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This painting is meant to capture “the human condition in the modern city and shows the effect of modernity which can often result in isolation and loneliness”.

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The modern city in this case is Jefferson, MS, and the effect of modernity being the townspeople’s gossip, the love in Emily’s life slipping away from her grip.The painting also represents the overall story/ending with the scene of the bed and Emily how kept herself locked up in the house (for the most part).

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Exposition
Characters:
Emily is
- “A tradition, a duty, and a care,”
- A woman who progressively became more and more - isolated,
- “A small, fat woman in black,”
- A bitter, stubborn elitist who didn’t want to pay her taxes because she was previously exempt from doing so (Faulkner 82).

Homer Barron is
- a Northern laborer,
- A lively Yankee,
- “A big, dark ready man with big voice and eyes lighter than his face” (Falkner 84).

Colonel Sartoris
- “The mayor,”
- A man who affirmed that Black women needed to “appear on the streets [with] an apron”  (Falkner 82).

Setting:
- Jefferson, Mississippi
- Focuses heavily on Emily’s expensive family home
Time:
- middle to late 1800s

Conflict (inciting incident):
Emily’s father’s death
- Her father kept Emily away from potential suitors, essentially isolating her from others, ensuring that he would be the only one truly close to her.
- In doing so, his death led to Emily being hung up on the idea itself, disabling her from facing reality, and furthering her loneliness (and sense of longing).

Rising Action:
- The idea of being a Grierson and the public’s expectation of her came with several rumors surrounding her. The death of her father resulted in a mix of pity and judgmentalness from the townspeople. It is at this point that Emily starts to show possible signs of her slowly losing who she is.

Climax:
Emily obtains arsenic, which the owner believes will be used to kill rats. Meanwhile, the townspeople believed that she’d use it to kill herself; however, it’s never clear what she uses it for.

Falling Action:
Homer Barron disappears, and Emily remains stuck in her house until she dies. When she's gone, the townsfolk enter her rotten house.

Resolution:
- A strand of Emily's hair on the slightly dented pillow next to Homer’s decaying body is discovered.
- This hints at Emily’s life; how she couldn’t let go of Homer the same way she couldn’t with her father, sleeping with his dead corpse unable to be tethered back to reality, clinging to the only other love she’d ever experienced.
- This can explain why Emily had closed herself off for the years leading up to her funeral.

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Progressively decaying and smelling, the house symbolizes the decline of the aristocratic Southern lifestyle. In the beginning, it appears as “a big, squarish frame house,” a beauty to behold, a symbol of the mighty, thriving aristocracy of the South; however, as time goes on, the South changes, and the house rots, stuck in the past, in the South that will never be.

Emily’s Hair symbolizes the passage of time and the decay of Emily’s beauty and youth. As time passes, Emily’s hair turns gray and, eventually, she cuts it so that she looks like a child. These changes reflect Emily’s inability to move on from her rich, entitled life, going so far as to change her hair to connect with her drained youth.

The Arsenic symbolizes destruction. The townspeople interpreted the purchase of arsenic as Emily trying to end her life, but it could've also meant that she was trying to kill Homer so she could be with him forever.

Emily is a symbol of the failing Southern aristocracy, embodying the negative effects of loneliness and clinging to the past, acting as the primary focus of social commentary on the South’s progression as well as shifts in values and traditional structures.

The bad smell that lingers around Emily's house represents that the Southern Aristocracy was still there even though it had died out. It also symbolizes how Emily can't accept the reality that her father is dead.

Death represents isolation. Everything Emily loved was ripped away from her by the hands of death. She was abandoned by everyone and no one would ever love her. Homer's death represents Emily's desperate search for love. Emily killed Homer so that he could be with her forever, which is shown when it is revealed that she had been sleeping next to Homer's dead body for years.

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The title “A Rose for Emily” is contradictory in regards to what happens in the story. Starting literally, a rose can be a symbol of love (also normally hinting at happiness), but the only love she’d ever had (her previous lover, her father and Homer) eventually left her alone. A “rose” is something that Emily had never been able to obtain, whether that be taken literally in terms of suitors/love interests or family.  The rose could also be simplified down to the idea of a plant (referring to life), with Emily a withered rose; once pretty (times when her father was still alive and she was a “tradition” as a Grierson) to a decaying thing (quite literally at the end) when she started to go downhill, possibly going crazy and shutting herself out from the world for ten years.

