A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner

• William Faulkner (1897-1962) was the first of four sons born to Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. His family was an old upper-middle-class southern family, but "not quite of the old feudal cotton aristocracy." He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, Lafayette county, the basis of his fictional Yoknapatawpha county.

• He was well aware of his family background, especially his great grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, a colorful if violent figure who fought gallantly during the Civil War, built a local railway, and published a popular romantic novel.

• Although he was a good student in his early years, with time his academic performance waned. He studied at the University of Mississippi and later Oxford, in England. Although his father preferred that he learn typical Southern male pastimes, such as fishing and hunting, his mother encouraged reading and education, as did his maternal grandmother, and his African-American nanny, Caroline "Callie" Barr who raised him from infancy.

William Faulkner

• Telling stories about the "Old Colonel," as his family called him, had already become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy. According to one of his biographers, by the time William was born, his great-grandfather had "long since been enshrined as a household deity."

• Faulkner joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force during the First World War, although he never served in combat. He worked temporarily for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper, and later as a Hollywood scriptwriter from the 1930s to the 1950s. Between 1932 and 1954, he worked on approximately 50 films.

William Faulkner (from Nobel Prize website, 1949)

• In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner invented a host of characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama in Faulkner’s novels is built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half. Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants.

• Their theme is the decay of the old South, represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the emergence of ruthless and brash newcomers, the Snopeses.

• Theme and technique – the distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue are fused particularly successfully in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters.

William Faulkner (From the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project)

• The first published Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, begins by conjuring up the spirit of Colonel John Sartoris. Dead since 1876, he haunts much of that text and many of the others; the 21 texts he appears in is the most of any inhabitant of Faulkner's imaginative world. (Note, Flags in the Dust was originally titled Sartoris.)

• As Faulkner acknowledged, his story is based largely on the life and death of Colonel William Falkner, the author's great-grandfather. His fictional biography is established in that first novel. He came from Carolina to Jefferson around 1837, where he built a large cotton plantation four miles north of town.

William Faulkner

• Colonel John Sartoris, a Civil War hero, an entrepreneur, and progenitor of the Sartoris family. Colonel Sartoris led a Confederate regiment during the Civil War and returned from the war to found a railroad and become a community leader in Jefferson. He shot and killed two carpetbaggers who were enrolling African Americans to vote, and he was shot and killed in 1876.

• To his descendants, he represents a code of honor that has become unfashionable in the twentieth century. At the time of the action of the novel, he has been dead for many years, but he remains a vital force in the lives of his descendants.

• For more information on Faulkner, see the website Digital Yoknapatawpha, Univ. of , Univ. of Virginia, NEH funding.

William Faulkner

• Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

• The change in spelling of his last name occurred as an accident with a publisher who made the error, asked Faulkner if he wanted it changed; he let it stand.

• In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) appears on similar lists.

William Faulkner

• Probably the most well-known and acclaimed of his novels is The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929. The title comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Just after Macbeth hears of his wife's death, he says:

  • Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  • That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  • And then is heard no more. It is a tale

  • Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  • Signifying nothing.

• Just after, in 1930, Faulkner published the short story, "A Rose for Emily," in an issue of the magazine, The Forum. It was Faulkner's first short story published in a national magazine. It's generally considered one of his best short stories.

A Rose for Emily

Characters:

• Emily Grierson

• Mr. Grierson, her father, patriarch, who prohibits any romantic involvement

• Homer Barron, northerner and Emily's suitor

• Tobe, the Black man serving as her butler

• Colonel Sartoris, former town mayor who remits Emily's taxes

• Emily's cousins, from Alabama

Questions for discussion

• What does Emily represent within the structure of Southern society?

• Would it be fair to say she's "symbolic"? Of what?

• What does Homer represent?

Questions for discussion

• Typical of Faulkner's style, this story begins at the end—Emily's death, funeral, and the discovery of Homer. It then moves backwards to fill in the events of her life previous to this.

• How many generations of townspeople are represented in this story?

• What's their opinion of Emily?

Questions for discussion

• Why do the townspeople fail to make some basic connections between the fact that Miss Emily bought arsenic, Homer has disappeared, and there's a stench around her house which they treat with lime?

Questions for discussion

• According to one astute academic critic, the real issue in this short story is its "narrative focus or point of view."

• According to one group of critics, the story has a rather "anonymous, ubiquitous narrator," who is an "innocuous, naive, passive citizen of Jefferson," a good story teller.

• To another group, the narrator simply records Emily's history and the town's response to her, which ranges from "bemused tolerance, to suspicion, to knowledge, to horror."

• The narrator is more complicated than that. What's his attitude toward Emily and the townspeople?

Breakout room question

• What did you take away from this short story?

Final thoughts—(from “Emily’s Rose of Love,” by Helen Nebeker)

• With the passage of years, only Emily, symbolic of the indomitable but dying Old South in all its decadence, pride, refusal to admit the changing order, remains distinguishable, definable.

• Only Emily “passed from generation to generation--

  • dear—to the old order

  • Inescapable--to her contemporary protectors

  • Impervious--to the new order

  • tranquil [in her madness], and perverse [turned to the illusory past instead of reality]."

• And so she dies, alone, scarcely remembered, "in the house filled with dust and shadows ..."

Final thoughts—(from “Emily’s Rose of Love,” by Helen Nebeker)

• Symbolically, the New South has triumphed.

• Have not we, knowing her horrible crime, concurring in it, even abetting it, stood guard, protected, cherished these many years this putrescent symbol of a way of life long dead, almost forgotten?

• Do we offer this last appalling act of devotion-the keeping of her ghastly secret-as a final tribute, as our "rose for Emily"? A rose in sharp, poignant, horrible contrast to the "bought flowers" of a new generation?

• And in preserving-or using-Emily, we have kept untarnished the honor and myth of the South!

Final thoughts—(from “Emily’s Rose of Love,” by Helen Nebeker)

• Robbed of everything else, even as Emily had been robbed, it [this social order] clings to the rotting body of the loved one-just as Emily had clung to the dead body of her father (the past) and the rotted body of her lover (the present and future)-cherishing it even as it putrefies and maddens . . . even as it dies.

Next week

Women writers of the South

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