A_rose_for_Emily赏析

Ⅰ.Introduction

“A Rose for Emily” is a classic story representing Faulkner’s favorite subject, theme and style. The story is set in the town of Jefferson in his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, the “mythical kingdom”. The story begins with a funeral of the eponymous Miss Emily. It does not follow a particular order of chronological time. The narration flows backwards or forwards in a line of reality, revealing significant details of Emily’s life and the murder of the Homer Barron by Emily, which are suspended till the end of the story. The narrative is also divided into five parts, allowing for flexible shifts in time and displays of Emily’s image at various stages of her life. Through the story about Emily, the author tries to pinpoint an unavoidable fate of the aristocracy and various changes in the South America after the Civil War.

In this story, Emily Grierson, the main character, is a victim. Dominated by her father and his rigid ideas of social status, she has been prevented from marrying during her lifetime. One year after her father’s death, she falls in love with a northerner. When she finds that her lover is not going to get married with her, she poisons him so that she can keep him with her forever. Though the plot of the story is not complicated, yet it can be considered as a minor program of his works. In it are examples of Faulkner’s artistic preoccupations and techniques: the exploration of psychological reality, the social structure and mores of a southern community, the nature of time, and the relation of the past to the present. This paper will approach the story from the following aspects: analysis of Emily’s character, the root causes of her characters and her destiny.

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Ⅱ.Analysis of Emily’s characters

Emily is the main character, the protagonist of the story. In this story, the author mainly focuses and reveals the main character—Emily. In order to analyze Emily’s character, some questions have at first to be answered: What type is this story or what kind of theme this story plans to reveal? When answering these questions, it becomes much easier to analyze her character. Miss Emily is kind of quiet and perverse, proud and aloof, haughty, brave and tough, a representative of traditional convention and so forth. The followings are going to expatiate on them.

2.1 Miss Emily’s haughty character

At the very first, Emily is easy to be regarded as a haughty woman. In the story, the writer not only reveals the abnormal phenomenon of Emily’s grotesque character and her ill-sexed psychology, but also lively portrays her as a strong figure of haughtiness. Miss Emily Grierson is the socialite of her town. Naturally with this status there is a certain reputation she has to withhold. She not only represented her family name but, in a sense the people of her town. Because she was such a dominant figure the townspeople had put her on a pedestal and were very attentive to her actions. During the time in which her father was alive Emily was seen as a figure to be admired but never touched. Many wooers she had but according to her father’s standard, none were suitable enough.

2.2 Miss Emily’s isolated and eccentric character

Besides, Miss Emily is isolated and eccentric. From the whole story, there is no

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doubt that she was an isolated one from the beginning of the story to the surprising end. All her life is the town people’s topic after meals. They regard her as a monster. And because of her family, in particular, her father, she nearly get separated from her neighbors, which adds more pressure to her personal affairs to fall in love with the Yankee, Homer Barron, which, at last, creates the tragedy. On the other hand, she is eccentric at the same time. When the men from the government want to tax her after her father’s death, but they are refused by Emily. The reason is quite simple, that is, when her father is alive, in Jefferson, they need not to pay taxes. She just tells the government that she has no taxes in Jefferson. What she said was the matter several years ago. And there was once a man called Colonel Sartoris explained it to her about her tax-free privilege. She does not respect the truth, that is, her so-called Colonel died ten years ago and new policy comes into practice. The narrator arranges the specific detail on her behavior of buying Arsenic. The druggist can not imagine her purpose in buying the poison and just thinks that she might use it for rat and such things. Miss Emily just stares at him, her head tilts back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looks away and goes and gets the arsenic and wraps it up for her. How strange and eccentric she is. She does not allow anyone to ask about her matter, even though it is a dangerous affair which is forbidden by law.

2.3 Miss Emily’s necrophilia

Miss Emily is a necrophilia, too. Greatly surprised at the sight of the last paragraph of Faulkner’s short-story “A Rose for Emily”, the town people find that Miss Emily is not only a murderer, but also sleeps with Homer Barron after she kills him. Then it is noticed that in the second pillow is the indentation of a head.

