Faulkner's Battle Between Tradition and Modernity

Introduction: Tradition Versus Modernity in Faulkner's Story

William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily is a classic for many reasons, but most notably its exploration of the conflict between tradition and modernity — a tension that secures the story's place among the great works of modern American literature. The story employs a communal narrator who uses "we," making the narration less a first-person account than a collective, community-wide perspective. Faulkner employs symbols throughout his plot — symbols representing loss and isolation, most obviously — that speak to universal aspects of the human condition.

In A Rose for Emily, Emily Grierson is the embodiment of tradition: a woman who grew up in the pre-Civil War South, a time when social status and polite manners defined a person's identity. By the time of the story's present, however, the world has changed, and Miss Emily Grierson has become displaced — a ghost of another era. Faulkner himself referred to the story as a ghost story (Klein 232). The central conflict stems from the fact that the world has changed around Emily while she has grown increasingly isolated, an outcast from society — dead to the world even before she is literally dead. Emily has died before she has truly died, and this makes death another of Faulkner's powerful symbols. What Faulkner is adept at conveying is that we all belong to a place and a time, and that time marches on, leaving those who cling to bygone traditions to simply fade away.

The story is set in the post-Civil War South, where everyone is struggling to make sense of a new way of life — everyone, that is, except Emily, who remains in her decaying house, a shrine to days gone by. There is an atmosphere of change throughout the narrative, a sense of progression, and the reader can almost feel the wind blowing the old era away and ushering in the new. This sense of forward movement acts as a symbol of progress set in direct contrast to Emily's stasis.

Setting and the Post-Civil War South

It is the death of Emily's father that serves as a kind of marker for this change — fitting, because it is the death of one thing that allows for the rebirth of another. Yet Emily's response to her father's death reveals the depths of her denial: when the ladies of the town came to call on her after his passing, she spent three days refusing to acknowledge that he was gone, appearing in ordinary clothes, showing no signs of grief at all.

Into this atmosphere of transition comes Homer Barron, who represents the "birth of something else" — a new love affair and a symbol of the modern world pressing in on Emily's life. As Faulkner writes:

The Death of Emily's Father and the Arrival of Homer Barron

"The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee — a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face" (Faulkner 53).

It is Emily's desperate clinging to the past that constitutes the emotional core of the story. The narrative begins with Emily's death and then takes the reader back through her life — her slow, inevitable surrender to mortality. Faulkner describes her as "bloated, like a body submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue" (Faulkner 49), conjuring the image of a woman who has physically lived through life but remains suspended in it — motionless, floating in a world that will not release her.