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“A Rose for Emily”

Context

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. One of the twentieth
century’s greatest writers, Faulkner earned his fame from a series of novels that
explore the South’s historical legacy, its fraught and often tensely violent present, and
its uncertain future. This grouping of major works includes The Sound and the
Fury(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1931), and Absalom,
Absalom! (1936), all of which are rooted in Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi county,
Yoknapatawpha. This imaginary setting is a microcosm of the South that Faulkner
knew so well. It serves as a lens through which he could examine the practices,
folkways, and attitudes that had divided and united the people of the South since the
nation’s inception.

In his writing, Faulkner was particularly interested in exploring the moral implications of
history. As the South emerged from the Civil War and Reconstruction and attempted to
shed the stigma of slavery, its residents were frequently torn between a new and an
older, more established world order. Religion and politics frequently fail to provide order
and guidance and instead complicate and divide. Society, with its gossip, judgment,
and harsh pronouncements, conspires to thwart the ambitions of individuals struggling
to embrace their identities. Across Faulkner’s fictional landscapes, individual characters
often stage epic struggles, prevented from realizing their potential or establishing their
place in the world.

“A Rose for Emily” was the first short story that Faulkner published in a major
magazine. It appeared in the April 30, 1930, issue of Forum. Despite the earlier
publication of several novels, when Faulkner published this story he was still struggling
to make a name for himself in the United States. Few critics recognized in his prose the
hallmarks of a major new voice. Slightly revised versions of the story appeared in
subsequent collections of Faulkner’s short fiction—inThese 13 (1931) and
then Collected Stories (1950)—which helped to increase its visibility.

Today, the much-anthologized story is among the most widely read and highly praised
of Faulkner’s work. Beyond its lurid appeal and somewhat Gothic atmosphere,
Faulkner’s “ghost story,” as he once called it, gestures to broader ideas, including the
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tensions between North and South, complexities of a changing world order,

disappearing realms of gentility and aristocracy, and rigid social constraints placed on
women. Ultimately, it is the story’s chilling portrait of aberrant psychology and
necrophilia that draws readers into the dank, dusty world of Emily Grierson.

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize in both 1955
and 1962. He died in Byhalia, Mississippi on July 6, 1962, when he was sixty-four.

Plot Overview
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The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily
Grierson’s death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no
stranger had entered for more than ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale
neighborhood, Emily’s house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel
Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities to the
town after her father’s death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had
once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make
unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board
of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact
that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to
Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost
a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out.

In section II, the narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists
another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a
powerful odor emanating from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has
been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry. As
complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime
sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a
couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly
reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity. The
townspeople have always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves,
with Emily’s father driving off the many suitors deemed not good enough to marry his
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daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is still single by the time she turns
thirty.

The day after Mr. Grierson’s death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their
condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a
charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her father’s body over for
burial.

In section III, the narrator describes a long illness that Emily suffers after this incident.
The summer after her father’s death, the town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks,
and a construction company, under the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is
awarded the job. Homer soon becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking
Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the town and increases
the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her
family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station.

As the affair continues and Emily’s reputation is further compromised, she goes to the
drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how
she will use the arsenic. She offers no explanation, and the package arrives at her
house labeled “For rats.”

In section IV, the narrator describes the fear that some of the townspeople have that
Emily will use the poison to kill herself. Her potential marriage to Homer seems
increasingly unlikely, despite their continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women
of the town insist that the Baptist minister talk with Emily. After his visit, he never
speaks of what happened and swears that he’ll never go back. So the minister’s wife
writes to Emily’s two cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an extended stay. Because
Emily orders a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homer’s initials, talk of the couple’s
marriage resumes. Homer, absent from town, is believed to be preparing for Emily’s
move to the North or avoiding Emily’s intrusive relatives.

After the cousins’ departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is
never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite the
occasional lesson she gives in china painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In
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what becomes an annual ritual, Emily refuses to acknowledge the tax bill. She
eventually closes up the top floor of the house. Except for the occasional glimpse of her
in the window, nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the
servant is seen going in and out of the house.

In section V, the narrator describes what happens after Emily dies. Emily’s body is laid
out in the parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After
some time has passed, the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in
forty years is broken down by the townspeople. The room is frozen in time, with the
items for an upcoming wedding and a man’s suit laid out. Homer Barron’s body is
stretched on the bed as well, in an advanced state of decay. The onlookers then notice
the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer’s body and a long strand of
Emily’s gray hair on the pillow.

Character List
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Emily Grierson -  The object of fascination in the story. A eccentric recluse, Emily is a
mysterious figure who changes from a vibrant and hopeful young girl to a cloistered
and secretive old woman. Devastated and alone after her father’s death, she is an
object of pity for the townspeople. After a life of having potential suitors rejected by her
father, she spends time after his death with a newcomer, Homer Barron, although the
chances of his marrying her decrease as the years pass. Bloated and pallid in her later
years, her hair turns steel gray. She ultimately poisons Homer and seals his corpse into
an upstairs room.
Homer Barron -  A foreman from the North. Homer is a large man with a dark
complexion, a booming voice, and light-colored eyes. A gruff and demanding boss, he
wins many admirers in Jefferson because of his gregarious nature and good sense of
humor. He develops an interest in Emily and takes her for Sunday drives in a yellow-
wheeled buggy. Despite his attributes, the townspeople view him as a poor, if not
scandalous, choice for a mate. He disappears in Emily’s house and decomposes in an
attic bedroom after she kills him.

