Rose for Emily Faulkner's Battle

¶ … Rose for Emily Faulkner's Battle Between Tradition and Modernity in a Rose for Emily William Faulkner's famous story "A Rose for Emily" is a classic for many reasons, most notably, the theme of tradition vs. modernity is most likely what keeps the story from being one of the greats of modern literature. The story uses a narrator, which makes the story a first person account, however, the fact that he or she uses "we" makes the narrator more "first people" than first person.

Faulkner employs many symbols in his plot -- symbols than represent loss and isolation, most obviously -- that are universal to the human condition. In "A Rose for Emily," Emily Grierson, the antagonist of the story, is the tradition, a woman who grew up in pre-Civil War South, a time when social status and polite manners were the characteristics that defined a person and made them who they were.

In Faulkner's story, the time has now changed and Miss Grierson, Emily, is a woman who has become displaced in the world -- a sort of a ghost of another time. Interestingly enough, Faulkner referred to his short story as a ghost story (Klein 232). The conflict revolves around the fact that the world has changed around Emily while she has become isolated, an outcast from society -- dead to society.

Emily has died even before she has really died, which makes death another symbol in Faulkner's tale and one that secures its place in literature as a piece of work that speaks directly to humanity's obsession with its own mortality. What Faulkner is adept at pointing out is that we all belong to a place and a time and, just as it did for Emily, time marches on and leaves those who are traditions of by-gone times simply fade away. The setting of the story is post-Civil War South.

Everyone is trying to make sense of the new way of life -- everyone but Emily, who remains in her house that is replete with a shrine to days gone by. There is an environment of change in the air, progression, and the reader can almost feel the wind blowing away the old time and bringing in the new, a symbol of progress.

It is the death of Emily's father that feels like the marker for this change, which is fitting because it is the death of something that allows for the rebirth of something else. Though this took some time as when the ladies in the town went to call on Emily following her father's death, for three days she remained in denial that he was gone; she was in normal clothes, not grieving at all.

It is Homer Barron, Emily's lover, which is the birth of something else -- a love affair. The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee -- a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face (Faulkner 53). It is Emily's hanging onto the past that is the resounding feeling throughout Faulkner's story.

The story begins where the reader learns of her death, but the reader is then taken on her journey, her slow giving in to death. In fact, Faulkner describes her as "bloated, like a body submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue" (Faulkner 49), giving the idea of a woman who has physically lived life, but yet is still hanging on, floating in life, motionless and suspended in a world that also won't let her go.

What perhaps is the most troubling about Faulkner's story, and what resounds for all readers who read "A Rose for Emily," is the way in which Emily is not only not able to move with the times, but that she is not able to let go of anything. First her father's death and then Homer's. She is responsible for killing Homer and it is her way of keeping him near her -- though it obviously does not work, proving just how strong death is.

No one is able to escape death and thus no one is able to escape time. Though Emily kept Homer in her house until he.