A rather dark and disturbing short story written in 1931 by William Falkner, “A Rose For Emily” tells the tale of Emily Grierson, a troubled, and mysterious woman who has always been an outsider in her town. The story begins with the funeral of Emily, who had died at 74. Nobody, except her servant Tobe, had been inside her house for ten years, and the story goes back to this last encounter. Emily had had a special relationship with the town which allowed her to opt out on taxpaying because she couldn’t pay, but the newer generation did not like the idea. This is when the authorities went to her house to ask for payment, and she refused straight out. The story goes back thirty years before this when, there had been a terrible stench coming from her house. This was a couple years after her father had passed away, leaving her only the house but no money, and soon after a man she was seeing had disappeared from her life. The townspeople, unwilling to confront her about it, sprinkled lime around her house until the smell left. The story moves further back to when she begins dating the man named Homer Baron and the town fetches her cousins to attempt break up the relationship. Emily is seen buying arsenic at the drugstore and the townspeople thinks she plans to kill herself. Homer and the cousins leave, Homer comes back, and after he enters Emily’s house, he is never seen again. She rarely leaves the house. As she ages, her hair turns grey, and she becomes overweight and unhealthy, she dies, and the reader is brought back to the funeral. When it is over, the townspeople go upstairs in the house to break into a room which had been closed for forty years. They find the corpse of Homer on a bed, the indentation of a head on the pillow nex... ... middle of paper ... ...en taught: to fall in love and get married and have a family, but it all began falling apart when she realized Homer was going to leave. It is just as when the authorities showed up at her house asking her about her taxes, and she refused to pay, saying, “the authorities must see Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson” although Colonel Sartoris had been dead for quite some time. She is unable to deal with conflicts because she refuses to let go of the past. There are many different levels to Emily’s disturbed mindset and behavior. Her refusal to let go is only one part, and merely scratches the surface of this intricately written story. Faulkner skillfully creates the disturbing, sad, tragic nature of this tale. The non-chronological order helps maintain the mystery and intrigue until the shocking conclusion of this expertly written story.
Ulf Kirchdorfer, "A Rose for Emily: Will the Real Mother Please Stand Up?” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 10/2016, Volume 29, Issue 4, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2016.1222578
Faulkner first tells that shortly after her father’s death Miss Emily’s sweetheart left her. Everybody in the town thought that Emily and this sweetheart of hers were going to be married. After her sweetheart left her the people of the town saw her very little. Faulkner then tells what might be viewed as the climax of the story next. He explains that one day Miss Emily went into town and bought rat poison. By revealing this so early on in the story it challenges the reader to use their imagination. The readers’ view of Miss Emily could now possibly be changed. It has changed from feeling sorry for this woman to thinking she is going to murder someone.
Emily was drove crazy by others expectations, and her loneliness. ““A Rose for Emily,” a story of love and obsession, love, and death, is undoubtedly the most famous one among Faulkner’s more than one hundred short stories. It tells of a tragedy of a screwy southern lady Emily Grierson who is driven from stem to stern by the worldly tradition and desires to possess her lover by poisoning him and keeping his corpse in her isolated house.” (Yang, A Road to Destruction and Self Destruction: The Same Fate of Emily and Elly, Proquest) When she was young her father chased away any would be suitors. He was convinced no one was good enough for her. Emily ended up unmarried. She had come to depend on her father. When he finally died, ...
More often than not, when analyzing the similarities and differences between a written story and its reimagined film version, the differences leave an altered impression on the audience. In the short story, A Rose for Emily, the outstanding differences take the viewer on a ride they didn’t experience when reading the story. The biggest alteration is how the story’s chronological order takes a twist as they place the events back into an order in which they happened. Even though it is easier to follow, the original version left the audience dazed and confused for a reason. It made it less predictable, and allowed the reader to guess why Emily did those things. The offbeat approach the film takes adds more romance, rearranges the original time
Is being attached to something in a great abundance a bad thing? Well, it can be in some cases. Undoubtedly, many people in today’s society live constantly in angst with the fear of losing their loved ones and cope with their anxiety in a variety of ways. However, while many methods are accepted by society’s standards as of dealing with their stressors, some individuals have more extreme methods of coping with their separation anxiety. For instance, in “A Rose for Emily”, the main character, Emily Grierson, loses her father and fears a similar event will occur with her assumed lover. For that reason, it is easy for readers to assume that Emily has a separation anxiety. In this story by William Faulkner, she takes what modern day society would consider drastic measures to make sure the two never leave her.
