A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner
About the author
William Faulkner’ life
 William Faulkner(1897-1962)was born in New
Albany,Mississippi. He attended the University
of Mississippi in Oxford before and after his
service in the Royal Canadian Air Force in
World I. His literary career began in New
Orleans where he met Sherwood Anderson,
who helped him get his first novel Soldier’s
Pay published in 1926. The work which won
Faulkner a Nobel Prize in 1950 is often a
depiction of life in his fictional Yoknapatawpha
County, an imaginative reconstruction of the
area adjacent to Oxford.
A Picture of Yoknapatawpha
County( a little postage stamp of
native soil)
His Main Writings
 His major novels :
 The Sound and the Fury(1929)
 As I Lay Dying(1930)
 Sanctuary(1931)
 Light in August(1932)
 Absalom , Absalom !(1936)
 The Hamlet(1940)
 His books of short stories:
 These Thirteen (1931)
 Go down, Moses(1942)
 The Collected Stories of William
Fanlkner(1950)
Faulkner: A country folk writer
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福克纳的作品中交织着一种对家乡的怨恨与不由自主的
热爱的情感，这是他写小说的主要动力．
马克斯韦尔说，他“在其他美国小说家也许完全不会自称
是南方人的时候，不仅代表了南方，而且本人就是深沉的
南方．”
福克纳记述了密西西比州的生活史，把Oxford变成了虚构
的“杰弗逊”，创造了一个“约克纳帕塔法县”．这一切
在本质上类似于托马斯哈代对英国西部郡生活的记录．
“我发觉”，福克纳评论说，“不但每本书必须有构思，
就是一个艺术家的全部作品，或者说整个创作也得有一个
通盘的考虑．”
福克纳的作品特点是;人物和地方的反复出现在不同的故
事里，开始象是一部南方生活的连续的家世故事：一个生
活痛苦，死气沉沉的穷乡僻壤的记录，一个居住着穷苦白
人农民，暴发户政客，受尽剥削的黑人佃农和念念不忘光
荣过去的没落贵族的地方的记录．
William Faulkner
American Writer
1897-1962
The Nobel Prize in
Literature 1949
"for his powerful and
artistically unique
contribution to the
modern American
novel"
About the text
“A Rose for Emily” is one of Faulkner’s most widely
read in the American classroom.
Chinese students may find it difficult to understand
and appreciate. Some of them may think it is a
bizarre story about an old eccentric lady in an
American Southern town. It is true that the setting
of the story is the American South. Yet, the theme
of the story is universal, transcending the
boundaries of time and space. Like many other
works of great literature, this short story tells about
love, death, honor, pride, change, and loss.
• The story is set in the southern town of
Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha Country which
is also the setting for a dozen of his novels.
• Emily Grierson, the protagonist, has been
twisted in personality by forces beyond her
control. Dominated by her aristocratic father,
she has been prevented from marrying and
after his death she is left alone and
penniless. She kills her lover Homer Barron
in order to keep him with her. She does not
accept change of the time and alienates
herself from the community. She is insane
and her actions grotesque, but she is a
victim, a tragic woman who invites
sympathy. One of the themes of this story is
the relation of the individual and his actions
to the past, present and future. Apart from
the exploration of psychological reality, the
displaced chronology in narration is also
characteristic of Faulkner’s style.
The Meaning of the Title
The meaning of the title is ambiguous,
capable of various interpretations. A rose is
a cliché, symbolizing love and a pledge of
faithfulness. From the story we can see Miss
Emily was denied love. So, in this sense, the
title has an ironic meaning. A rose for
somebody can also mean a kind of
memorial, an offering, in memory of
somebody. Then, who offered a rose for
Emily?
Writing style
Flashback and foreshadowing are two often
used literary devices that utilize time in order
to produce a desired effect. Flashbacks are
used to present action that occurs before
the beginning of a story; foreshadowing
creates expectation for action that has not
yet happened. Faulkner uses both devices
in ‘‘A Rose for Emily.’’
Detailed Study of the Text
Part I
1.
2.
The street used to house only the best families. Then great changes took
place: garages and cotton gins were established on the street and their
existence wiped out the aristocratic traces in that neighborhood. While the
whole street was becoming modern and commercial, only Miss Emily’s
house remained the same. Although her house was decaying, it still
assumed an air of a stubborn and frivolous girl. The cotton wagons and
gasoline pumps were ugly enough, but this house, which was old, in
decay, pretentious, and completely out of place, was more unpleasant to
look at. This detail shows that the house and its owner share the same
character.
Miss Emily had lived long and had become a tradition because she
represented the aristocracy of the Old South that had lost out in the Civil
War. She was a care because she was old, unmarried, and without family,
and the people in the town felt they must take care of her. They felt that
taking care of her was their duty and obligation. This obligation passed
from generation to generation as long as she lived.
