Key fact Key Fact

Full title: A Rose for Emily Author: William Faulkner

Type of work: short story

GenreGothic Protagonist: Miss Emily Grierson

William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897 Faulkner belonged to a once-wealthy family of former plantation owners He was a high school dropout He later signed on with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) to train as a pilot, but the war ended before he saw any combat.

Faulkner used pieces of his own life and family history in his fiction.
Faulkner published almost twenty novels, several volumes of short fiction, and two volumes of poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, the same day his great-grandfather, the Old Colonel, had been born on 137 years earlier.

: dome on a house, often serving as a belfry

AUGUST: majestic; inspiring admiration

COQUETTISH: to act like a flirtatious woman MOTES: particles or specks of dust or dirt PALLID: pale, drained of color VINDICATED: cleared from accusation; liberate;

IMPERVIOUSNESS: impenetrable; incapable of being impaired, injured or influence CABAL: a group of plotters or conspirators BIER: frame or stand for a coffin SIBILANT: hissing

MACABRE: gruesome; grim, ghastly

ALDERMAN: member of town legislating bodies.

ACRID: sharp or biting in taste or smell CUCKHOLD: husband of an unfaithful wife VIRULENT: full of hat; venomous PERVERSE: odd; contrary

TRANQUIL: calm; quite

ARCHAIC: old-fashioned

The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily Griersons death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for more than ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emilys house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the towns previous mayor, had suspended Emilys tax responsibilities to the town after her fathers death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum.

As new town leaders take over, they Make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out.

In section II, the narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry.

As complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity.

The townspeople have always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves, with Emilys father driving off the many suitors deemed not good enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is still single by the time she turns thirty.

The day after Mr. Griersons death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her fathers body over for burial.

In section III, the narrator describes a long illness that Emily suffers after this incident. The summer after her fathers death, the town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks, and a construction company, under the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is awarded the job.

Homer soon becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station.

As the affair continues and Emilys reputation is further compromised, she goes to the drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She offers no explanation, and the package arrives at her house labeled For rats.

In section IV, the narrator describes the fear that some of the townspeople have that Emily will use the poison to kill herself. Her potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly unlikely, despite their continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town insist that the Baptist minister talk with Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what happened and swears that hell never go back.

So the ministers wife writes to Emilys two cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an extended stay. Because Emily orders a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homers initials, talk of the couples marriage resumes. Homer, absent from town, is believed to be preparing for Emilys move to the North or avoiding Emilys intrusive relatives.

After the cousins departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite the occasional lesson she gives in china painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In what becomes an annual ritual, Emily refuses to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes up the top floor of the house. Except for the occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the servant is seen going in and out of the house.

In section V, the narrator describes what happens after Emily dies. Emilys body is laid out in the parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed, the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by the townspeople.

The room is frozen in time, with the items for an upcoming wedding and a mans suit laid out. Homer Barrons body is stretched on the bed as well, in an advanced state of decay. The onlookers then notice the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homers body and a long strand of Emilys gray hair on the pillow.

Tradition, duty, care Fallen monument Hereditary obligation on the town Would not accept charity Emily in denial about fathers death Small fat woman in black Bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water; pallid hue Eyes like coal pressed in dough; fatty ridges An idol Hair cut short, like a girl Angelic comparison Carried head high with Homer Thin, cold, haughty black eyes; lighthouse keeper Fat with iron gray hair; like the hair of an active man Dead on a heavy walnut bed

Emilys house also represents alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the living past, and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she preserves the man she would not allow to leave her. house, like Emily herself, is a monument, the only remaining emblem of a dying world of Southern aristocracy.

The strand of hair is a reminder of love lost and the often perverse things people do in their pursuit of happiness. The narrator foreshadows the discovery of the long strand of hair on the pillow when he describes the physical transformation that Emily undergoes as she ages. The strand of hair ultimately stands as the last vestige of a life left to languish and decay, much like the body of Emilys former lover.

Roses, in literature and the general daily experience, usually represent love.

Roses are also often used as memories, as a way to preserve a moment in time or to keep a person close to ones heart.

In a way, the dust is a protective presence; The layers of dust also suggest the cloud of obscurity that hides Emilys true nature and the secrets her house contains. In the final scene, the dust is an oppressive presence that seems to emanate from Homers dead body. The dust, which is everywhere, seems even more horrible here.

is an erotic attraction to corpses, with the most common motive cited by psychologists as the attempt to gain possession of an unresisting or non rejecting partner. Fascination with blood, sexual activities with corpses and dismemberment of corpses are all considered aspects of necrophilia.

According to
, there are three basic types of "true" necrophilia:

In fact, in another paper, J. Paul de River documents the case of an Italian gravedigger who began to masturbate as he worked whenever he had to bury a beautiful young woman. To help him achieve climax, he'd touch the corpse. In time, he began having sex with the dead when no one was around. When caught with his mouth on the genital area of a deceased woman, he admitted to having violated hundreds of corpses. De River diagnoses him (and all necrophiles) as a psychopath. He cites another case of a mortuary worker who would expose and then touch his penis against the thighs of cadavers as he worked on them. He was soon having sex with four or five corpses every week. With one adolescent girl, he sucked both blood and urine from her, and badly wanted to chew on parts of her body. Instead, he bit her buttocks and then sodomized her.

