The Decay of the South: Duality and Containment in “A Rose for Emily”
Michael Bolin
Introduction
William Faulkner, as the literary voice of the post-Reconstruction South, probes the dark
corners of southern society in his short story “A Rose for Emily.” In this paper, I will examine
the ways in which “A Rose for Emily” functions as a modern parable about the South as
Faulkner experienced it. I will argue that below its narrative surface, the story uses an allegory
for the society of its audience to reveal that the South is rotting from the inside out. Faulkner
argues that the South is a moribund society that sustains itself with illusions, cruelty, and
injustice, and then attempts to defend itself from the revelation of that fact through an elaborate
sacrificial mechanism of contained, ritualized violence. Whether the decaying cruelties of
Southern society will succeed in sustaining themselves depends on the parable’s audience. It
ultimately falls to them to accept the parable’s revelation of the South’s decay. For Faulkner,
whether they will do so remains an open question.
I will make my argument in a few steps. I will first examine the structures that sustain the
Southern society of the story, most importantly the intersection of duality and containment,
paying particular attention to violations of those structures that occur in the story. I will then turn
my attention to the society’s reaction to violations of its structures: the containment and
destruction of the violation through a complex, symbolic sacrifice. I will conclude by drawing
out a few narrative modes by which Faulkner forces his audience to face the parable’s revelation
as if it pertained not to the fictional characters, but to the audience themselves.
In order to provide depth to this analysis, I will occasionally refer to Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness. Although “A Rose for Emily” and Heart of Darkness have very different
plots, their narrative concepts and purposes are closely tied. Broadly, they both reveal the corrupt
nature of their respective societies by combining containment with duality. I do not claim to fully
account for this narrative process in Heart of Darkness; rather, I will use it only as a
hermeneutical tool for understanding the revelation that lies at the intersection of containment
and duality.
Heart of Darkness and “A Rose for Emily” are not odd partners. There can be no doubt
about Conrad’s influence on Faulkner. The parallels between Heart of Darkness and “A Rose for
Emily,” while perhaps unexpected, are not coincidental. Faulkner was four years old when Heart
of Darkness was published, and he wrote “A Rose for Emily” when he was 31. 1 In the
intervening years, Conrad’s writing profoundly shaped Faulkner’s. While still obscure, Faulkner
proposed in an anonymous magazine article that “art is preeminently provincial...it comes from a
certain age and a certain locality.” He admiringly qualified his thesis with only two exceptions:
Eugene O’Neill and Joseph Conrad.2 In January 1925, just months prior to the publication of his
first novel and four years prior to “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner told his friend Sherwood
Anderson that the two stories he admired most were Anderson’s short story “I’m a Fool” and
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.3 In October of that same year, Faulkner visited the picturesque
Kentish countryside, where Conrad had been known to write. He wrote to his mother that it was
the “Quietest most restful country under the sun. No wonder Joseph Conrad could write such fine
books here.”4 Conrad remained on his mind for at least the next several years. In 1931, he
identified his two favorite books as Melville’s Moby Dick and Conrad’s The Nigger of the
“Narcissus”.5 About a year later, he reflected on his artistic development over the prior few
years, writing that “I was now aware before each word was written down just what the people
would do,” and he compared his growth as a writer to that of Conrad.6 This was two years after
“A Rose for Emily.” Similarities of narrative style and narrative techniques between the two
authors—though not, as far as I am aware, specifically between Heart of Darkness and “A Rose
for Emily”—have been well-documented in Faulkner’s fiction throughout this period.7
Throughout his artistically formative years, Faulkner clearly had Conrad, specifically Heart of
Darkness, on his mind. Similarities between the two stories—especially of the structural, driving
sort that I will discuss—are likely, consciously or unconsciously, products of Faulkner’s
admiration for, identification with, and emulation of Conrad.
The Parable
“A Rose for Emily” and Heart of Darkness are both modern parables that build on a
narrative tradition dating to the Gospels. As parables, they construct an allegory for a specific
society that communicates a lesson about the nature of that society. Beyond that general
structure, a parable must have two specific characteristics, a narrative and another layer of
meaning beneath the narrative surface.
As a narrative, a parable must have the basic narrative elements of a story: plot structure,
characters, conflict, rising and falling action, and so on. These devices can be simple or
elaborate, but they must be present. Jesus’s tale of the sower is a parable, while the saying “A
seed that falls on hard ground never grows” is not. It is a saying. Both convey more or less the
same message, but the parable does so through a story.8
The second defining trait of parables is that their meaning, which consists of multiple
layers, lies beneath their narrative surface. The moral of the Parable of the Sower concerns
conversion to a new way of being, not weed growth. The story is not just a narrative; rather, as
an allegory for the society, its deeper levels of meaning convey truths that may or may not be
readily and easily perceived by any attentive listener.9 The purpose of the allegory is to open the
audience to ways of perception that are new and even revolutionary. It might even suggest an
undesirable ultimate outcome of current conditions, and then propose an alternate path which, if
followed, will produce a more desirable outcome.
