The story begins at the huge funeral for Miss Emily Grierson.

Nobody has been to her house in

ten years, except for her servant. Her house is old, but was once the best house around. The town
had a special relationship with Miss Emily ever since it decided to stop billing her for taxes in
1894. But, the "newer generation" wasn't happy with this arrangement, and so they paid a visit to
Miss Emily and tried to get her to pay the debt. She refused to acknowledge that the old
arrangement might not work any more, and flatly refused to pay.

Thirty years before, the tax collecting townspeople had a strange encounter with Miss Emily
about a bad smell at her place. This was about two years after her father died, and a short time
after her lover disappeared from her life. Anyhow, the stink got stronger and complaints were
made, but the authorities didn't want to confront Emily about the problem. So, they sprinkled
lime around the house and the smell was eventually gone.

Everybody felt sorry for Emily when her father died. He left her with the house, but no money.
When he died, Emily refused to admit it for three whole days. The town didn't think she was
"crazy then," but assumed that she just didn't want to let go of her dad, (even though you could
argue that he had stolen her youth from her). Next, the story doubles back and tells us that not
too long after her father died Emily begins dating Homer Barron, who is in town on a sidewalk-
building project. The town heavily disapproves of the affair and brings Emily's cousins to town
to stop the relationship. One day, Emily is seen buying arsenic at the drugstore, and the town
thinks that Homer is giving her the shaft, and that she plans to kill herself.

When she buys a bunch of men's items, they think that she and Homer are going to get married.
Homer leaves town, then the cousins leave town, and then Homer comes back. He is last seen
entering Miss Emily's house. Emily herself rarely leaves the home after that, except for a period
of half a dozen years when she gives painting lessons.

Her hair turns gray, she gains weight, and she eventually dies in a downstairs bedroom that hasn't
seen light in many years. The story cycles back to where it began, at her funeral. Tobe, miss
Emily's servant, lets in the town women and then leaves by the backdoor forever. After the
funeral, and after Emily is buried, the townspeople go upstairs to break into the room that they
know has been closed for forty years.

Inside, they find the corpse of Homer Barron, rotting in the bed. On the dust of the pillow next to
Homer they find an indentation of a head, and there, in the indentation, a long, gray hair.

Themes

There's no getting around the fact that "A Rose for Emily" is a story about the extremes of
isolation by physical and emotional. This Faulkner classic shows us the process by which
human beings become isolated by their families, by their community, by tradition, by law, by the
past, and by their own actions and choices. In effect, this story takes a stand against such
isolation, and against all those who isolate others. When you get through with this story, you
might feel the urge to take a nice stroll in the county, or at least take a spin around the park. Go!
Breathe the air; feel the sunshine; visit a friend.
Questions About Isolation

1. Which character is more isolated, Tobe or Miss Emily? What are the different reasons
behind their isolations? Did they have a choice?

2. Does the town play a role in Miss Emily's isolation? If not, why not? If so, what are some
of the things the town does to isolate her?

3. Does Emily's father play a role in her isolation (even though he is dead)? If so, what role
does he play?

4. What are some other factors behind Miss Emily's isolation?

5. Besides Tobe, and Miss Emily, are there any other isolated characters described in the
story? If so, which ones, and how are they isolated.

Memory and the Past

Gavin Stevens (a William Faulkner character) famously says, "The past is never dead. It's not
even past." This idea is highly visible in all Faulkner's work, and we definitely see it here, in "A
Rose for Emily." Spanning approximately 74 years, this short story spins backwards and
forwards in time like memory, and shows a southern town torn between the present and the past.
Post-Civil War and Pre-Civil Rights, "A Rose for Emily" shows us an American South in limbo,
trying desperately, with each generation, to find a better way, a way which honors the good of the
past, while coming to terms with its evils.

Visions of America
A Rose for Emily" doesn't look at America through rose-colored glasses, even though many of its
characters do. In the aftermath of slavery, the American South shown in the novel is in bad
shape. The novel deals with the stubborn refusal of some southerners to see that the America they
believed in an America based on slavery was no more. The story covers about 74 years,
beginning sometime just before the Civil War. The focus, however, is on the periods from about
1894 to 1935. Because the dates are all jumbled together, we have to work to untangle the stories
present vision of America from the vision of the past.
Versions of Reality
By showing people with skewed versions of reality, "A Rose for Emily" asks us to take off our
"rose-colored" glasses and look reality in the face. What we confront is the reality of America in
the story, and the reality of the main character's complete isolation. Faulkner reveals how
difficult it can be to see the past and the present clearly and honestly by depicting memory as
flawed and subjective. This "difficulty" is part of why the main characters goes insane, or so it
certainly appears. Luckily, there are healthy doses of compassion and forgiveness in the novel.
When we start to feel that, we start to see things more clearly.