The traits of the necrophilous character include: an inability to relate to living people language that includes numerous death-related or scatological words a tendency toward boredom and lifeless conversation a tendency to wear light-absorbing dark colors and to dislike bright colors the belief that resolving conflict involves force or violence an appreciation for machines over people dreams involving death, destruction or dead parts an interest in sickness a view that the past is more real than the present a fascination with bad odors an incapacity to laugh and tendency to smirk a lack of spontaneity lifeless, dry skin the worship of techniques or devices of destruction the compartmentalization of emotion and will insensitivity to tragedy involving loss of life

Necrophiles are primarily male Most necrophiles are heterosexual Most common occupations of necrophilic are as follows:

Hospital orderly Morgue attendant funeral parlor assistant cleric cemetery employee

A Bunch of Necrophilic

History offers several singular accounts of such activity, including the fear that ancient Egyptians expressed that embalmers would violate their deceased wives, so they kept them home until decomposition was clearly evident. One legend states that King Herod killed his wife and then had sex with her for seven more years.

Edmund Kemper III, 25, had had enough. In 1973, he called the police in California and turned himself in.

He'd first murdered when he was 15, taking a rifle to both of his grandparents because he wanted to feel what it was like to kill someone. Kemper was verbally abuse by her mother. He was socially inept and her belittling attitude made things worse. So by the time he was 24, he started picking up female hitchhikers.

Once he had his chosen victims in his car, he'd take them to a secluded spot and shoot or stab them to kill them quickly. Then he shoved them into the trunk of his car to take them home. While his mother slept, Kemper brought the bodies inside to behead and dismember them. He also had sex with them, sometimes with just the heads. From a few of the girls he cut off pieces of flesh to cook and consume. He murdered in this way six times, and on two occasions, he killed two girls at once and kept their bodies in his room. He buried one girl's head in the backyard, arranged to look at the house, because it thrilled him to know it was there. Even when he went for and passed a follow-up psychiatric examination, he had the head of one of his victims (a girl of 15) in the trunk of his car. That same day, the psychiatric team judged that he presented no threat to society.

The day before Easter in 1973, he finally turned his rage against its true target: his mother. She was in bed and he took a hammer and bashed her in the head until it was clear that she was dead. He removed her head and placed her larynx into the garbage disposal. Then he used the head for a dart game. Afterward he invited a friend of his mother's over for dinner and when she arrived, he killed her, too.

About decapitating the girls, Kemper said that the idea came from a fantasy he'd had in childhood. "It was something I'd always wanted to do." He described the rush from removing one girl's head. "There was actually a sexual thrill. And, in fact, there was almost a climax to it. It was kind of an exalted, triumphant thing." In part it was the physical effort of killing them that brought on the physical titillation. With the woman who was hardest to kill, he actually achieved orgasm at the moment of her death. In his final analysis, when contemplating whether he'd have achieved the same pleasure from killing a man, he thought not: there was just a thrill about having a woman around, he said, dead or alive.

It was 1974 in the Pacific Northwest when a number of attractive young women came up missing. When two bodies were found on a mountainside in Washington State, the police started looking for a suspect named Ted. Yet by that time, Ted was already in Utah and girls were disappearing there.
Then there were four in Colorado, but a fifth woman, Carol Da Ronch, managed to escape from a man who had tried to kill her. She fingered Theodore Robert Bundy, a law student from Washington, and while he was in prison, an intense investigation was launched to determine if there were links to the missing girls in the other states. Colorado got him for the murder of Caryn Campbell, but he escaped. He was caught but escaped again and went to Tallahassee, Florida.

On January 15, 1978, Lisa Levy and Martha Bowman were attacked in their sorority house at Florida State University. A man fatally clubbed and raped them, clubbed another woman in the head, and managed to viciously attack a girl in another sorority house. Then less than a month later a 12-year-old girl, Kimberly Leach, was abducted from her school, raped, strangled, and left in the woods. Bundy was responsible for them all, and he'd made the mistake of leaving his own bite mark on the left buttock of Lisa Levy.

Then he began to talk. He eventually confessed to 30 murders in six separate states, dating back to May 1973, although experts believe there might have been far more.
Bundy being hollow and empty, with some indication from Bundy's own words that his compulsion to kill was a way to fill up the emptiness, at least temporarily. He admitted to having raped his victims after they were dead and revisiting the corpses to relive the erotic experience of killing them. He himself said that he didn't think of his victims as women in the normal way but as objects against which he took out his inner turmoil.

Ed was devoted to his mother, who was quite demented and thoroughly disgusted with sex. She thought it the world's greatest evil so she preached to her two sons that they were to keep themselves pure.
When her husband died, she had even more influence, and then Ed's brother died, leaving him alone with this delusional woman. Mildly retarded and mentally unstable, he was completely dependent on her. When she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her, he nursed her even as she verbally abused him. Sometimes he crawled into bed with her to cuddle.

