. He had lived across the street from me for years, yetI knew so little about him. I remembered my mother telling me tobe nice to him when I was younger. She said that he needed a friend. When I asked her why he acted so different, she told me that his mother had done bad things when she was pregnant with him. It wasn't until I was older that I really understood this. I would occasionally wave at him on the street, but not if my friends were with me. I tried to make myself feel better by thinking that I had at least treated him better than others had.Jimmy was pleasantly interesting. Sometimes I could see in his room through his window as I passed by. He was often playing his guitar, or sitting at his desk writing. After I got the note, I wondered if he had been writing things for me. From then on I tried to see Jimmy through the window. It was my only way of looking into his world. I wondered if my admirer had ever done the same.One evening, I got a call from Christy."I think I know who your admirer is!" she shrieked.My heart pounded. "Who?""You're not going to believe this, but I think itsRussell Moore! At church I overheard him say you were cute! Can you believe it?"There was a long silence."Well, aren't you excited?" she asked."I guess," I said."Who do you want it to be?" she asked.。
a rose for Emily
Looking for the Rose“A Rose for Emily” is a very famous short fiction written by William Faulkner, who is the southern representative writer of American literature. In this story, William Faulkner creates the character -Emily who is the heroine of the short novel. Emily was born into a noble southern family with a strict upbringing. She fell in love with a man, but she didn’t get what she wanted from him. Finally, she killed him with poison and then kept the so-called eternal love until her death. The following passage is focused on analyzing the symbolic meaning of “rose”.In most cases, people wonder what the “rose” is after reading though this story, because there is nowhere to be seen the “rose”. As far as I am concerned, “rose”has several symbolic meanings here.Firstly, there is such description as “Alive, Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care；a sort of hereditary upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 ………..”From the aspect of her family background, we can see Emily comes from a noble family, which is one part of high society. For one thing, her noble birth makes her such a rose as can stand for beauty, honor, dignity, loftiness and everything like that. For another, her father’s tight control makes her isolated and live in solitude for a long time, because he thinks nobody can match her. Therefore from this aspect, the rose is always under observation and everyone wants to have it for themselves, thus making it unavailable to others. All this contributes to the conclusion that Emily actually is like a rose, having both the light and tragic sides.Secondly, the first thing coming to our mind is normally about love when we talk of “rose” and without exception in this fiction, the rose can also symbolize Emily’s love. Emily falls in love with a man, the Yankee road worker-Homer Barron. Homer Barron is her only loved man, but he can’t make a promise to marry her, for he is persistent in pursuing freedom. Homer Barron’s discarding is unacceptable and consequently, she chooses to end his life to get the eternal and complete love. The end of this story is full of tragedy, which is just like the fate of a rose, withering definitely on one day. In most people’s eyes, the rose indicates adoration, beauty, and puritymost of the time, while some others remind us that no flower can bloom for a hundred days, since it is difficult for us to seize any good things but easy to lose all. Hence, the rose stands for Emily’s love, sweet and bitter, faithful and faithless.Thirdly, we all know every masterpiece derives from the writer’ true feelings and deep thinking. The character –Emily is likely to reflect the author himself. The title is “A Rose for Emily”. “For” here means “to give somebody something”, so it shows us that the author is full of pity for Emily, and desire heartedly that Emily can have the most wonderful and meaningful life, full of happiness and hope. To some extent, it is the author’s good wishes for himself.Last but not least, the author is expert in making use of complex narrative style. Besides all above- the symbolic meanings of rose, there comes to be the theme of this story, which suggests the decline of the old south and development of the new south. No matter the times in which Emily lives is of prosperity or decadence, there is always the tendency that an old civilization will be definitely replaced by a new one. Therefore, the rise and decline of southern America is just like the life of roses, full of beauty but never everlasting.References:1. Selected Readings in British and American Literature (text book)2. English Stylistics (text book)。
a rose for emily
This story happens after the American Civil War, in Jefferson Town. It’s a story about an eccentric spinster named Emily Grierson whose marriage is totally manipulated by her father. Two years after her father’s death, poor Emily is acquainted with a north erner called Homer Barron, a day laborer and she falls in love with him. However, their relation is short-lived as Homer becomes tired of her and intends to get rid of her. In order to keep Homer at hand, Emily kills him with arsenic and “obtain” him, thus, she sleeps with his corpse for decades. This is the truth that villagers find after her death. From my own perspective, this masterpiece reflects the decline of the southern society and reveals the conflicts between the two different value systems and tw o societies after the American Civil War.In this novel, Emily symbolizes the South, old and tradition, the Y ankee represents the North, new and modern. Both young guys might be interested in each other when they first meet. But they possess altogether different values or concept of lives. So they inevitably separated before long. The conflict between the two partners