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).

Narration and Point of View in Both Stories

In "Barn Burning," the narrator relates the tale in the third person and possesses at least limited omniscience, especially regarding Abner and Sarty. He knows about Sarty's fear, anxiety, and hunger, has some knowledge of the boy's future, and holds details about Abner that Sarty will never learn. When Abner limps out of the court held in the general store, for example, the anonymous narrator reveals that Abner was shot in the heel during the Civil War while stealing a horse — something Sarty does not know. As Abner beats Sarty because he believed "you were fixing to tell them. You would have told him," the narrator reveals that Sarty would indeed have done so, believing that the Justice of the Peace was genuinely interested in truth and justice (Faulkner). Abner knows better, though he has no power to change the system — only to irritate it at the margins.

Although Sarty was named after Abner's cavalry commander during the Civil War — Colonel Sartoris — and imagines his father was a great hero, the narrator knows that Abner joined the army primarily to loot and plunder from both sides.

In "A Rose for Emily," the narrator uses the third-person plural rather than "I" and perhaps represents the town of Jefferson, or at least its collective memory. Miss Emily's inner thoughts and motivations remain unknown beyond what the narrator can observe, because no one truly knows her — "no one save an old manservant…had seen her in at least ten years" (Faulkner). The narrator does not mention what happened to her mother, but describes her father as a cold, authoritarian figure who controlled her completely and drove away all her young suitors with a horsewhip. Evidently he had believed that "none of the young men were good enough for Miss Emily and such" (Faulkner). Even after he died, she refused to surrender his body for three days, and Faulkner strongly implies that their relationship may have been incestuous. Since Miss Emily and the town have ostracized each other, the only details known about her come through the narrator's filtered account.

Miss Emily: Isolation, Decay, and Aristocratic Pride

Miss Emily symbolizes the Southern gentry that fell on hard times after the Civil War — though ironically she shares her last name with a famous Union cavalry officer who led destructive raids through the region during the war. She has little money but retains an intense aristocratic pride and arrogance that most of the townspeople find off-putting. She evidently holds them in contempt as well, refusing to pay her property taxes and claiming she had been exempted from them years before.

Her house smells of death and decay — the reason the town had lime spread around it, as though it were a corpse in a graveyard. The townspeople may have long suspected that she murdered Homer Barron, having purchased arsenic "for rats." In this grim metaphor, Homer became a dead rat (Faulkner). He may have promised to marry her and then tried to leave, but Miss Emily ensured that the old, rotting house became his tomb. In every sense that matters, of course, the house was also her tomb: her existence there amounted to a kind of living death.

As the narrator describes her late in life, she "looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of a pallid hue" (Faulkner). This image of physical dissolution mirrors the moral and social dissolution that Faulkner associates with the aristocratic class she represents.

Conclusion: Two Portraits of a Dying Social Order

Miss Emily represents a decaying Southern aristocracy, trapped in the past and living out her lonely existence in a decrepit Gothic mansion. She symbolizes a dying social order, and in the end the reader learns that her only real companion has been the mummified body she has been sleeping beside for decades. We know little about her inner mental state — whether she is sane, whether she was a victim of incest — but her actions, seen through the eyes of others, reveal a profoundly disturbed and twisted personality. Only at the story's climax does the reader fully grasp how twisted Miss Emily and the social order she represents truly are.

The same is true, in a different register, of Abner and Sarty Snopes. The narrator provides more detail about their inner moods of fear, anger, and resentment than any character in "A Rose for Emily" receives, and reveals more about Abner than Sarty or his siblings will ever know. Abner has always been violent, dishonest, and powerless — a man who understands that the law and the land are controlled by an aristocratic elite increasingly becoming a capitalist elite in the aftermath of the Civil War. He can lie, cheat, and steal, but he ultimately has no control over his life or his world. He can burn down barns and run away, but he remains trapped in a condition of near-slavery. In the end, he clashes with a planter who shoots him dead.

Faulkner appears to reserve a measure of hope for Sarty alone. The boy's destination at the story's climax is unclear, but it could hardly be worse than the life he has escaped — one defined by hunger, poverty, illiteracy, and brutality. In placing these two stories side by side, Faulkner offers a sweeping vision of the American South as a society haunted by its own past, in which both the grandest mansion and the most wretched tenant farm are, in their own ways, Gothic monuments to failure and decay.