As a parable, “A Rose for Emily” is a story that contains layers of meaning, which it
discloses through an allegory for the society it addresses. The least discerning reader will
recognize its narrative surface, a mystery-horror story, just as that reader might believe the
Parable of the Sower to be concerned purely with agriculture. Below the narrative surface lie two
layers of meaning. A mildly attentive reader will perceive the first level of meaning, which is the
moral of the parable: that the South is in bed with a rotting way of life. Below the moral lies a
second, deeper level of meaning: a hidden, inner meaning that cannot be cognitively understood
or communicated.10
Let us pause to fully define this concept. While the moral of the parable is intended for all
but the most ignorant readers, the inner meaning is meant only for a few select readers. In
discussing the meaning of his parables, Jesus explains that “To you has been given the secret of
the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see
but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand.”11 The insiders will grasp the inner
meaning, while the outsiders, though they stare directly at it, will not. This is a paradox that is
exemplified by the dying Kurtz: “‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The candle was
less than a foot from his face.”12 Similarly, for Jesus, the inner meaning is not hidden to the
outsiders, but rather “everything is in parables.”13 The word he uses, the Greek parabolē, is often
equated by Mark with the Hebrew mashal, meaning “riddle” or “dark saying.”14 Like a riddle,
the inner meaning will be understood by only a privileged few, the insiders. But unlike a riddle,
the inner meaning cannot be cognitively deduced from the parable. Jesus’ dictum “He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear,”15 is not rhetorical, as it might seem, but rather an indication that the
insiders are the ones who have already experienced the inner truth, but who perhaps do not
realize what has already been imparted to them.16
Storytellers also influence the unfolding of such parables. Conrad and Faulkner have each
experienced the dark truths of their respective societies, but both face the parable-teller’s
quandary: they are storytellers who have knowledge of hidden realities of their societies, but they
cannot impart this knowledge openly through their stories. They cannot state the facts, but they
can indicate the existence of hidden truths. As a result, they embrace aporia, seeding their stories
with unexplained hints. Conrad leaves his readers to aimlessly ponder such inexplicable riddles
as “We live in the flicker,”17 and “The horror! The horror!”,18 while the absence of any roses in a
story titled “A Rose for Emily” has befuddled generations of Faulkner’s readers. Any attempt to
explain what the authors meant by these riddles, however plausible, is ultimately mere
speculation. These are the recurrences of mashal, the dark stories and riddles that cannot be
answered cognitively.19 Conrad grows increasingly frustrated with his inability to communicate
the incommunicable, exclaiming to his audience through Marlow, “Can you see him? Can you
see the story? Can you see anything?”20 Faulkner is more accepting of the futility of explanation,
preferring to remain coolly ambiguous, describing in calm and precise language the uncanny and
hidden reality of the early twentieth-century South.
Each author must communicate what he can—the moral of the story—and merely
indicate the existence of the incommunicable inner meaning. Both facets of the parable’s
message are transmitted through an allegory for society. Two allegories can be drawn from “A
Rose for Emily”. The first equates Emily with the post-Reconstruction Deep South: each is a
relic of an old, formerly noble order that is in bed with a rotting way of life. The second
interpretation equates the fictional town of Jefferson, in which the story is set, with the South.
Because they both communicate the same meanings in the same way, for our purposes, it is
irrelevant which interpretation is preferred. As we will see, both allegories are constructed as a
combination of duality and containment. It is through the structure of the parable that the other
devices of “A Rose for Emily” function.
Duality
The role of the parable is to reveal dark societal mechanisms. As a parable, “A Rose for
Emily” issues a verdict on the dualities that sustain Southern society. A duality is a structure
containing two mutually exclusive concepts that can only be fully defined as the opposite of each
other.21 “It is a matter of establishing the representation of pairs of opposing values, of
establishing quantitative differences between the opposing forces.”22 Dualities are modes of
perception and interpretation that are unquestioned and thus generally universal within a
particular society. They make society possible by providing a foundation of common perception
and interpretation for all members of the society to follow. It is dualities, rather than some other
framework, that serves this function because dualities explain conflict without necessitating a
solution for that conflict. The South of “A Rose for Emily” follows the dualities of Northern vs.
Southern, black vs. white, masculine vs. feminine, nobility vs. laborers, inside vs. outside, and
acceptable vs. unacceptable behavior. They largely go unchallenged (I will address the
consequences of challenging duality below), so they dominate the Southern worldview without
ever being debated in terms of their validity. Since they are neither recognized nor understood by
those within the social system that sustains them, they possess both potency and fragility: they
are usually allowed unchecked dominion over the society’s worldview, but their dominance
becomes dependent upon itself. Any challenges that do occur, whether or not they gain
widespread approval, are enough to destroy the sheen of perfection that defines and sustains the
duality’s dominance over perception in the society.
In use, dualities restrict activity beyond directly distinguishing two opposed concepts.
The duality of masculine vs. feminine, for example, has implications within Faulkner’s Southern
society that it would not necessarily have in another society: that women, particularly women of
high birth, are expected to be conservative, modest, domestic, and either chaste or married.
While the most raw assault on a duality is the collapse of its two concepts, any breach in the
duality’s implications are a threat as well. Emily does both. She, a noble Southern belle, has an
extramarital affair—an indirect assault on the installed duality of masculine vs. feminine—and
she has it with a working-class Northerner, which forms a direct assault on the dualities of
Northern vs. Southern and nobility vs. laborers. Because it defies the dualities that govern their
thought, this assault is unfathomable by those within the society. When Emily begins to be seen
around town with Homer Barron, “the ladies all said, ‘Of course a Grierson would not think
seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.’”23 Of course not.
