A Rose for Emily College Essay--Necrophelia in the South

"A Rose for Emily" is one of Faulkner's most controversial stories. In this short story, the main character Emily Grierson shuts herself away and is aided by townspeople in not following the rules of our society. When she dies, the reader and townspeople discover that many years ago, she killed her love and has slept with his corpse every night. In this way, acceding to critic Peter Swiggart, this setting "serves as a vehicle for moral and social commentary, enabling Faulkner to explain the South's tragic failure" (Swiggart 9). Faulkner does use this story and Emily in particular as a symbol of the failure of the South to accept change.

After the Civil War, many Southerners denied that their lives had changed. They were unwilling to accept new ways and tended to cling to the past, or actually the romanticized image of what was the past. In "A Rose for Emily," everything about Emily is kind of a last hold out of the old ways of the South. In the beginning of the story, even her house is a hold-out. "Only now Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pump-a eyesore among eyesores" (Faulkner). This clearly tells the reader that the old South is relished without the new technology or new changes. In "A Rose for Emily," Emily begins to fade after her father's death. She acts like nothing tragic has happened in her life when people come to pay respects. She closes the door or symbolically "stops time" and stays inside. When she won't pay her taxes and angrily refers people to a man who died ten years ago, the townspeople overlook this. She does not go to jail. The townspeople overlook things like this because Emily is a symbol of their romanticized past, and they cannot bear to let to of the view of their former glory, even if it is crumbling. When mailboxes and house

Numbers are being implemented in town; Emily refuses to have either a mailbox or a house number. Of the changes in town, Faulkner writes "When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and alderman, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction" (Faulkner). Again, this keeps with the ideas of the older South being better.

When she gave china painting lessons, the parents sent their kids to her without questions, afraid to break that old tradition. They sent their children "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" (Faulkner). This in itself is a dying art though, so she must discontinue it.

Even when the bad smell begins to bother others around Emily's house, townspeople come and spread lime. They want to get rid of the smell; they don't question Emily too strenuously. Of Emily Grierson, Faulkner says, "Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, a care" (Faulkner). In trying to keep Homer, Emily has again been unable to break with the past. Homer wanted to leave her so she poisoned him. Now, he can never leave her and all is well in her world. Homer incidentally is from the North and symbolizes the more fast paced life of the North. Emily symbolizes that slow, slow pace of the South. So, this Northern guy could not leave her and move on to other things, according to Emily, so she does what she can to make him stay. If Homer is indeed ready to leave her, she is ready to clutch at any way to keep him. Even Emily holding onto the rose all this time symbolizes a desire to cling to the past, to a world that is no more. She is still clutching a decaying past.

At the end of the story, all the townspeople must understand that indeed, times do change. Their symbol of southern ways has committed murder because of her unwillingness to accept the changes happening around her. She has tried to slow down or stop time, which of course, no one can do. Critic Frederick Hoffman would describe

Emily as "trapped in history-immobilized because of a fixation with the past" (Hoffman 31).

The ways of the world had changed around her and Emily Grierson just had not accepted it. She had tried to stop time in her own twisted ways, and even more miraculously, the townspeople had let her. To them, she was a symbol of the old South, even if they did suspect some madness. She was her father's daughter, and they were more than content to let her do things in her own way. They, in fact, liked her as a symbol of the Old South so that they could cling to an idealized past as well. But as the reader knows and the townspeople find out, time stops for no man. It can never stop and no matter how you try to trap it, it will find a way out eventually. Emily's way out was death. She leaves behind the townspeople who defended her to figure out how they will move into this new world of change and growth, how they will reconcile the Old South with the new one.

Works Cited

Dilworth, Thomas. "A Romance to Kill For: Homicidal Complicity in Faulkner's 'A

Rose for Emily", Studies in Short Fiction. 36. (1999). 251-62.

Hoffman, Frederick J. William Faulkner, University of California Riverside, Twayne

Publishing (1961).

Swiggart, Peter,. The Art of Faulkner's Novels. University of Texas Press. Austin.

(1962).