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Miss Emily's house is an important symbol in this story. (In general, old family homes are often
significant symbols in Gothic literature.) For most of the story, we, like the townspeople, only
see Miss Emily's house from the outside looking in. Let's look at the some of the descriptions we
get of the house:

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires
and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been
our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the
august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and
coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps an eyesore among eyesores.
(1.2)

The fact that the house was built in the 1870s tells us that Miss Emily's father must have been
doing pretty well for himself after the Civil War. The narrator's description of it as an "eyesore
among eyesores" is a double or even triple judgment. The narrator doesn't seem to approve of the
urban sprawl. We also speculate that the house is an emblem of money probably earned in large
part through the labors of slaves, or emancipated slaves. The final part of this judgment has to do
with the fact that the house was allowed to decay and disintegrate.

For an idea of the kind of house Miss Emily lived in, take a look at artist Theora Hamblett's
house in Mississippi, built, like Emily's, in the 1870. Now picture the lawn overgrown, maybe a
broken window or two, the paint worn and chipping and you have a the creepy house that Emily
lived in, and which the children of the "newer generation" probably ran past in a fright.

The house, as is often the case in scary stories, is also a symbol of the opposite of what it's
supposed to be. Like most humans, Emily wanted a house she could love someone in, and a
house where she could be free. She thought she might have this with Homer Barron, but
something went terribly wrong. This something turned her house into a virtual prison she had
nowhere else to go but home, and this home, with the corpse of Homer Barron rotting in an
upstairs room, this home could never be shared with others. The house is a huge symbol of Miss
Emily's isolation.

These are all symbols of time in the story. What's more, the struggle between the past and the
future threatens to rip the present to pieces. When members of the Board of Aldermen visit Emily
to see about the taxes a decade before her death, they hear her pocket watch ticking, hidden
somewhere in the folds of her clothing and her body. This is a signal to us that for Miss Emily
time is both a mysterious "invisible" force, and one of which she has always been acutely aware.
With each tick of the clock, her chance for happiness dwindles .

Another symbol of time is Emily's hair. The town tells time first by Emily's hair, and then when
she disappears into her house after her hair has turned "a vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an
active man" (4.6). When Emily no longer leaves the house, the town uses Tobe's hair to tell time,
watching as it too turns gray. The strand of Emily's hair found on the pillow next to Homer, is a
time-teller too, though precisely what time it tells is hard to say. The narrator tells us that
Homer's final resting place hadn't been opened in 40 years, which is exactly how long Homer
Barron has been missing. But, Emily's hair didn't turn "iron-gray" until approximately 1898,
several years after Homer's death.

In "What's up With the Ending?" we suggest that the town knew they would find Homer Barron's
dead body in the room. But maybe what they didn't know was that she had lain next to the body
at least several years after its owner had departed it, but perhaps much more recently. Still, the
townspeople did have to break into the room. When and why it was locked up is probably only
known by Emily (who is dead, and wouldn't talk anyway) and Tobe (who has disappeared, and
wouldn't talk anyway).

The stationery is also a symbol of time, but in a different way. The letter the town gets from
Emily is written "on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink" (1.4).
Emily probably doesn't write too many letters, so it's normal that she would be using stationery
that's probably at least 40 years old. The stationery is a symbol, and one that points back to the
tensions between the past, the present, and the future, which this story explores. Notice how the
first section of the story involves what Benjamin Franklin said were the only two certain things
in the world: death and taxes. Franklin was talking about the fact that even the U.S. Constitution
would be subject to future change.

Miss Emily's death at the beginning of the story, and the narrators memory of the history of her
tax situation in Jefferson might be what Alfred Hitchcock called "macguffins." A macguffin is
"an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion
despite usually lacking intrinsic importance" (source). Neither the funeral nor the tax issue seem
to be about are all that important to the tale of murder and insanity that follows.

Still, we should question whether or not they actually are macguffins.