Containment and the Revelation
As we have seen, the society of Faulkner’s story depends on the total dominance of
duality in perception. By definition, duality cannot be questioned; the opposition is total, eternal,
and immutable. What happens, then, when duality is questioned? Society is thrown into disarray,
for the assumptions that sustain it no longer exist—the act of questioning reveals that the
dualities can be questioned, removing forever the sheen of perfection. A challenge to the
established order, however small, provides the fatal hairline crack in the structure. A challenge to
one duality throws all other dualities into question, as described by the Portuguese monk Fco
(sic) de Santa Maria in 1697: “As soon as this violent and tempestuous spark is lit in a kingdom
or a republic, magistrates are bewildered, people are terrified, the government thrown into
disarray. Laws are no longer obeyed; business comes to a halt; families lose coherence....
Everything is reduced to extreme confusion.”24 Reduction to confusion is the result of a
challenge to duality.25 Because duality gives social structure, its absence is experienced as an
absence of social structure—in short, as anarchy.26
How does society handle a collapse of duality, and the resultant slide into anarchy? Its
first resort is to contain the collapse. For my purposes, containment is a type of liminality.
Liminality, in turn, comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold,” so I understand
“liminality” to refer to the thresholds and boundaries within the space in which the action of the
story takes place.27 Those boundaries form a liminal zone between two parallel worlds (an inner
and an outer world), which can only be breached under special circumstances. Containment is
the type of liminality in which one world encloses and hides the other, and in which the
contained world is at the center—both literally and metaphorically—of the surrounding world.
The inner and outer worlds possess distinct natures. Because every “tempestuous spark”28
has been contained within it, the inner world is radically defiant of the dualities of its society. As
a result, the liminal experience of the inner world reduces difference and discards social structure
and hierarchy, so that
Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the
positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.... It is
as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be
fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with
their new station in life.29
Containment is a convenient response to a collapse of duality: the collapse is hidden away
behind liminal barriers and within a peculiar inner world. This inner world may be at the center
of the society, but it is sealed off from, and unknown to, the society. Beyond mere liminal
separation, the inner and outer worlds are fundamentally different. In the outer world, the
dualities are respected and hold near-total power over perception, as discussed above. But in the
inner world, the dualities are challenged, leading to their collapse and the destruction of the
power. Dualities, in their structured potency, are present in the outer world and absent in the
inner world. Because dualities play a major role in structuring perception and thought, their
presence or absence can be experienced as the presence or absence of rationality.
As Marlow moves closer to the interior, he notes that light and shadow blend; that
Europeans and Africans intermingle, being reduced to the same equal plane and adopting each
other’s cultural customs; that rationality disappears—“For a time I would feel I belonged still to
a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long”30—and that even the basic
tenets of civilized human behavior disappear, as illustrated by Kurtz’s use of shrunken heads as
domestic decor.31 Conrad himself notes in his autobiography that
In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the
experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of
circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going
to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?32
By containing the collapse of duality, the interior contains the collapse of everything that duality
sustains, including society itself. Girard notes that “All these crimes seem fundamental. They
attack the very foundation of cultural order...the hierarchical differences without which there
would be no social order.”33 The experience of the collapse constitutes the inner truth of the
parable, which is told in the outer world of society. The third layer of the parable directs the
receptive listener into the interior, there to be “ground down” and bestowed with the knowledge
of society’s hollowness, the knowledge of the truth behind the illusion.
In “A Rose for Emily,” the collapse and the inner truth are contained within Emily’s
house, the inner world, which is separated from the outer world—the town of Jefferson—by the
liminal zone of the house’s yard, its walls, and even the bedroom door leading to Homer’s tomb.
The barrier between house and town is rarely breached before Homer’s death and is never
crossed in the three decades between his death and Emily’s.34 When the townspeople do enter the
house, they find that the door to the bedroom where Homer lies is sealed shut, forcing them to
violently break it down before entering the deepest interior zone.35
Once they have reached the inner world, Conrad’s and Faulkner’s characters must cope
with the revelation of the collapse of duality. As I will discuss in the next section, the dualities’
collapse is ultimately experienced as “a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by
abominable terrors.”36 But the insiders’ reaction when the collapse is revealed goes beyond
horror—though, as Kurtz demonstrates, it certainly includes that. The moment of attaining the
ultimate knowledge, of experiencing the incommunicable inner nature and hidden ultimate
ramifications of the forces that sustain the society, is tantamount to a religious epiphany.37
Conrad dwells not on the realization per se, but on the experience of witnessing the
realization, an experience which can only be described in contradictory and ambiguous terms, as
epitomized in the scene of Kurtz’s death: “ ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The
light was within a foot of his eyes.”38 Kurtz’s gaze “could not see the flame of the candle, but
was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that
beat in the darkness.”39 Marlow describes Kurtz’ expression at his moment of epiphany as one
“of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he
live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme
moment of complete knowledge?”40 For Conrad, that final realization of the rotten core
sustaining society is, in a word, nihilistic.
Faulkner shows his resignation to his inability to communicate the open truth, the inner
meaning of his story, by entirely omitting any explicit reference to the moment of realization.
The story concludes: “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.”41
The characters’ reaction is never described. At the moment of realization Faulkner
confronts his reader not with an eloquent description of that startling revelation, as with
Conrad—but with the literal blankness of an empty page. Faulkner conveys not the revelation
itself, but the sensation of reaching the interior. To read the story’s last line, as above, is to
experience a moment of lonely and silent despair at the discovery of a terrible truth whose
implications reverberate through the core of the society. It is the sensation that the parable-teller
has experienced in the interior, as he experienced it, in a sublime and intensely personal dawning
of realization and disgust—that “We live, as we dream—alone.”42
The Sacrifice
The sacrifice is the mechanism that creates the horrors of the inner world, by examining
its roots in, and function for, the society of the outer world. The ultimate cause of the frightening
and threatening collapse of duality is the society’s reliance on a hollow and vulnerable system.