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For what potential reasons could William Faulkner have chosen to write the story from a townsperson’s perspective?

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How does the story’s structure affect your understanding of Emily and her life?

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Our main characters are Emily and the narrator, the voice of the townspeople. Emily is a dynamic round character: she psychologically deteriorates in the story, denying her father’s death, isolating herself, and neglecting her physical health. She’s proud and stubborn, lonely and bitter, still under her father’s control, even after his death. With everyone gone in her life, she’s alone, and she can’t stand that; however, she continues to isolate herself.

Furthermore, although it isn’t blatantly explained, it’s suspected that Emily kills Homer and preserves his body so that he can’t leave her like her father and former romantic partner do. She strives to fill the growing void within her and maintain tradition and structure, refusing to pay her taxes in Jefferson because she didn't need to in the past. Hence, her entire character is a juxtaposition of itself, which produces a sense of intrigue and sympathy in the readers.

The narrator, on the other hand, is a static round character whose perspective on Emily changes throughout the story: one moment she’s someone he/she pities and roots for --another she’s the antagonist he/she silently wishes would commit suicide; besides, that, he/she doesn’t change; there’s no growth, neither negatively nor positively.  His/her purpose is to be the townspeople’s eyes and henceforth our eyes, witnessing Emily physically change and isolate herself.

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What details from the story potentially foreshadow the ending?

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- He was born in New Albany, Mississippi (9/25/97), but spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi
- Oxford served as inspiration for his novels, and he created a fictional town of his own called Jefferson
- Many of his characters are modeled around those he knew in Oxford
- He was part of a respected Southern family
- Ever since he was a kid, his family saw him as a gifted storyteller
- His creative imagination caused them to wonder whether or not the stories he told were true or straight from his mind
- Started his writing career as a poet, adopted a flowery style of writing
- He struggled with depression and alcoholism
- Themes of his works are generally based on events, influences, and cultures in relation to the South/rural South (ex: the decline and decay of the aristocratic South)
- His experimental style in terms of narration (jumping his readers through different points of the story/non-chronological events) and writing techniques, in general, drew attention to his literature

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Born: September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, United States

Died: July 06, 1962 in Oxford, Mississippi, United States

Other Names: Faulkner, William Cuthbert

"It is [the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail."

Born September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, William Cuthbert Faulkner (ne Falkner) came to be regarded as one of America's greatest and most prolific novelists. Inspired by and having written mostly about the South, he died in Byhalia, Mississippi on July 6, 1962.

William Faulkner is considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. He spent most of his literary career in the South, which both inspired and informed his fiction. Faulkner chronicled the decline and decay of the aristocratic South with an imaginative power and psychological depth that transcends mere regionalism.

William Faulkner was born into a respected Southern family that played into Mississippi's history. Faulkner's great-grandfather and namesake, William Clark Falkner (Faulkner added the "u" to his last name later), had served with the Confederate Army, had been involved in the development of the American railroad, and had written a popular Southern novel, entitled The White Rose of Memphis.

A bright and precocious child, Faulkner was described by his family as a gifted storyteller, even as a very young child, so much so that it was difficult for even an adult to discern whether what young Faulkner was describing was an actual event that had taken place or a made-up plot he had hatched in his creative mind. He was a strong student as a younger child, but as he approached adolescence he scored increasingly poor marks. Bored with school, Faulkner was frequently truant and quit school in December of 1914. He returned to school the following fall so that he could play football, but when he was inflicted with a nose injury he quit school again, this time for good. During the winter of 1916, Faulkner worked briefly as a clerk at his grandfather's bank, First National Bank. During the same period, he frequented the campus of the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss"), and befriended writers and intellectuals there. He wrote poetry and even contributed some of his drawings to the Ole Miss yearbook.

When the United States declared war against Germany, Faulkner tried to enlist, but was rejected due to his small stature (he stood only five feet five inches). He then traveled north to New Haven, Connecticut, to visit his friend, Phil Stone, a Yale-educated man Faulkner had come to know during his teens and who had served as a mentor for Faulkner's writing ambitions. Faulkner, under Stone's influence, came to appreciate the Balzac and French Symbolist poets. Eager to join the U.S. effort to defend France and its allies against the German threat, Faulkner, with Stone's assistance, launched a plan to sneak into military service by applying to the Royal Canadian Air Force with an affected British accent and forged letters of recommendation (at this time, he effectively changed his last name by applying to the force as Faulkner, rather than Falkner, his birth name). He succeeded in gaining acceptance into the RAF, but the war ended before he had opportunity to experience a tour of combat.

