A Rose for Emily-
William Faulkner
(1930)
William Faulkner
William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi and died on July 6, 1962 in Byhalia, Mississippi. He was an accomplished American novelist and writer who published several books and a short story anthology in his lifetime. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. (Britannica) "A Rose for Emily" was included in his short story collection These Thirteen in 1931.
Overall Idea and Plot Summary
The overall idea of this story is a small town placing judgement on a local woman who they have deemed to be sad and somewhat crazy. The woman has been kept away her entire life by her father and even after he dies she finds it impossible to immerse herself in society with others.
Five Main Plot Points-
Emily begins her reclusive ways after her father dies by refusing to leave the house or pay her taxes to the town and eventually the townspeople give up and leave her be.
A strong and horrible smell comes from around Emily's house that leads the neighbors to complain until men snuck onto her land to spread lime and eradicate the smell.
Homer Barron comes into town and Emily begins a relationship with him that the townspeople are both happy for and question greatly because they find it to be inappropriate because of her family's high standard. At one point in their relationship she goes to the druggists and asks for arsenic.
Some of Emily's family comes to town to attempt to persuade her to end her relationship, but the town suspects that she and Homer Barron get married because she buys homemaking things and items with his initials. Her relatives leaves and he comes to live with her. Neither are seen for years after.
After Emily has died, the townspeople finally go into her house to discover the place in which she had been hiding for so long. Upon breaking into a room that had not been seen in decades, they discover the decomposed body of Homer Barron in a room filled with rose colored things. They see an indent on the pillow opposite the body and find a single gray hair of Emily's.
Literary Devices in "A Rose for Emily"
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There is lots of imagery found in "A Rose for Emily" through the descriptions of the old house slowly decaying that seem to match Emily slowly withering away locked inside of the house. "Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores." (1170) She was "a small, fat woman in black....Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness is another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and that of a pallid hue. Her eyes' lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough..." (1171)
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The author also uses time consistently throughout the story both as a symbol and as a plot device. The narration jumps around in time throughout many years and Emily is often described by how time has affected her, such as her gray hair and decrepit frame. Time is played with as a plot device through the way the narrator skips many years at a time and goes back and forth in time in order to build Emily's story.
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Foreshadowing is consistent in this story, especially for Homer Barron's character. The scene of Emily buying the arsenic and refusing to explain why and the scene of Homer suddenly never being seen again happen so close to each other that it seems to build a sense of foreshadowing around what has happened to Homer.
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Characterization- Faulkner uses characterization through the way he builds Emily using description of her physical appearance and her actions. When she is younger she is "a slender figure in white" that hides behind her father and nothing much is known about her. But as she changes physically, she changes mentally. When she buys the poison she is "thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face of flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye-sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look" and she is much stronger in her personality, refusing to answer the druggist's questions and instead she "stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye" until he did what she wanted. The moments of her physical description and her actions being matched together in a scene show her change in character and the characterization Faulkner uses.
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Setting-The setting of the story has a large impact on the plot because it is set in a rural, Southern, traditional American town that makes its expectations and rules clear. This is shown through the townspeople's reactions to Emily and her relationship with Homer Barron. They consider her a fallen woman and her actions were "a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people" (1175). These societal expectations set up the way Emily is seen throughout the story, especially because the story is narrated by a townsperson, not Emily.
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Narration-Faulkner makes an interesting choice in the writing of this story by having the narrator be a nameless townsperson, rather than perhaps Emily herself or a different significant character. This faceless narrator helps keep the focus of the story solely on Emily, rather than the narrator themselves, and because the narrator is a townsperson it helps show Emily's impact on the town through a first hand view.