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William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"

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Student Responses
Virginia Commonwealth University

The title of a story often contains symbolism about a character or the meaning of the work as a whole. In "A Rose for Emily" the title explains a lot about the character of Miss Emily. The rose in the title may not be an actual rose, but rather a symbol of the town's love and admiration for her. It is easy to imagine a sorrowful burial for Miss Emily at which someone places a single rose on her coffin as a sign of respect for this admired woman. I think that Emily is very much respected in her town. Maybe not because she was such a wonderful woman, but because she symbolized the essence of humanity. She was in love and lost love; she had to deal with rejection while in the public eye. It is almost as if the respect and admiration is rooted in the town's sympathy for her. At one point, the narrator talks about how the townspeople would say "Poor Emily" as she rode past them in her buggy alongside of Homer. The townspeople knew that she was going to lose Homer because he had even said that he was "not the marrying type." They knew that she was going to get her heart broken. There is much more symbolism in this story, too. Her name is also important: "Miss Emily" shows a sign of respect from the townspeople. Also, the narrator talks about her steel gray hair: "Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man." It seems to symbolize her strength and vitality even in old age. Essentially, this story revolves around Emily's family's past and their reputation in the town. Her respected reputation is expressed through the symbolism in the title.

Chad

As the story is told, we do not know what Emily has planned, though we are led to believe that her life is determined by fate. We understand her diminishment only after her death. When her sweetheart deserted her I am sure that it caused a lot of pain. He was not the first man to leave her, after all. When Emily was sure that she loved Homer Barron, she had to do something because of her fear of losing love again. She was somehow able to justify poisoning him. Emily was content only when she knew that the love she was searching for would not leave her.

I wondered where the rose was in "A Rose for Emily"; that is why I chose to look at this story more closely. I do not expect my interpretation to be accepted by many, but maybe partially by most. The title "A Rose for Emily" might be deceiving. I was half expecting someone to give Emily a rose, and have it change her life. There are, however, several subtle points within the story that might refer to its significance.

Emily's father was a controlling man, and he had a lot of influence in Emily's life. He might be viewed as the stem of Miss Emily's rose, for as a rose stem has thorns for protection, Emily's father discouraged suitors, and protected Emily from outsiders. Emily herself might be the blossom, a shy protected bud as a child and young woman. Then she blossoms as she falls in love, and finally begins to wilt when she does not expose herself to enough sun. Emily treated Homer in a similar manner to how someone might care for roses (though I imagine it is rare that someone deliberately kills a rose). She had prepared a room for him with the finest settings. When roses are set in a vase it usually takes a small amount of manipulation to place them just right, and set them down in just the right position. A rose is sometimes preserved as a keepsake after it dies. This is done by placing the rose between pages in a book. We learn in the end that Emily has done the same with Homer; she has placed him between the sheets, and in a way preserved him in the room. Maybe she would visit the room to remember the moments they shared. There are also several references to the color rose in the story. The room in which Homer was kept was decorated in rose-colored textiles and rose-shaded lights. Emily, though pitiful, somehow saw the world "through rose-colored glasses." Emily was quite optimistic that things would go her way, she saw herself to be above the laws that others must abide.

Although the idea cannot be colored, another interesting aspect of the story is the conflict between the past and present, or Emily versus her society. I included this quote with my first posting, yet it is so profound, I will ask you to look at it another time. It is a description of those who attended the funeral of Miss Emily Grierson.

. . . talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her, and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years. (282)

Miss Emily refused to live in the present manner of society. The society she lived in refused to remember the past. Emily could not have dealt with this; she saw her past as what defined her. Others, however, might have seen her as irrational. Miss Emily's rose was her death; she would not have survived in the conditions outside her home.

Malissa

In Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" the perspective of Miss Emily is a bit distorted and might not even be accurate because the story was narrated by the townspeople. It seems that the story is told through the town's collective unconsciousness, or maybe everyone is reminiscing about this woman and the oddities surrounding her death.

This story skips around a lot, which is probably due to the fact that so many people are contributing to this story. Through the narration of the townspeople, varying perspectives of Miss Emily's character are shown. At the beginning of the story she is seen as "a tradition, a duty, a care," a discarded fragment left over from the dead aristocracy; at another point she is seen as a fallen woman when she was courting Homer Barron and the ladies of the town "began to say it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example for the young people"; sometimes she is likened to an angel, and at others she seems to "vanquish" the town. Although she is a town relic shrouded in mystery (and surrounded by controversy and rumors), everyone in the town has respect for her because she was a part of the glorious past. This is shown through the way the whole town goes to her funeral. Though it might seem as though the townspeople barged into her house, they saw the people from outside of the town as the intruders. I think that the town described this part of the story to distance themselves from the hideous scene, to push away the terrible knowledge that Emily killed someone (imagine, a member of the aristocracy!) and to displace some of the guilt they might have felt about the way they treated Emily during her lifetime. It's interesting how Emily was a hermit for so long and when she dies her cousins appear from nowhere; old men come in their Confederate uniforms and everyone stands "on the porch and lawn, talking of Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that she had danced with her . . . confusing time with its mathematical progression."