Faulkner returned to Oxford, Mississippi after his brief service in the RAF, and in 1919 he roamed the South, visiting Memphis and New Orleans. During his travels he spent a great deal of time writing poetry. He entertained new acquaintances with false yet glorious accounts of his days as a flying ace during the Great War. He attended Ole Miss and began publishing his poetry in the Mississippian and Oxford Eagle. In August, his poem "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" was published in New Republic. His somewhat eccentric manner and appearance on campus and lack of a steady occupation led to him being known around Ole Miss as "Count No Count." In November of 1920, Faulkner dropped out of Ole Miss. He worked at the university post office and continued telling fanciful tales orally and, more importantly, on paper, now in the genre of novel and short story.

Storytelling was Faulkner's way of connecting who he was and what the world around him was with who he wanted to be and what the world could be. He sported a number of different characters in the way he dressed and acted, according to his mood: he might have appeared as a genteel Southern aristocrat, a carefree rebel, or a seriously artistic Bohemian. As his writing developed, Faulkner became aware of his multifaceted personality and his skill in imagining and illustrating how a real event or character could have been or should have been. He became a novelist who never attempted to resolve human conflicts but to detail them in a good tale, which served its purpose not by providing answers, but by helping people to understand the complexities inherent in human conflict.

In 1924, Faulkner befriended novelist Sherwood Anderson, when he travelled to New Orleans to visit an old friend, Anderson's wife, Elizabeth Prall. Anderson encouraged Faulkner's writing in the form of the novel. Despite his energies in this alternate genre, Faulkner's collection of verse, The Marble Faun, his first book, was published shortly after he arrived in New Orleans. Sales were poor, and Faulkner pursued work on his novel, Soldiers' Pay, which, though not a commercial success, achieved praise in certain literary circles.

During the summer of 1925, Faulkner familiarized himself with many American literary expatriates in Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, France, and England. His experience in Europe must have inspired him, because when he returned to Oxford he embarked on a prolific writing career, publishing Mosquitos in 1927, Sartoris in 1928, The Sound and the Fury in 1928, As I Lay Dying in 1930, Sanctuary in 1931, and Light in August in 1932. At the time of publication, Faulkner's early novels were not very popular among the general reading public; during the beginning of an extreme national recession, American readers were seeking entertainment value in finding solutions to dilemmas such as unemployment and hunger. Faulkner's works did not offer practical fixes to these important and pressing problems in America. Rather, Faulkner examined the complexities of various human problems and faults, which tended further to disillusion readers who longed for literature that fit into a growing national mood of a "New Deal" hope for a brighter future. Others among the public faulted Faulkner's novels for having fascist leanings. These criticisms, coupled with a crippled economy, led to poor sales for Faulkner.

As he continued writing novels, Faulkner married Estelle Franklin and had two daughters, Alabama (born and died in 1931), and Jill (born in 1933). Struggling to pay the bills with his novel royalties alone, Faulkner worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, but never enjoyed the work very much. Some of the movies he wrote were Today We Live (1933), The Road to Glory (1936), Banjo on My Knee (1936), Slave Ship (1937), Gunga Din (1939), To Have and To Have Not (1945), and The Big Sleep (1946).

During the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner continued to be productive in novel writing as well, creating some of his finest and most well-received works, including Phylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). Highly esteemed by writers and intellectuals in America and Europe, Faulkner's works became increasingly appreciated by a significant portion of the educated reading public. His work was particularly well received in France, where literary critics and philosophers--including Andre Malraux, Marice LeBreton, Jean Pouillon, and Jean-Paul Sartre-- lauded him as a superior narrator of the human condition.

After a brief slump in the sales of his books due to the effects on the public mood and economy with the war effort during the early 1940s, Faulkner was able to resurrect an audience and interest in his writing in 1946 with the publication of The Portable, a collection of his previous works. In the foreword to the collection, editor Malcolm Cowley praised Faulkner as having an "imagination that has not been equaled in our time..."

Fifteen of Faulkner's novels take place in his mythical Southern setting of Yoknapatawpha County, contrived from an American Indian word meaning "water runs slow through flat land." Jefferson, its county seat, closely resembles Oxford, Mississippi. Nearby is Frenchman's Bend, the impoverished part of the county. Depicted in both the past and the present, Yoknapatawpha is populated with various kinds of people: the Indians who originally inhabited the land, the Southern aristocrats who worked their way into the landed gentry, poor farmers, carpetbaggers, and religious fundamentalists. Proud of his imaginary society, Faulkner penned in his map of Yoknapatawpha County in Absalom, Absalom!: "William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor."