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One of the townspeople lifts something from it, and leans forward, finding the faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, and a long strand of iron-gray hair. Horribly, she kills her lover and sleeps next to him for a long time until being found out. As for the whole passage, the narrator refuses to dismiss Emily as simply mad or to treat her life as merely a grotesque, sensational horror story.

Instead, his narrative method brought us into her life before we hastily rejected her, and doing so offered us a complex imaginative treatment of fierce determination and strength coupled with illusions and shocking eccentricities.4

2.4 Miss Emily’s braveness and toughness

She is brave and tough as well. As a woman, Emily is normal. She just tries her best to pursue her happiness. In this story, the most attractive part for a great number of people is Emily’s brave pursuit of love. Only after her father’s death, she begins to have the right to love. “In the summer after her father’s death, she has her hair cut short and looks like a little girl. Soon she falls in love with Homer, who is a Yankee, a northerner and a day labor as well.” She holds her head high in her dignity as she is the last Grierson of her family though the townspeople think she has fallen because she is with a man who is different from her. However, Emily’s love affair is not affected by the townspeople and her two female cousins’ interference. What’s more,

Ⅲ.Intrinsic and extrinsic Reasons

3.1 Intrinsic reasons

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3.1.1 Family

It is her family, especially her father that influences her so much. Emily, the heroine in the story, is a victim. Dominated by her father and his rigid ideas of social status, she has been prevented from marrying during his life time and therefore after his death, she is left alone and penniless. Her dependence on her father continues even after he dies; she refuses to bury him and keep his portrait in a prominent place in her living room. Emily not only clings to her father’s memory, she also begins to assume his domineering traits. She does not accept the passage of time and changes or the inevitable loss that accompanies it. It is not just pathetic attempts to cling to the past, it develops into obsession and finally, homicidal mania. Rather than lose Homer as she lost her father, she kills him in order to keep him. She lives many years as a recluse. Abnormal characters are easy to form when under such strong pressure. It is Emily’s family that ruins her life and then Homer’s.

3.1.2 Physiology

Emily’s typical characters are cause by another important reason, namely, the physiological one. From Freud Sigmund’s narration, there are three conceptions which are connected to the analysis needed to understand, that is, Id, Ego, and Super-ego.

They are the three parts of the fictive “psychic apparatus” defined in Freud’s so-called structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described.

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According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are the “id”; the organized realistic part of the psyche is the “ego”, and the critical and moralizing function the “super-ego”. The Id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. The Id is unconscious by definition.6

Id is human’s first reaction when human physiological needs happen, which is also an unorganized phenomenon. Miss Emily just tries her best to chase her happiness as other normal women do. From this angle, Miss Emily has the right to fall in love with Homer and to have their own family. What she has done is within the common practice. However, a lot of elements result in the tragic sequel. It is she that can not grasp the physiological element and causes her unhappy or even miserable destiny.

3.1.3 Pathology and psychology

There is another important intrinsic reason, that is pathological and psychological one. From her behavior to her father Mr. Drieson, she is complete Elctra Comlex(恋父情结). She lived with her father when Mr. Grieson was alive, without communicating with others. Mr. Grieson controlled her whole life completely, which is the root that causes Miss Emily’s tragedy and Homer’s. What is more, Emily’s father drove away all the young men who were going to chase his daughter for the reason that he just wanted to hold Emily for himself. In Emily’s sub-consciousness, her father is her lover. It is this kind of abnormal psychology that influences the formation of Emily’s abnormal characters. In Emily’s eyesight, losing her father amounts to losing her lover. And that means

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she will be alone from that time on. Therefore, she refuses to bury her father even though he has been dead for several days. And at last she kills her own lover just in order to keep him with her.

3.2 Extrinsic reasons

When referred to intrinsic reasons, it is easy to think of extrinsic reasons causing Miss Emily’s characters and her destiny. What is more, the extrinsic reasons play a crucial role on her which worth of researching here.