3. Miss Emily would not have accepted charity. “Not that” is used to
say what follows is not true. Charity would be humiliating to Miss
Emily. When her father died, Miss Emily was quite poor, but
being a proud woman from an august family, she would not
accept charity. Colonel Sartoris, born into another aristocratic
family in Jefferson, had elaborate ideas about how white upper
class women should be treated. With the decline of the South
after the war, these rich white families also declined. He knew
that the wives and daughters of the declining plantation owners
enjoyed very high but also outdated status. They should be
looked up to, respected and taken care of. He knew exactly what
Miss Emily needed and how she felt now, and thus invented a
tale to justify the edict so that he could give her some financial
aid without appearing charitable.
4. fat, obese, plump, overweight, large, heavy, chubby, stout, tubby
If you want to be polite, don’t say that people are fat. Overweight
or just large, in American English heavy, would be more polite.
Plump is most often used of women and children and means
slightly or pleasantly fat. Chubby is most often used of babies
and children and also means pleasantly fat and healthy looking.
Stout means slightly fat and tubby means short and fat. If
someone is extremely fat and unhealthy, he/she is obese. Obese
is also the word used by doctors.
Part II
1.
The ladies didn’t believe that a man, any man, could keep a
kitchen properly. When the terrible smell developed, they
thought it was because the manservant didn’t keep the kitchen
clean.
2.
The Griersons regarded themselves as very important and the
outside world as vulgar full of people inferior to them. They
belonged to tow entirely different worlds. After her father died,
Miss Emily shut herself up in the house, retreating to her world
of the past. However, the complaints about the smell served
as a link between the two different worlds and compelled her
to deal with the other world.
3.
The next day the mayor received two more complaints. One of
them was from a man who came and pleaded to the mayor in
a shy and timid way.
4.Miss Emily sat in the
window with the light behind
her. What people Could see
was her silhouette, a dark
figure seen against a light
Background. In this image
She didn’t look like a living
person but an idol, or a
Goddess. Such a image suited
her rigid and stubborn personality,
her arrogant character.
4. People in the town felt that the Grierson family regarded themselves more
important than they really deserved to be. The fact that Miss Emily’s greataunt. Old lady Wyatt, had gone crazy had to do with this blind, excessive
self-importance.
5.长久以来，我们把这家人一直看做一幅画中的人物：身段苗条、穿着白衣的
爱米丽小姐立在背后，她父亲叉开双脚的侧影在前面，背对爱米丽，手执
一根马鞭，一扇向后开的前门恰好嵌住了他们俩的身影。
This sentence depicts a central image that tells several things about the
relationship between father and daughter in Grierson family. First, the
positions of the father and daughter are meaningful. The father was
standing in the foreground while Miss Emily was standing in the
background. This shows the father’s dominant position and the daughter’s
subordinate role. The father’s spraddling adds to his image as a stern
patriarchal figure. Second, the father turned his back to her, showing that
he refused to listen to her, denying her wishes. Then Mr. Grierson was
clutching a horsewhip, which was clearly a symbol of power, authority, and
strict control. Miss Emily’s slender figure suggests vulnerability, and her
white dress symbolizes purity, the most valued quality of the Southern
white women. The fact that the two of them were framed by the back-flung
front door may be interpreted in different ways. One interpretation is that
the father was blocking the door, suggesting Miss Emily was unable to
walk out of the house and choosing her suitor freely. Another
interpretation is that the door was open for suitors but the suitors were
driven away by the father holding a horsewhip.
6. When she got to be thirty and was still single, people in
the town were not happy about such a outcome, but it
did confirm their predictions—Miss Emily was still single
because the Griersons held themselves too high for what
they really were, and all the young men who had come
to court Miss Emily had been driven away by the father.
They knew that even though there was insanity in the
family, Miss Emily wouldn’t have turned down all of her
chances if they had really existed.
因此当她年近三十，尚未婚配时，我们实在高兴不起来，只是觉得先前的看法得
到了证实。即使她家有着疯癫病史，如果真有机会摆在她面前，她也不至于全然
放过。
7. Without her father’s over-protection and without
much money, she had become a common person
like the other townspeople. Ordinary people often
become excited or worried when they get a penny
more or a penny less. Being poor, now Miss Emily
would learn to appreciate the value of money like
other people in the town.
单身独处，贫苦无告，她变得通人性了。如今她也懂人之常情，也会多一便士就
激动喜悦、少一便士就痛苦失望。
Part III
1. It is obvious that there is something else beneath the change of
appearances. What is it? It is quite ambiguous. The images in this
passage may be interpreted as a woman stripped of her sexuality. In
this portrait, Emily assumes the semblance of a girl instead of a
sexually mature woman of thirty. Her cut hair is especially important.
