Rose for Miss Emily Writing

¶ … Rose for Miss Emily Writing instructors sometimes tell people to "write what they know." William Faulkner grew up in the Deep South. Presumably, he grew up with stories about the Civil War. If his story "A Rose for Miss Emily" is based on writing about what he knew, he used the experience of living in a small town along with a Southern view of the Civil War to create a chilling picture of small town life.

It shows why "write about what you know is good advice," because the story is full of details that show real understanding of the town where the story is set. Faulkner shows how time has passed in this town by describing the old house Miss Emily had lived in. It had been a fine Victorian house once, but now was near gas stations and cotton gins now, and like Miss Emily, its beauty had declined over the years. He also buries the town's history in details about the town.

Surface opinion was important in this town: in 1894, Miss Emily's father had had a law passed stating that no Negro woman could walk on the street unless she was wearing an apron. Such a law is shocking today but demonstrates that the town had rules about personal behavior. Miss Emily followed those rules, sedately allowing a man from "the North" to court her when it seemed that she would remain a spinster all her life.

While the town generally did not approve of Yankees, they also believed that Miss Emily was getting older, and if her only prospect was a Yankee, then they would find a way to go along with it. Other rules the town seemed to hold were that men should never treat a respected woman badly, and that revenge against a Yankee was sometimes justified. If Faulkner had just come out and stated these rules they would have seen silly, like the one about aprons.

Instead, Faulkner weaves these rules into general understandings on the part of the people in the town. Because of this, when we finally find out exactly what Miss Emily has done, it is understandable to the people of the town, and to the reader. The whole town seems to know that Miss Emily is living out a fiction. She believes that for some reason she does not have to pay the property tax everyone else in town must pay.

She says that at one time her father, "the Colonel," had a special arrangement. Nothing the town officials do can shake her from that notion, and in the end she gets away with not paying her property taxes. This sets us up to understand that Miss Emily is a "special case." She is a link to a more noble time in the town, almost like a living fossil.

The town will tolerate and even approve of a lot of eccentricities from Miss Emily because she represents what they think was a better time for the town. Miss Emily has a "manservant," something that also reminds people of an earlier, and in the opinion of some, a better, time. So even though she presumably is paying, feeding and clothing her servant with money that could have been used to pay her property taxes, no one objects.

In modern times, a manservant would not be viewed as a necessity, but it is understood that Miss Emily has not moved on to modern times. This odd behavior endears her to some. The narrator describes her as "Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town..." It is as if she is some kind of living museum. Miss Emily's status as some example of former greatness protected her in other ways. time came when her house.. well.. smelled.

A neighbor went to officials and complained. The response the neighbor got was, "Damn it, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" The assumption was that some animal, perhaps a rat, had died. The location of Miss Emily's house now being so unfortunate with the passage of time, this probably made sense to the town leaders. Rather than confront Miss Emily, they checked her property for carcasses, and sprinkled lime around to encourage the rapid decay if any bodies were about.

Such action is unimaginable today, which is one thing that makes the story so striking: the narrator reports these events as fact. What the narrator knows is not what the reader knows. He is giving us a peek into another time and place, a place he apparently knows well. There is no doubt Miss Emily did pecular things. When her father died, she refused to acknowledge his death for three days, and ten years later referred to him as if he were still alive.

In fact, when Miss Emily allowed the Yankee, a laborer, to court her, some approved of this because it suggested that Miss Emily was finally getting a little more in touch with reality. They suggested that -- even though she was a fine lady -- her father may have thought of their family as just a little better than they really were.

The result was that no man had been good enough for Miss Emily, leaving her in the predicament of being a spinster who had to accept the attentions of a Yankee. Well, times were changing. Miss Emily never lost her ability to set herself above the rules, however. When she went to the druggist to buy arsenic, the pharmacist insisted that because it was.