The taxes are can be seen as symbols of death. The initial remission of Miss Emily taxes is a
symbol of the death of her father. It's also a symbol of the financial decline the proud man must
have experienced, but kept hidden from Emily and the town, until his death. Since the story isn't
clear on why Emily only got the house in the will, the taxes could also be a symbol of his
continued control over Emily from the grave. If he had money when he died, but left it to some
mysterious entity, (the story is unclear on this point), he would have denied Emily her
independence.

Over 30 years after the initial remission of Miss Emily's taxes when the "newer generation" tries
to revoke the ancient deal they inherited, taxes are still a symbol of death, though this time, they
symbolize the death of Homer Barron.

As we argue in "What's Up With the Ending?", the town is probably already aware that she has a
rotting corpse upstairs. Maybe the taxes were just an excuse to definitively see what was going
on at the house. The next phase of their plan might well have been foreclosure. They could have
used the tax situation to remove Emily from the neighborhood, and to condemn her house.
Perhaps they wanted to remove the "eyesore," and to cover up everything Miss Emily says about
the past and present of the South.

The fact that they didn't do this might just turn the taxes into a symbol of compassion. Wasn't it
out of compassion that her taxes were initially remitted? That the "newer generation" decides to
continue the tradition also shows that some of the older ways might well have merit. Where It All
Goes Down

A creepy old house in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, 1861-1933

(approximately)

Setting is usually pretty rich in Faulkner. SimCity-style, William Faulkner created his own
Mississippi County, Yoknapatawpha, as the setting for much of his fiction. This county comes
complete with several different families including the Grierson family. "A Rose for Emily" is set
in the county seat of Yoknapatawpha, Jefferson and as you know, focuses on Emily Grierson, the
last living Grierson. For a map and a detailed description of Yoknapatawpha, click here.

OK, so the where is pretty easy. Though Jefferson and its inhabitants are unique, we can see their
town as any southern town during that period. The situations that arise in the story develop in
large part because many southerners who lived during the slavery era didn't know what to do
when that whole way of life ended. Imagine if suddenly you are told and shown that your whole
way of life is a sham, an atrocity, an evil. Then heap on a generous helping of southern pride, and
you have tragedies like this one. This story also explores how future generations deal with this
legacy. To really feel the movement of history in the story, and to understand the movements of
Emily's life, it important to pin down the chronology of events.

The dates we use, other than 1874, are just a little rough, but in the ballpark.

1861 Miss Emily Grierson is born.

1870s The Grierson house is built.
1893 Miss Emily's father dies.
1893 Miss Emily falls ill.
1893 Miss Emily's taxes are remitted (in December).
1894 Miss Emily meets Homer Barron (in the summer).
1895 Homer is last seen entering Miss Emily's house (Emily is "over thirty; we use thirty-three
for our calculations).
1895 The townspeople become concerned about the smell of the Grierson house and sprinkle
lime around Emily's place.
1895 Miss Emily stays in for six months.
1895-1898 Miss Emily emerges and her hair gradually turns gray.
1899 Miss Emily stops opening her door, and doesn't leave the house for about five years.
1904 Miss Emily emerges to give china-painting lessons for about seven years.
1911 Miss Emily stops giving painting lessons. Over ten years pass before she has any contact
with the town.
1925 They "newer generation" comes to ask about the taxes. This is thirty years after the
business with the lime. This is the last contact she has with the town before her death.
1935 Miss Emily dies at 74 years old. Tobe leaves the house. Two days later the funeral is held
at the Grierson house. At the funeral, the townspeople break down the door to the bridal
chamber/crypt, which no one has seen in 40 years.

This doesn't answer all the questions by any means. Since nobody in the town ever knew what
was really going on in Emily's house, there are numerous holes and gaps in this history. Still, you
can use this as a guide to help make sense of some of the confusing moments.

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

First Person (Peripheral Narrator)

The fascinating narrator of "A Rose for Emily" is more rightly called "first people" than "first
person." Usually referring to itself as "we," the narrator speaks sometimes for the men of
Jefferson, sometimes for the women, and often for both. It also spans three generations of
Jeffersonians, including the generation of Miss Emily's father, Miss Emily's generation, and the
"newer generation," made up of the children of Miss Emily's contemporaries. The narrator is
pretty hard on the first two generations, and it's easy to see how their treatment of Miss Emily
may have led to her downfall. This lends the narrative a somewhat confessional feel.

While we are on the subject of "we," notice no one townsperson is completely responsible for
what happened to Emily. (It is fair to say, though that some are more responsible than others.)
The willingness of the town to now admit responsibility is a hopeful sign, and one that allows us
to envision a better future for generations to come. We discuss this further in "Tone," so check
out that section for more information.