3.2.1 Cultural tradition

Cultural tradition makes great impact on Emily’s characters and the tragedy. Faulkner was aware of the Southerners’ association with the South tradition，not only physical，but spiritual as well; so he took pains to picture a group of Southerners who desperately submitted to the old way of life．But as an artist of the twentieth century, he observed the gradual changes of the South: the old veterans were dying of, and the old loyalties were adjusted to conform to new conditions．In “A Rose for Emily”,Faulkner described the conflicts between the old tradition and the new order, and the doomed defeat of the old tradition．Emily lived in her big and squarish frame house, which Grierson family thought the great choice. But her house was on its way to “coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps. And the once most select street which was filled with houses decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seveties” was then encroached and obliterated by garages and cotton gins. Faulkner admired somewhat the merits of the South

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tradition—the compassion and humanity men like Colonel Sartoris and his peers–inherited forced them to tell a kind lie to Emily so as to look after the single lady without insulting her dignity．But only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it. The moral values of the South tradition were lost．The new generation of public officials may be more efficient and businessman-like. They were more practical; the next generation，with its more modern ideas，produced some little dissatisfaction with the hereditary obligation upon the town. but the old generation like Judge Stevens totally objected to the idea for it was shameful to let others know that such noble lady had smell on her faces. The conflicts between the old generation and the new one indicated the decline of the Southern tradition．Faulkner believed that it was the moral values—courage，honor，pride，compassion，liberty and justice that produced the glorious Southern kingdom，but the new generation lost the virtues，thus losing its faith and force．

The loss of the South tradition and the appearance of the North industrialization caused not only the devastation of the Southern plantation system, but also the macabre disillusionment to the Southern descendants. They were reared in the ways of the traditional South, vividly taught the beliefs and the loyalties of the tradition as the South knew them．Whereas，they saw that world changing into another kind and they were themselves of that new changed world，yet apart from it．Faulkner revealed with intensity the rootless of the Southern descendants．They witnessed that the Northern industrialization penetrated the South, but their inherited Southern aristocracy forbade their acceptance of the new order of life．They stubbornly objected to the invasion of the northern way of life, but in vain．So the Southern descendants had to suffer from the loneliness and

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bitterness of separating from the new world．The disillusionment of the Southerners was wel1 revealed in the portrayal of Emily, which is a symbol that Emily’s characters formed and caused her tragic end. For Miss Emily, she holds a firm conception that the Southern tradition or her family system is some sort of superiority. Therefore, when another new system－the Northern one comes into being, she just can not accept the truth and does some deeds to resist it and protect her “perfect one”. It is such behaviors and traditions that makes her abnormal characters.

3.2.2 Social element

Another extremely crucial factor for Emily’s characters to form is the social element. Here it mainly refers to the environment—the Jefferson community around her. For the townspeople, Grieson family never choose a northerner, a day labor. They think even though Emily is sad, she can not forget that she is a noble. They seem to be Emily’s new father after her father died. They try to control Emily on her love affair. When Emily and Homer appear together, they talk about them with scornful expression. However, the community’s opposition does not influence Emily’s persistent love with Homer. If the townspeople give up at this moment, the result of Emily may be much better. But, instead the opposition becomes further intensified. A priest gets in and fails. Then come Emily’s two far-distance cousins. From the writer’s viewpoint in the story, Miss Emily has been much better when she fall love in Homer. But the social environment pushes her to the edge of an abnormal woman again and again.

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Ⅳ.Destiny

She refused to release her father’s body for burial，and kept his portrait in a prominent place in her living room： She refused to cooperate with modernization in the tax-paying service, answering the tax notice “on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink…” Her clinging to the past developed into such obsession and homicidal mania that she killed Homer Barron when she knew he would not marry her. So she killed him and kept the body， From Emily’s tragic end and Faulkner’s other characters， we can see the portentous disillusionment of the Southern descendants in the transitional period．“They isolated themselves from the actual society, so what they could do was only to miss the past desperately until at last they died with deep agony.”9

Consequently, Miss Emily suffered great pressure from the society, her family tradition, her relatives and community’s nonchalance etc. on her personal affair which finally caused her to die. Nonetheless, nobody paid much attention to whether she was alive or dead. Poor Emily is a character of misery. She is the sacrificial lamb of her time.

