Elemets of the Prose A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

Guiuan




I. Elements of the Prose used:
Title: A Rose for Emily
Author: William Cuthbert Faulkner (Falkner) was born on September 25, 1897, at New Albany, Mississippi, U.S. He is an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was the eldest of four more sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi where his family moved in 1902. This history and culture of the American South posed a great influence on Faulkner throughout his childhood and also on his literary work later on.
The beginning of 1920s till the outbreak of World War II was the most productive period of Faulkner’s writing career. In addition to numerous short stories, Faulkner published 13 novels. Some of his most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932),and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulker’s short stories such as A Rose for Emily, Red Leaves, That Evening Sun, and Dry September have also contributed immensely to his fame. In addition to these, Faulkner also composed two volumes of poetry The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough in addition to a collection of short crime fiction stories Knight’s Gambit (1949). Faulkner’s work has widely been appreciated for its experimental manner, contemporary themes and the often used stream of consciousness technique

Genre: Southern Gothic (subgenre of Gothic fiction in American literature that takes place in South America.)

Settings:
The whole prose took place in a creepy old house in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi between years 1861 - 1933 approximately.

Plot:
1. Exposition
The narrator recalls the time of Emily Grierson’s death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for more than ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emily’s house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities to the town after her father’s death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out.
2. Rising action
The narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity. The townspeople have always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves, with Emily’s father driving off the many suitors deemed not good enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is still single by the time she turns thirty.
day after Mr. Grierson’s death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her father’s body over for burial.
The narrator describes a long illness that Emily suffers after this incident. The summer after her father’s death, the town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks, and a construction company, under the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is awarded the job. Homer soon becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station.
As the affair continues and Emily’s reputation is further compromised, she goes to the drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She offers no explanation, and the package arrives at her house labeled “For rats.”
Then, the narrator describes the fear that some of the townspeople have that Emily will use the poison to kill herself. Her potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly unlikely, despite their continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town insist that the Baptist minister talk with Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what happened and swears that he’ll never go back. So the minister’s wife writes to Emily’s two cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an extended stay. Because Emily orders a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homer’s initials, talk of the couple’s marriage resumes. Homer, absent from town, is believed to be preparing for Emily’s move to the North or avoiding Emily’s intrusive relatives.
After the cousins’ departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite the occasional lesson she gives in china painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In what becomes an annual ritual, Emily refuses to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes up the top floor of the house. Except for the occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the servant is seen going in and out of the house.
3. Climax
The narrator describes what happens after Emily dies. Emily’s body is laid out in the parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed, the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by the townspeople.
4. Falling action:
The narrator describes Homer's body, its attitude, and final posture, as well as the fact that it has essentially rotted so much that it "had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay.The room is frozen in time, with the items for an upcoming wedding and a man’s suit laid out. Homer Barron’s body is stretched on the bed as well, in an advanced state of decay.
5. Resolution:
The onlookers then notice the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer’s body and we learn that a long piece of Emily's easily identifiable hair is found on the pillow beside Homer's.  At this point, what we might have suspected is confirmed: Emily murdered Homer in order to prevent him from ever leaving her, as he apparently briefly did when her awful family came to visit at the request of the townsfolk.
Conflict:
• Man vs. Society – It is when Emily was being talked about all over her town. They’re obviously against on whatever things she’s doing inside her house. Especially when she went into some pharmacy to buy arsenic without a single hesitation on what she's doing.They're also intrigued when her house smelled so fishy—the time when he is about to kill Homer.

• Man Vs. Man- This conflict occurs during her younger years. Emily's father wanted to keep her for himself so he restrained the men who have interest on her to come and visit her on their house. She hated her father during those times but then she managed to just live simply with him though she never liked it.

• Man vs. Self-  Emily hated herself for being alone so she decided to kill Homer Barron—the only person who showed interest for her when the time her father died. She was able to accumulate the feeling of being fulfilled when Barron seemed to like her back. Knowing Homer Barron, who have said that she'll never marry, so Emily make every ways possible to keep him, by hook or by crook.
Characterization:
• Emily Grierson : She was also referred to as Miss Emily in the text, and is the main character of the short story. Miss Emily is described as “a small, fat woman” who lived within a modernizing town full of people who saw her as a very cold, very distant woman who lived in her past.

• Homer Barron - A foreman from the North. Homer is a large man with a dark complexion, a booming voice, and light-colored eyes. A gruff and demanding boss, he wins many admirers in Jefferson because of his gregarious nature and good sense of humor. He develops an interest in Emily and takes her for Sunday drives in a yellow-wheeled buggy. Despite his attributes, the townspeople view him as a poor, if not scandalous, choice for a mate. He disappears in Emily’s house and decomposes in an attic bedroom after she kills him.