But “rather than blame themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole, which
costs them nothing, or other people who seem particularly harmful for easily identifiable
reasons.”43 Just as a disease is cured by treating its cause, not its symptoms, the society’s first
step toward order is not to directly seize control, but rather to reinstate the paradigm of duality.44
The challenge to the accepted structure of dualities is treated as a crime against the society, a
breach that must be repaired with blood. The archetypal example is the Passion.45 The breach in
the structure sustaining Southern society is addressed by Homer’s ritual sacrifice—but the
disturbing and devastating revelations about the society’s rotten foundation ultimately cannot be
silenced.
The sacrifice varies from a simple criminal prosecution in that “the persecutors choose
their victims because they belong to a class that is particularly susceptible to persecution rather
than because of the crimes they have committed.”46 The sacrificial victim in “A Rose for Emily,”
Homer, is chosen as a suitable sacrifice because he is easy to persecute. Homer emerges as the
ideal sacrifice because he acquires three social roles: monster, scapegoat, and ultimately victim.
Homer is first identified as a suitable sacrifice on two counts: he can be somehow connected to
the challenge to and even the collapse of duality that causes the crisis, and the population has
difficulty identifying itself with him.
In mythology such a character is often represented by a monster.47 The Minotaur is halfman and half-bull, the dragon is a man whose greed manifests itself physically, and the sphinx is
usually a lion with a human head. Each is partially human and animal, embodying a
disconcerting collapse of duality; each signifies and is blamed for society’s ills; and each must be
slain to heal society.48 The repugnance of monstrosity equates collapse of duality with disgust
and places the monster outside the borders of accepted society.49 Homer is fully human, but he
embodies a challenge to a crucial duality to Southern society: he is a Northerner living, albeit
temporarily, in the South. Perhaps the greatest indication of Homer’s separation from the society
of Jefferson is his unexplained absence, which is noticed but causes neither surprise nor alarm.
The narrator dismisses the townspeople’s indifference by noting that the street paving, which
Homer had been in Jefferson to supervise, had been completed.50 Homer is not connected to the
society, as are the other societal insiders. He is an outsider who must be thought of in different
terms—as transient, disposable, and insignificant.
A problem arises: the monster may be outside society, but that fact alone does not make
him responsible for the specific crisis threatening society. He is, nonetheless, held responsible for
it. This is the scapegoat impulse, which brings us to Homer’s second role. As a scapegoat, he is
not merely blamed for the crisis; he is equated with it.51 The line connecting him to the crisis so
that the two become indistinguishable is neither rational nor justified, but it nonetheless makes
the sacrifice possible. So what defines the scapegoat? We have already established how Homer’s
Northern origins account for his monstrosity according to the dualist terms of the Southern town.
But the scapegoat is something more than the monster. While Homer’s foreign origins—at least
from the viewpoint of the town—help make him monstrous, the monster does not necessarily
have to be foreign. Indeed, the Minotaur was conceived and born in Crete, while dragons are
often slain by a hero from (or fighting on behalf of) their hometown or native tribe. The
scapegoat, however, is strongly associated with foreign origins. The Jews of Europe, who have
frequently been scapegoats for many centuries, are defined as a people largely by their foreign
origins. While their persecutors may also have had foreign ancestors, the Jews’ foreign ancestry
was particularly conspicuous.52 The Jews exemplify another trait of the scapegoat, that “despite
[their] personal insignificance, [the scapegoat] is engaged in activities that can potentially affect
the whole of society.”53 Homer, who transgresses several Southern dualities, fits the model
perfectly.
The scapegoat also tends to be a member of a group that once persecuted—or is
perceived to have persecuted—the people who now persecute him.54 Faulkner wrote “A Rose for
Emily” a full fifty years after the end of Reconstruction, but in many ways the South remained
just as bitter as it had ever been, determined never to be truly vanquished even after defeat in the
war. Homer, who is in Jefferson to pave the roads, is perceived to be among the despised class of
carpetbaggers, Northerners who migrated across the Mason-Dixon to capitalize on the need to
rebuild and modernize the South—or, in other terms, to exploit the South for a profit after having
destroyed it. The unspoken charge against Homer is the invasion, occupation, and attempted
transformation of the South. The charges are brought by the Confederate veterans who govern
the town at the time of his murder, and the executioner is Emily, who is as much a relic of the
Old South as the Confederacy is. Homer, like the dragons of legend or the Jews of Europe, is a
monster because he is outside society and is a scapegoat because he can be identified with the
crime. The society isolates the crime and places it entirely within Homer, then kills him, ritually
killing the crime itself.
Homer’s final role is as the victim who must die in order to re-establish the absolute
power of the dualities.55 The society exists to restrain its members from uncontrolled violence by
channeling violent tendencies into acceptable channels, such as war and the execution of
criminals. If the challenge to duality goes unanswered and society dissolves into anarchy, those
protections against mass violence will also dissolve. Therefore the threat of mass violence is
channeled into one act of symbolic violence, which replaces mass violence, against one symbolic
individual, who replaces all the other members of the society.56 This logic, “That only one man
should die,” drives the sacrificial mechanism.57 Because the victim’s death must be justified on
socially acceptable grounds—the victim must be somehow culpable of a crime, preferably of the
one for which he is being sacrificed—the scapegoat is the ideal victim. Homer’s monstrosity, his
outsider traits that make it difficult for the people of Jefferson to empathize with him, further
increases his vulnerability. Homer, therefore, forms the ideal sacrificial victim. His ritual murder
atones for his and Emily’s transgression of three dualities that are central to Southern society,
masculine vs. feminine, Northern vs. Southern, and nobility vs. laborers. An extramarital affair
would have been bad enough. An open affair between an unmarried Southern gentlewoman and
a Northern carpetbagger and day laborer breaches the core of Southern society, which cannot
survive the collapse of these dualities.
