Faulkner's Southern Gothic: Barn Burning and A Rose for Emily

Introduction: Faulkner's Southern Gothic World

William Faulkner's short stories are told by an omniscient narrator who likely represents the author himself, and in their plots, characters, and symbolism they have often been classified as Southern Gothic horror. His characters are horrors — frequently satirical, humorous, and bizarre caricatures of the different social classes of the South, spanning the era of slavery through the New (Capitalist) South of the twentieth century. They are often violent, deranged, frustrated, and physically and psychologically isolated.

In "A Rose for Emily," the reader knows very little about the thoughts or inner emotional state of Miss Emily — only that she was a recluse her entire life, completely isolated from human contact. Her father was a stern patriarch who controlled her life absolutely and, it seems, continues to do so even after his death, opening the story to a wide range of feminist readings. She is a prisoner in everything but name, whether by her own choice or because society has ostracized her. Her only companion, it emerges, was the mummified body of her lover Homer Barron, though Faulkner reveals the truly Gothic nature of this horror only at the very end of the story.

In "Barn Burning," Faulkner turns his gaze on the Snopes family — itinerant tenant farmers in Mississippi led by the cruel and violent Abner, a man who hates the planter class that controls his life as well as the Black people, women, and children positioned below him on the social scale. He can get even with the elite only through acts of petty deceit, violence, and vandalism, since he is politically and economically powerless. At the same time, he vents his rage and frustration on those even lower down the social ladder than himself.

"Barn Burning" is a grim tale whose plot centers on the Snopes family — poor white tenant farmers in Mississippi during the 1890s. As the story unfolds, the stark reality of the poverty and brutality that young Sarty must endure becomes painfully clear. He is so accustomed to extreme deprivation and violence that he literally cannot imagine any other condition of life. He is "small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him" (Faulkner). He cannot read or write, but he smells the food in the general store and knows he is very hungry. The family's few possessions — "the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl which would not run" — also reveal the depths of their poverty (Faulkner).

Miss Emily Grierson represents the opposite end of the white social spectrum from the Snopes family, yet she too is a Southern Gothic horror and caricature. Her lifespan runs roughly from the 1860s to the 1930s, all spent in Faulkner's imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its capital of Jefferson — a setting that represents an agrarian America whose time is passing. She lives isolated from the world in an old, decaying Gothic mansion that functions in many ways as a prison, reflecting her psychological isolation. As the narrator puts it, "she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro to wait on her" (Faulkner).