The Explicator, Vol. 68, No. 3, 195–198, 2010
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online
DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2010.499087
JUDITH CAESAR
American University of Sharjah
Faulkner’s Gay Homer, Once More
Keywords: William Faulkner, homosexuality, “A Rose for Emily”
Now, some fifteen years after the debate in these pages concerning whether
Homer Barron in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is homosexual, students
continue to assume that homosexuality explains Barron’s reluctance to marry
Emily Grierson. The question is not irrelevant, as James Wallace suggested (107),
reading the story as primarily about gossip and its pernicious effects. The story
is also about a woman buried alive in a house that has literally become a tomb;
buried alive in the concept of Southern ladyhood, and to this the auxiliary concept
of manhood is very relevant. Moreover, the question about Barron’s sexuality also
reveals the ways in which we read the literature of the past through the lenses of the
present, often oblivious to the ways in which both language and social constructs
change.
Today, many students simply assume Homer Barron is homosexual. These
students, using the close reading techniques they have been taught, point to the
phrases “he liked men” (429) and “he was not the marrying kind” (429), both
of which they assume are code phrases meaning that Homer was homosexual. In
fact, James Wallace, arguing against the interpretation of Homer as gay, suggests
himself that the narrator is, indeed, implying that Homer is homosexual (107).
Wallace merely doubts the narrator’s reliability, given the ambiguous structure of
the story. In fact, Wallace, Blythe, and the hundreds of students who have inferred
Homer’s real or rumored homosexuality could have been right if the story had been
written after 1980, rather than in 1931, and if the story were set in the twenty-first
century rather than the nineteenth. But in that case, it wouldn’t have been a very
good story.
In the first place, if Homer were homosexual or rumored to be so, much of the
story’s plot would not make sense on a realistic level. Why would the townspeople
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imagine Emily to be “fallen” if they thought that Homer was gay? And why would
Homer have been seen entering Emily’s house by the back door after dark after
Emily’s cousins had left? One would think that if Barron were using his open
courtship of Emily as a cover for his homosexuality, he would have left as soon
as the sidewalks he was commissioned to install were completed. But the narrator
makes a point of saying that “the streets had been finished some time since” (430).
Why would Barron stay, and even return after leaving the town while the Grierson
cousins were there, if Emily were simply a decoy?
Given this, why do both critics and students give credit to the idea that Homer
may be homosexual? Back in 1993, James Wallace suggested that these attitudes
sprang from students’ homophobia and their “fascination with even mild sexual
references in literature” (105). However, I would argue that this misunderstanding
comes from a lack of student knowledge about attitudes toward homosexuality at
the time the story was written and at the time the story takes place. It also shows a
perhaps understandable ignorance of the ways in which words and phrases, especially code words and euphemisms, change over time. Even the term “gay” once
suggested heterosexual impropriety. In the late nineteenth century, it referred to
engagement in prostitution, as Frank Harris’s autobiography reveals. In Faulkner’s
story the phrases “he liked men” and “he was not the marrying kind,” which today
imply homosexuality, more probably imply socially approved male bonding and
heterosexual misogyny within the context of the times. “He liked men” could
simply mean “he preferred the social company of his own sex,” at a time when
the rigid codes of social decorum prescribed for ladies might well have made
them seem prim and dull. “He was not the marrying kind” could mean, “he did
not want to be domesticated into family life.” Homer drinks with “younger men
at the Elk’s Club” (429), a men’s lodge, a place men could go to drink, smoke,
swear, tell jokes, and discuss sports and business without offending or boring “the
ladies.” While Blythe sees this as an indication the Barron was an ephebephile,
seducing younger men (49), it might very well merely suggest a kind of immaturity. Moreover, the townspeople of Jefferson would not have viewed Barron
as “gay,” even if he were homosexual, since the term was not used in that way
until the mid–twentieth century. They would more probably have seem him as a
“degenerate” (Williams 1723), which is how Stella Kowalski describes her sister
Blanche’s homosexual husband in A Streetcar Named Desire, a play written more
than a decade after Faulkner’s story but indicative of pre–gay liberation attitudes
toward homosexuality.
Given this, the narrator’s phrases seem too off-hand and too casual, and the
disapproval too mild to be a reference to “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Consider the view of homosexuality at the time the story takes place and at the time
that it was written, and how homosexuality is depicted in Faulkner’s other work.
The part of the story in which Homer is paying his attentions to Emily Grierson
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takes place in the 1870s. Twenty years later, in an era surely no less intolerant
toward of homosexuality, Oscar Wilde was tried and convicted of sodomy. Perhaps
even more than in Britain, homosexuality was considered abhorrent in the American South. Betina Entzminger convincingly argues that “white supremacy merges
with compulsory heterosexuality because white supremacy involves domination
and control” (90). To be either part black or homosexual is to lose ones one’s status
as a full human being. Entzminger goes on to suggest that in Absolom, Absolom
Henry Sutpen kills his friend Charles Bon not because he learns that Bon is part
black, but because he is unable to reconcile his own homoerotic attraction to Bon
with his concept of manhood. In Light in August, when the Reverend Hightower
tries to protect Joe Christmas from a lynch mob, Percy Grimms (falsely) accuses
Hightower of being Christmas’s homosexual lover, this being the most devastating
accusation he could make. Suggestions of homosexuality are not made lightly in
Faulkner’s work.
Moreover, in American society in the early twentieth century, anything suggestion of pedophilia could evoke violence (as it can even today). Consider the
fate of Wing Biddlebaum in Sherwood Anderson’s 1916 story “Hands,” wherein
angry townspeople beat a young schoolteacher almost to death on the basis of
teenage boy’s unsupported accusation. If Homer were in the Elk’s Club to seduce
young men, one would think the townspeople would have taken more exception
to this behavior, and moreover would not be hoping that Emily “would persuade
him yet” (429) to marry her.
It is important to establish that Homer Barron was probably not intended to
be perceived as gay for two reasons. First, believing Barron to be homosexual
distracts students from one of the story’s important ideas: that in turning Emily
Grierson into a monument, the town has done much to turn her into a murderer
and a necrophile. Indeed, they would rather have her be a murderer than lose her
status as a lady. The rigid roles formed by gender and social class have driven
Emily mad. Second, this misconception causes students to miss the fact that in
other times many Americans thought very differently about gender, race, class, and
sexual behavior than the majority of young Americans do now. One of the benefits
of reading literature, surely, is to help readers understand worlds of ideas and
values different from their own. If we think that in the 1870s, or even in the 1920s,
homosexuality in an American small town called forth no more response than a
lewd nudge and wink, we are fundamentally misunderstanding our own history.
Works Cited
Blythe, Hal. “Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.”’ The Explicator 47.2 (1989): 49–50. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 25 Aug. 2009.
Entzminger, Betina. “Passing as Miscegenation: Whiteness and Homoeroticism in Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom.” The Faulkner Journal 22.1–2 (2007): 90–106. Academic Search Premier. Web.
25 Aug. 2009.
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Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 8th ed. Ed. Jerome
Beaty et al. New York: Norton, 2002. 425–32. Print.
Harris, Frank. My Life and Loves. 1922–27. New York: Grove, 1994. Print.
Wallace, James. “Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’ ” The Explicator 50.2 (1992): 105–07. Academic
Search Premier. Web. 25 Aug. 2009.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 8th ed. Ed.
Jerome Beaty et al. New York: Norton, 2002. 1677–1744. Print.
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Copyright of Explicator is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users
may print, download, or email articles for individual use.