I will now examine the sacrifice itself. The actual act of violence cannot be directly
connected to its source or to its purpose, because the sacrificial mechanism itself is part of the
secret. “‘Penalties no longer proceed from the will of the legislator, but from the nature of things;
one no longer sees man committing violence on man.’58 In analogical punishment, the power that
punishes is hidden.”59 Recognition that the dualities must be defended destroys the perception
that they are unquestionable, which the sacrifice seeks to protect.60 When direct violence is used,
“the desired effects are no longer produced. The mystery has been exposed.”61 Society relies on
duality to control perception; to react openly to a challenge to duality is to give it credence,
which is exactly what it needs to tear society down. “The existence of a debate already indicates
that a decision is impossible.”62 Emily is therefore appointed as the society’s agent of violence;
like a pagan priestess, she carries out the ritual sacrifice on behalf of her society.
The performance of the sacrifice is highly mythical and reflects the relation of
containment to the collapse of duality. The upstairs bedroom, where Emily constructs her altar, is
the most inner part of the house: in addition to the yard and threshold of the house, the stairs and
sealed bedroom door provide additional liminal layers of separation from the exterior world. To
enter the bedroom where Homer lies, the townspeople must break open the bedroom door, rather
than simply entering as they had done downstairs.63 Within this deepest, most hidden room,
Emily prepares her sacrifice as a pagan priestess might. Shortly before poisoning Homer she
purchases, most likely at great expense, a new set of men’s dress clothes—including a nightshirt,
presumably the one he wears in death—and a set of silver toiletries on which is inscribed the
initials “H. B.”64 After their purchase they do not resurface for thirty years. That scene of the
tomb’s discovery speaks for itself.
A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked
and furnished as for a bridal: ...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. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had
just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust.
Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the
discarded socks.65
The clothes and toiletries are part of the sacrifice; they are the relics of his life that will be
Homer’s companions in his tomb, just as an Egyptian pharaoh would have been entombed with
his everyday possessions.66 Emily’s elaborate preparation for Homer’s death suggests the
chilling premeditation of the sacrifice:
“I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then,
still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a
face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets
as you imagine a lighthouse keeper’s face ought to look. “I want some poison,”
she said.
“Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d recon—”
“I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.”
The druggist named several. “They’ll kill anything up to an elephant. But
what you want is—”
“Arsenic,” Miss Emily said. “Is that a good one?”
“Is...arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want—”
“I want arsenic.”67
Emily reveals much by revealing nothing. She stands in a trance, fixed on one purpose and
devoid of any emotion at the act of killing the man she loves, having left herself behind and
assumed the societal role of the priestess. This masochistic impulse to kill the thing one loves,
which is tantamount to fratricide, is part of the sacrifice’s constantly shifting blame.68 Society’s
defensive mechanism of indirect violence seizes complete control over her, driving her against
every instinct she might have for herself.69 To the townspeople, Emily appears mad. Her actions,
though, form not random madness but rather cool calculation of the cruelest sort—and the
actions are not hers, but rather the defensive impulses of society acting through her. The act of
violence cannot be directed against, or conducted by, any specific individual. The individuals
involved must act purely in their ritual roles, on behalf of the society, because the sacrifice “aims
to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall
equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers.”70 By acting through
Emily, the society avoids responsibility for the crime, utilizing a twisted circle of blame: Homer
is blamed for the breach of dualities and punished to absolve that crime, but the punishment in
itself is a crime, for which Emily must be blamed. Emily is a convenient resting place for the
blame because she, being dead and having no descendants, can be fully blamed without being
punished.
While the sacrifice of Homer follows the ultimate purpose for the execution of any
criminal—to isolate and kill the crime through ritual violence conducted on behalf of the
society—Homer is never publicly executed. To understand Homer’s death as an execution on
behalf of society, the high-profile drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, who had
attempted to assassinate Louis XV, provides a salient comparison. Even if Faulkner was not
familiar with the Damiens case, he would certainly have known of public execution and torture,
which Damiens’ death exemplifies. The plan for Damiens’ execution was that
the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot
pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said
parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn
away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted
together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and
body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.71
As with the murder of Homer, Damiens’ execution is meticulously planned and methodically
conducted, with the ultimate goal of isolating the crime within the criminal’s body and
destroying it. But unlike Homer’s destruction, Damiens’ destruction is total and public. The
maximum amount of agony possible is inflicted over several hours before thousands of
witnesses, including his wife, demolishing Damiens’ humanity and his will to live.72 His body is
then hacked and torn to pieces and burned for several hours until nothing remains but fine ash.73
Homer’s fate is far gentler. Presumably, arsenic in his food or drink results in his fairly
quick and painless death. His body is never directly harmed, save by the natural forces of decay.
And his death, which takes place in complete secrecy, remains undiscovered for three decades.
Homer’s sacrifice, while premeditated and ritually prepared, leaves a margin for failure.