Ⅴ.Conclusion

Emily was respected as a monument by townspeople. Emily’s resistance is heroic. Her tragic flaw is the conventional pride: she undertook to regulate the natural time- universe. She acted as though death did not exist, as though she could retain her unfaithful love by poisoning her lover and holding his physical body in a world which had all of the appearances of reality except that most

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necessary of all things- life. Because Homer died, he couldn’t marry Miss Emily, then the monument continued to exist in the south people. In fact, the two generations ignored the real Emily, and create and maintain the myth of Emily as an example of southern womanhood from a last age. The writer uses the comic technique to disclose the conflict between south and north. This conflict cannot easily be solved at that time. Instead, it does great harm to Emily doomed destiny.

In the above passage, Miss Emily’s characters are analyzed from different dimensions. At first, her behavior shows that she is a haughty, isolated and eccentric, necrophilia but brave and tough woman. Her characters are complex and to some extent ambivalent. From the intrinsic and extrinsic reasons above, it is known that Emily tragic destiny is doomed to happen at last.

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An analysis of \"A Rose for Emily\"

William Faulkner regarded the past as a repository of great images of human effort and integrity, but also as the source of a dynamic evil. He was aware of the romantic pull of the past and realized that submission to this romance of the past was a form of death (Warren, 269). In \"A Rose for Emily\past with the present era. The past was represented in Emily herself, in Colonel Sartoris, in the old Negro servant, and in the Board of Alderman who accepted the Colonel's attitude toward Emily and rescinded her taxes.

The present was expressed chiefly through the words of the unnamed narrator. The new Board of Aldermen, Homer Barron (the representative of Yankee attitudes toward the Griersons and thus toward the entire South), and in what is called \"the next generation with its more modern ideas\" all represented the present time period. Miss Emily was referred to as a \"fallen monument\" in the story. She was a \"monument\" of Southern gentility, an ideal of past values but fallen because she had shown herself susceptible to death (and decay). The description of her house \"lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps--an eyesore among eyesores\" represented a juxtaposition of the past and present and was an emblematic presentation of Emily herself (Norton Anthology, 2044).

The house smells of dust and disuse and has a closed, dank smell. A description of Emily in the following paragraph discloses her similarity to the house. \"She looked bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that palled hue\". But she had not always had that appearance. In the picture of a

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young Emily with her father, she was frail and apparently hungering to participate in the life of the era. After her father's death, she looked like a girl \"with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene\". This suggests that she had already begun her entrance into the nether-world.

By the time the representatives of the new, progressive Board of Aldermen waited on her concerning her delinquent taxes, she had already completely retreated to her world of the past. She declared that she had no taxes in Jefferson, basing her belief on a verbal agreement made with Colonel Sartoris, who had been dead for ten years. Just as Emily refused to acknowledge the death of her father, she now refused to recognize the death of Colonel Sartoris. He had given his word and according to the traditional view, his word knew no death. It is the past pitted against the present--the past with its social decorum, the present with everything set down in \"the books.\"

We can further see this distinction in the attitude of Judge Stevens, who was over eighty years old, and the young man (a member of the rising generation) who came to the judge regarding the smell at Emily's house. For the young man, it was easy to point out the health regulations that were on the books. But for the judge dealing with the situation it was not so simple. \"Dammit, sir...will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?\" (Norton Anthology, 2045). If Homer had triumphed in seducing Emily and deserting her, Emily would have become susceptible to the town's pity, therefore becoming human.

Emily's world, however, was already in the past. When she was threatened with

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desertion and disgrace, she not only took refuge in that world but also took Homer with her in the only manner possible--death. Miss Emily's position in regard to the specific problem of time was suggested in the scene where the old soldiers appear at her funeral. There are two perspectives of time held by the characters. The first perspective (the world of the present) views time as a \"mechanical progression\" in which the past is a \"diminishing road\" (Norton Anthology, 2049). The second perspective (the world of tradition and the past) views the past as \"a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years\" (Norton Anthology, 2049). The first perspective was that of Homer and the modern generation. The second was that of the older members of the Board of Aldermen and of the confederate soldiers. Emily held the second view as well, except that for her there was no bottleneck dividing her from the meadow of the past.

