A Rose for Emily

• William Faulkner

  • 1897 - 1962 in Mississippi, USA
  • 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.”
  • The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
  • Usual theme: decay of the South, racism, social and moral burdens
• SOUTHERN Gothic literature

  irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires,

  and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and

  an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation.
• A Rose For Emily: The Forum, 1930
• Anti-Commercialism:

  • garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated
  • the belief that quality, artistic value, or doing good is more important than advertising and making a profit
  • cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an
• Psychological: denial

  “Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves." "But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?"
• Psychological: repression/superego

  “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of

  them framed by the back-flung front door.”
• Stream of Consciousness

  “When her father died, it got about that the house

  was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were

  glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left

  alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized.

  Now she too would know the old thrill and the old

  despair of a penny more or less.”
• Multiple POV; Unreliable Narrator:

  “SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene... When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."
• •Juxtaposition:

  “Then the newer generation became the backbone

  and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils

  grew up and fell away and did not send their children

  to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and

  pictures cut from the ladies' magazines."

  • the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.
• •Psychological: necrophilia

  “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the

  indentation of a head. One of us lifted something

  from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible

  dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long

  strand of iron-gray hair."
• The Resurfacing of the Taboo:

  Her relationship and killing of Homer is her way

  rebelling against the lasting effects of her father’s

  repression and control.