Horror or Gothic Fiction, Southern Gothic, Literary Fiction, Tragedy, Modernism

Even before we see the forty-year-old corpse of Homer Barron rotting into the bed, the creepy
house, and the creepy Miss Emily let us know that we are in the realm of horror or Gothic
fiction. Combine that with a southern setting and we realize that it's not just Gothic, but Southern
Gothic. The Southern Gothic genre focuses sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly on slavery,
or the aftermath of slavery in the South. You can definitely see this in "A Rose for Emily."

Since author William Faulkner won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice (first in 1955 for A Fable,
and then in 1963 for The Reivers), and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1949) we'd also have to
put it in the category of "Literary Fiction."

Even if Faulkner hadn't won all those prizes, we'd still put "A Rose for Emily" in this category.
The story is masterfully told, and it's obvious that much care and skill went into it. It's also
strikingly original and experimental in terms of form. This is part of what makes it a classic
Modernist text. The Southern Gothic is a perfect field on which to perform a Modernist
experiment. Modernist is all about what happens when everything you thought was true is
revealed to be false, resulting in shattered identities. Modernism tries to make something
constructive out of the pieces. We can see all that loud and clear in "A Rose for Emily."
Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?

Ironic, Confessional, Gossipy, Angry, Hopeful

We can think of a bunch more adjectives to describe the tone of the story, these seems to be the
dominant emotional tones the narrator is expressing as Miss Emily's story is told. (Keep in mind
that it's also the town's story.)

The irony of the story is closely tied to the rose in the title, and to Williams Faulkner's
explanation of it:

[The title] was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy,
an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a
saluteto a woman you would hand a rose. (source)

It's ironic because in the story Miss Emily is continually handed thorns, not roses, and she herself
produces many thorns in return. This is where the "confessional" part comes in. Since the
narrator is a member of the town, and takes responsibility for all the townspeople's actions, the
narrator is confessing the town's crimes against Emily.

Confession can be another word for gossip, especially when you are confessing the crimes of
others. (Here one of the big crimes is gossip.) The chilling first line of Section IV is a good
representative of the elements of tone we've been discussing so far: "So the next day we all said,
'She will kill herself'; and we said it would be the best thing." This is where the anger comes in.
Because this makes us angry, we feel that the narrator too is angry, particularly in this whole
section. This leads us back to confession and hopefulness.

The hopefulness of the town is the hardest for us to understand. It comes in part from the title
again if we can put ourselves in the same space as Faulkner and manage to give Emily a rose,
to have compassion for her even though she is a murderer, to recognize her tragedy for what it is,
this might allow us to build a more compassionate future for ourselves, a future where tragedies
like Emily's don't occur. This also entails taking off our "rose-colored glasses" (as we discuss in
"What's Up With the Title?") and facing the ugly truths of life, even confessing our
shortcomings. Hopefully, we can manage to take those glasses off before death takes them off for
us.

Lush

While Ernest Hemingway boils things down to the essentials, his friend William Faulkner lets
the pot boil over, spilling onto the stove, down onto the floor, and maybe somehow catching the
kitchen on fire.

With Faulkner we can feel the vines tangling, the magnolias blooming, the plants around Emily's
house breeding, helping to hide her from the harshness of the world she lives in, a world in
which she doesn't really belong. This tangling of blooming and breeding is replicated in the
fancy words and long, complicated sentences for which Faulkner is famous.
Part of lushness is that other side of nature, the side we might not want to look at, and the side
that's in store for everything in nature: death and decay. Faulkner never neglects this side
(certainly not here), and with every blooming rose, he gives us a rotting one, too.

The lushness is also ironic, and perhaps a reaction against a lack of lushness. We know that
although Emily's place was probably lush and overgrown, she never went outside to enjoy it, and
only rarely even let in the light from outside. The story not only celebrates a lush life, by
representing its opposite, but also cautions us against alienating others, against pushing others to
hide from the light of life.

You probably noticed that there is no rose in the story, though we do find the word "rose" four
times. Check out the first two times the word is used:

When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked;
and when they sat down a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes
in the single sun-ray. (1.5)

They rose when she entered a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to
her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. (1.6)

These first two times "rose" (as you can see) is used as a verb, which is why we barely notice the
subtle echo of the "rose" in the title when we read. We are concentrating on the image, first, of
the inside of Miss Emily's lonely parlor, and then of Miss Emily herself. In both cases, the word
"rose" is working on us, maybe even subconsciously, to contribute to the image.

