¶ … Rose for Emily
For some people, letting go of the past is particularly difficult, whether they are holding on because their past was spectacular and wonderful, or, as in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the past is all they have. For Miss Emily Grierson, the title character in Faulkner's grotesque, haunting tale, the past offers a place of safety and respectability unavailable to her in the present. The townspeople who once held her aristocratic family in reverence has morphed into a crass and detached place, and Emily is the victim of this passage of time and values. Faulkner presents Miss Emily sympathetically and the reader feels for her as she powerlessly watches time pass and the town's respect for her dwindle, an inescapable indictment of the "new" values of the South.
Miss Emily Grierson was born into an aristocratic family in the post-Civil War South. Her family's house was on the "most select street" and her family name was among the most "august" in the town. Her standing in the town is clear, and the narrator describes her as "a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…." By the time of her death, however, her family's grand house is now shabby and forgotten, and cotton gins and garages have ruined the once fair landscape. None of the other old houses remain -- they have passed away along with their residents, the last representatives of a generation gone by. Miss Emily herself had become a curiosity. No one had been inside her home for over a decade, and she had rarely been seen in the years since her one suitor, Homer...
Along with her psychological behavior, her social behavior was also completely absurd and she proved this when she poisoned Mr. Homer Barron, a Yankee with whom she started dating after Mr. Giererson's death. Faulkner has emphasized on racism and addressed Homer as "a big, dark, ready man with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face," in other words he was a nigger. Emily was aware of the
Rose for Emily chronicles the life of a woman named Emily Grierson as narrated by the people in her town. The short story by William Faulkner focuses on the character itself, and Faulkner used the townsfolk as his 'eye' in characterizing and describing Emily to the readers. The voice that narrates in the short story is but a representation of the people's collective sentiments for Miss Emily. In the
The "original paraphernalia" (Jackson 618) from the very first occasion was lost "long ago" (618). The people in this small town instinctively know that something is wrong with the lottery but still they feared "to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box" (618). Here the people do not know why they gather every year; they only know that they have done it for a
Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." Jilt can have particularly negative consequences on an individual who is left, considering that the respective person comes to consider that he or she is actually to blame for the fact that his or her lover did not share his or her feelings. The effects of jilting are reflected by the behavior of individuals like Emily in William Faulkner's
Rose for Emily In William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily," the noted author doesn't give very strong evidence that Emily Grierson actually killed Homer Barron, and worse yet, that she slept with his corpse for years. Faulkner teases the reader into believing that Emily did indeed commit these horrific acts. In the process of teasing the reader, Faulkner succeeds in producing what amounts to a satire of sensationalized,
Faulkner utilizes many techniques in setting up this mystery and one is imagery. The images associated with the house are ones that conjure up visions of death. For example, we read that the house had "a big, squarish frame house that had once been white" (Faulkner 452). It had once been on the town's "most select street" (452) but now it was doing well to lift its "coquettish decay
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