• Judge Stevens - A mayor of Jefferson. Eighty years old, Judge Stevens attempts to delicately handle the complaints about the smell emanating from the Grierson property. To be respectful of Emily’s pride and former position in the community, he and the aldermen decide to sprinkle lime on the property in the middle of the night.

• Mr. Grierson - Emily’s father. Mr. Grierson is a controlling, looming presence even in death, and the community clearly sees his lasting influence over Emily. He deliberately thwarts Emily’s attempts to find a husband in order to keep her under his control. We get glimpses of him in the story: in the crayon portrait kept on the gilt-edged easel in the parlor, and silhouetted in the doorway, horsewhip in hand, having chased off another of Emily’s suitors.


• Tobe - Emily’s servant. Tobe, his voice supposedly rusty from lack of use, is the only lifeline that Emily has to the outside world. For years, he dutifully cares for her and tends to her needs. Eventually the townspeople stop grilling him for information about Emily. After Emily’s death, he walks out the back door and never returns.

• Colonel Sartoris - A former mayor of Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris absolves Emily of any tax burden after the death of her father. His elaborate and benevolent gesture is not heeded by the succeeding generation of town leaders.

Theme:
"People should let go of the past, and let’s see what tomorrow might bring."

        Emily was the proof of a person who always lived on the shadow of the past; she clung into it and was afraid of changing. The first evident that shows to the readers right on the description of Grierson's house "it was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street." The society was changing every minutes but still, Emily's house was still remained like a symbol of seventieth century. The next evidence
was the fact that Miss Emily had kept her father's death body inside the house and didn't allow burying him. She has lived under his control for so long, now all of sudden he left her, she was left all by herself, she felt lost and alone, so that she wants to keep him with her in order to think he's still living with her and continued controlling her life. The third proof and also the most interesting of this story, the discovery of Homer Barron's skeleton in the secret room. The arrangement inside the room showing obviously that Miss Emily has slept with the death body day by day, until all remained later was just a skeleton, she's still sleeping with it, clutching on it every night. Well, Emily didn’t have the guts to move on with her life because it seems like she needed love like any other man. Her love here was beyond sanity so it turned out to be an obsession. I think that in order for us to move with our lives, we should let go of the past and see what tomorrow might bring.

Point of View:
The prose was written in  third-person plural point of view from the perspective of the town. It feats the plural "we," indicating that the  vantage point is a collective rather than an individual.

Style:
Foreshadowing was used to prepare the reader for the big reveal at the end of the story. Some examples of foreshadowing include Emily buying the arsenic and Emily refusing to acknowledge anyone's death.

Summary:
"A Rose for Emily" opens with Miss Emily Grierson's funeral. It then goes back in time to show the reader Emily's childhood. As a girl, Emily is cut off from most social contact by her father. When he dies, she refuses to acknowledge his death for three days. After the townspeople intervene and bury her father, Emily is further isolated by a mysterious illness, possibly a mental breakdown.

Homer Barron’s crew comes to town to build sidewalks, and Emily is seen with him. He tells his drinking buddies that he is not the marrying kind. The townspeople consider their relationship improper because of differences in values, social class, and regional background. Emily buys arsenic and refuses to say why. The ladies in town convince the Baptist minister to confront Emily and attempt to persuade her to break off the relationship. When he refuses to discuss their conversation or to try again to persuade Miss Emily, his wife writes to Emily’s Alabama cousins. They come to Jefferson, but the townspeople find them even more haughty and disagreeable than Miss Emily. The cousins leave town.

Emily buys a men’s silver toiletry set, and the townspeople assume marriage is imminent. Homer is seen entering the house at dusk one day, but is never seen again. Shortly afterward, complaints about the odor emanating from her house lead Jefferson’s aldermen to surreptitiously spread lime around her yard, rather than confront Emily, but they discover her openly watching them from a window of her home.

Miss Emily’s servant, Tobe, seems the only one to enter and exit the house. No one sees Emily for approximately six months. By this time she is fat and her hair is short and graying. She refuses to set up a mailbox and is denied postal delivery. Few people see inside her house, though for six or seven years she gives china-painting lessons to young women whose parents send them to her out of a sense of duty.

The town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, tells Emily an implausible story when she receives her first tax notice: The city of Jefferson is indebted to her father, so Emily’s taxes are waived forever. However, a younger generation of aldermen later confronts Miss Emily about her taxes, and she tells them to see Colonel Sartoris (now long dead, though she refuses to acknowledge his death). Intimidated by Emily and her ticking watch, the aldermen leave, but they continue to send tax notices every year, all of which are returned without comment.

