A Rose for Emily: Faulkner's Southern Gothic Storytelling

Introduction: Writing What You Know

Writing instructors sometimes tell people to "write what you know." William Faulkner grew up in the Deep South and presumably absorbed stories about the Civil War from an early age. If his story "A Rose for Emily" reflects that advice, then Faulkner drew on the experience of living in a small Southern town — along with a distinctly Southern memory of the Civil War — to create a chilling portrait of small-town life. The story is full of precise details that demonstrate a deep understanding of the world it depicts, which is exactly why "write what you know" is such enduring advice.

The Town as Setting and Social World

Faulkner establishes the passage of time by describing the old house Miss Emily had lived in. It had once been a fine Victorian home, but by the story's present it stands awkwardly near gas stations and cotton gins, its beauty faded — much like Miss Emily herself. He also buries the town's history in carefully chosen details. Surface opinion mattered enormously in this community: in 1894, Miss Emily's father had a law passed stating that no Black woman could walk on the street unless she was wearing an apron. Such a law is shocking by modern standards, but it demonstrates that this town had deeply held rules about personal behavior and social order.

Miss Emily largely followed those rules. She sedately allowed a man from "the North" to court her when it seemed she would otherwise remain a spinster for life. While the town generally disapproved of Yankees, they also recognized that Miss Emily was getting older, and if her only romantic prospect was a Yankee, they would find a way to accept it.

Other unwritten rules governed the town as well: men should never treat a respected woman badly, and revenge against a Yankee was sometimes considered justified. Had Faulkner stated these rules outright, they would have seemed as absurd as the apron ordinance. Instead, he weaves them into the shared assumptions of the townspeople. Because of this, when we finally discover what Miss Emily has done, her actions feel comprehensible — both to the people of the town and to the reader.

Miss Emily as a Living Relic of the Old South

The whole town seems to sense that Miss Emily is living out a kind of fiction. She believes, for instance, that she is exempt from the property taxes everyone else in town must pay, citing a vague special arrangement her father — "the Colonel" — supposedly made long ago. Nothing the town officials do can shake her from this conviction, and in the end she gets away with paying nothing. This episode establishes Miss Emily as a "special case": a living link to a more aristocratic era, almost like a fossil from another age. The town is willing to tolerate — and even quietly approve of — a great many eccentricities from Miss Emily because she represents what they imagine was a finer time.

She also keeps a "manservant," a detail that reminds people of an earlier and, in some minds, better time. Even though she presumably uses money on his wages, food, and clothing that could have gone toward her tax bill, no one objects. In modern terms, a manservant would not be considered a necessity, but it is understood that Miss Emily has not moved on to modern times. This odd arrangement only endears her further to certain members of the community. As the narrator puts it, "Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town." She functions, in effect, as a kind of living museum.

This is the Southern Gothic tradition at work: Faulkner uses the decaying grandeur of Miss Emily's life to reflect a broader regional psychology — a culture that romanticizes its own past to the point of delusion.

Conclusion: Belief as Backdrop for Extreme Behavior

"Write what you know," as illustrated by "A Rose for Emily," does not simply mean writing down the beliefs of the people you grew up around. In Faulkner's hands, it means something more sophisticated: make those beliefs the backdrop of your story, and then show the extreme behavior that could plausibly grow from them. The customs of Miss Emily's town — its deference to class, its romanticization of the Old South, its unwritten rules about ladies and Yankees and propriety — do not excuse what Miss Emily did. But they make it legible. Perhaps a better formulation of the familiar advice would be: use what you know when you write.