Homer cannot be sacrificed in 1897 as Damiens was in 1757 because modern society, even
though capital punishment is still widespread in the United States, has moved beyond direct
awareness of the scapegoat mechanism at work in capital punishment. Homer’s secret
destruction therefore can neither be public nor total, but is rather conducted in secret and in a
manner that preserves the body as much as possible. The implications are profound: the absence
of public torture and execution does not indicate a more just or humane society. It indicates
instead that the old cruel sacrificial mechanism has merely moved out of public view and into a
secret, contained space, and that punishment has moved away from the criminal’s body and
against the criminal’s soul.74 But despite the layers of concealment between the crime and the
punishment, there is no doubt that Homer has died because he challenged the South’s dualities:
his body rots on the very bed where he and Emily likely consummated their affair, and where
(though Faulkner never explicitly refers to necrophilia) their sexual contact possibly continued
beyond his death. His death and the crime are even physically fused: by the time his corpse is
discovered, it has become “inextricable from the mattress on which it lay.”75
When combined with the certainty that the victim has been unjustly sacrificed, the
attempt to place a margin of doubt between the crime and the execution, between the punishment
and the criminal, reveals the sacrifice’s corrupt nature in a way that can be—and, in light of
Emily’s mortality and the townspeople’s curiosity, must be—discovered. The sacrifice’s
unchanged purpose, to preserve the illusions of dualities by destroying a victim who is
objectively innocent, is revealed to any insider who breaches the liminal zone and enters the
inner world.
Disconnection of the Sign
Let us consider the details of Homer’s entombment and their implication for the
sacrifice’s goal of hiding not just the collapse of duality, but the very existence of such a corrupt
and cruel structure. Ordinarily, a ritual entombment would act as a rite of passage into the
underworld. Homer’s tomb draws on burial rites ranging from ancient Egypt, where pharaohs
were entombed with their possessions, to the modern West, where the dead are buried in their
best dress clothes. Homer’s entombment should be a symbolic sending-off, with Homer dressed
presentably in his new set of dress clothes and with a few expensive, personal possessions—the
monogrammed silver toiletries—to signify that his high rank in this life will carry into the next.
But it does not mean these things at all. While those rituals are carried out, they become
completely perverse. Homer is clothed not in his new suit, but in a simple nightshirt. The suit
instead rests on a nearby chair, neatly folded, as if taunting him. The toiletries are in their proper
place, beside the bed, but reflect Emily’s wealth, not Homer’s; indeed, any such sign of wealth in
the tomb of a working-class construction worker is inherently artificial and misplaced. Most
significantly, the bedroom is not Homer’s proper resting place. It is not only above ground, but
on the second floor of the house, in a location that is secret but that must ultimately be
discovered and disturbed. Emily cannot have thought that she and Homer would lie there forever,
at least not literally. Homer receives the horrific and unnatural dishonor of being allowed to rot
above ground, exposed to the air and to the viewing of the disgusted townspeople, an
unparalleled insult that dominates stories as far back as Homer’s76 Iliad and Aeschylus’
Antigone. In those stories, at least, the insult of going unburied was transparent; in “A Rose for
Emily” it is just as insulting but packaged as its opposite, an honorable entombment.
The disjointed symbolism of Homer’s entombment, wherein an honor is actually a
perverse insult, is more deeply structural than a mere reversal of expectations. Faulkner invokes
mythical motifs but disconnects them from their usual mythical meaning. Let us think of each
motif as a sign that consists of a signified, a signifier, and the relationship between the two:
Signifier
Proper burial rites
Signified
Passage to underworld
Insult77
Faulkner disconnects the signifier from the signified to which it might be expected to
point. In this case, he disconnects Homer’s highly ritualized burial rites from a respectful
sending-off into the underworld. Reversing the meaning of a mythical motif is no small gesture:
“A Rose for Emily” is full of mythical motifs, and once one has been challenged, none of them
are safe. Indeed, Homer’s entombment is not the only reversal of a motif. We have already seen
that Homer’s sacrifice, which consumes much of the story, is both scrupulous in including
mythical details and uncompromising in reversing the expected course of the sacrifice, its
outcome departing radically from Damiens’ archetypal sacrifice of 240 years prior.
This radical departure from the expected is undertaken not for the sake of uniqueness, but
to point to the incommunicable inner meaning of the parable and to reflect the decay of Southern
society. Only a reversal of the accepted meanings of motifs can point to an inner meaning that is
itself a reversal of the accepted structure.78 And only a story that disconnects motifs from their
expected meanings can capture the massive misappropriation of symbols to their meanings that
makes possible the corruption of the society. “It is society that defines, in terms of its own
interests, what must be regarded as a crime: [the definition of a crime] is not therefore natural.”79
Homer is treated as a criminal, but his only offense has been to challenge the dualities of the
story’s Southern society. He is an innocent victim who is punished for an offense that is a crime
in name only. This injustice is made possible when dualities, which are really just modes of
perception, are mistaken for natural laws and universal truths. In practice, the results are often
ugly: racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all their consequences. In “A Rose for Emily,” those
consequences include betrayal, murder, and necrophilia. That misplacement of perception as
substance is at the heart of the society’s illusions, which, as we have seen, the parable seeks to
reveal and to reject.