Emily's room above the stairs was that timeless meadow. In it, the living Emily and the dead Homer remained together as though not even death could separate them. In the simplest sense, the story says that death conquers all. But what is death? On one level, death is the past, tradition, whatever is opposite of the present (Hoffman, 265). In the setting of this story, it is the past of the South in which the retrospective survivors of the Civil War deny changing the customs and the passage of time.

Homer Barron, the Yankee, lived in the present, ready to take his pleasure and depart, apparently unwilling to consider the possibility of defeat neither by tradition (the Griersons) nor by time itself (death). In a sense, Emily conquered time, but only briefly and by retreating into her \"rose-tinted\" world of the past.

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This was a world in which death was denied at the same time that it was shown to have existed. Such retreat, the story implies, is hopeless since everyone, even Emily, was finally subject to death and to the invasion of his or her world by the clamorous and curious inhabitants of the world of the present. \"When Miss Emily died, [the] whole town went to her funeral...the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant...had seen in at least ten years\" (Norton Anthology, 2044).

艾米丽小姐大多数时候隐藏在情节里。

年轻时代，“身段苗条、穿着白衣”的她站在父亲威严身影的阴影里，是人们眼中的画中人；年近中年的她，昂着头坐在与她门第不符的心上人的轻便马车上招摇过市，任人们对她的窃窃评论“可怜的艾米丽”淹没在绸缎的窸窣声中；中年以后，她渐渐足不出户，藏身于她家那栋“虽已破败，却还是执拗不驯，装模作样”的白色木屋里，偶尔从窗子里露出她那神龛里的偶像般的身影。艾米丽小姐基本上藏匿在福克纳对她的细碎零散的描述中，是一个画中人，一个人们交头接耳议论纷纷的话题，一个窗棂里的剪影，一个没落贵族的象征，“高贵，宁静，无法逃避，无法接近，怪癖乖张”。

然而她在书中仅有的两次出场，却给人留下了难以磨灭的印象。

近中年失恋后，去买毒药，她的“面孔像一面拉紧了的旗子”，“一双黑眼冷酷高傲”，在药剂师询问她买药的用途时，她“只是瞪着他，头向后仰了仰，以便双眼好正视他的双眼，一直看到他把目光移开了，走进去拿砒霜包好”。

当数年后艾米丽小姐出现在登门造访督促她恢复纳税的面前时，她完全变成了个“小模小样，腰圆体胖的女人”，“看上去像长久泡在死水中的一具死尸，肿胀发白”，

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曾经的青春和美貌荡然无存，可依然冷酷高傲。她只用一句冷酷无情的“我在杰斐逊无税可纳”便将他们“连人带马”打败了。

当然，艾米丽小姐留在爱人枕畔的那绺铁灰色长发，可以看作是她最震撼人心的一次出场。

艾米丽小姐确实可怜。

身处一个没落贵族家庭，“自视过高，不了解自己所处的地位”，她高傲而狂暴、恶毒的父亲赶走了她的所有追求者，死后留给她的全部财产也只有那栋房子，除了作为贵族的尊严，艾米丽小姐一无所有了。

可她偏偏要将她的头抬得更高，不合时宜地维持她仅余的这份尊严。

她拒绝人们的接济和同情，拒绝纳税，拒绝理会邻居的投诉而去清除屋内的臭味，她深居简出，到后来索性闭门谢客，不再与任何人保持往来。这种种极端的行为，只是为了与芸芸众生拉开距离，让人们不能忘记她高贵的贵族身份。

她唯一一次放下身段，是为了爱情。

来自北方的工头显然是配不上她的高贵出身的，牧师的劝说、堂姐的阻挠、人们的蜚短流长，她全不放在心上，父亲既然已经不在了，那便没人可以阻止她追求自己的幸福。

——可惜，她说服不了风流不羁的爱人为她停留下来。

于是，这个决绝的女子，在买了全套新婚器具和男士衣物后，在将自家一间房间布置得宛若新房后，将爱人毒杀在他们的婚床上，更为可怖的是，她在爱人死后，还安睡在他

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身旁，不知多少年月。

真是让人魂飞魄散的爱情。

福克纳显然是怀着深深的敬意与同情，献上了纪念艾米丽小姐的这朵玫瑰花。如此决绝到极至的女子，即算不是可敬的，至少也是令人难忘的。

福克纳出身于南方一个庄园主家庭，虽说他羞怯地自称是来自南方的乡巴佬，但面对南方贵族的颓败没落，他内心显然还是有着淡淡的惆怅的。

福克纳本人对于短篇小说的创作及其重视，这部作品里，他并没有大量使用意识流的技巧，可却像个精妙的工匠一般，造了个小巧的迷宫；他又像个狡猾的推理小说家，在看似零乱琐碎的描述中，处处暗藏玄机。所以，在谜底揭晓的瞬间，人们既会感觉意外，又会觉得早已了然于胸。