Since ancient times, a woman’s hair has symbolized her sexuality.
Emily’s hair, along with her sexuality, has been cut short through her
father’s pride. The cut hair also introduces religious imagery, for an
initiate into nunnery shears her hair as a symbol of her chastity. In
addition, the adjectives “tragic and serene” envisage a Madonna, a
holy virgin, as an addendum to the primary image of angels who,
although often depicted as women, are asexual. The images can
also indicate that with her hair cut short, Emily was now a liberated
woman. She was determined to change her role as an upper-class
genteel woman. A short hair usually makes a woman look stronger
and more independent in character. This quality of hers can be seen
in her courting with Homer Barron, a Yankee foreman, despite
traditional social prejudice.
2. Yankee: Homer Barron was one of those from the victorious North
who, after the Civil War, came to South in the hope of making money.
They were often called “carpetbaggers”, and were objects of scorn or
suspicion for most Southerners.
3. But there were still others, older people,
who said that no matter how sad Miss Emily
was over her father’s death, she should not
forget she had certain obligations as a
member of the nobility, though a real lady
would not describe her self-restraint by the
expression noblesse oblige. The implied
meaning is that it should be unthinkable for
Emily as part of the local “nobility” to
consider marrying a man so far beneath her.
Part IV
1. He would never disclose what happened during his talk with
Miss Emily. We can infer that Miss Emily must have treated
him with distain when he came to express the community’s
disapproval of her public courting activities with Homer Barron.
This is why he refused to have another talk with Miss Emily.
2. The townspeople were glad because they had been annoyed
by the arrogant attitude of Miss Emily and now the two cousins
were even more stubborn and self-important than Miss Emily.
They believed that the two cousins would succeed in
persuading Miss Emily and Homer Barron to get married
quickly so that her public courting with Homer Barron would
come to an end.
3. The people in the town guessed that their relationship had
turned sour and so Homer Barron had left. And they expected
to see a quarrel between them. When nothing of the kind
happened, they were a little disappointed. Then they began to
think that he perhaps had gone to prepare for the wedding.
blowing-off: a loud quarrel that signals the end of something
4. By that time, the cousins had completed their mission and
should leave Jefferson. Now the townspeople were taking
the side of Miss Emily and made secret plans to help her
deal with her cousins in a clear way.
5. Her father had driven away her suitors so many times, thus
preventing her prom getting what she wanted as a woman.
thwart: to prevent someone from doing what they are trying
to do
6. What is the symbolic meaning of her vigorous iron-grey
hair?
It symbolizes her strong and stubborn personality. She
refused to make any change to adapt her herself to the
changing society. Even her hair ceased turning its color.
7. Now Miss Emily no longer went out.
From time to time the townspeople would
see her in one of the downstairs windows.
She had evidently shut the top floor of the
house. Sitting in the window, Miss Emily
looked like the carved torso of an idol for
worship placed in a niche. Whether she
was looking at us or not we could not tell
and it was not important because she had
ceased to be a real human being, but
had completely become a sort of
monument,
symbol of a tradition and hereditary
obligation.
不时地，我们在楼底下的一个窗口能见到她的身影，
她显然是把楼
上封闭起来了。她的身影就像神龛中的雕刻的一尊
偶像的躯体，我
们说不上她是不是在看着我们。
niche
8. The author uses five adjectives to describe how the
townspeople felt about Miss Emily. These words reflect
the townspeople’s ambivalent attitude toward Miss Emily.
She was dear because she represented the Southern
heritage to a certain extent. She was inescapable
because she was “a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town”. She was impervious and not affected by any
changes taking place in the town, and her
imperviousness was well reflected by her ignoring the
tax notice and her refusal to pay taxes. She was tranquil.
Though she was tragic, she remained calm and free
from disturbance. Her tranquility as well as her rigidity
was portrayed by her motionless silhouette in the
window. She was certainly perverse, always behaving in
an unreasonable way and regularly doing the opposite of
what people expected her to do.
她就这样度过了一代又一代——高贵，宁静，无法
逃避，无法接近，怪僻乖张。
Part V
1. The very old men, who were even older than Miss Emily, came to
the funeral. Some of them were veterans of the Civil War, and they
had put on their old Confederate uniforms to pay their last
respect this Southern lady from an aristocratic family. Standing
on the porch and the lawn, they talked of Miss Emily, mistakenly
thinking of her as someone of their age, born around 1840 or so
whereas she (born around 1855) was much younger than they
were. They imagined they had danced with her and courted her
perhaps. As the old people often do, they confused the dates and
years of past happenings. To the old people, all the past should
be like a road that becomes smaller as it reaches further back.