Reflexive Interpretation
The true purpose, means, and outcome of the sacrifice are revealed by the parable. The
time and place of “A Rose for Emily” are central to the potential meaning and interpretation of
the story. One of the necessary characteristics of a parable is that, when it is told, it is set within,
and targeted at, a specific society. The Parable of the Sower is clearly set within and meant for an
agricultural society, particularly one that farms on land that is difficult to cultivate, such as the
lands of the ancient Israelites. The Parable of the Good Samaritan explicitly names its societal
context, as indicated by its title, and its moral cannot be understood without first understanding
the Israelites’ view of the Samaritans.80 As a parable, “A Rose for Emily” targets the postReconstruction Deep South, which forms both the story’s setting and its intended audience. It
assumes the existence two Souths: a fictional one within the story, and a real one outside of the
story—the society in which Faulkner lives. Those two societies, one inside the story and one
outside, are in the same place at the same time.
Because of the fragmented chronology of the story, I will attempt to determine the date of
Emily’s death. In 1894 Colonel Sartoris remits Emily’s taxes in response to her father’s death,
which presumably occurred in or shortly before that year.81 At the time of her father’s death,
around 1894, Faulkner tells us that Emily is about 30 years old.82 Homer’s death occurs two
years later, which coincides with an indication that Emily is “over thirty” when she purchases the
arsenic with which to kill Homer.83 About thirty years later, the younger generation that has
taken control of the town attempts, in vain, to reinstate Emily’s taxes.84 She dies some unknown
amount of time later. If we assume that Emily’s father dies just before Emily’s taxes are remitted
in 1894, that Homer dies in 1896, and that Emily dies exactly 30 years later, we can place
Emily’s death in 1926 at the earliest—three years before Faulkner wrote the story. The story's
geographical location is identical to that in which Faulkner's audience lives, the Deep South.
Like many of Faulkner’s short stories, “A Rose for Emily” is set in the fictional town of
Jefferson in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which was modeled after Faulkner’s
Mississippi hometown.85 While the story can be appreciated by people from any region,
Faulkner’s initial intended audience would have been Southern; his stories, at least the early ones
such as “A Rose for Emily”, were written about Southerners and for Southerners. The parable’s
specific time and place are equated with the time and place of its intended audience.
Faulkner thus places the parable on top of his audience, leaving no space between the
two. His awareness of the space, or lack of space, between parable and audience adds new
complexity to the parable. The parables of the Gospels allow this space; they are stories that
occur within their audiences’ societies, and that occasionally occur in a specific geographic
space, but they are never given a specific chronological space. Faulkner identifies this traditional
view on the parable with the older generation of the town, who after Miss Emily’s funeral gather
on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a
contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her
perhaps, 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 bottleneck of the
most recent decade of years.86
From this perspective, an ambiguous separating space is maintained between parable and
audience. While the parable is presumed to contain lessons that transcend that separating space,
the audience can selectively apply those lessons to their own society. The space allows the caveat
that the parable does not necessarily apply to the audience’s society, only that it might, if it so
pleases the audience. Its moral and inner meaning is taken as gentle advice. But, because of the
brutal and disturbing nature of the inner meaning of “A Rose for Emily,” the parable loses its
effectiveness if this comfortable space is maintained. “A Rose for Emily” challenges this space,
and in eliminating it, Faulkner forces his audience to confront the corrupt nature of their society
without any escape.
Because the parable’s audience belongs to the society in question, its interpretation of the
parable is necessarily—and perhaps unwittingly—an interpretation of itself. The acts of narrative
interpretation and of self-scrutiny become one action, each inseparable from the other.87 The
conditions of the story are understood as closely reflecting the conditions of society, while the
story’s outcome is taken as the natural conclusion of those societal conditions.88 The story’s
moral, therefore, becomes a dictum for society, an alternate path that if followed will adjust
conditions to provide a desirable outcome.89 This narrative process, which I have labeled
reflexive interpretation, almost literally draws the audience into the parable. Faulkner’s unusual
use of collective narration, using the first-person plural “we” as the story’s narrator and
protagonist, further equates the characters with the audience by using a pronoun that could
include the audience. Collective narration conveys an undefined group of people, observing and
occasionally interacting with the story together, and ultimately receiving the revelation together.
The audience is implicitly included in the group-protagonist. Once the audience and the
characters have been equated, the next question is whether the members of the society—and of
the audience—will choose the alternate path.
It is the younger generation within the story that views the revelation as a direct
indictment of the audience’s society. The older generation, which consists of Confederate
veterans and other irrational yet genteel guardians of the old order, is married to the Old South;
they, like Kurtz, cannot see its decay even when it stares them in the face. In contrast, the
younger generation, which has largely inherited control of the town by the time of Emily’s death,
[“Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town....”] is far enough
removed from the old order that they can receive the revelation of its corruption. But while they
can receive the revelation, the audience is never told whether they choose to, or whether they
instead follow their forebears in ignoring it. For as we have seen, at the moment of revelation,
the sickening shock of realization passes from the characters to the audience. The space between
audience and story completely collapses; the choice to receive the revelation lies not with the
characters but with the audience. And even if the revelation is ignored, it cannot be ignored in
the manner of the older generation of characters, who never directly faced the revelation as the
audience does in the story’s final paragraphs:
The man himself lay in the bed.
For a long time we just stood there, looking down at the profound and
fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain the the attitude of an embrace,
but the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had
cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the
nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay....90
This is the pure physical and emotional manifestation of Southern society as Faulkner sees it;
this is the sensation of experiencing the inner truth, as far as Faulkner can communicate it. The
full culmination of the society’s corruption—the false dualities, the unjust and brutal sacrifice of
an innocent victim, the deception of the sacrifice’s containment, all of which are ultimately lies
and bigotry and pointless violence—stares you in the face. It is brutal, raw, and undeniable. That
the society’s corruption is to blame for the sacrifice, and that the blame for sustaining that system
rests in part with each member of that society, is as tangible as the corpse that is only a few feet
away. Denial is impossible, as put by Shakespeare:
Gloucester:
Say that I slew them not?