In her later years, it appears that Emily lives only on the bottom floor of her house. She is found dead there at the age of seventy-four. Her Alabama cousins return to Jefferson for the funeral, which is attended by the entire town out of duty and curiosity. Emily’s servant, Tobe, opens the front door for them, then disappears out the back. After the funeral, the townspeople break down a door in Emily’s house that, it turns out, had been locked for forty years. They find a skeleton on a bed, along with the remains of men’s clothes, a tarnished silver toiletry set, and a pillow with an indentation and one long iron-gray hair.

II. Critical Analysis

Self-evaluation:

Emily Grierson is a peculiar character, withdrawn from society with symptoms indicating mental illness. Her influence on the community was significant, though she was a very independent character. Seeing things through, I've realized that we ourselves had been like Emily Grierson, we have our own hidden mysteries inside ourselves. We have our own madness and the reason we have these is because we're not fine being alone. We are craving for love that we can't have. We have our own Homer Barrons inside our insane being who seemed to be the only person who can understand us , that we can't afford to lose because we think that they're all we've got. So we tend to keep them as long as we can because if they'll leave, we have no reason to live anymore. I think Emily just do what she did because she's just like any other human being who needs their other half to love them. Well, reciprocation in this story seemed like a dream so she just killed him—to keep him. It is quite ironic, that you loved a person so much that you can't contain it so you killed him. What we often do when we're longing something was to find it then once we found it, we don't want to let go of it. Never again.


Society:

The whole story centers around the lives of townspeople obsessed with a fellow woman who has shut herself out from their community. Although the lineage of Miss Emily Grierson has deep roots in the community, she is anything but a normal citizen. The town people did not know much about Emily, so their judgments were based mainly on hearsay, though Emily refused to let the town’s criticism affect her.
Dominated by a controlling father, whose death leaves Miss Emily very alone, she ostracizes herself from the town by having limited contact with the outside world for the remainder of her life. The community itself does little to coerce Miss Emily out of her forced seclusion. A few routine visits from the townspeople, companionship from Homer Barron, who is found as a skeleton in her house upon her death, and assistance from her housekeeper Tobe is the only interaction Miss Emily has with the outside world. In a community infiltrated with evolving social standards brought on by an ever changing political and technological country, Miss Emily is left as “the victim of southern tradition and culture”  Her victimization, and ultimate ostracism, is a result of the community’s inability to perceive Miss Emily as anything but a “high and mighty” Grierson who became a “disgrace to the town” when the working class , Homer Barron, began courting her.

The beginning and end of the story illustrates the townspeople’s almost indifferent opinion of Miss Emily’s death. From the beginning, the community depicts Miss Emily more as an unwanted object they wish to explore than a recently deceased person.
When a person dies, the initial reaction of most people would be to give their condolences to the next of kin or try in some way to put the deceased to rest, and some could argue that the men of the town do this, but most of the townspeople, arguably the women, attend her funeral purely to benefit their own curiosity.  Here, her death appears to be used to the townspeople’s advantage because it gives them an excuse to snoop around her house to see for themselves how this very private person had lived. At last they are able to enter her sanctuary to scrutinize her existence unsupervised by anyone. Although the townspeople may be indifferent to Miss Emily’s death, it does serve the town’s purpose of being able to force entry into the way she lived and violate her privacy.

Furthermore, the townspeople see Miss Emily more as a spectacle than an actual human being trying to find happiness in life. Miss Emily’s story begins with her father depriving her  of woman's happiness and isolating her from the outside world
Consequently, her father driving away all of her suitors with his controlling nature alienated her from society because the community thought the opinion of Miss Emily’s father was also Miss Emily’s opinion. This is why the townspeople thought “when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated”. Instead of feeling sorry for a woman that is nearing an age when spinster is the term most often used to refer to her, the townspeople are “vindicated” that she is still single. They see her as a snobby Grierson getting what she deserves and they enjoy watching her single status and her resulting loneliness continue. The town’s obsession with observing Miss Emily’s life further unfolds after her companion Homer Barron is believed to have left Jefferson for good.

What the story tells about society is that they'll never understand her because they tend to judge before they ask and maybe because it's her fault that she isolated herself.
But one thing here is for sure. For the society, she will never be enough.


Family:
The role of Emily's father is portrayed as a strict, oppressive figure who stifles her ability to grow as a woman by preventing young men from courting her.  Throughout her life, Emily submits to her father's will and is profoundly affected by his domineering personality. Her father's overprotective nature prevents her from developing meaningful relationships with people outside of her family, which explains her reclusive nature. Following her father's death, Emily initially refuses to acknowledge that he is dead and rarely leaves her home. As a grown woman, Emily defies the social standards of Jefferson and searches for love by dating Homer Barron, a working-class Yankee. Her fear of losing another loved one results in her decision to kill Homer Barron. Overall, Emily's unstable mental state can be viewed as a result of growing up with a tyrannical father in an oppressive, austere home.