Compare And Contrast A Rose For Emily And Landlady

Sydney Klimas

Caroline Porter

English 203

3 November 2014

Looking Deeper into the Eyes of The Faulkner and Dahl

In “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “Landlady” by Roald Dahl, both authors create stories that are largely symbolic and similar in many ways. Faulkner and Dahl have somewhat similar writing styles, and both of their stories are centered on death. Although several themes occur in both, death is the one that they share in common the most. Dahl focuses on how hard it is to lose people with his inclusion of the landlady who preserves old bodies and Faulkner focuses on this theme in the form of Emily keeping dead people in her house. This is intriguing because this shows that love can turn people to take twisted actions, and

Faulkner allows the reader freedom to guess what the landlady’s past may have been which can, in turn, make the story mean quite a few different things to several different people. The readers aren’t made aware what caused her to be attracted to keeping young men and stuffing them in her house. “‘Seventeen?’ She cried. ‘Oh that’s the perfect age!’” Did she lose two young boys of her own? Did they run away from her? Did they die? Dahl relays these questions to his readers allowing them to form conclusions of their own. Not knowing the history behind the story leaves us with these questions. I have come to the conclusion that the landlady in “The Landlady” had boys who were teenagers when they died. As a result, the landlady feels she needs to open this Bed and Breakfast to attract the teenagers so she can love them just like she loved her son(s). However, there is some irony in this conclusion. If her teenage son(s) died, why would she want to keep killing young boys that she wants to keep forever? As a reader, I would have anticipated that the landlady would want to keep them alive as long as possible and, then, keep their bodies after they die. In a misguided way, these actions of stuffing the bodies are an expression of love. This way of showing their love is definitely not what many would call “normal”. Usually people show their love by going on dates, getting the other person flowers, and by doing activities together that grow their love even stronger. In these stories, killing the people and stuffing them is those two women’s way of showing their love. Dahl and Faulkner have kept the reader’s consistent interest throughout by including these twisted minds in their