Lady Anne:
Then say they were not slain:
But dead they are, and, devilish slave, by thee.91
Conclusion
The mechanism by which Faulkner’s Southern society causes atrocities is dark and
elaborate. The society depends on dualities, modes of perception and interpretation that are
misappropriated as natural laws and universal truths. When they are enforced as such, the
inevitable result is the death of an innocent victim for a crime that never existed. The dualities’
sacred status and the belief that to violate it is an intolerable crime are the hidden lies upon which
Southern society is built. When played out to their natural conclusion, these premises for the
society are revealed to be illusions. For Faulkner, Southern society uses cruelty to preserve a
system that lives by cruelty, utilizing a decaying, self-destructive mechanism of violence that
“will produce nothing but victims.”92
The revelation of Southern society’s corruption, and the use of reflexive interpretation to
implicate the audience in that corruption, lies at the heart of Faulkner’s parable. Faulkner
modernizes the parable by transforming it from an instructive tale about the society to a tale that
is the society. It is a forceful parable that cannot be passively dismissed: its revelation will either
be accepted and the society changed, or it will be rejected and the society will continue on its
moribund path. Because the parable has eliminated the comfortable space between story and
audience, the audience can never again claim blamelessness. Knowledge of the parable’s
revelation is all that is needed to change the society’s course, for “Once understood, the
mechanisms can no longer operate; we believe less and less in the culpability of the victims they
demand. Deprived of the food that sustains them, the institutions derived from these mechanisms
collapse one after the other.”93 Faulkner leaves it up to his audience to decide whether to accept
the revelation—but in either case, they have been made vividly aware of the inhuman
consequences of the status quo. They are no longer innocent if those inhuman consequences
continue to occur. Any future blood is on their hands.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my mentor for this project, Professor Brenda Deen Schildgen, for her
patience, her advice, and her significant dedication of time to this project over the course of five
months. I am also indebted to Professor Marijane Osborn, who has been a wonderful unofficial
mentor to me for two years, and with whom I developed the beginnings of this project.
Additional thanks go to Hope Medina, MURALS, the Davis Honors Challenge, and the
Department of Comparative Literature for their sponsorship of this paper.
Notes
1. Blotner 632. The article, titled “American Drama: Eugene O’Neill,” was published in the
“Books and Things” column of the Mississippian on 3 Feb. 1922 under the pen name “W. F.”
2. Blotner 388.
3. Blotner 476.
4. Blotner 715.
5. Blotner 703.
6. Blotner 457-8, 521, 703.
7. Kermode 24.
8. Kermode 24.
9. Levi-Strauss 14.
10. Mark 4:11-12, cited in Kermode 29.
11. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 104.
12. Mark 12, cited in Kermode 31.
13. Kermode 23, 25.
14. Kermode 29.
15. Kermode 2-3.
16. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 7.
17. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 105.
18. Bruns 627-8.
19. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 40.
20. Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked 1.
21. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 104.
22. Faulkner 55
23. Girard 13.
24. Girard 30.
25. Turner 166-7.
26. Turner 94-5.
27. Girard 13.
28. Turner 95.
29. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 18.
30. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 73.
31. Conrad, A Personal Record, xviii. Cited in Watts 49.
32. Girard 15.
33. Faulkner 52. After the younger generation of town officials fails to reinstate Emily’s taxes,
the narrator lays out a chronology: “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had
vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her
father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart [Homer]—the one we believed would
marry her—had deserted her. After her father’s death she went out very little; after he
sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.”
34. Faulkner 60.
35. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 107.
36. Girard 55.
37. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 104.
38. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 106.
39. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 105.
40. Faulkner 61.
41. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 40.
42. Girard 14.
43. Girard 101.
44. Girard 100-3.
45. Girard 17.
46. Girard 35-36.
47. Girard 48.
48. Girard 31-34.
49. Faulkner 58.
50. Girard 36.
51. Cf. Girard 1-11.
52. Girard 17.
53. Girard 32, 104, 115.
54. Girard 16.
55. Girard 112-13.
56. Girard 112.
57. Marat, Jean-Paul, Plan de legislation criminelle, 1780. P. 33. Cited in Foucault, Discipline
and Punish 105.
58. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 105.
59. Girard 116.
60. Girard 116.
61. Girard 112.
62. Faulkner 60.
63. Faulkner 57.
64. Faulkner 60-61.
65. Cf. Girard 113.
66. Faulkner 56.
67. Cf. Girard 125-48.
68. Turner 174.
69. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 249.
70. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 3.
71. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 3.
72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 5.
73. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 29.
74. Faulkner 60.
75. While there is no direct evidence that Faulkner intended to draw the parallel, it should not
escape us that the character of “A Rose for Emily” and the poet of the Iliad share a common
name.
76. de Saussure 65-8.
77. Turner 166-68.
78. Foucault, Discipline and Punish 104.
79. Kermode 24-5, 34-9.
80. Faulkner 50.
81. Faulkner 54.
82. Faulkner 55-6.
83. Faulkner 52: “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their
fathers thirty years before about the smell [of her father’s body].”
84. Blotner 644.
85. Faulkner 60.
86. Bruns 627-36.
87. Bruns 633-4.
88. Kermode 4, 24, 28-9.
89. Faulkner 61.
90. Richard the Third, I.ii.88-90.
91. Girard 113.
92. Girard 101.
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