福克纳用一种冷静得可怕的方式讲叙故事，所有的痛苦、挣扎、矛盾、冲突，都隐藏在了不动声色的平淡叙述里，甚至情节也是简略到可有可无的境地——然而这样简略的叙述推出的又是一个怎样惊心动魄的故事！

福克纳像个高明的庖丁，将故事所有多余的筋肉都剔除了，只余下风骨——清朗却又耐人寻味

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Introduction to Faulkner’s Chronology Section 1 Section II Section III Section IV Section V

Faulkner’s most famous, most popular, and most anthologized short story, “A Rose for Emily” evokes the terms Southern gothic and grotesque, two types of literature in which the general tone is one of gloom, terror, and understated violence. The story is Faulkner’s best example of these forms because it contains unimaginably dark images: a decaying mansion, a corpse, a murder, a mysterious servant who disappears, and, most horrible of all, necrophilia—an erotic or sexual attraction to corpses.

Most discussions of the short story center on Miss Emily Grierson, an aristocratic woman deeply admired by a community that places her on a pedestal and sees her as “a tradition, a duty”—or, as the unnamed narrator describes her, “a fallen monument.” In contrast to the community’s view, we realize eventually that Miss Emily is a woman who not only poisons and kills her lover, Homer Barron, but she keeps his rotting corpse in her bedroom and sleeps next to it for many years. The ending of the story emphasizes the length of time Miss Emily must have slept with her dead lover: long enough for the townspeople to find “a long strand of iron-gray hair” lying on the pillow next to “what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt” and displaying a “profound and fleshless grin.”

The contrast between the aristocratic woman and her unspeakable secrets

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forms the basis of the story. Because the Griersons “held themselves a little too high for what they really were,” Miss Emily’s father forbids her to date socially, or at least the community thinks so: “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such.” She becomes so terribly desperate for human love that she murders Homer and clings to his dead body. Using her aristocratic position to cover up the murder and the necrophilia, ironically she sentences herself to total isolation from the community, embracing the dead for solace.

Although our first reaction to the short story might be one of horror or disgust, Faulkner uses two literary techniques to create a seamless whole that makes the tale too intriguing to stop reading: the suspenseful, jumbled chronology of events, and the narrator’s shifting point of view, which emphasizes Miss Emily’s strength of purpose, her aloofness, and her pride, and lessens the horror and the repulsion of her actions.

Faulkner’s chronology

One way of explaining the excellence of “A Rose for Emily” is by considering its lack of chronological order. Such a dissection of the short story initially might appear to weaken it, but this approach allows us to see Faulkner’s genius at work—particularly his own, unique way of telling a story. Unlike other writers of his era, such as John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, who usually narrate their stories in a strictly linear progression, Faulkner violates all chronological sequences.

Only a few specific dates are mentioned in the story, but a close reading

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makes it possible to assign certain sequential events. We know, for example, that Colonel Sartoris remits Miss Emily’s taxes in 14, and that he has been dead for at least ten years when she confronts the new aldermen. Likewise, we know that she dies at the age of 74. Using these facts, we can build a framework on which to hang the following chronology:

Section IV Miss Emily is born.

Section II She and her father ride around the town in an old, elegant carriage.

Section II Her father dies, and for three days she refuses to acknowledge his death.

Section III Homer Barron arrives in town and begins to court Miss Emily.

Section IV She buys a man’s silver toilet set—a mirror, brush, and comb—and men’s clothing.

Section III The town relegates her to disgrace and sends for her cousins.

Section IV The cousins arrive, and Homer leaves town.

Section IV Three days after the cousins leave, Homer returns.

