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; dream-like
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 madeup 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)