Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, hailed as the greatest love story ever written, immediately begins to unfold in a dark and gloomy atmosphere. The opening line gives a clear indication of Faulkner’s intent, “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral? ” (Faulkner, 29). The blunt mention of death within the opening line of this short story, gives the reader an obvious notion that the rest of it will be somewhat on the non-traditional side; meaning it will not conclude as most fairy tales do, with a happy ending.
Perhaps Faulkner wanted the reader to know right away that the main character dies, therefore evoking a spark of curiosity to keep their interest. Within Section I of A Rose for Emily, an unnamed narrator describes Miss Emily’s house. “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white”? “but garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner, 29). The description of the house is of a decaying mansion and is gothic in itself. According to the definition above, one can only imagine the unkempt, dark, and terror filled house that Miss Emily resided in.
In addition, the narrator goes on to describe Miss Emily herself. Not only is she dressed in black, but her skeleton is small, and she leans on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. “Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small piece of coal pressed into a lump of dough? ” (Faulkner, 30). Again, the reference to black; an ebony cane and her eyes compared to lumps of coal is another vision alluding to a gothic story. Although the narrator does not come right out and say that Miss Emily looks like a dead person, the reader can depict in his or her own mind that she must have looked like a walking, living corpse.
At the closing of this section, Miss Emily is summoned to pay her taxes yet she claims that she has no taxes in Jefferson. She seems extremely aggravated and lashes out at those who are accusing her of not paying them. She then says for them to “See Colonel Sartoris,” (Faulkner, 30) who has been dead for nearly ten years. She is living in the past and obviously has not yet gotten over her father’s death or she is unwilling to accept the fact that he is dead. Section begins two years after Miss Emily’s father had passed away. Townspeople began to complain about an awful stench coming from her house.
Because this story takes place in the South, it was rude and improper for anyone to tell a Southern lady that she smelled. Courteously, gentlemen came and spread lime on her lawn and inside the cellar door of her house and the smell eventually went away. “That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her? people in our town believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner, 32). This setting is gothic in the sense that the townspeople frowned upon Miss Emily’s family because they held themselves in such a high regard.
The narrator describes Miss Emily in white against her father’s silhouette, again giving the image of black. Emily clings to her father’s death and is unable to face the unbearable reality that he is no longer alive and present in her life. For three days she kept saying that her father was not dead. She experiences a harsh reality check when she becomes a pauper and only has the gloomy house left to her. At the end of this section, the narrator says: “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.
We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with othing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (Faulkner, 32. As third person, the reader can now see the dark side of William Faulkner and his gothic style of writing. In a sense, this scene is foreshadowing for what is to come. One grasps that Miss Emily obviously has a difficult time dealing with death and perhaps she is somewhat unstable. Section I also begins with a dark situation as the narrator describes how Miss Emily was sick for a long time.
She was sick until she meets Homer Barron, a Yankee, a northerner, a day laborer. omeone who the townspeople thought would not be up to Miss Emily’s standards because after all, she was a Grierson. At the age of thirty or so, Miss Emily says to the druggist, “I want some poison” (Faulkner, 33). Again there is the repeated description of “cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look” (Faulkner, 33). The look in her eyes is a trait of gothic writing. Generally, things that are described as dark or black were written in gothic narrative.
Initially, one might get the sense that her own death is approaching, but then there is a sudden twist of events. Section IV describes how Homer Barron “like men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club. that he was not the marrying man” (Faulkner, 34). The narrator continues and says that it, meaning Miss Emily and Homer Barron’s relationship, was a “disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people” (Faulkner, 34). Of course it would be too cliche if Homer Barron was Mr. Right for Miss Emily.
Faulkner instead sees this as the perfect opportunity to trick the townspeople into thinking that the two of them are married when the narrator mentions “Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece” (Faulkner, 34). Thus, the following events of her cousins coming and going after a week of staying with her and Homer leaving town for a short while were not out of the ordinary if it were true that Miss Emily and Homer were married. When he had returned, it was the “last we saw of Homer Barron.
And of Miss Emily for some time” (Faulkner, 34). At this point, one can interpret this scene in one of two ways: 1) they really were married and they wanted to spend time together or 2) she knew that he was never going to marry her and she planned on killing him so he could not be with someone else. The next time the townspeople saw her, “she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray”? “up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man” (Faulkner, 34). Again, the narrator makes reference to her hair as iron-gray, another gothic narrative trait.
Years pass by and still her door remains closed. At the end of Section IV, the audience learns that Miss Emily had died. She “fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows” (Faulkner, 35). Here is another description of her decaying house. From years of aging, it had accumulated dust and was most likely not cleaned on a daily basis, for one can infer that Miss Emily had given up, not only on herself, but life as well. “She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of unlight” (Faulkner, 35).
Traditional gothic style writing often creates gloomy and dark atmospheres. Here, one can clearly imagine Miss Emily, seemingly alone in her aged house, in a dark room just wasting away to nothing. Section V is perhaps the most important section in this story because it brings the other four sections together. At this point, one is still unsure of what has really happened to Homer Barron, as it is unclear in the previous sections. This section goes back to the present, where the story first began, at Miss Emily’s funeral, which is at her house and not a church.
After the service, the townspeople knew there was a room in the house that had not been touched in over forty years, yet they waited until Miss Emily was buried to explore it. They discovered what seemed to be men’s wedding clothes, which had been carefully folded. “The man himself lay in the bed” (Faulkner, 36). It is here where the townspeople discover Homer Barron’s body and the pieces fall together as to what had really happened to him. The narrator describes Homer’s fleshless grin. There was a second pillow with an indentation of a head; “We saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (Faulkner, 36).
Miss Emily had been denied male companionship by her father as seen earlier in the description of her in white against his black silhouette with his back towards her. She was in search of human love and when she thinks she’s found the perfect man, he denies her and says he is not the marrying type. Unable to deal with this rejection, Miss Emily uses her aristocratic status to kill Homer Barron and get away with it. She could not have him and refused to let anyone else have him as well. She did what she had to do to preserve her relationship with him; she killed him and kept him to herself.
Some say A Rose for Emily is the greatest love story ever written. Perhaps in a gothic sense it is. With all of its dark references, it tells the story of how far love can go; how far someone will go even if it means murder. Faulkner was a renowned Southern gothic novelist and his gothic style is quite apparent in this classic short story. Not only does he describe Miss Emily in a gothic way, but he describes everything and everyone that she comes in contact with in a gothic way as well. This story begins in a dark state and inevitably ends in a dark and tragic way; the ironic part is that it was a tragic love story.