Judge Stevens -  A mayor of Jefferson. Eighty years old, Judge Stevens attempts to
delicately handle the complaints about the smell emanating from the Grierson property.
To be respectful of Emily’s pride and former position in the community, he and the
aldermen decide to sprinkle lime on the property in the middle of the night.
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Mr. Grierson -  Emily’s father. Mr. Grierson is a controlling, looming presence even in
death, and the community clearly sees his lasting influence over Emily. He deliberately
thwarts Emily’s attempts to find a husband in order to keep her under his control. We
get glimpses of him in the story: in the crayon portrait kept on the gilt-edged easel in
the parlor, and silhouetted in the doorway, horsewhip in hand, having chased off
another of Emily’s suitors.

Tobe -  Emily’s servant. Tobe, his voice supposedly rusty from lack of use, is the only
lifeline that Emily has to the outside world. For years, he dutifully cares for her and
tends to her needs. Eventually the townspeople stop grilling him for information about
Emily. After Emily’s death, he walks out the back door and never returns.

Colonel Sartoris -  A former mayor of Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris absolves Emily of

any tax burden after the death of her father. His elaborate and benevolent gesture is
not heeded by the succeeding generation of town leaders.
Analysis of Major Characters
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Emily Grierson

Emily is the classic outsider, controlling and limiting the town’s access to her true
identity by remaining hidden. The house that shields Emily from the world suggests the
mind of the woman who inhabits it: shuttered, dusty, and dark. The object of the town’s
intense scrutiny, Emily is a muted and mysterious figure. On one level, she exhibits the
qualities of the stereotypical southern “eccentric”: unbalanced, excessively tragic, and
subject to bizarre behavior. Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, such as
when she refuses to pay her taxes or state her purpose for buying the poison. Emily
also skirts the law when she refuses to have numbers attached to her house when
federal mail service is instituted. Her dismissal of the law eventually takes on more
sinister consequences, as she takes the life of the man whom she refuses to allow to
abandon her.

The narrator portrays Emily as a monument, but at the same time she is pitied and
often irritating, demanding to live life on her own terms. The subject of gossip and
speculation, the townspeople cluck their tongues at the fact that she accepts Homer’s
attentions with no firm wedding plans. After she purchases the poison, the townspeople
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conclude that she will kill herself. Emily’s instabilities, however, lead her in a different
direction, and the final scene of the story suggests that she is a
necrophiliac. Necrophilia typically means a sexual attraction to dead bodies. In a
broader sense, the term also describes a powerful desire to control another, usually in
the context of a romantic or deeply personal relationship. Necrophiliacs tend to be so
controlling in their relationships that they ultimately resort to bonding with unresponsive
entities with no resistance or will—in other words, with dead bodies. Mr. Grierson
controlled Emily, and after his death, Emily temporarily controls him by refusing to give
up his dead body. She ultimately transfers this control to Homer, the object of her
affection. Unable to find a traditional way to express her desire to possess Homer,
Emily takes his life to achieve total power over him.

Homer Barron

Homer, much like Emily, is an outsider, a stranger in town who becomes the subject of
gossip. Unlike Emily, however, Homer swoops into town brimming with charm, and he
initially becomes the center of attention and the object of affection. Some townspeople
distrust him because he is both a Northerner and day laborer, and his Sunday outings
with Emily are in many ways scandalous, because the townspeople regard Emily—
despite her eccentricities—as being from a higher social class. Homer’s failure to
properly court and marry Emily prompts speculation and suspicion. He carouses with
younger men at the Elks Club, and the narrator portrays him as either a homosexual or
simply an eternal bachelor, dedicated to his single status and uninterested in marriage.
Homer says only that he is “not a marrying man.”

As the foreman of a company that has arrived in town to pave the sidewalks, Homer is
an emblem of the North and the changes that grip the once insular and genteel world of
the South. With his machinery, Homer represents modernity and industrialization, the
force of progress that is upending traditional values and provoking resistance and
alarm among traditionalists. Homer brings innovation to the rapidly changing world of
this Southern town, whose new leaders are themselves pursuing more “modern” ideas.
The change that Homer brings to Emily’s life, as her first real lover, is equally as
profound and seals his grim fate as the victim of her plan to keep him permanently by
her side.
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Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

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Themes

Tradition versus Change

Through the mysterious figure of Emily Grierson, Faulkner conveys the struggle that
comes from trying to maintain tradition in the face of widespread, radical change.
Jefferson is at a crossroads, embracing a modern, more commercial future while still
perched on the edge of the past, from the faded glory of the Grierson home to the town
cemetery where anonymous Civil War soldiers have been laid to rest. Emily herself is a
tradition, steadfastly staying the same over the years despite many changes in her
community. She is in many ways a mixed blessing. As a living monument to the past,
she represents the traditions that people wish to respect and honor; however, she is
also a burden and entirely cut off from the outside world, nursing eccentricities that
others cannot understand.

Emily lives in a timeless vacuum and world of her own making. Refusing to have
metallic numbers affixed to the side of her house when the town receives modern mail
service, she is out of touch with the reality that constantly threatens to break through
her carefully sealed perimeters. Garages and cotton gins have replaced the grand
antebellum homes. The aldermen try to break with the unofficial agreement about taxes
once forged between Colonel Sartoris and Emily. This new and younger generation of
leaders brings in Homer’s company to pave the sidewalks. Although Jefferson still
highly regards traditional notions of honor and reputation, the narrator is critical of the
old men in their Confederate uniforms who gather for Emily’s funeral. For them as for
her, time is relative. The past is not a faint glimmer but an ever-present, idealized
realm. Emily’s macabre bridal chamber is an extreme attempt to stop time and prevent
change, although doing so comes at the expense of human life.

