A Rose for EmilyBy:

William Faulkner

“A Rose for Emily” was originally published in the April 30, 1930, issue of Forum. It was his first short story published in a major magazine. A slightly revised version was published in two collections of his short fiction, These 13 (1931) and Collected Stories (1950). It has been published in dozens of anthologies as well. “A Rose for Emily” is the story of an eccentric spinster, Emily Grierson. An unnamed narrator details the strange circumstances of Emily’s life and her odd relationships with her father, her lover, and the town of Jefferson, and the horrible secret she hides. The story’s subtle complexities continue to inspire critics while casual readers find it one of Faulkner’s most accessible works. The popularity of the story is due in no small part to its gruesome ending.

Faulkner often used short stories to “flesh out” the fictional kingdom of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, for his novels. In fact, he revised some of his short fiction to be used as chapters in those novels. “A Rose for Emily” takes place in Jefferson, the county seat of Yoknapatawpha. Jefferson is a critical setting in much of Faulkner’s fiction. The character of Colonel Sartoris plays a role in the story; he is also an important character in the history of Yoknapatawpha. However, “A Rose for Emily” is a story that stands by itself. Faulkner himself modestly referred to it as a “ghost story,” but many critics recognize it as an extraordinarily versatile work. As Frank A. Littler writes in Notes on Mississippi Writers, ‘‘A Rose for Emily’’ has been ‘‘read variously as a Gothic horror tale, a study in abnormal psychology, an allegory of the relations between North and South, a meditation on the nature of time, and a tragedy with Emily as a sort of tragic heroine.’’

CHARACTERS

Miss Emily Grierson

Miss Emily is an old-school southern belle trapped in a society bent on forcing her to stay in her role. She clings to the old ways even as she tries to break free. When she's not even forty, she's on a road that involves dying alone in a seemingly haunted house. At thirty-something she is already a murderer, which only adds to her outcast status.

Miss Emily is a truly tragic figure, but one who we only see from the outside. Granted, the townspeople who tell her story know her better than we do, but not really by much. This is why Emily is called "impervious." We can't quite penetrate her or completely understand her. But, perhaps there is a little Emily in all of us. In the spirit of finding the human being behind the mask, lets zero in on a few aspects of Emily, the person.

Tobe

• Tobe, first described as "an old man-servant – a combined gardener and cook " . He is an even more mysterious character than Emily, and, ironically, probably the only one who knows the answers to all the mysteries in the story. He's also a major connection to the theme "Compassion and Forgiveness." Read on to see what we mean.

Homer Barron• Homer is the man Emily murderers. Yet, somehow, the focus

of the tragedy is on Emily. Given the information we know about Homer, he isn't a very sympathetic character. This is partly because the town, as represented by the narrator, doesn't like him. Jeffersonians don't like him because he's a rough-talking, charismatic northerner and an overseer in town working on a sidewalk-paving project.

How involved with Emily he was, we don't know. He may have intended to marry her, but became dissuaded by the wacky antics of her cousins and the town. Why he went to her house that last time, and how exactly he ended up dead in the bed, we don't know. We don't even know if he really did, or was about to, break off his relationship with Emily before she killed him.

Miss Emily's Father

• Emily's father is the guy with the gigantic horsewhip. He's only referred to as "Emily's father." Faulkner himself didn't approve of the man at all. In an interview, Faulkner expounds on this character:

• In this case there was the young girl with a young girl's normal aspirations to find love and then a husband and a family, who was brow-beaten and kept down by her father, a selfish man who didn't want her to leave home because he wanted a housekeeper, and it was a natural instinct of – repressed which – you can't repress it – you can mash it down but it comes up somewhere else and very likely in a tragic form, and that was simply another manifestation of man's injustice to man, of the poor tragic human being struggling with its own heart, with others, with its environment, for the simple things which all human beings want. In that case it was a young girl that just wanted to be loved and to love and to have a husband and a family.

• That description is pretty straightforward. The story is meant to show a very selfish man in a very selfish society. He's kind of a one-note fellow, and that note is Me, me, me, me, me!