...s story he writes about how earlier in Emily’s life she refuses to let the town’s people in her house even though there is a strong odor that is coming from her property. In this section her father has just passed away and was abandoned by a man who she wanted to marry. This section she becomes very depressed. In section three it talks about how Emily is starting to come down with an illness after all of the depressing events she had to endure. In sections four and five Faulkner describes how there is fear throughout the towns people is that of which Emily is going to possibly poison herself. A while later she then she passes away. In section five is when the truth is revealed to the public about her sickness. Faulkner uses the view point of an unnamed town member while he uses a third person perspective to show the general corrosion of the southern town’s people.
“A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner takes us back in time with his Gothic short story known as, “A Rose for Emily.” Almost every sentence gives a new piece of evidence to lead the reader to the overall theme of death, isolation, and trying to maintain traditions. The reader can conclude the theme through William Faulkner’s use of literary devices such as his choice of characters, the setting, the diction, the tone, and the plot line. William Faulkner introduces us to a number of characters but the most involved being Emily Grierson, Homer Barron, Tobe, and the ladies of the town; who are not named individually. Emily Grierson was once a beautiful and wealthy upper class young women who lived with her father, who has since died, on the towns,
In “ A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner tells the complex tale of a woman who is battered by time and unable to move through life after the loss of each significant male figure in her life. Unlike Disney Stories, there is no prince charming to rescue fallen princess, and her assumed misery becomes the subject of everyone in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. As the townspeople gossip about her and develop various scenarios to account for her behaviors and the unknown details of her life, Emily Grierson serves as a scapegoat for the lower classes to validate their lives. In telling this story, Faulkner decides to take an unusual approach; he utilizes a narrator to convey the details of a first-person tale, by examining chronology, the role of the narrator and the interpretations of “A Rose for Emily”, it can be seen that this story is impossible to tell without a narrator.
Faulkner has created a masterful piece of story telling in taking the reader through a suspenseful and captivating story. The effective use of foreshadowing does not diminish the climax of the story but rather enhance it by not giving out the details, but leaving it to the imagination of the reader. Through the organization of the structure of the storyline mixing with clever clues, Faulkner transforms Emily through the many tragic stages of her life and the ever-accompanying presence of death.
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a short story told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator and opens with the death of Miss Emily Grierson, an elderly woman that the reader quickly learns that the town views more as a character than an actual human being. Through flashbacks, the mysterious and haunting tale of Emily is revealed. As a child, Emily was the member of an aristocratic family, but has now long been living in relative poverty in the former grand home of her family after her father left her with no money. The product of the Civil War South, Emily never moved past the social customs of her youth, and refused to live according to modern standards. This becomes evident when she accepts the mayor’s hidden charity under the guise of her never owing taxes due to a lie that her father had loaned the town money and this was how the town would re...
William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” displays themes of alienation and isolation. Emily Grierson’s own father is found to be the root of many of her problems. Faulkner writes Emily’s character as one who is isolated from the people of her town. Her isolation from society and alienation from love is what ultimately drives her to madness.
William Faulkner used indirect characterization to portray Miss Emily as a stubborn, overly attached, and introverted women through the serious of events that happened throughout her lifetime. The author cleverly achieves this by mentioning her father’s death, Homer’s disappearance, the town’s taxes, and Emily’s reactions to all of these events. Emily’s reactions are what allowed the readers to portray her characteristics, as Faulkner would want her to be
In William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” he uses many literary elements to portray the life of Emily and the town of Jefferson. The theme of the past versus the present is in a sense the story of Miss Emily’s life. Miss Emily is the representation of the Old South versus the New South, mainly because of her inability to interact with the present or come to terms with reality. Holding onto the past and rejecting change into the present led Miss Emily into a life of isolation and mental issues.
In "A Rose for Emily," William Faulkner's use of setting and characterization foreshadows and builds up to the climax of the story. His use of metaphors prepares the reader for the bittersweet ending. A theme of respectability and the loss of, is threaded throughout the story. Appropriately, the story begins with death, flashes back to the past and hints towards the demise of a woman and the traditions of the past she personifies. Faulkner has carefully crafted a multi-layered masterpiece, and he uses setting, characterization, and theme to move it along.
Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal girl with aspirations of growing up and finding a mate that she could soon marry and start a family, but this was all impossible because of her father. The father believed that, “none of the younger man were quite good enough for Miss Emily,” because of this Miss Emily was alone. Emily was in her father’s shadow for a very long time. She lived her li...