The Power of Death

Death hangs over “A Rose for Emily,” from the narrator’s mention of Emily’s death at
the beginning of the story through the description of Emily’s death-haunted life to the
foundering of tradition in the face of modern changes. In every case, death prevails
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over every attempt to master it. Emily, a fixture in the community, gives in to death
slowly. The narrator compares her to a drowned woman, a bloated and pale figure left
too long in the water. In the same description, he refers to her small, spare skeleton—
she is practically dead on her feet. Emily stands as an emblem of the Old South, a
grand lady whose respectability and charm rapidly decline through the years, much like
the outdated sensibilities the Griersons represent. The death of the old social order will
prevail, despite many townspeople’s attempts to stay true to the old ways.

Emily attempts to exert power over death by denying the fact of death itself. Her bizarre
relationship to the dead bodies of the men she has loved—her necrophilia—is revealed
first when her father dies. Unable to admit that he has died, Emily clings to the
controlling paternal figure whose denial and control became the only—yet extreme—
form of love she knew. She gives up his body only reluctantly. When Homer dies, Emily
refuses to acknowledge it once again—although this time, she herself was responsible
for bringing about the death. In killing Homer, she was able to keep him near her.
However, Homer’s lifelessness rendered him permanently distant. Emily and Homer’s
grotesque marriage reveals Emily’s disturbing attempt to fuse life and death. However,
death ultimately triumphs.

Motifs

Watching

Emily is the subject of the intense, controlling gaze of the narrator and residents of
Jefferson. In lieu of an actual connection to Emily, the townspeople create subjective
and often distorted interpretations of the woman they know little about. They attend her
funeral under the guise of respect and honor, but they really want to satisfy their lurid
curiosity about the town’s most notable eccentric. One of the ironic dimensions of the
story is that for all the gossip and theorizing, no one guesses the perverse extent of
Emily’s true nature.

For most of the story, Emily is seen only from a distance, by people who watch her
through the windows or who glimpse her in her doorway. The narrator refers to her as
an object—an “idol.” This pattern changes briefly during her courtship with Homer
Barron, when she leaves her house and is frequently out in the world. However, others
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spy on her just as avidly, and she is still relegated to the role of object, a distant figure
who takes on character according to the whims of those who watch her. In this sense,
the act of watching is powerful because it replaces an actual human presence with a
made-up narrative that changes depending on who is doing the watching. No one
knows the Emily that exists beyond what they can see, and her true self is visible to
them only after she dies and her secrets are revealed.

Dust

A pall of dust hangs over the story, underscoring the decay and decline that figure so
prominently. The dust throughout Emily’s house is a fitting accompaniment to the faded
lives within. When the aldermen arrive to try and secure Emily’s annual tax payment,
the house smells of “dust and disuse.” As they seat themselves, the movement stirs
dust all around them, and it slowly rises, roiling about their thighs and catching the slim
beam of sunlight entering the room. The house is a place of stasis, where regrets and
memories have remained undisturbed. In a way, the dust is a protective presence; the
aldermen cannot penetrate Emily’s murky relationship with reality. The layers of dust
also suggest the cloud of obscurity that hides Emily’s true nature and the secrets her
house contains. In the final scene, the dust is an oppressive presence that seems to
emanate from Homer’s dead body. The dust, which is everywhere, seems even more
horrible here.

Symbols

Emily’s House

Emily’s house, like Emily herself, is a monument, the only remaining emblem of a dying
world of Southern aristocracy. The outside of the large, square frame house is lavishly
decorated. The cupolas, spires, and scrolled balconies are the hallmarks of a decadent
style of architecture that became popular in the 1870s. By the time the story takes
place, much has changed. The street and neighborhood, at one time affluent, pristine,
and privileged, have lost their standing as the realm of the elite. The house is in some
ways an extension of Emily: it bares its “stubborn and coquettish decay” to the town’s
residents. It is a testament to the endurance and preservation of tradition but now
seems out of place among the cotton wagons, gasoline pumps, and other industrial
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trappings that surround it—just as the South’s old values are out of place in a changing
society.

Emily’s house also represents alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the
living past, and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she
preserves the man she would not allow to leave her. As when the group of men
sprinkled lime along the foundation to counteract the stench of rotting flesh, the
townspeople skulk along the edges of Emily’s life and property. The house, like its
owner, is an object of fascination for them. They project their own lurid fantasies and
interpretations onto the crumbling edifice and mysterious figure inside. Emily’s death is
a chance for them to gain access to this forbidden realm and confirm their wildest
notions and most sensationalistic suppositions about what had occurred on the inside.

The Strand of Hair

The strand of hair is a reminder of love lost and the often perverse things people do in
their pursuit of happiness. The strand of hair also reveals the inner life of a woman
who, despite her eccentricities, was committed to living life on her own terms and not
submitting her behavior, no matter how shocking, to the approval of others. Emily
subscribes to her own moral code and occupies a world of her own invention, where
even murder is permissible. The narrator foreshadows the discovery of the long strand
of hair on the pillow when he describes the physical transformation that Emily
undergoes as she ages. Her hair grows more and more grizzled until it becomes a
“vigorous iron-gray.” The strand of hair ultimately stands as the last vestige of a life left
to languish and decay, much like the body of Emily’s former lover.