symbolizes the conflict between the South and the North. And the absurd murder aggravates the contradictions.In a directly way to summery novel is a story that in a period of south rebuilding the old south society had a big revolution in every field. The north industry went to south which made a strong confliction to culture and morality of south. In this conditions, conservative south people had to find a symbol of the past to stick to its recall. Unlucky Emily is the chosen one seemed as tradition, noble and many people looked at her. Her existence is a hopeful example of no personal desire and needs. In this bossy society she had no right for happiness. His father expelled all men to show love to her because he thought them could not match his noble. When she fell in love with homer, all the residents of town came to prevent them to get married only because homer was from north. All her chances to catch happiness was killed by conservative soc ety. Because this is a society which had a strict restriction to women. She had had try to resist in order to escape the constraint on her but fall in the end with homer rejecting her love. In order to save the respect of her family and her noble character she had to kill homer which made her living with guilty left lifelong.In this novel, writer use a jumbled time order to make story full of rises and downs to attracting readers to read to gradually find out how noble Emily comes to be a fallen down monument and make a strong strike in emotion of readers. Through this people feel that the sharp between ideology of south and north, and suffering people had in this conflict. And express Faulkner's contradictory mind of love and hate to old south society. He know the unreasonable system in old south but also don't want to let it fade away.。
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英语阅读美文：A Rose For MarlyIt was one week before high school graduation when I found the note. I didn’t know it then, but by the end ofthat week, my life would be changed forever.I had been cleaning out my locker, looking through old papers and taking down all the pictures I had taped to the door. Everything seemed to hold memories from the past year, so I was careful not to throw away anything with sentimental value. I found the note on the top shelf of my locker, laying on top of my biology book. It had my name , Marly, printed neatly at the top, and though I didn’t recognize the handwriting, I thought that it was probably from one of my friends. But as I read it, I realized that it couldn't be. It was signed, 'from a secret admirer.' I knew I shouldn't take it seriously, but I couldn't stop my heart from beating fast or my face from turning red.I kept thinking that it was just a prank. But whocould've written something so sweet and touching just for a good laugh? I heard laughter from the end of the hall, but when I looked down there I saw that those laughing were paying no attention to me.That evening I kept replaying the words of the note in my head. I reread it so many times during my last hour class, I almost had it memorized.We never spent any time together, it said, but in my mind we did... In my mind we shared so much... from our first kiss to popcorn at the movie theater on our first date. We laughed at inside jokes that no one else got, you taught me how todance in my backyard. Of course, none of those things really happened... I only imagined them. Outside of my mind we never existed as a couple, you never even knew my true feelings for you. And I'm afraid you never will if I don't tell you now. Please meet me Friday night after the prom, in the park.I spent that entire evening thinking about the note and who could've written it. It wasn't every day I got a note from someone who had been admiring me from afar.The next day at school, I showed the note to my best friend, Christy. We sat down by our lockers, musing over who the mysterious person could be. Every time a boy walked by I contemplated the question： Could it be him? I tried to act like it wasn't important to me. After all, it could just be a cruel joke someone was playing on me and I would look stupid if I made a big deal out of it.By the end of third hour, everyone knew about the note I had received. At noon, a crowd had gathered around my locker. Some wanted to see the note but I was cautious of who I let read it. I guarded it as if it were some great treasure, and to me, it was."What if its him?" Diane Johansen said, pointing in his direction and laughing. She started doing a dead-on impersonation of Jimmy. I couldn't help but laugh as Diane talked with a stutter and shook, as Jimmy often did. I instantly regretted it. I looked at him. I didn't see love or admiration in his eyes, I saw pain.Throughout the rest of the day I kept thinking about Jimmy. He had lived across the street from me for years, yetI knew so little about him. I remembered my mother telling me to be nice to him when I was younger. She said that he needed a friend. When I asked her why he acted so different, shetold me that his mother had done bad things when she was pregnant with him. It wasn't until I was older that I really understood this. I would occasionally wave at him on the street, but not if my friends were with me. I tried to make myself feel better by thinking that I had at least treatedhim better than others had.Jimmy was pleasantly interesting. Sometimes I could seein his room through his window as I passed by. He was often playing his guitar, or sitting at his desk writing. After Igot the note, I wondered if he had been writing things for me. From then on I tried to see Jimmy through the window. It was my only way of looking into his world. I wondered if my admirer had ever done the same.One evening, I got a call from Christy."I think I know who your admirer is!" she shrieked.My heart pounded. "Who?""You're not going to believe this, but I think itsRussell Moore! At church I overheard him say you were cute! Can you believe it?"There was a long silence."Well, aren't you excited?" she asked."I guess," I said."Who do you want it to be?" she asked.。