Section III Miss Emily buys poison at the local drug store.

Section IV Homer disappears.

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Section II A horrible stench envelops Miss Emily’s house.

Section II Four town aldermen secretly sprinkle lime on her lawn.

Ironically, when we reconstruct the chronological arrangement in this linear fashion, we render Faulkner’s masterpiece an injustice: Looking at the central events chronologically, Miss Emily buys poison, Homer Barron disappears suddenly, and a horrible stench surrounds the house—it is apparent why she buys the poison, and what causes the stench. The only surprise would be the shocking realization that Miss Emily has slept for many years in the same bed with her dead lover’s rotting corpse. The horror of this knowledge makes the murder almost insignificant when compared to the necrophilia. However, the greatness of the story lies not in linearly recounting the events, but, instead, in the manner that Faulkner tells it; he leaves us horrified as we discover, bit by bit, why this so-called noble woman is now a “fallen monument.”

In contrast to a traditional narrative approach, the story, as Faulkner presents it, begins with Miss Emily’s funeral and ends shortly thereafter with the discovery of Homer’s decayed corpse. Among other themes, it emphasizes the differences between the past, with its aristocracy—Colonel Sartoris’ gallantry, the Griersons’ aloofness and pride, and the board of old aldermen’s respect for Miss Emily—and the modern generation’s business-like mentality, embodied in the board of new aldermen and the many modern conveniences we hear about.

Section 1

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The story’s opening lines announce the funeral of Miss Emily, to be held in her home—not in a church—and the reasons for the entire town’s attending-the men out of respect for a Southern lady, the women to snoop inside her house. Her death symbolizes the passing of a genteel way of life, which is replaced by a new generation’s crass way of doing things. The narrator’s description of the Grierson house reinforces the disparity between the past and the present: Once a place of splendor, now modern encroachments—gas pumps and cotton wagons—obliterate most of the neighborhood and leave untouched only Miss Emily’s house, with its “stubborn and coquettish decay.”

This clash between the past and the present is evidenced by the different approaches that each generation takes concerning Miss Emily’s taxes. In the past, Colonel Sartoris had remitted them for her, believing it uncivilized to remind a Southern woman to pay taxes, which Miss Emily does not do after her father dies. But the next generation, with its more modern ideas, holds her responsible for them. Miss Emily, however, returns the tax notice that the new aldermen send to her; when the young men call upon her, she vanquishes them, saying, “I have no taxes in Jefferson” and “See Colonel Sartoris,” who has been dead for at least ten years.

One of the most striking contrasts presented in this first section entails the narrator’s portrayal of Miss Emily’s physical appearance and her house. Descriptive phrases include terms that add to the gothic quality of the story: She is dressed in black and leans on a cane; her “skeleton” is small; and she looks “bloated,” with a “pallid hue.” But Faulkner doesn’t say outright that she looks much like a dead person, for it is only in retrospect that we realize that the

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dead-looking Miss Emily has been sleeping with the very dead Homer Barron.

Miss Emily’s decaying appearance matches not only the rotting exterior of the house, but the interior as well. For example, the crayon, pastel, picture mentioned prior to the narrator’s description of Miss Emily is supported by a “tarnished” stand, and Miss Emily supports herself by leaning on the “tarnished” handle of her cane. Also note that the picture is a colored chalk portrait of her father, no doubt drawn by her when she was a child. Miss Emily has some artistic talent: She teaches china painting, which is highly detailed and usually done in soft colors. But if she painted her father’s portrait using the same techniques she uses to paint china, then the portrait would not be an accurate representation of the fiercely authoritarian man who was Mr. Grierson. It would be washed out, pale as death, a shadow of his real self.

Section 2

We return to the past, two years after Miss Emily’s father’s death. There have been complaints about an awful stench emanating from Miss Emily’s house. The older generation, which feels that it is improper to tell a lady that she stinks, arranges for a group of men to spread lime on her lawn and inside the cellar door of her house. All the while, she sits at a window, motionless.

