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Student Name
Ms. Curley
American Literature, 4th
21 November 2014
Symbolic Time in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
It is difficult to understand the mind of a woman who isolates herself from the rest of the
world, but that does not stop these southern townspeople from attempting to solve her mystery.
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a spine-chilling, gothic, short story which introduces
an unsettling relationship between love, death, obsession and secrecy. The story revolves around
a disturbed woman raised in an aristocratic home, who lost her mind after losing her father. It is
told in an unchronological order and narrated by gossiping townspeople who share their own
points of view rather than the facts. Ultimately, the theme of “Rose” is man’s relation to time
which is conveyed through the literal and figurative symbolism of dust and decay to characterize
Emily.
“A Rose for Emily” “set two different attitudes about time against each other” by
introducing two opposing views of time, “the new generation” versus “the old generation”
(Vartany 189). Emily Grierson was raised in the middle of a Civil War-torn south. When her
father died, most of her did too. What did not die was her connection to what soon became the
“old generation,” even when the lifestyle itself, did. After the war, the town Emily grew up in
industrialized and regenerated, just as the rest of the south was conforming to the northern way
of life. Homer Barron is Emily’s lover and victim of murder. Homer and the modern
townspeople represented the “new, northern generation” whereas Emily and the confederate
soldiers represented the “old, southern generation.” Presently, time is associated with the past
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which we cannot change, but Faulkner metaphorically elaborates on the contrast between our
views versus theirs when he says “and the very old men…confusing time with its mathematical
progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge
meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck
of the most recent decade of years” (Faulkner 47). Emily and the confederate soldiers view the
past as something that never dies, confusing it with a mathematical progression which
“conserves everything. In seven you have all that you had in six. Thus if time were only a
mathematical progression, it would only add things to the past. There would be no loss, no death,
no decay” (Vartany 190). Although strange to the average mind, understanding the concept of
mathematical progression helps the reader understand more of why Emily refused to believe she
was no longer exempt from paying taxes, killed and sheltered a man whom she loved, and hid in
her house (which remained exactly the same) for forty years; she did not want to let go, and
convinced herself she didn’t have to if she’d simply keep life exactly the same as it had always
been. Critics say, “maybe she want[ed] to re-create the traumatic situation to face it anew and
overcome it. This time she will have her way. She will decide when the man dies, and she will
keep the body” (Vartany 190).
In “Rose,” Faulkner uses symbolism to portray an underlying theme of dust and decay.
Though dust and decay are mentioned in the text, the two also represent people, objects and
secrets within the town. The narrator implies the decaying of Emily’s house when describing it
as a “big, squarish frame house that had once been white… set on what had once been our most
select street” (Faulkner 12). It is no coincidence that Faulkner often mentions decay in the story,
because when referring to it, most think of decomposition, rot and age. Emily’s house decays
over time, just as she and Homer Barron do while rotting away inside, just as the old “Negro”
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does as he goes in and out to the market. In the grander scheme of things, Emily is the decay
which symbolizes the end of an entire generation and era; she lingers in one place, lifeless, and
deteriorates over time.
This prevailing symbol in “Rose,” dust and dust imagery, serves to suggest that
the past somehow remains in the present: “the past is always there waiting to be remembered and
uncovered” (Binder 5), just like Homer’s corpse and all the secrets kept within Emily’s house in
those forty years. Dust seems insignificant until the larger picture is viewed, because it “provides
the key to understanding the role of the past and the manner in which it lingers in the present”
(Binder 7). To even remotely comprehend Emily’s actions, one must first understand what led
her to madness; the world she grew up in, her past relationship with her father and the effects he
left upon her—all of which remain concealed in her mind, just as dust would cover an old vase.
Like Emily obscuring her biggest secret, Homer’s murder, “[dust] is content to remain covering
its object yet not completely resistant to a good ‘dusting’” (Binder 7). In the smaller scheme of
things, Faulkner’s use of dust imagery in the last part of the story represents the extended period
of time in which Homer is thought to be a runaway groom, living his own life in the north, far
away from Emily. At the end of the story, the curious townspeople finally enter Miss Emily’s
home and force their way into the deserted upstairs room, stating “the violence of breaking down
the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust” (Faulkner 42). Mr. Barron’s body is found
with an “even coating of the patient and biding dust,” which instantly indicates to the
townspeople and the reader that Emily not only killed him, he’s been dead a long time (Faulkner
43).From mixed chronology to contrasting generations to the symbolization of dust and decay,
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a complicated and complex story to fathom. It is one that may
never be fully understood, but it seems this was Faulkner’s exact intention. He left the ending
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open for the readers to analyze themselves, by simply saying “[t]hen we noticed that in the
second pillow was the indentation of a head…we saw a long strand of iron gray hair” (49).
Though vague, “indentation” is a word telling the story within itself. After all, it must take quite
some time to leave an indentation in a pillow, much like the indention the war era invariably left
on Emily’s psyche. For Emily, maintaining Homer’s presence is a comforting illusion that all is
as it’s ever been. Past remains the present, just as dust—particles of a bygone era—intermingle
with a contemporary life. Ultimately, it is not so much the juxtaposition of these elements, but
rather their cohesion in Emily’s mind that reveal Faulkner’s purpose in his disjointed narration.
The story must be told unchronologically because Emily remains tragically trapped while the
world moves on.
Works Cited
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Binder, Aubrey. “Uncovering the Past: The Role of Dust Imagery in ‘A Rose for Emily.’” The
Explicator 70.1 (2012): 5-7. Print.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 1983. Print.
Vartany, Edwin. “Time’s Mathematical Progression in William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’”
The Explicator 69.4 (2011): 189-92. Print.