Literary Analysis a Rose Emily William Faulkner

Rose for Emily Emily as a Symbol of the South in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a complex short story that investigates the conflicted nature of the post-War South. Emily Grierson represents the Old World aristocracy, refined in its manners and in its dignity. She represents the glory of the South. And yet the South is fallen; defeated by the Union, it has lost is glory. Its sense of order has been overturned and its hope for the future looks dim.

So, too, with Emily, whose reclusion mirrors the South's withdrawal from the pursuit of the rights it fought for. This paper will analyze the way Faulkner uses Emily to convey the desperate and sad plight of South in the years following the Civil War. Emily's supposed marriage to Homer, the Yankee laborer from the North, represents the return of the South to the Union after the war. Beneath the Southern State's dignity, surrender was viewed as inevitable but tragic.

The land-owners of the South were different from the industrial North, just as Emily is different in class from Homer Barron. But Emily's marriage to Homer does not go through, as the townspeople imagined it would. Faulkner does not give the exact details of what happens. Instead, he observes Emily and her actions from a distance, giving information as though he were only one more onlooker.

He does not make use of the third-person omniscient narrator because he himself only wants to suggest, hint, give a sketch of who Emily and the South really are. What Faulkner does reveal, however, is the fact that Homer disappeared, that Emily became a recluse; that she refused to pay taxes and that the community, out of respect, sorrow and pity, looked the other way; that a rotten smell began to emanate from her home and that the community took measures to mask the smell.

All of these details, while important to the plot, serve a symbolic purpose: they represent the decay of the Southern lifestyle. The good manners and insistence on class, dignity and respect cannot cover over the fact that corruption has set in. The South, for all its grandeur, suffered from the same human defects and vices as the rest of the world. So, too, does Emily.

It is never clear why she kills Homer; perhaps he tried to refuse her and she took his life rather than suffer the shame of being turned down by a Yankee. Perhaps she killed him because she imagined that only in death could a Southerner ever truly be united to a Northerner. Faulkner does not exactly give the reason for this murder.

He does show, however, the Emily continued to sleep with the dead corpse of Homer, for the townspeople find the indentation of her head on the pillow beside Homer's decomposed body. They find one of her gray hairs. The horror of knowing that Emily had been living with a corpse for so many years reflects the greater societal horror that was the relationship between the South and the North after the.