Then when Ed was 39, his mother died. He could hardly bear it. Then one day he spotted a newspaper report about a woman who had just been buried not far from his mother's grave. He decided to go out and dig her up so he could have a look at a real body of a female. He got a friend named Gus, a gravedigger, to help him open up the grave. Over the next decade, he continued to visit the cemetery for more bodies, usually under a full moon. Sometimes he took the entire corpse and sometimes just certain parts. He later claimed that he had dug up nine separate graves in three different cemeteries.

Ed apparently just loved bodies. He was a true necrophile (also called a necrophiliac). Body parts excited him and he had no trouble having them in his home, no matter what their state of decomposition. From the bodies he dug up, he cut off the heads and shrank them, putting some on his bedposts. He also formed lampshades from the skin. Storing the organs in the refrigerator, and possibly cooking them, he made things like soup bowls out of the bones for his own use. Sometimes he had sexual contact with these bodies (though he denied it), and eventually he just went ahead and dug up his own mother. Rather than get a sex-change operation, he simply made himself a female body suit and mask out of the skin, and he would wear this outfit to dance around outside.

Finally, when it was clear that the skin would harden and crack, he decided to get bodies that were more pliable. That meant someone really fresh. In 1954, Gein shot a woman, Mary Hogan, who resembled his mother in size and brought her to his farm. No one suspected a thing. Three years later, he did it again to Bernice Worden, and this time the police decided to have a look. What they found was a house of horror. Inside, they discovered numerous body parts: four noses, several bone fragments, nine death masks, a heart in a pan on the stove, a bowl made from a skull, ten female heads with the tops sawn off, human skin covering several chair seats, pieces of salted genitalia in a box, skulls on his bedposts, organs in the refrigerator, a pair of lips on a string, and much more. It was estimated that he had mutilated some fifteen women and kept their remains around him.

In the barn they found the corpse of Bernice Worden, hung from the ceiling feet first. She was headless and slit from her genitals to her neck, gutted and with her legs splayed wide apart. Her head was found beneath a mattress inside the house with nails in her ears.
Since he never had actually hunted for deer, neighbors wondered what had been in the packages of fresh venison that he'd so generously brought them.

Dennis Nilsen lived in London and picked up his victims in pubs. Before he ever killed, he'd experienced an erotic attraction to death, so he would spend hours lying in front of a mirror, pretending to be dead.
His first murder occurred in 1978. He strangled a man he barely knew with a necktie, completely caught up in the eroticism of having this kind of power over another, and then placed him beneath the floorboards of his apartment. Once having tasted the climatic pleasure of this activity, he found ways to repeat it.

He continued to invite men to his home, strangling them, bathing the corpses, sometimes taking them to bed, usually attempting sexual contact, and finally butchering them or storing them in various places in his apartments. Sometimes after he bathed them, he'd then soak in the same water and then he would decide their fate: store them, sit them in a chair, or cut them up and distribute the parts. With experience as a butcher, he had no trouble dissecting them and boiling the flesh from their skulls.

He pointed out a closet where police found the dismembered parts of two different men. Another torso was found in his tea chest, along with a number of old bones, and he was arrested. He then confessed to killing 15 men over a period of five years, partly because the idea of them leaving his apartment made him feel alone and partly because he simply enjoyed it. In prison, he made drawings of their corpses and body parts.

Among funeral workers, there have been a few females who performed their own erotic rituals, and one of the most famous is Karen Greenlee. She didn't kill men to get the corpses, but she certainly had an attraction to them once they were dead.
In 1979 in California, Greenlee was to deliver the body of a 33-year-old man to a cemetery for a funeral, but instead she drove off in the hearse, abducting the corpse to keep for herself. She was found and charged with stealing a hearse and interfering with a funeral, and apparently it wasn't the first time she'd felt such a sexual attraction to the dead.

Into this casket she had put a long letter that detailed her erotic episodes with what she estimated had been over 20 male corpses. Calling herself a "morgue rat," she didn't understand why she felt so compelled to touch dead bodies, but it was an addiction she couldn't seem to break. She enjoyed the odor of the freshly embalmed corpse of a male in his twenties, and even the blood that might come out of his mouth as she got on top of him. She admitted having broken into some mortuaries and tombs in order to pursue her habit, and once she was nearly caught with the goods. Ashamed at first, she'd later accepted her desires.

Another woman who loves corpses and who is quite public about it is Leilah Wendell, the curator of the House of Death in New Orleans. S he thinks of it more as "necromantic" than necrophilic and has written about the distinction in The Necromantic Ritual Book. One night John pulled up to her home and pulled out a large package wrapped in a red bow. Carrying it in and placing it on her carpet inside, he urged her to unwrap it. She did, and before her lay a desiccated corpse, remarkably preserved. It had been exhumed from a pauper's cemetery and its disposition was pending. While getting caught at this is a criminal act in some states abuse of corpse most necrophiles keep their activities secret.

John told Wendell she could have it all to herself for four days. Immediately, she made a death mask for a memento. Then she took the corpse to bed. To her mind, this was the greatest gift that anyone had ever given her.

The End