Faulkner and the Southern Gothic

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Southern Gothic is a literary tradition that came into its own in the early twentieth
century. It is rooted in the Gothic style, which had been popular in European literature
for many centuries. Gothic writers concocted wild, frightening scenarios in which
mysterious secrets, supernatural occurrences, and characters’ extreme duress
conspired to create a breathless reading experience. Gothic style focused on the
morbid and grotesque, and the genre often featured certain set pieces and characters:
drafty castles laced with cobwebs, secret passages, and frightened, wide-eyed
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heroines whose innocence does not go untouched. Although they borrow the essential
ingredients of the Gothic, writers of Southern Gothic fiction were not interested in
integrating elements of the sensational solely for the sake of creating suspense or
titillation. Writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote,
Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, Erskine Caldwell, and Carson McCullers were drawn to the
elements of Gothicism for what they revealed about human psychology and the dark,
underlying motives that were pushed to the fringes of society.

Southern Gothic writers were interested in exploring the extreme, antisocial behaviors
that were often a reaction against a confining code of social conduct. Southern Gothic
often hinged on the belief that daily life and the refined surface of the social order were
fragile and illusory, disguising disturbing realities or twisted psyches. Faulkner, with his
dense and multilayered prose, traditionally stands outside this group of practitioners.
However, “A Rose for Emily” reveals the influence that Southern Gothic had on his
writing: this particular story has a moody and forbidding atmosphere; a crumbling old
mansion; and decay, putrefaction, and grotesquerie. Faulkner’s work uses the
sensational elements to highlight an individual’s struggle against an oppressive society
that is undergoing rapid change. Another aspect of the Southern Gothic style is
appropriation and transformation. Faulkner has appropriated the image of the damsel
in distress and transformed it into Emily, a psychologically damaged spinster. Her
mental instability and necrophilia have made her an emblematic Southern Gothic
heroine.

Time and Temporal Shifts

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In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner does not rely on a conventional linear approach to
present his characters’ inner lives and motivations. Instead, he fractures, shifts, and
manipulates time, stretching the story out over several decades. We learn about
Emily’s life through a series of flashbacks. The story begins with a description of
Emily’s funeral and then moves into the near-distant past. At the end of the story, we
see that the funeral is a flashback as well, preceding the unsealing of the upstairs
bedroom door. We see Emily as a young girl, attracting suitors whom her father chases
off with a whip, and as an old woman, when she dies at seventy-four. As Emily’s grip
on reality grows more tenuous over the years, the South itself experiences a great deal
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of change. By moving forward and backward in time, Faulkner portrays the past and
the present as coexisting and is able to examine how they influence each other. He
creates a complex, layered, and multidimensional world.

Faulkner presents two visions of time in the story. One is based in the mathematical
precision and objectivity of reality, in which time moves forward relentlessly, and what’s
done is done; only the present exists. The other vision is more subjective. Time moves
forward, but events don’t stay in distant memory; rather, memory can exist unhindered,
alive and active no matter how much time passes or how much things change. Even if
a person is physically bound to the present, the past can play a vibrant, dynamic role.
Emily stays firmly planted in a subjective realm of time, where life moves on with her in
it—but she stays committed, regardless, to the past.

The Narrator
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The unnamed narrator of “A Rose for Emily” serves as the town’s collective voice.
Critics have debated whether it is a man or woman; a former lover of Emily Grierson’s;
the boy who remembers the sight of Mr. Grierson in the doorway, holding the whip; or
the town gossip, Important Quotations Explained
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1. Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary
obligation upon the town . . . 

This quotation appears near the beginning of the story, in section I, when the narrator
describes Emily’s funeral and history in the town. The complex figure of Emily Grierson
casts a long shadow in the town of Jefferson. The members of the community assume
a proprietary relationship to her, extolling the image of a grand lady whose family
history and reputation warranted great respect. At the same time, the townspeople
criticize her unconventional life and relationship with Homer Barron. Emily is an object
of fascination. Many people feel compelled to protect her, whereas others feel free to
monitor her every move, hovering at the edges of her life. Emily is the last
representative of a once great Jefferson family, and the townspeople feel that they
have inherited this daughter of a faded empire of wealth and prestige, for better or
worse.
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The order of Faulkner’s words in this quotation is significant. Although Emily once
represented a great southern tradition centering on the landed gentry with their vast
holdings and considerable resources, Emily’s legacy has devolved, making her more a
duty and an obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order. The town leaders
conveniently overlook the fact that in her straightened circumstances and solitary life,
Emily can no longer meet her tax obligations with the town. Emily emerges as not only
a financial burden to the town but a figure of outrage because she unsettles the
community’s strict social codes.

2. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us
lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid
in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair. 

These lines end the story. Emily’s secret, finally revealed, solidifies her reputation in
the town as an eccentric. Her precarious mental state has led her to perform a
grotesque act that surpasses the townspeople’s wildest imaginings. Emily, although
she deliberately sets up a solitary existence for herself, is unable to give up the men
who have shaped her life, even after they have died. She hides her dead father for
three days, then permanently hides Homer’s body in the upstairs bedroom. In
entombing her lover, Emily keeps her fantasy of marital bliss permanently intact.