Colonel Sartoris

• The Colonel is the guy who initially dreamed up the scheme to relieve Emily of her tax obligations when her father died. That was a nice thing to do. But, this same Colonel, the mayor, "who," we are told also "fathered the edict that no N egro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" . That's not so nice. Unfortunately, the coexistence of these two modes was the norm in those days among powerful political figures

J udge Stevens• Judge Stevens gets one of the best lines in the story:

“ D ammit, sir, will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad ? “ Given everything the town knows at this point, the smell should have generated a warrant to inspect her home. He's portrayed as an older, (he's 8 0), powerful, and a very southern man, and he raises a little question. O k we know that Colonel Sartoris was the mayor when Emily's father died, and we know that it was two years later that the townspeople began complaining about the smell. The town could have changed mayors in two years, but would they have elected a mayor that was eighty years old? We challenge you to figure this out.

O L D L A D Y WYATT

• O ld lady Wyatt is Emily's great-aunt (on her father's side, we believe). Before her death, according to the townspeople, old lady Wyatt is "completely crazy " . She seems to be in the story to suggest that insanity runs in Emily's family.

The Cousins

• The town thinks Miss Emily's “ two female cousins are even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been" . That is definitely not a compliment. These cousins from Alabama are relatives of old lady Wyatt and had been estranged from Emily's father since the time of old lady Wyatt's death. In fact, they were so estranged that they didn't even show up to Emily's father's funeral.

The situation with the cousins exposes some of the dark irony of the story. The townspeople call in the cousins to stop Emily from dating Homer, but when they decide they hate the cousins, they switch sides and try to push Emily and Homer together.

A Rose for Emily Summary

The story, told in five sections, opens in section one with an unnamed narrator describing the funeral of Miss Emily Grierson. (The narrator always refers to himself in collective pronouns; he is perceived as being the voice of the average citizen of the town of Jefferson.) He notes that while the men attend the funeral out of obligation, the women go primarily because no one has been inside Emily’s house for years. The narrator describes what was once a grand house ‘‘set on what had once been our most select street.’’ Emily’s origins are aristocratic, but both her house and the neighborhood it is in have deteriorated. The narrator notes that prior to her death, Emily had been ‘‘a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.’’ This is because Colonel Sartoris, the former mayor of the town, remitted Emily’s taxes dating from the death of her father “on into perpetuity.’’ Apparently, Emily’s father left her with nothing when he died. Colonel Sartoris invented a story explaining the remittance of Emily’s taxes (it is the town’s method of paying back a loan to her father) to save her from the embarrassment of accepting charity.

The narrator uses this opportunity to segue into the first of several flashbacks in the story. The first incident he describes takes place approximately a decade before Emily’s death. A new generation of politicians takes over Jefferson’s government. They are unmoved by Colonel Sartoris’s grand gesture on Emily’s behalf, and they attempt to collect taxes from her. She ignores their notices and letters. Finally, the Board of Aldermen sends a deputation to discuss the situation with her. The men are led into a decrepit parlor by Emily’s black man-servant, Tobe. The first physical description of Emily is unflattering: she is ‘‘a small, fat woman in black” who looks “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue.” After the spokesman awkwardly explains the reason for their visit, Emily repeatedly insists that she has no taxes in Jefferson and tells the men to see Colonel Sartoris. The narrator notes that Colonel Sartoris has been dead at that point for almost ten years. She sends the men away from her house with nothing.

Analysis

A Rose for Emily Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

The House

• Miss Emily's house is an important symbol in this story. (In general, old family homes are often significant symbols in Gothic literature.)

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

The Pocket Watch, the Stationery, and the Hair

• 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" .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.

• 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" .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.

Lime and Arsenic

• Lime and arsenic are some of the story's creepiest symbols. Lime is a white powder that's good at covering the smell of decomposing bodies. Ironically, it seems that the lime was sprinkled in vain. The smell of the rotting corpse of Homer Barron stopped wafting into the neighborhood of its own accord. Or maybe the town just got used to the smell. The lime is a symbol of a fruitless attempt to hide something embarrassing, and creepy. It's also a symbol of the way the town, in that generation, did things.

• The arsenic used to kill a stinky rat creates a foul stench, which the townspeople want to get rid of with lime. We should also note that arsenic is a favorite fictional murder weapon, due to its reputation for being odorless, colorless, and virtually undetectable by the victim. Director Franz Capra's 1944 film Arsenic and Old Lace is good example of this.

Death and Taxes

• 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" .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.

A Rose for Emily Setting

• 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,

• 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.

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.

A Rose for Emily Narrator: First Person (Peripheral Narrator)

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.

