This paper offers a comparative character analysis of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," focusing on how both authors use retrospective narration to generate reader empathy for deeply flawed protagonists. Faulkner's Emily Grierson is rendered sympathetic despite her disturbing actions through a collective neighborhood narrator that repeatedly voices pity for her decline. Olsen's unnamed mother justifies years of neglect through the lens of economic hardship and single parenthood, while her daughter Emily's early promise and ultimate resilience invite compassion. The paper argues that backstory and narrative framing are essential tools for humanizing otherwise unappealing characters.
This paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis across two short stories. It identifies a shared technique — retrospective narration as an empathy-building device — and then traces how each author applies that technique differently. Faulkner uses a collective communal narrator whose repeated "Poor Emily" cues the reader's sympathy, while Olsen uses first-person maternal retrospection to frame neglect as the product of poverty and circumstance. Grounding the comparison in a shared analytical lens keeps the essay focused rather than merely descriptive.
The paper follows a classic comparative essay structure: a framing introduction that names both texts and states the thesis, two body sections each dedicated to one work (Faulkner first, then Olsen), and a brief conclusion that restates the unifying argument. Each body section moves from plot summary to character description to empathy analysis, mirroring each other's internal logic and making the comparison easy to follow.
Complex characters tend to be challenging to write, especially when their circumstances and actions make them slightly unappealing. William Faulkner and Tillie Olsen, however, show that with brief stories about their characters' pasts, eliciting reader endearment is not so difficult after all. In Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Emily Grierson's character is shown through the eyes of a collective narrator. In Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," the narrator looks back on the rearing of a troubled child — also named Emily. Both authors retell stories that bring a kind of reader empathy toward their characters, particularly when the difficult pasts those characters faced are brought to light.
"A Rose for Emily" is a short story told in five sections, each reverting to a particular time period as narrated by a collective neighborhood voice. At the opening, Emily Grierson has just died, and men and women clamor to attend the funeral — the men out of a sense of obligation, and the women because they had not seen Emily in many years. Though born an aristocrat and an upstanding citizen of the town of Jefferson, the death of her father leaves Emily destitute. At thirty years old, her one promising romantic prospect is later revealed to be "interested in men." Rather than relinquish him, Emily buys arsenic and poisons him; the act is only discovered after Emily's burial at age 74.
It is clear from the descriptions that Emily is an unappealing, troubled character. The first physical description of Miss Emily presents her as a "small, fat woman in black," who "looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue." According to those who had gone to visit her about taxes, her eyes "looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another." When Emily throws the tax collectors out, she offers them nothing. She continues throughout the story to act in ways that suggest serious mental illness, and at some point townsfolk can only whisper about her hermit-like behavior.
Yet throughout the story, the reader cannot help but feel empathy for the deranged and perverse Miss Emily. Even the townsfolk could not help but pity her, especially when she is "left alone, and a pauper," a condition that paradoxically gives her a more humanized form. After her father dies, it becomes clear that Emily is a person to be pitied. Faulkner writes Emily's denial of her father's death, showing that she maintains the charade for three days before she "breaks down, and they buried her father quickly" — a moment that once more reveals the humanity beneath her disturbing exterior. Throughout Section IV of the narration, the townsfolk utter "Poor Emily" with increasing frequency, a cue that guides the reader toward recognizing just how pitiable she truly is.
Throughout both short stories, Faulkner and Olsen portray characters that are difficult to like. Had the reader not been given the characters' pasts as justification for their actions, empathy might be impossible to summon at all. But in "A Rose for Emily" and "I Stand Here Ironing," readers find that even though the characters are hard to fully embrace within their respective environments, both authors nevertheless succeed in creating the conditions under which genuine empathy becomes possible.
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