We have to look at a few more things before we can get at why these passages are significant.

First, let's consider the next two mentions of "rose," which occur at the very end of the story:

A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished
as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon
the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with
tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. (5.4)

Things are starting to make sense here we are talking about the color "rose" from the curtains
to the lampshades, rose was the dominant color of Miss Emily's bridal chamber. We've all heard
about the dangers of seeing through 'rose colored' glasses. This was a particular problem for
people of Miss Emily's generation in the South.

As we discuss in "Setting," Emily was born in the early 1860s, probably near the beginning of
the Civil War. Emily's father basically raised her to believe that nothing had really changed after
the war. He instilled in her that being part of the southern aristocracy (those who made money on
backs of slaves) was still something to be proud of, and that people like them were above the
law.
But, in this moment, we realize just how rosy Miss Emily's glasses were, and that death trumps
glasses, rose colored or otherwise. The reality of death cannot be avoided. Now that the bridal
chamber has turned into a death chamber, the rose color is bathed in the hues of decay and death,
shaded by the "acrid pall as of the tomb." Which might make you wonder just what an "acrid
pall" is.

"Acrid" is easy, it's used to refer to something that's nasty smelling. "Pall" is actually a pretty
interesting word, and one that isn't normally thrown around in conversation. It usually refers to
some kind of covering, like a cloak or a blanket draped over a coffin. We can see how the word
works literally and figuratively to thicken the atmosphere of death and decomposition. It works
because even if we don't know precisely what a "pall" is, we can hear the deathly, pale tones it
holds.

Well, we're not quite done yet. Lucky for us, William Faulkner told an interviewer what he meant
by the title:
[The title] was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy,
an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a
saluteto a woman you would hand a rose. (source)

We think this perspective is very important, not just because it provides a straightforward
explanation, but also because it persuades us to indulge in a more compassionate reading. It's
easy to judge Miss Emily, and maybe to forget she's a human being who has had a tragic life. For
a look at how this explanation exposes the story's irony, check out our discussion of "Writing
Style." Needless to say, there are many possible interpretations of the title, "A Rose for Emily,"
and you can feel free to think creatively when trying to figure out what this title means.
Ending
It's funny that a story as out of sequence as "A Rose for Emily" ends at the end with the
discovery of the forty-year-old corpse of Homer Barron. Readers and critics often feel that if the
story were told linearly, in sequence, it wouldn't be much of a story. Some people feel that all the
power lies in the discovery of the rotting corpse of this fellow.

We disagree with this opinion. For example, if we already knew that the corpse of Homer Barron
was up in the bedroom, we would have been creeped out to read that Emily was giving painting
lessons to kids in the parlor (or wherever such lessons are given). The story could have been just
as creepy, and just as tragic, if told linearly.

So maybe "A Rose for Emily" had to be told this way to mirror the experience of the town, to
mirror their surprise at finding the corpse. Obviously, the town didn't know about Homer Barron
until Emily died, otherwise, they sure as heck wouldn't have let their kids go to her house for
painting lessons, and they would arrested her for murder.

Or maybe not. Check out this moment from the ending:

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in
forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the
ground before they opened it. (5.3)

The town must have known all along. Maybe this is the real surprise of the ending, the
realization that the town has long ago pieced together the puzzle. While we can be fairly sure that
most townspeople had talked the matter to death and figured out what went on before the end of
the story, we can't be sure precisely when it became the consensus. Probably the night the lime
was sprinkled (we're talking about the white powder here, and not the citrus fruit!).

Thirty years later, those people's children had heard the story in bits and pieces (the way it's told
to us), all the while seeing her house grow more and more decayed, seeing her in the window,
almost a ghost already, wandering the halls of her haunted house. The town knew her story by
heart, because it was also their story, down to the last detail.

As such, the following passage takes on new significance:

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting
pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and
tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. (4.8)

The "newer generation" wasn't going to charge in and arrest Miss Emily, but they weren't about
to leave their kids with her. If they had arrested her, she probably would have ended up in an
institution or worse. And this is where the theme "Compassion and Forgiveness" comes into the
picture. One question the story asks is whether the town's hiding of Miss Emily's crime is an act
of compassion, or yet another crime against her.

To see how hard the question is, we can remember what we are told very early in the story,
"Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town" (1.3). She is family. What would you do?