Master One (Literature and Civilization) – American Literature ( 2024/2025)
Lecture Number Four
William Faulkner’s A rose for Emily ( 1930)
Teacher : Dr. Wafa BERKAT
William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, is one of the 20th century
American literary giants and the representative of stream of consciousness literature in
America. A Rose for Emily, as Faulkner's most distinguished short story, is also Faulkner's
masterpiece of absurdity, belongs to Faulkner's York series of novels and can be regarded as a
masterpiece of American Southern Gothic novels. Besides, it reflects the Southern life under
the historical background of the strong conflict between the old and the new order, as well as
the psychological state of depression, contradiction and pain of the southerners through
Faulkner’s huge distinctive local flavor and sense of place.
By showing a series of events that are not arranged according to a narrative time sequence, the
novel vividly depicted readers the decline of an old era and showed readers the extremely
miserable life of a noble and prominent Southern lady, Emily, who is struggling for herself
during her whole life under the patriarchal system and identity background. Emily, the
heroine of the novel, though noble and beautiful, behaves strangely and has an aloof
personality. When Miss Emily was young, she lived in the shadow of her father who had a
strong desire for control and possession. In order to maintain the noble family, her father
drove out Emily’s suitors. Under the excessive control of her father, she can only peep into
the outside world and imagine fantasy love. After her father's death, Emily fell in love with
"Yankee" Homer but caused the severe criticisms from people. At last, Emily poisoned her
lover due to his abandonment and she has taken up the corpse for 40 years. It wasn't until
Miss Emily's death that people in the Jefferson opened her bedroom that the truth was
uncovered.
Themes Analysis :
1- The Post Civil-War South :
Before the American Civil War (known as the “antebellum South”), the South’s economy
relied on the agricultural output of plantations, large farms owned by wealthy Southern whites
who exploited black slave labor to keep operating costs as low as possible. By its very nature,
plantation life gave rise to a rigid social hierarchy—one in which wealthy white farmers were
treated like aristocrats, middle-class and poor whites like commoners, and blacks like
property. Along with this social hierarchy, plantation life also gave rise an aristocratic culture
that valued very highly chivalric ideals (those associated with the institution of medieval
knighthood) like courage, honor, courtesy, social propriety, female virginity, and a readiness
to help the weak. “A Rose for Emily” is set in the South after the Civil War (the “postbellum”
Hassiba Ben Bouali University / Faculty of Foreign Languages / Department of English
Master One (Literature and Civilization) – American Literature ( 2024/2025)
South), after slavery had been abolished and plantation life had collapsed. With their society
in economic ruins, however, Southerners did not give up on their aristocratic culture but
rather clung to it nostalgically, and yearned to return to a past more glorious in memory than
it ever was in reality.
This historical situation underlies Faulkner’s depiction of the Southern (and fictional) town of
Jefferson, Mississippi in “A Rose for Emily.” The very epitome of the Old South in the short
story is Colonel Sartoris, who as mayor passed a racist law forcing black women to wear
their aprons in public—an insidious reminder of the old social hierarchy of the South—and
who in 1894 excuses Miss Emily from paying taxes to Jefferson on a chivalric impulse. In
addition, Miss Emily Grierson’s family is presented as having been once wealthy and still
highly respected in their Southern community; they quite likely belonged to the aristocratic
class of slaveholders before the Civil War, though their fortune in the postbellum world has
since dwindled. Nonetheless, the family is as proud of its aristocratic heritage as Sartoris is, so
much so that Emily’s father refuses to let his daughter become romantically involved with
anyone of a lower social class. The townspeople of Jefferson not only approve of but seem to
protect and uphold such rigid adherence to their old traditions. Even after Miss Emily’s father
dies and Miss Emily comes to think of herself as being socially better than her poverty would
justify, the townspeople nonetheless tolerate her haughtiness because she is a living
monument to their glorified past, just as significant to them in this respect as the Grierson
family house itself, or the cemetery where Civil War soldiers are buried.