But to those old southerners, the recent past of ten years or so
was like a bottleneck, a narrow passage, or a tunnel. Beyond that
narrow passage, the remote past became a huge level meadow
where things were pleasantly and fondly mixed up together. Like
the green grass on the meadow never touched by the winter, their
memories of the remote past remained blurred, sweet,
romanticized, and unchanged.
a. mathematical progression: sequence or succession of
happenings in time marked by numbers
b. bottleneck: any place, as a narrow road, where traffic is slowed
up or halted; any point at which movement or progress is slowed
up.
停尸架上方悬挂着她父亲的炭笔画像，
一脸深刻沉思的表情，女人们唧唧喳喳地谈
论着死亡，而老头们呢——有些人还穿上了
刷得很干净的南方同盟军制服——则在走廊
上，草坪上纷纷谈论着爱米丽小姐的一生，
仿佛她是他们的同龄人，而且还相信和她跳
过舞，甚至向她求过爱，他们把按数学级数
向前推进的时间给搅乱了。这是老年人常有
的情形。在他们看来，过去的岁月不是一条
越来越窄的路，而是一片从来没有冬天光顾
的广袤的大草地，只是最近十年却像窄小的
瓶颈，把他们同过去隔断了。
2. Just before his death, the man was lying in a
position of an embrace. But death that always
lasts longer than love and conquers even the
pain and suffering of love had turned him into a
man whose wife proved unfaithful.
那尸体躺在那里，很显然曾经呈拥抱的姿势。但
是，比爱情更持久的长眠、甚至连爱情的熬煎都
征服了的长眠，使他屈服了。他所遗留下来的肉
体已在破烂的睡衣下腐烂，跟他躺着的木床粘在
一起，难分难解了。在他身上和他身旁的枕上，
均匀地覆盖着一层长年累月堆积下来的灰尘。
Why did Miss Emily kill Homer
Barron?
a. Barron had deserted her.
b. Barron refused to marry her.
c. She feared that Barron would not remain
faithful to her after their marriage.
d. She was insane.
e. He wanted to blackmail her.
f. He wanted to take her to the North.
What kind of a woman is Miss Emily? How is
she portrayed in the story?
Born into an aristocratic family of the South, Miss Emily was proud,
self-important and obstinate like other Griersons. As a lady from
such a family, she enjoyed a high but obsolete social status. On the
one hand she was placed on a pedestal for people to admire as if
she were perfect. She was closely watched by the community and
was always expected to bring honor to the town and set a good
example for the young. She was viewed as a representative of the
Southern tradition, “an idol in the niche”. Nominated by her father,
she was deprived of all opportunities for a happy marriage and thus
for a normal woman’s life. After she began to court with Homer
Barron, a Northern laborer, she was accused of being a disgrace to
the town and a bad example to the young people. The patriarchal
and social pressure warped her character. She tried hard to cling to
the past, which meant privilege and glory to her. She cut herself off
from the changing world and lived in complete self-isolation. Over
the years, she was transformed from a subordinate young lady
controlled by her domineering father to a middle-aged woman
courting a laborer against the accusation of the community and then
to a murderer who not only killed her love but also kept the corpse
in her house and even sometimes lay down beside the remains of
the dead body.
How did the townspeople think of her？
For such a woman, the townspeople had
mixed feelings----she was “dear,
inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and
perverse”. For better or worse, she is the
embodiment of the social conditions at that
time. Through telling this story and exploring
the character of Miss Emily, Faulkner
reveals his ambivalent relationship to the
South, of which he felt proud and ashamed
at the same time.
The meaning of the story
The plot of the story evolves around many
conflicts: the conflicts between Mr. Grierson and
his daughter, the conflict between Miss Emily and
Homer Barron, the conflict between Miss Emily
and the community, the conflict between the
South and the North, the conflict between Miss
Emily and the established codes of conduct, and
the conflict between the past and the present.
The readers’ different focus on these conflicts
may lead to different interpretations. On the
whole, it tells what it is like to live in the American
South between the 1860s and the 1930s when
the South had to digest the loss of the war and
cope with its legacy in a changing society.
Questions:
 1. How old was Emily when her father died?
 2. At what age did Emily teach Chinese
painting?
 3. Why did Emily refuse to pay the tax?
 4. Why does the narrator use the pronoun “we”?
 5. What does this story tell you about the
culture and mores of the American South
during that period? How does it compare with
your own conception of small town life?
Which of the photos below best represents the image of Emily Grierson's
house before it became "an eyesore among eyesores"?
A.
B.
C.
D.