Emily’s excessive need for privacy is challenged by the townspeople’s extreme

curiosity about the facts surrounding her life. Unsatisfied with glimpses caught through
doorways and windows, the townspeople essentially break into the Grierson home after
Emily’s death. Convincing themselves that they are behaving respectfully by waiting
until a normal period of mourning has expired, they satisfy their lurid curiosity by
unsealing the second-floor bedroom. There is no real moral justification for their act,
and in light of their blatant violation of Emily’s home and privacy, Emily’s eccentric,
grotesque behavior takes on a layer of almost sympathetic pathos. She has done a
horrible, nightmarish thing, yet the confirmation of the townspeople’s worst beliefs
seems sad, rather than satisfying or a cause for celebration.

spearheading the effort to break down the door at the end. It is possible, too, that the
narrator is Emily’s former servant, Tobe—he would have known her intimately, perhaps
including her secret. A few aspects of the story support this theory, such as the fact
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that the narrator often refers to Emily as “Miss Emily” and provides only one descriptive
detail about the Colonel Sartoris, the mayor: the fact that he enforced a law requiring
that black women wear aprons in public. In any case, the narrator hides behind the
collective pronoun we. By using we, the narrator can attribute what might be his or her
own thoughts and opinions to all of the townspeople, turning private ideas into
commonly held beliefs.

The narrator deepens the mystery of who he is and how much he knows at the end of
the story, when the townspeople discover Homer’s body. The narrator confesses
“Already we knew” that an upstairs bedroom had been sealed up. However, we never
find outhow the narrator knows about the room. More important, at this point, for the
first time in the story, the narrator uses the pronoun “they” instead of “we” to refer to the
townspeople. First, he says, “Already we knew that there was one room. . . .” Then he
changes to, “They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they
opened it.” This is a significant shift. Until now, the narrator has willingly grouped
himself with the rest of the townspeople, accepting the community’s actions, thoughts,
and speculations as his own. Here, however, the narrator distances himself from the
action, as though the breaking down of the door is something he can’t bring himself to
endorse. The shift is quick and subtle, and he returns to “we” in the passages that
follow, but it gives us an important clue about the narrator’s identity. Whoever he was,
the narrator cared for Emily, despite her eccentricities and horrible, desperate act. In a
town that treated her as an oddity and, finally, a horror, a kind, sympathetic gesture—
even one as slight as symbolically looking away when the private door is forced open—
stands out.

Title

You probably noticed that there is no rose in the story, though we do find the word
"rose" four times. Check out the first two times the word is used:

When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was
cracked; and when they sat down a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs,
spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. (1.5)

They rose when she entered – a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain
descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a
tarnished gold head. (1.6)
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These first two times "rose" (as you can see) is used as a verb, which is why we barely
notice the subtle echo of the "rose" in the title when we read. We are concentrating on
the image, first, of the inside of Miss Emily's lonely parlor, and then of Miss Emily
herself. In both cases, the word "rose" is working on us, maybe even subconsciously,
to contribute to the image.

We have to look at a few more things before we can get at why these passages are
significant.

First, let's consider the next two mentions of "rose," which occur at the very end of the
story:

A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and
furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-
shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's
toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was
obscured. (5.4)

Things are starting to make sense – here we are talking about the color "rose" – from
the curtains to the lampshades, rose was the dominant color of Miss Emily's bridal
chamber. We've all heard about the dangers of seeing through 'rose colored' glasses.
This was a particular problem for people of Miss Emily's generation in the South. 

As we discuss in "Setting," Emily was born in the early 1860s, probably near the
beginning of the Civil War. Emily's father basically raised her to believe that nothing
had really changed after the war. He instilled in her that being part of the southern
aristocracy (those who made money on backs of slaves) was still something to be
proud of, and that people like them were above the law. 

But, in this moment, we realize just how rosy Miss Emily's glasses were, and that death
trumps glasses, rose colored or otherwise. The reality of death cannot be avoided. Now
that the bridal chamber has turned into a death chamber, the rose color is bathed in the
hues of decay and death, shaded by the "acrid pall as of the tomb." Which might make
you wonder just what an "acrid pall" is.

"Acrid" is easy, it's used to refer to something that's nasty smelling. "Pall" is actually a
pretty interesting word, and one that isn't normally thrown around in conversation. It
usually refers to some kind of covering, like a cloak or a blanket draped over a coffin.
We can see how the word works literally and figuratively to thicken the atmosphere of
death and decomposition. It works because even if we don't know precisely what a
"pall" is, we can hear the deathly, pale tones it holds.
 16

Well, we're not quite done yet. Lucky for us, William Faulkner told an interviewer what
he meant by the title:

[The title] was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a
tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and
this was a salute…to a woman you would hand a rose. 

We think this perspective is very important, not just because it provides a

straightforward explanation, but also because it persuades us to indulge in a more
compassionate reading. It's easy to judge Miss Emily, and maybe to forget she's a
human being who has had a tragic life. For a look at how this explanation exposes the
story's irony, check out our discussion of "Writing Style." Needless to say, there are
many possible interpretations of the title, "A Rose for Emily," and you can feel free to
think creatively when trying to figure out what this title means.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 was awarded to William Faulkner"for his
powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".

William Faulkner received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1950. During the selection
process in 1949, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year's
nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the
Nobel Foundation's statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the
following year, and this statute was then applied. William Faulkner therefore received
his Nobel Prize for 1949 one year later, in 1950.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the
agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to
create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So
this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money
part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like
to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I
might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same
anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here
where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now
that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the
question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing
today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone
can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and
the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be
afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for
anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking
which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and
 17

compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of
love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without
hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal
bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the
end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is
immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has
clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and
dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny
inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is
immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but
because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man
endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and
pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The
poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the
pillars to help him endure and prevail.

William Faulkner delivered his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in
Stockholm, 10 December 1950. 