A Rose for Emily Genre

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."

A Rose for Emily Tone

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 salute…to a woman you would hand a rose

• 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.

What’s Up With the Title?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 salute…to a woman you would hand a rose.

What’s Up With the Ending?

• 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 crept 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.

• 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.

• 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" .She is family. What would you do?

A Rose for Emily Plot Analysis

Initial Situation

• Death and Taxes• As we discuss in "Symbols, Imagery,

Allegory," Faulkner might be playing on the Benjamin Franklin quote, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," in this initial scene. We move from a huge funeral attended by everybody in town, to this strange little story about taxes.

Conflict

• Taxes aren't the only thing that stinks.• The taxes seem tame compared to what comes next. In

Section II, we learn lots of bizarre stuff about Miss Emily: when her father died she refused to believe it (or let on she believed it) for four days (counting the day he died); the summer after her father died, she finallygets a boyfriend (she's in her thirties); when worried that her boyfriend might leave her, she bought some poison and her boyfriend disappeared, but there was a bad smell around her house. We technically have enough information to figure everything out right here, but we are thrown off by the issue of the taxes, and by the way in which facts are jumbled together.

Complication

• The Town's Conscience• For this stage it might be helpful to think of this

story as the town's confession. This section is what complicates things for the town's conscience. The town was horrible to Miss Emily when she started dating Homer Barron. They wanted to hold her to the southern lady ideals her forbearers had mapped out for her. She was finally able to break free when her father died, but the town won't let her do it. When they can't stop her from dating Homer themselves, they sick the cousins on her.

Climax

• "For Rats"• Even though this story seems all jumbled up

chronologically, the climax comes roughly in the middle of the story, lending the story a smooth, symmetrical feel. According to Faulkner, Homer probably was a bit of a rat, one which noble Miss Emily would have felt perfectly in the right to exterminate. Yet, she also wanted to hold tight to the dream that she might have a normal life, with love and a family. When she sees that everybody – the townspeople, the minister, her cousins, and even Homer himself – is bent on messing up her plans, she has an extreme reaction. That's why, for us, the climax is encapsulated in the image of the skull and crossbones on the arsenic package and the warning, "For rats."

Suspense• Deadly Gossip• As with the climax, Faulkner follows a traditional plot

structure, at least in terms of the story of Emily and Homer. Emily buys the arsenic, and at that moment the information is beamed into the brains of the townspeople. This is one of the nastiest sections. The town is in suspense over whether they are married, soon will be, or never will be. Their reactions range from murderous, to pitying, to downright interference. We also learn that Homer Barron was last seen entering the residence of Miss Emily Grierson on the night in question. So, we can be in suspense about what happened to him, though by the time we can appreciate that this is something to be suspenseful about, we already know what happened.

Denouement• The Next 40 Years• At this point, we've already been given a rough

outline of Emily's life, beginning with her funeral, going back ten years to when the "newer generation" came to collect the taxes, and then back another thirty some odd years to the death of Emily's father, the subsequent affair with Homer, and the disappearance of Homer. The story winds down by filling us in on Miss Emily's goings on in the 40 years between Homer's disappearance and Emily's funeral. Other than the painting lessons, her life during that time is a mystery, because she stayed inside.

Conclusion

• The Bed, the Rotting Corpse, and the Hair

• The townspeople enter the bedroom that's been locked for 40 years, only to find the rotting corpse of Homer Barron.

A Rose for Emily Theme of Isolation

• 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.

A Rose for Emily Theme of 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.

A Rose for Emily Theme of V isions 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 1 8 9 4 to 1 9 3 5 .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.

A Rose for Emily Theme of V ersions 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.

A Rose for Emily Theme of Compassion and Forgiveness

• "Compassion and Forgiveness" is another major theme that we can find in almost any Faulkner story. At first, it might not be apparent in this case. We almost have to be told that these sentiments are behind "A Rose for Emily" before we can see them. The story can seem downright cruel, the characters wholly unsympathetic, and the plot gross. When we begin to see the magnitude of the tragedy, and its impact on multiple generations, we understand the story is a call for understanding. The story seems to argue that forgiveness, compassion, and understanding can only come by facing the facts of the past and the present, which are tangled up together in an tight knot. Faulkner is both mercilessly subtle, and painfully blunt in this story, but we can feel the spirit of compassion rushing through.