Of primary importance in this section is Miss Emily’s relationship to her father and her reaction to his death. The town views the father and daughter as a “tableau,” in which a sitting Mr. Grierson grasps a horsewhip and affects an oblivious attitude toward his daughter, who, dressed completely in white, stands

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behind him. This image reinforces the physical relationship and the emotional distance we feel between the two, and it recalls the crayon picture standing before the fireplace. Also, the horsewhip that Mr. Grierson clutches suggests a bridled violence in this most gothic of tales, a violence that will reveal itself by the end of the story.

When her father dies, Miss Emily cannot face the reality of his death and her loneliness. Because she has no one to turn to—”We remembered all the young men her father had driven away . . .”—for three days she insists that her father is not dead. Her clinging to him after his death prepares us for her clinging to Homer Barron after she poisons him, and we feel that her father ultimately has some responsibility for his daughter’s killing her lover.

Section 3

During the summer after Mr. Grierson’s death, Homer Barron, a happy-go-lucky type who “was not a marrying man,” and his construction crew begin to pave the town’s sidewalks. Soon the townspeople begin to see Miss Emily and Homer often riding together in a buggy. At first, they acknowledge her right to date him, but they also believe that she would never consider him seriously—after all, he is “a Northerner, a day laborer,” and she is a Grierson. Then the townspeople relegate her to adultery, condemning her as “fallen,” and we recall the first sentence of the story, when the men of the town go to Miss Emily’s funeral to pay their last respects to “a fallen monument.”

A year later, Miss Emily, now over 30, enters the town’s drugstore and

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announces, “I want some poison.” When the druggist is reluctant to sell her any without a reason, she uses her aristocratic bearing to intimidate him: “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye to eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up.” At this point, we have no idea why she wants the poison, although it will become clear later that she uses the arsenic to kill Homer Barron.

Section 4

The townspeople, never suspecting that the poison is intended for Homer, conclude that Miss Emily will likely use it to kill herself. After Homer announces to the men that he is not the marrying kind, the townspeople think that his and Miss Emily’s relationship is a disgrace, and they try to stop it. When they can’t put an end to the relationship between the perceived lovers, they write to Miss Emily’s relatives in Alabama, and two cousins come to stay with her. The town then learns that Miss Emily has bought a man’s toilet set—a mirror, brush, and comb—inscribed with the initials “H.B.,” and also men’s clothing, including a nightshirt, which, ironically, will serve not as a nuptial nightshirt, but as a burial nightshirt for decades.

Homer disappears after Miss Emily’s cousins move into the house, and everyone assumes that he has gone to prepare for Miss Emily’s joining him. A week later, the cousins leave. Three days later Homer returns. The narrator notes, “And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron.” The townspeople never suspect the horror of what happens, believing that such an aristocratic woman as Miss Emily could never do any wrong. She secludes herself for six months, and when

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she next appears in public, she is fat and her hair is “pepper-and-salt iron-gray,” the same color of the strand of hair that will be found on the pillow next to Homer’s decayed corpse.

Years pass, and a new and more modern generation of people control the town. Miss Emily refuses to pay her taxes; she will not even allow postal numbers to be put on her house, a symbolic gesture on her part to resist what the town sees as progress. The narrator notes Miss Emily’s staying power: “Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.” The term “perverse” undoubtedly carries a double meaning—her perverseness both in refusing to pay taxes and to permit postal numbers on her house, and in nightly sleeping with a corpse.

Section 5

We return to the present and Miss Emily’s funeral. Her black servant meets the mourners, who arrive at the house, then he walks out the back door and disappears forever, apparently fully aware that Homer’s decayed body is upstairs.

Even in death, Miss Emily cannot escape her father: “They held the funeral on the second day . . . with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier . . .” When the townspeople break into a locked room upstairs, they find carefully folded wedding clothes and Homer’s remains. Only after their initial shock at seeing his skeletal corpse do they notice an indentation on the pillow next to him, with a long strand of iron-gray hair lying where a head once rested.

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Because Faulkner presents his story in random fragments, it is not until the final sentence that the entire picture of Miss Emily is complete. We realize that, having been denied male companionship by her father, she is desperate for human love, so desperate that she commits murder and then uses her aristocratic position to cover up that murder. But by killing Homer, she sentences herself to total isolation. With no possibility of contact with the living, she turns to the dead.

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