2- Patriarchal Authority and Control :
Members of Jefferson’s Board of Alderman, whether old and gallant and nostalgic for the Old
South like Sartoris or young and business-like such as the newer generation of authorities, all
have something in common: they are all male and govern over—and to the exclusion of—
women. Faulkner foregrounds this dynamic when he has his narrator recall Sartoris’s law
requiring all black women to wear their aprons in public, and dramatizes it in Miss Emily’s
relationships with her father and the town authorities themselves. For even in private life, the
men in Jefferson exert full control over women’s lives, as Emily’s father does in telling his
daughter which suitors she may and may not allow to court her. Indeed, social repression, stiff
propriety, and a fetishization of female virginity characterize the Southern culture portrayed in
the story.
However, one reason Ms. Emily draws so much attention to herself in town is because she
often resists patriarchal authority, as when she flat-out refuses to pay her taxes (here she plays
the old generation of patriarchal authority against the newer), or when she forbids the
installation of a mailbox and postal numbers on her property. Even courting Homer Bell is a
subtle act of rebellion on Miss Emily’s part, against her society’s social conventions and,
presumably, the wishes of her dead father.
Given how pre-determined the course of her life has been—not only by the Jefferson
patriarchs but also by the Civil War and its aftermath and the code of conduct enforced on her
by her society—it is no wonder that Miss Emily attempts to take control of her own life, to
live on her terms, to be the master of her fate. Her ultimate gesture to this end, of course, is
the murder of Homer and her lifelong marriage, as it were, to his rotting, dust-suffused
corpse—instead of letting Homer leave her, Miss Emily asserts absolute control over his life,
literally turning him into an object which she can manipulate at will. The madly desperate,
horrific nature of this crime speaks to just how oppressed and stifled Miss Emily is, as well as
to the huge denial of freedom which her society subjects her to. That her great
aunt Wyatt went mad too suggests that Miss Emily’s is not an isolated case. Although it
Hassiba Ben Bouali University / Faculty of Foreign Languages / Department of English
Master One (Literature and Civilization) – American Literature ( 2024/2025)
would be misguided to insist on this comparison past a certain point, the subjugation of
women in this story quietly reflects the even more virulent subjugation of black Americans at
the hands of the white South, as Tobe’s presence in the story quietly reminds us.
3- Gossip, Social Conventions, and Judgment :
“A Rose for Emily” is narrated by a plural “we” voice, which stands in for the memory of
the collective town. In this way, the story can be read as the town’s collective,
nostalgically tinged, darkly disturbed memory. And yet that collective voice has a darker
edge than a simple collective memory. Because of that collective narrator, “A Rose for
Emily” is also a collection of town gossip centering on Miss Emily, generated by decades
of intense scrutiny on her life.
The townspeople watch Miss Emily very closely, both because their own nostalgia for
the pre-Civil War South makes her necessary to them as a representative of their
aristocratic heritage, but also because, as an individual, she is eccentric, pitiable, exciting
to watch and exciting to judge behind closed doors. Indeed, the “we” narrator almost
seems sometimes aware that they have darker motives for scrutinizing Miss Emily’s life,
like taking a pleasure in her fall to poverty, a feeling of social superiority over her when
she begins to court Homer and the like. But it is also through scrutiny and gossip that the
society in Jefferson enforces its social conventions: for example, it is the gossip of
“ladies” that leads the Baptist minister’s wife to write to Miss Emily’s cousins, who
themselves come to Jefferson to scrutinize and oversee Miss Emily’s conduct with Homer,
whom, not serious about marriage, the town implicitly judges a danger to Miss Emily’s
virginity (and her ability to uphold the lost social conventions the town requires her to). It
is almost as if the town needs Miss Emily to be the representative of its lost, mythologized
past, and hates her for it.
Ironically, for all that the townspeople watch and judge Miss Emily, for all that they
intervene to make sure that she doesn’t violate the social conventions of Jefferson, they
nevertheless fail to realize—despite her buying the arsenic, despite the bad smell issuing
from her place—that Miss Emily has in secret committed a dreadful and horrifying crime,
nor do they realize just how damaged a woman she is prior to committing the crime itself.
The implication is that close scrutiny does not a close community make; social bonds
consisting solely of gossip and judgment are not enough for people living together to truly
know and care for one another.
Hassiba Ben Bouali University / Faculty of Foreign Languages / Department of English