Award Ceremony Speech

Presentation Speech by Gustaf Hellström, Member of the Swedish Academy,

December 10, 1950

William Faulkner is essentially a regional writer, and as such reminds Swedish readers
now and then of two of our own most important novelists, Selma Lagerlöf and Hjalmar
Bergman. Faulkner's Värmland is the northern part of the state of Mississippi and his
Vadköping is called Jefferson. The parallelism between him and our two fellow
countrymen could be extended and deepened, but time does not allow such excursions
now. The difference - the great difference - between him and them is that Faulkner's
setting is so much darker and more bloody than that against which Lagerlöf's cavaliers
and Bergman's bizarre figures lived. Faulkner is the great epic writer of the southern
states with all their background: a glorious past built upon cheap Negro slave labour; a
civil war and a defeat which destroyed the economic basis necessary for the then
existing social structure; a long drawn-out and painful interim of resentment; and,
finally, an industrial and commercial future whose mechanization and standardization
of life are strange and hostile to the Southerner and to which he has only gradually
been able and willing to adapt himself Faulkner's novels are a continuous and ever-
deepening description of this painful process, which he knows intimately and feels
intensely, coming as he does from a family which was forced to swallow the bitter fruits
of defeat right down to their worm-eaten cores: impoverishment, decay, degeneration
in its many varied forms. He has been called a reactionary. But even if this term is to
some extent justified, it is balanced by the feeling of guilt which becomes clearer and
dearer in the dark fabric at which he labours so untiringly. The price of the gentlemanly
environment, the chivalry, the courage, and the often extreme individualism was
inhumanity. Briefly, Faulkner's dilemma might be expressed thus: he mourns for and,
as a writer, exaggerates a way of life which he himself, with his sense of justice and
humanity, would never be able to stomach. It is this that makes his regionalism
 18

universal. Four bloody years of war brought about the changes in the social structure
which it has taken the peoples of Europe, except the Russians, a century and a half to
undergo.

It is against a background of war and violence that the fifty-two-year-old writer sets his
more important novels. His grandfather held a high command during the Civil War. He
himself grew up in the atmosphere created by warlike feats and by the bitterness and
the poverty resulting from the never admitted defeat. When he was twenty he entered
the Canadian Royal Air Force, crashed twice, and returned home, not as a military hero
but as a physically and psychically war-damaged youth with dubious prospects, who for
some years faced a precarious existence. He had joined the war because, as his alter
ego expressed it in one of his early novels, «one doesn't want to waste a war». But out
of the youth who once had been thirsting for sensation and battle, there gradually
developed a man whose loathing of violence is expressed more and more passionately
and might well be summed up by the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. On the
other hand, there are things which man must always show himself unwilling to bear:
«Some things», says one of his latest characters, «you must always be unable to bear.
Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. Not for kudos and not for cash - Just
refuse to bear them.» 0ne might ask how these two maxims can be reconciled or how
Faulkner himself envisages a reconciliation between them in times of international
lawlessness. It is a question which he leaves open.

The fact is that, as a writer, Faulkner is no more interested in solving problems than he
is tempted to indulge in sociological comments on the sudden changes in the economic
position of the southern states. The defeat and the consequences of defeat are merely
the soil out of which his epics grow. He is not fascinated by men as a community but by
man in the community, the individual as a final unity in himself, curiously unmoved by
external conditions. The tragedies of these individuals have nothing in common with
Greek tragedy: they are led to their inexorable end by passions caused by inheritance,
traditions, and environment, passions which are expressed either in a sudden outburst
or in a slow liberation from perhaps generations-old restrictions. With almost every new
work Faulkner penetrates deeper into the human psyche, into man's greatness and
powers of self-sacrifice, lust for power, cupidity, spiritual poverty, narrow-mindedness,
burlesque obstinacy, anguish, terror, and degenerate aberrations. As a probing
psychologist he is the unrivalled master among all living British and American novelists.
Neither do any of his colleagues possess his fantastic imaginative powers and his
ability to create characters. His subhuman and superhuman figures, tragic or comic in a
macabre way, emerge from his mind with a reality that few existing people - even those
nearest to us - can give us, and they move in a milieu whose odours of subtropical
plants, ladies' perfumes, Negro sweat, and the smell of horses and mules penetrate
immediately even into a Scandinavian's warm and cosy den. As a painter of
landscapes he has the hunter's intimate knowledge of his own hunting-ground, the
topographer's accuracy, and the impressionist's sensitivity. Moreover - side by side
with Joyce and perhaps even more so - Faulkner is the great experimentalist among
twentieth-century novelists. Scarcely two of his novels are similar technically. It seems
as if by this continuous renewal he wanted to achieve the increased breadth which his
limited world, both in geography and in subject matter, cannot give him. The same
desire to experiment is shown in his mastery, unrivalled among modern British and
American novelists, of the richness of the English language, a richness derived from its
different linguistic elements and the periodic changes in style - from the spirit of the
Elizabethans down to the scanty but expressive vocabulary of the Negroes of the
southern states. Nor has anyone since Meredith - except perhaps Joyce - succeeded in
framing sentences as infinite and powerful as Atlantic rollers. At the same time, few
writers of his own age can rival him in giving a chain of events in a series of short
sentences, each of which is like a blow of a hammer, driving the nail into the plank up
 19

to the head and securing it immovably. His perfect command over the resources of the
language can - and often does - lead him to pile up words and associations which try
the reader's patience in an exciting or complicated story. But this profusion has nothing
to do with literary flamboyance. Nor does it merely bear witness to the abounding agility
of his imagination; in all their richness, every new attribute, every new association is
intended to dig deeper into the reality which his imaginative power conjures up.