Although Faulkner's works told tales of Southern American folk and life, he was hardly considered to be a provincial writer by critics at home and abroad. Arthur Edelstein considered the Yoknapatawpha collection "a hallucinated version of the Deep South which has escaped its local origins to become a region of the modern consciousness." What was particularly remarkable and effective about Faulkner's writing was his application of, even experimentation with, various narration styles and techniques, many of which he was the first to employ and would be imitated by future writers. He narrated from the point of view of the confused and weak, such as in The Sound and the Fury; he beamed the reader into different time periods of the story, usually out of chronological order of events; he omitted punctuation to communicate a specific flow speed and meter of the tale's information; he employed vague pronoun reference to model oral speech. Jean-Paul Sartre compared Faulkner's technique of the protagonist's frequent reflection of the past to that "of a passenger looking backward from a speeding car, who sees, flowing away from him, the landscape he is traversing. For him the future is not in view, the present is too blurred to make out, and he can see clearly only the past as it streams away before his obsessed and backward- looking gaze."

In 1949, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Critics of his work fumed that he had been honored with such a prestigious literary award, citing his work as inaccurately and too negatively depicting American, especially Southern, life. However, Faulkner's stirring acceptance speech calmed the waves of controversy and literary debate among critics and readers, causing many to change their opinion of him seemingly overnight. He explained that it is the writer's duty and privilege "to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail." Equally moving and meaningful to hearers were his words that man "is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart." After his acceptance speech, Faulkner went from being accused of promoting immorality to being lauded as a moral hero.

Faulkner's post-Nobel Prize novels appeared to be echoes of his acceptance speech and have been considered overly didactic by critics. Some of his works from this period are: Requiem for a Nun (1951); A Fable (1954), for which he was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction the same year; Big Woods (1955); and The Reivers (1962).

Faulkner wrote consistently throughout his lifetime. Recognizing his extraordinary talent to be so prolific, Faulkner wrote to a friend near the end of his life: "And now I realize for the first time what an amazing gift I had.... I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, elected me to be the vessel. Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply amazement." The trace that Faulkner left on American literature is extraordinary for its sheer volume and effect on the evolution of freedom in literary technique, as well as its quality in commentary on human nature at an abstract level. In an article in the News & Observer, J. Peder Zane praised Faulkner "as the most exalted American writer of the 20th century," and noted, "His 20 novels and scores of short stories constitute a body of work considered to have few peers for its depth and invention."

FURTHER READINGS

On-line

"Faulkner Resources on the World Wide Web," http://www.unf.edu/~alderman/faulkner.html (March 3, 2000).

"William Faulkner," http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/faulkner_william (March 3, 2000).

"William Faulkner Collections," http://www.lib.virginia.edu/special/colls/faulkner/html (March 3, 2000).

"William Faulkner Foundation," http://www.uhb.fr/Faulkner (March 3, 2000).

"William Faulkner on the Web," http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner (March 3, 2000).

"William Faulkner Society," http://www.utep.edu/mortimer/faulkner.mainfaulkner.htm (March 3, 2000).

"William Faulkner: Winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature," http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/literature/1949a.html (March 3, 2000; opening quote).

Periodicals

News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), September 21, 1997.

Source Citation

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Born: September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, United States Died: July 06, 1962 in Oxford, Mississippi, United States Other Names: Faulkner, William Cuthbert "It is [the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

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This story renders a mysterious, suspenseful, somber tone, with its vivid, unsettling descriptions of Emily — “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand” — and out-of-order story structure, starting with Emily’s death and ending with Homer’s, forcing the readers to put the pieces together (Faulkner 3). The words “lump,” “bloated,” “motionless,” and “fatty ridges,” to describe the bitter woman evoke an eerie, uncomfortable feeling in the audience, one that simultaneously sparks curiosity and disgust as does the simile comparing coal to the “fatty ridges of her face” (Faulkner 3).

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What makes the title ironic?

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What is the significance, if any, of Homer Barron's name?

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Why do the townspeople dislike Emily?

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What are some important themes in the story?

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Why does Emily continue to isolate herself in the story?