精读6 Paraphrase A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily
Unit 8
1. But garages and cotton gins had ...of that neighborhood... (p2)
The street used to house only the best families. But then great changes took place: garages and cotton gins were established on the street and their existence wiped out the aristocratic traces in that neighborhood.
2. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. (p3)
It would not be true to say that miss Emily would have accepted charity.
3. "Just as if a man-any man-could keep a kitchen properly," the ladies said.... (p16) What the ladies said meant that they did not in the least believe a man, any man, could keep a kitchen properly.
4. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons. (p16)
The Griersons regarded themselves as very important and the outside world as vulgar and full of people inferior to them. They belonged to two entirely different worlds. However, the complaints about the smell served as a link between the two different worlds and compelled Miss Emily to deal with the outside world.
5. The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation.(p21)
The next day the mayor received two more complaints. One of them was from a man who came and pleaded to the mayor in a shy and timid way.
6. 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.(p25)
People in the town felt that the Grierson family regarded themselves more important than they really deserved to be. The fact that miss Emily great-aunt, old lady Wyatt, had gone crazy had to do with this blind, excessive self-importance.
7. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.(p26)
Ordinary people often become excited or worried when they get a penny more or a penny less. Being poor, now she would learn to appreciate the value of money like other people in the town.
8. But there were still other, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- without calling it noblesse oblige.(p31)
But there were still others, older people, who said that no matter how sad miss Emily was (over her father death), she should not forget she had certain obligations as a member of the nobility, though a real lady would not describe her self-restraint by the expression noblesse oblige.
9. We were glad because the female cousins were even more grierson than miss Emily had ever been.(p45)
We were glad because the cousins were even more stubborn and self important than miss Emily.
10. and the very old men 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 by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years. (p55)
And the very old men confused the dates and years of past happenings. To the old people, all the past should be like a road that becomes smaller as it reaches further back. But to those old southerners, the recent past of ten years or so was like a bottleneck, a narrow passage, or a tunnel. Beyond that narrow passage, the remote past became a huge level meadow where things were pleasantly and fondly mixed up together. Like the green grass on the meadow never touched by the winter, their memories of the remote past remained blurred, sweet, romanticized and unchanged.。