Faulkner has often been described as a determinist. He himself, however, has never
claimed to adhere to any special philosophy of life. Briefly, his view of life may perhaps
be summed up in his own words: that the whole thing (perhaps?) signifies nothing. If
this were not the case, He or They who set up the whole fabric would have arranged
things differently. And yet it must mean something, because man continues to struggle
and must continue to struggle until, one day, it is all over. But Faulkner has one belief,
or rather one hope: that every man sooner or later receives the punishment he
deserves and that self-sacrifice not only brings with it personal happiness but also adds
to the sum total of the good deeds of mankind. It is a hope, the latter part of which
reminds us of the firm conviction expressed by the Swedish poet Viktor Rydberg in the
recitative of the Cantata presented at the Jubilee Degree Conferment at Uppsala in
1877.

Mr. Faulkner - The name of the southern state in which you were born and reared has
long been well known to us Swedes, thanks to two of the closest and dearest friends of
your boyhood, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain put the Mississippi
River on the literary map. Fifty years later you began a series of novels with which you
created out of the state of Mississippi one of the landmarks of twentieth-century world
literature; novels which with their ever-varying form, their ever-deeper and more
intense psychological insight, and their monumental characters - both good and evil -
occupy a unique place in modern American and British fiction.

Mr. Faulkner - It is now my privilege to ask you to receive from the hands of His
Majesty the King the Nobel Prize in Literature, which the Swedish Academy has
awarded you.

At the banquet, Robin Fåhraeus, Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences,

addressed the American author: «Mr. William Faulkner - We heard with great pleasure
that you were coming to our country to receive your Prize in person. We are indeed
happy to greet you as an eminent artist, as a detached analyst of the human heart, as
a great author who in a brilliant manner has enlarged man's knowledge of himself.»

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing

Company, Amsterdam, 1969

Synopsis
American writer William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. Much
of his early work was poetry, but he became famous for his novels set in the American
South, frequently in his fabricated Yoknapatawpha County, with works that
included The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dyingand Absalom, Absalom! His
controversial 1931 novel Sanctuary was turned into two films, 1933's The Story of
Temple Drake as well as a later 1961 project. Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel
Prize in Literature and ultimately won two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards as
well. He died on July 6, 1962.
 20

Younger Years
A Southern writer through and through, William Cuthbert Falkner (the original spelling
of his last name) was born in the small town of New Albany, Mississippi, on September
25, 1897. His parents, Murry Falkner and Maud Butler Faulkner, named him after his
paternal great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, an adventurous and shrewd man
who seven years prior was shot dead in the town square of Ripley, Mississippi.
Throughout his life, William Clark Falkner worked as a railroad financier, politician,
soldier, farmer, businessman, lawyer and—in his twilight years—best-selling author
(The White Rose of Memphis).

The grandeur of the "Old Colonel," as almost everyone called him, loomed large in the
minds of William Clark Falkner's children and grandchildren. The Old Colonel’s son,
John Wesley Thompson, opened the First National Bank of Oxford in 1910. Instead of
later bequeathing the railroad business to his son, Murry, however, Thompson sold it.
Murry worked as the business manager for the University of Mississippi. Murry’s son,
author William Falkner, held tightly to his great-grandfather’s legacy, writing about him
in his earliest novels set in the American South.

As much as the older men in Faulkner's family made an impression on him, so did the
women. Faulkner's mother, Maud, and grandmother Lelia Butler were voracious
readers, as well as fine painters and photographers, and they taught him the beauty of
line and color. Faulkner’s "mammy," as he called her, was a black woman named
Caroline Barr. She raised him from birth until the day he left home and was
fundamental to his development. At her wake, Faulkner told the mourning crowd that it
was a privilege to see her out, that she had taught him right from wrong and was loyal
to his family despite having borne none of them. In later documents, Faulkner points to
Barr as the impetus for his fascination with the politics of sexuality and race.

As a teenager, Faulkner was taken by drawing. He also greatly enjoyed reading and
writing poetry. In fact, by the age of 12, he began intentionally mimicking Scottish
romantics, specifically Robert Burns, and English romantics, A. E. Housman and A. C.
Swinburne. However, despite his remarkable intelligence, or perhaps because of it,
school bored him and he never earned a high school diploma. After dropping out,
Faulkner worked in carpentry and sporadically as a clerk at his grandfather’s bank.

During this time, Faulkner met Estelle Oldham. At the time of their meeting, she was
both popular and exceedingly effervescent and immediately stole his heart. The two
dated for a while, but another man, named Cornell Franklin, proposed to her before
Faulker did. Estelle took the proposal lightheartedly, partly because Franklin had just
been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces and was leaving
soon to report for duty. Estelle hoped it would dissolve naturally, but several months
later, he mailed her an engagement ring. Estelle’s parents bade her to accept the offer,
as Franklin was a law graduate of the University of Mississippi and came from a family
of high repute.

Afflicted by Estelle’s engagement, Faulkner turned to new mentor Phil Stone, a local
attorney who was impressed by his poetry. Stone invited Faulkner to move and live
with him in New Haven, Connecticut. There, Stone nurtured Faulkner's passion for
writing. While delving into prose, Faulkner worked at the Winchester Repeating Arms
Company, a distinguished rifle manufacturer. Lured by the war in Europe, he joined the
 21

British Royal Flying Corps in 1918 and trained as a pilot in the first Royal Canadian Air
Force. He had earlier tried to enlist in the U.S. Forces, but was rejected due to his
height (he was slightly under 5' 6"). To enlist in the Royal Air Force, he lied about
several facts, changing his birthplace and surname—from Falkner to Faulkner—to
appear more British.

