This essay compares and contrasts two literary characters — Miss Emily from William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Miss Brill from Katherine Mansfield's short story of the same name — both of whom refuse to accept change and retreat into delusional fantasy worlds. The paper argues that Emily symbolizes the stubborn resistance of the past against an inevitable future, embodied through her relationship with Homer Barron as a metaphor for industrialization and Reconstruction-era America. Miss Brill is examined as a parallel figure whose distorted perception of reality leads to painful self-discovery. Together, the two characters illustrate how denial of change produces loneliness, misery, and ultimately tragic self-deception.
Miss Emily and Miss Brill are two highly interesting yet complex characters who refuse to accept change and are thus stubbornly — or naively — living in the past. Both women symbolize the destruction and decay that befall those who refuse to move forward with the times and prefer instead to inhabit their own fantasy worlds. The past is meant to perish because the forces of change are more powerful than the memories of yesteryears. Those who refuse to acknowledge this fact lead lonely lives and become as rusty a figure as the past they cling to.
William Faulkner's character Emily is one such stubborn, obstinate woman who cannot move forward with time. She refuses to accept that the world is changing and that new values are replacing old ones. She is afraid that she will not be able to keep pace with changing times and therefore simply closes her eyes to the future and turns a deaf ear to the bells of change. The story is set during a period when change was entering America with a vengeance — not the minor shifts of ordinary times, but a period of massive, global transformation in which industrialization completely altered the reality people had known. Such sweeping change must have been very difficult for some people, causing them to construct a world of delusion around themselves. This is precisely what Emily does. She wants to believe that the past is still intact and cannot come to terms with the fact that life moves on and requires us to leave the past behind and embrace the future.
Though Emily's character certainly arouses sympathy in many readers, we must take into account the era in which the story was written to understand what she actually represents. Faulkner does not intend for readers to simply sympathize with this character or to read the story merely as a mystery with an evil twist at the end. Rather, the story was primarily written to describe the psychology of certain people during times of massive national and global change. It is a story about the romance of the past, the freshness of the future, and the fear of the unknown. Emily represents the struggle of the past to overcome the future — but the future ultimately wins, because it is destined to do so. The following passage from the story makes this clear:
"Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years."
There is another telling incident in Emily's life that illustrates her obsession with clinging to the past and blocking the influx of new traditions and ideas. This incident occurs when a man of decidedly modern views enters her life and Emily falls in love with him. Faulkner uses this relationship symbolically to represent the collision of past and future. While Homer Barron is a true representative of the future — a product of the age of industrialization — Emily represents the past and those who have stood steadfastly against change. When these two people meet, it is in effect a meeting of the past with the future, and that is why conflict inevitably follows.
Reading the story in this context provides a much clearer picture of the era when Reconstruction was underway and industrialization was rapidly reshaping people's lives. The new was supplanting the old, and according to this universal law, it was destined that Homer would move beyond the past — that is, beyond Emily. Homer, as the representative of the future, wanted to leave the past behind; but Emily could not bear to see the past defeated and therefore refused to let him go. Unable to defeat the future by any other means, she decides to end it. By destroying one representative of change and the future, she believes she has emerged victorious in the battle between past and future — but she is gravely mistaken. She only becomes unhappier and ultimately meets a sad end.
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