A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 The author
 born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897
 one of the most important writers of the Southern
literature of the United States, along with Mark
Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery
O'Connor, Truman Capote etc.
 Persistent lyrical embroidery and coloring, in
extended passages, of the narrative theme; realistic
colloquialism, expressing lively dialogues; dreamlike use of stream of consciousness;
phantasmagoric and deranged, or incoherent style
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 The title
 The title character is a tragic figure. Manipulated by
her father and unable to function in the modern
world, she lives as a recluse most of the time and
eventually goes insane. In an attempt to hold on to
a man who becomes her companion but later
decides to abandon her, she murders him and
keeps his corpse in an upper room of her house.
 In a lecture at Nagano, Japan, author William
Faulkner said of Emily: “Here was a woman who
has 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.”
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Type of work
 “A Rose for Emily” is a short story of Gothic horror
and tragedy. Gothic horror is a genre of fiction
presenting dark, mysterious, terrifying events that
take place in a gloomy or ghostly setting. The genre
derives its name from the Gothic architectural style
in Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth
centuries. When a Gothic horror story takes place in
the American South and centers in part on
Southern cultural traditions and character types, as
well as on a realistic rather than romantic account
of events, scholars often characterize the story as
Southern Gothic.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Setting
 William Faulkner set a “A Rose for Emily” in the
fictional Mississippi town of Jefferson, modeled
after the real Mississippi town of Oxford, where
the author spent most of his life. Events in the
story take place in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Major Characters
 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. 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.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Major Characters
 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. 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.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Themes
 Psychological Bondage
 Living in the past
 Death of the Old South
 Tradition versus change
 The power of death
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Motifs - Watching
 Emily is the subject of the intense, controlling
gaze of the narrator and residents of Jefferson.
 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.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Motifs - Dust
 The dust throughout Emily’s house is a fitting
accompaniment to the faded lives within.
 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.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Symbols
 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.
 Emily’s House: Emily’s house, like Emily
herself, is a monument, the only remaining
emblem of a dying world of Southern
aristocracy. Emily’s house also represents
alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a
shrine to the living past.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Symbols
 Barron: Homer Barron, a Northerner who traveled
to Jefferson to install new sidewalks, dated Emily
for about a year and then severed his relationship
with her. He symbolizes post-Civil War
carpetbaggers and, in a larger sense, any
opportunists.
 Episcopal Religion: With its elaborate rituals, the
Griersons' Episcopalianism appears to represent
the ornate trappings and elegant lifestyle of Old
South aristocrats.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Symbols
 Mailbox, Metal House Number: These
symbolize modernity and change. Emily refuses
to allow postal officials to install the house
numbers and the mailbox.
 Sidewalks: The new sidewalks that Homer
Barron and his crew construct appear to
symbolize the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Symbols
 Stationery: The note Emily sent the mayor was
written on “paper of an archaic shape, in a thin,
flowing calligraphy in faded ink.” The archaic shape
of the stationery and the faded ink seem to
represent the outmoded traditions of the Old South.
 Tarnished Metals: The tarnished gold head of
Emily's cane and the tarnished silver toilet set in the
room with Barron's corpse symbolize aging,
deterioration, and death.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Faulkner and the Southern Gothic
 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.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Faulkner and the Southern Gothic
 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, and Truman
Capote 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.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Faulkner and the Southern Gothic
 “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. Emily’s mental instability and
necrophilia have made her an emblematic
Southern Gothic heroine.
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
 Further readings
 The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 As I Lay Dying (1930)
 Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
 A Fable (1954) (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1955)
 The Reivers (1962) (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction in 1963)