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Romn Englez ( grupa L131 )

The Miss Emily Griersons portraits

William Faulkner is seen today as one of the twentieth centurys greatest writers, his fame
being earned from a series of novels that picture Souths dilemmas and historical legacy :
The Sound and the fury ( 1929 ), As I lay dying ( 1930 ), Light in August ( 1931 ) and
Absalom! Absalom ( 1936 ).
Many critics identified in his works traits of Gothic style, especially Southern Gothic
elements. This literary tradition borrows ingredients from the Gothic but is not interested in
scary castles and secret passages or frightened heroines. Instead, it has a preference for
revealing humans psychology and exploring antisocial behaviors, reactions against social
conduct. Even though Faulkner stands outside this sub gender, the influence of Southern
Gothic style may be seen in his writing because of the morbid atmosphere, isolation and
grotesquerie. He paints the individual struggle against the society and against change and
creates a character, a psychological damaged spinster, which has much in common with the
emblematic Southern Gothic heroine. Faulkner is interested to reveal the society with its
gossip, judgement and harsh opinion, which affects the ambitions and the identities of the
individuals, their place in the world.
The novel A rose for Emily appeared on April 30, 1930, when the name of the author
was not so well known in the United States. His ghost story , as he called it, makes
reference to the conflict between North and South and reflects a world in change, where the
figures respected some time ago, the aristocrats, are now seen as a dying world.
The most important character in this story is Miss Emily Grierson, who is a proof of the
decaying place of the aristocrats. All of the five sections of the story make portraits of her,
beginning with the time when she stands in the shadow of her father until her death, but these
events are not presented in a chronological order.
In section I, the reader can witness the Emilys funeral together with the entire town, that
is more than curious to see the intimacy of her house, which looked like the last embodiment
of a lost era, where no stranger had entered for more than ten years. Also, the text offers an
anchor to the previous events of the story, when Miss Emily was suspended to pay taxes
because of the respect showed by the towns previous mayor, colonel Sartoris, after her
fathers death. But once Sartoris was no longer in charge, the new leader makes attempts to
obtain the money for the taxes from her. Strange enough, when the members of the Board of
Aldermen came to her house, Emily stands that she is not required to pay the taxes and that
they should convince themselves by asking Sartoris, who was already dead. She invite them
out.
Section II presents a time thirty years earlier than the first one, when Emily was
confronted with another issue related to towns people and rules. It was detected a powerful
odor that came from her house and the neighborhood, after her father died and she has been
abandoned by the man who the townspeople believed she was to marry. The mayor sent four

Huu Claudia
Romn Englez ( grupa L131 )

people in the middle of the night at her house to discover the source of the smell but they did
not find anything and the smell vanished after a couple of weeks. The people begin to pity
Emily for being so reclusive , remembering of how her aunt succumbed to insanity but on the
other hand, they cannot forget the imposing image of her father, that considered no one as
good as them, no right boy was found to marry his daughter. Another strange thing is that,
when people came to express their condolences, she denied her fathers death and gives him
for burial after three days.
In section III it is described the suffer of Emily after her fathers death but also the new
project of the town, the construction of the side walks under the coordination of Homer
Barron, who is seen taking Emily to buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, fact that provokes a
number of gossip in town because they think she is forgetting her pride and dates with a lower
class man. The third strange thing that happened is that Emily went to drug store and bought
some arsenic. Although she is asked to say the reason for what she needs it, she denies it.
In section IV, the town worries for Emily and the reason why she bought the poison and
they decide to send the Baptist minister to talk to her, a discussion about which he never
speaks about, and also they wrote to Emilys cousins in Alabama to come. In spite of all
these, Emily ordered a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homers initials and everybody
understood that she is preparing to marry. After this, Homer entered the Grierson home one
evening and he was never seen since then. Emily closed up the top floor of the house and
people could see her only from the glimpses at the window, until she was seventy four.
Section V, the last one, describes the situation after Emilys death. The townspeople
decided to broke down the door that was closed years ago and they discovered a room caught
in frozen time, with the clothes and necessities for a wedding, and Homers body in an
advanced state of decay. On the pillow next to the body could be seen a long strand of
Emilys hair, sign that she slept there recently.
Death seems to have been an obsession for Faulkner from an early age, this fear of death
may have come from the scarlet fever at age four or from his experience, at age of nine, when
he watched his grandmother destroyed by cancer.
The story A rose for Emily is a story of horror, where it is presented a mansion in
decay in which the protagonist shut away from the world, grows into something monstrous
and divorces from the human. She remains in voluntary isolation. Miss Emily is one of those
persons for whom time has no meaning, the distinction between reality and illusion had
blurred out : she refuses to admit that she owes any taxes, sending those men to colonel
Sartoris to confirm, who had been dead almost ten years ; she refuses to accept her fathers
death and gave his body to be buried after three days.
Miss Emily is a pathological case. The text shows clear that people from the town
believed that she was crazy, the same as her aunt. She was a tremendous firmness of will, she
dominated the people who came for the taxes, she completely defies the clerk from who she
took the arsenic, she refuses to say him the reason for she wants the poison. This firmness of