Faulkner trained on British and Canadian bases, and finished his time in Toronto just
before the war ended, never finding himself in harm's way. A man of skilled
exaggeration, Faulkner embellished his experiences and sometimes completely
fabricated war stories for his friends back home. He even donned the uniform of a
lieutenant to bolster his reputation and wore it when he returned to Mississippi.

Early Writings
By 1919, Faulkner had enrolled at the University of Mississippi. He wrote for the
student newspaper, the Mississippian, submitting his first published poem and other
short works. However, after three semesters as an entirely inattentive student, he
dropped out. He worked briefly in New York City as a bookseller's assistant and for two
years as the postmaster for the university, and spent a short stint as the scoutmaster
for a local troop.

In 1924, Phil Stone escorted a collection of Faulkner’s poetry, The Marble Faun, to a

publisher. Shortly after its 1,000-copy run, Faulkner moved to New Orleans. While
there, he published several essays for The Double Dealer, a local magazine that
served to unite and nurture the city’s literary crowd. In 1926, Faulkner succeeded in
having his first novel published, Soldiers' Pay. As soon as it had been accepted for
print in 1925, he sailed from New Orleans to Europe to live for a few months at Le
Grand Hôtel des Principautés Unies in Paris. During his stay, he wrote about the
Luxembourg Gardens that were a short walk from his apartment.

Back in Louisiana, American writer Sherwood Anderson, who had become a friend,

gave Faulkner some advice: He told the young author to write about his native region
of Mississippi—a place that Faulkner surely knew better than northern France. Inspired
by the concept, Faulkner began writing about the places and people of his childhood,
developing a great many colorful characters based on real people he had grown up
with or heard about, including his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner. For his
famous 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, he developed the fictional
Yoknapatawpha County—a place nearly identical to Lafayette County, in which Oxford,
Mississippi, is located. A year later, in 1930, Faulkner released As I Lay Dying.

Famed Author
Faulkner became known for his faithful and accurate dictation of Southern speech. He
also boldly illuminated social issues that many American writers left in the dark,
including slavery, the "good old boys" club and Southern aristocracy. In 1931, after
much deliberation, Faulkner decided to publishSanctuary, a story that focused on the
rape and kidnapping of a young woman at Ole Miss. It shocked and appalled some
readers, but it was a commercial success and a critical breakthrough for his career.
Years later, in 1950, he published a sequel that was a mix of conventional prose and
play forms, Requiem for a Nun.
 22

Personally, Faulkner experienced both elation and soul-shocking sadness during this
time in his career. Between the publishing of The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary,
his old flame, Estelle Oldham, divorced Cornell Franklin. Still deeply in love with her,
Faulkner promptly made his feelings known, and the two were married within six
months. Estelle became pregnant, and in January of 1931, she gave birth to a
daughter, whom they named Alabama. Tragically, the premature baby lived for just
over a week. Faulkner’s collection of short stories, titled These 13, is dedicated to
"Estelle and Alabama."

Faulkner's next novel, Light in August (1932), tells the story of Yoknapatawpha County

outcasts. In it, he introduces his readers to Joe Christmas, a man of uncertain racial
makeup; Joanna Burden, a woman who supports voting rights for blacks and later is
brutally murdered; Lena Grove, an alert and determined young woman in search of her
baby's father; and Rev. Gail Hightower, a man besieged by visions. Time magazine
listed it—along with The Sound and the Fury—as one of the 100 best English-language
novels from 1923 to 2005.

Screenwriting
After publishing several notable books, Faulkner turned to screenwriting. Starting with a
six-week contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he cowrote 1933's Today We Live,
starring Joan Crawford and Gary Cooper. After Faulkner's father died, and in need of
money, he decided to sell the rights to film Sanctuary, later titled The Story of Temple
Drake (1933). That same year, Estelle gave birth to Jill, the couple's only surviving
child. Between 1932 and 1945, Faulkner traveled to Hollywood a dozen times to toil as
a scriptwriter and contributed to or wrote countless films. Uninspired by the task,
however, he did it purely for financial gain. 

During this period, Faulkner also published several novels, including the epic family
saga Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the satirical The Hamlet (1940) andGo Down,
Moses (1942).

Wins Nobel Prize

In 1946, Malcolm Cowley published The Portable Faulkner and interest in Faulkner's
work was revived. Two years later, Faulkner published Intruder in the Dust, the tale of a
black man falsely accused of murder. He was able to sell the film rights to MGM for
$50,000. 

One of Faulkner's greatest professional moments came when he was awarded the
1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving the award the following year. The committee
deemed him one of the most important writers of American letters. This attention
brought him more awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction for Collected
Stories and the Legion of Honor in New Orleans. He also won the 1951 National Book
Award for The Collected Stories of William Faulkner. A few years later, Faulkner was
awarded the 1955 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction along with another National Book Award for
his novel A Fable, set in France during WWI.  
 23

Death
In January 1961, Faulkner willed all his major manuscripts and many of his personal
papers to the William Faulkner Foundation at the University of Virginia. On July 6,
1962, coincidentally the same date as the Old Colonel's birthday, William Faulkner died
of a heart attack. He was posthumously awarded his second Pulitzer in 1963 for The
Reivers. 

Faulkner created an impressive literary legacy and remains a revered writer of the rural
American South, having expertly captured the immense complexities of both the
region's beauty and its dark past.