William Faulkner’s “A Rose for

Emily”

This is the story of a town’s institution, “an idol”, “a monument”,

“a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon
the town”. Emily Grierson is the emblem of a moral, social and
economic order in decline. She stands for the Old South, the
antebellum period in which the plantation system sustained
A first-person plural narrator
certain class, race and gender codes. Emily’s defeminization defy
provides a sense of community
the aesthetic image of the Southern Lady, this process implies
-townspeople- cherishing their
impossible sexual reproduction as well, which is quite meaningful
customs, roles, authorities and
in light of the story’s focus on the disappearing Old South.
social codes.
At the end the narrative voice
Patriarchal attitude: women in Old Southern culture were often abandons the first plural
treated like delicate objects, to be spared reality so that men could homodiegetic and takes up a
gallantly take pleasure in them all the more. third plural heterodiegetic.

Southern gothic has to do with decay, the grotesque and the morbid. The decaying mansion symbolizes
the disappearance of an aristocratic system and the corruption that it houses. Throughout the story,
the townspeople ascribe Miss Emily's qualities to her house, as though the two were one and the same.
The house is described as "stubborn and coquettish," qualities a house can't literally have but which
Miss Emily does seem to exhibit to some extent. This is consistent with the townspeople's idealization of
Miss Emily, which ironically reduces her to the status of an inanimate monument.

The Post Civil-War. With their society in economic ruins, however, Southerners did not
give up on their aristocratic culture but rather clung to it nostalgically, and yearned to
return to a past more glorious in memory than it ever was in reality.
THEMES

Tradition vs Progress. It seems like the North and South, torn apart during the Civil
War, are becoming reconciled to one another and reintegrated once more. However, the
townspeople’s conflicted attitude toward Homer—they think him a fine fellow, yet don’t
think he is good enough to court Miss Emily—is indicative of their broader ambivalence
about progress in Jefferson.

The Grierson Family House. This house and those like it are monuments that symbolize
SYMBOLS

for the townspeople of Jefferson the glorified aristocratic past of the South. The house
also comes to symbolize just how untenable the culture of the Old South is, its moral
ugliness in its foundation on slavery and its irrelevance in the face of the modern world—
a world increasingly reliant not on agriculture but industry, a world that increasingly
holds not aristocratic but democratic values.

By beginning the story at its end, the townspeople who act as communal narrators repress the
painful events of their past and focus instead on the monumental memory of the pre-Civil War
South that is so important to them. And yet as the story moves back from this moment into the
past, and then back again to what the funeral-goers discover in the house, the horrors of the past
prove inescapable, both in Miss Emily's personal story and in the larger story of the slave-owning
South. “The Negro” and the end of the story disappears… like the figure of “Old Negro”.