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Romn Englez ( grupa L131 )

will and pride , though, have not kept her from being hurt. Her madness is a development of
her pride and her refusal to submit to ordinary standards of behavior.
On the one hand, she is respected and admired by the community because she represents
the image of a grand family, which the community has been proud of. On the other hand,
because of her incapacity to accept the others will and the modern world in general, the
others feel superior to her and to the past she represents. She insist on meeting the world on
her own and her independence of spirit and pride twist her individuality into a monster. The
community wanted to pity her when she lost her money and when she became a fallen women
but she triumphed over their pity .
Another important aspect in Faulkners story is the first person narrator, the voice of the
townspeople, who present Emily as an antiquated Southern belle ( Ioan Sava) from an
external angle . The use of we instead of I is not a common feature for literature and
this choice brings to the writing a degree of uniqueness and originality.
The most important aspect in Faulkners story is the imagery of changing portraits, which
allows critical eyes to explore both significant detail and literary structure in order to find
meaning. The author creates numerous portraits of Emily Grierson by framing her in
doorways or windows and sneaks them into the text in chronological order so that the reader
can see the evolution and the changes occurring in her life.
Chronologically, the back flung door ( Ioan Sava) is the first picture of a young Miss
Emily, who is been guarded by her father. She is now seen as a slender figure in white , like
a vulnerable virgin, hiding in the background, subordinate. Her father, a straddled silhouette
in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip , is a menacing dark figure in a
dominant position, who wards off potential danger of her maidenhead. His standards are
unattainable for the suitors who came for Emilys heart, the Griersons held themselves a
little too high for what they really were and that is why Emily remains a spinster at age
thirty. His intimidation over her remains there over his death because of the angelic figure she
adopts after that: when we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl,
with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows sort of tragic and
serene . Instead of a mature woman at thirty, she is presented like a girl, her hair cut being
extremely important because since ancient times, a womans hair has symbolized her
sexuality and here, Emilys hair. Along with her sexuality, has been cut short through her
fathers pride.
After she kills Homer Barron, her picture framed by the upstairs window becomes exactly
the opposite of the first one : a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in
it, the light behind her. In this portrait with the light behind her, she becomes a dark
silhouette like her father, expressing her dominance with this act of murder.
Later, there is shift from upstairs window to a downstairs one is important because even
though the descriptions are quite similar, in both she is a torso of an idol , the latter portrait
is downstairs, which sends to the idea of aristocracy because for them, the upstairs cannotes
private life as opposed to public life displayed downstairs. This means that Emily shut off the

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Romn Englez ( grupa L131 )

top floor representing her private life and allows the townspeople to view only her public
image.
The final portrait of Emily as an old lady, captured when she was discussing her taxes,
contrasts sharply with the first angelic image from the beginning : a small, fat woman in
black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, learning on
an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head () 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 . Here Emily is no longer slender, her obesity overwhelms the small
frame. She reflects an image of dominance and death, she wears black now. Her pallid
complexion and her bloated body suggest that something has died within her, the time also
died with her the watch has vanished invisibly into her belt. She refuses the signs of
progress ( metal numbers above the door) , time for her becomes a meadow of past and
present which merging helps her control the pain of loss.
These chronological portraits mirror the frozen images that Emily gained from the
townspeople, the collective narrator. She is torn between female and male romanticism of a
patriarchal antebellum society. Influenced by her father, she imitates male romanticism to
ensure her male romanticism to ensure her emotional survival, even though her father refuses
her a husband and that part of a females existence that can find fulfillment only through
marriage. Because of this male domination she killed Homer Barron. To marry Homer would
again transfer control into the hands of a man she could not trust, especially because he liked
man and was not the marrying type. Through the violence of her murder, she takes over the
reins of her life.
Emily Grierson remains a tradition, a duty and a care in the minds of the townspeople
as well as in the minds of the readers, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . Her
portrait of a tragic woman transforms from a virginal victim to a murderess, ending with a
genteel Emily resting on her funeral bier underlines the great writing abilities and ingenuity of
an author that can create in less than ten pages what other writer could not show in hundreds
of pages.