Through the narration of the townspeople, the reader realizes how the town and the people change, but Emily refuses to. Even though she tries to make a small living by teaching classes where "the daughters and great-granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries" could learn to paint, slowly the "newer generation" fell away from this tradition. When the new postal services arrived, Emily refused to let the town put numbers up. Although this might seem insignificant, later on one realizes that Emily didn't want anything to change from the way things were in the past which is probably the main reason that she killed Homer Barron, aside from loneliness and a touch of insanity (you would have to be crazy to keep a corpse in your house for that long and not mind the smell).

The key to this story is the bias of the townspeople towards Emily and the hypocrisy that they don't realize they have. By observing the way the townspeople describe Emily and the happenings of her life, one gets a feel for the biases these people harbor towards Emily, the past aristocracy and all types of general things. Though this story might seem as though it is only about one woman, it's also about how people develop (and distort) their view of others.

Kenya

Point of view is very important in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." Readers have to remember that they are getting the point of view from somebody outside of Emily's world. The narrator seems to be a townsperson telling Emily's story. As a reader we never get to hear Emily's point of view. We are constantly being told facts from this unknown person about her. We are supposed to take his/her word. This gives the reader a very limited amount of knowledge. Having this limited amount of knowledge is therefore bound to shape the reader's reaction to the story. If, however, we had been given Emily's point of view, would our reaction to the story have changed? Would we feel differently about Emily?

The narrator of the story often refers to himself throughout the story as "we." "We had long thought of them as a tableau. . . ." It may be that the narrator is the town and that this is how the town itself saw her. This may be the town's collective thought on the eccentric among them, a conglomeration of how they all saw and thought of her. I got the feeling while reading the story that the town felt as if they owned Emily. For example, look at the way that they talk about her. They took great liberties in thinking that they know a great deal more information than they possibly could. When the older ladies begin to talk about Emily and Homer Barron they said things like "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer" or "Do you suppose it's really so?" "Of course it is. What else could . . ." By giving us this point of view the narrator or narrators make us side more with them in this instance than with Emily. If we had gotten Emily's point of view we may have seen her in a much different light. It may have been that Homer Barron was going to leave her, or attacked her and that is why she killed him. Or perhaps the reason that she never left the house is because whenever she did she had prying eyes on her. She may have felt the need to hide in her home because when she left she was always being picked apart.

Tanya

"A Rose for Emily" is told from the point of view of the townspeople. Similar to a folk tale, the stories of Miss Emily have been passed down from one generation to the next, to a point when almost anyone in the town could have told this story of her life. The narrator, or narrators, freely associate one occurrence to the next to provide the reader with an overall picture of Miss Emily's life.

William Faulkner presents a reccurring theme—through details, sentences and repetitions—to imply Miss Emily's unwillingness to adapt to the changes taking place in the small southern town.

Miss Emily's house "had once been" white and sat on what "had once been" a most select street. But now, it is surrounded by cotton gins, garages and gasoline pumps—"an eyesore among eyesores." The idea of dust, or stagnation, was evident throughout the house: "it smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell." Her front door remained closed for the last ten years of her life. I picture Miss Emily liking to keep everything in its place. Her desires throughout her life remain unknown, making her a very mysterious character.

Her inability to accept change is evident throughout the story by her reaction to various circumstances. For example, when Miss Emily's father died she told everyone "he was not dead" as she tried to "cling to that which had robbed her." When the city authorities came to her house to collect the taxes, "she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water" and disregarded the new authorities by saying "perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson." And furthermore, when the town got free postal delivery Miss Emily refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it.

When she died, the whole town went to her funeral for the "fallen monument." She represents an unwillingness to conform to the present times in the townspeople's appreciation of the past. "Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town." Within her house, she enshrined her bedroom, "furnished as a bridal" with the man's collar and tie described "as if they had just been removed." The man himself lay in the bed, further exemplifying her hold on the past and the theme of her unwillingness to change.

John

"A Rose for Emily" is a story that contains a lot of foreshadowing. The main foreshadowings that I found in this story were: one, the smell that the townsfolk experienced, and two, the disappearance of Homer Barron. The first time that I saw foreshadowing in this story was when the narrator is discussing how Emily acted when her father passed away. The narrator is describing the events that took place when the ladies in the town tried to comfort Emily in her time of pain. When the ladies came to Emily's house they were greeted at the door by Emily, who told them "that her father was not dead." She did not want any comfort and refused to admit her father was dead. "She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body." I thought this was extremely strange behavior but the townsfolk just passed it off as her way of grieving. The fact that she would not let them dispose of the body had me thinking. I wondered what in the world was wrong with this woman. If it had been me, I would not have wanted to continue to live in a house with a dead body. In this statement, the reader is clued in that Emily has a few screws loose.

After Emily's father has passed away we are brought back into history and told about the problems the townsfolk have had with Emily and her taxes. We are told that she "vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart—the one we believed would marry her—had deserted her." This is a big foreshadowing; we are told that the smell came after her sweetheart disappeared. So, this is a foreshadowing of events that are to come. Soon we will discover that the smell was a smell of a rotting decaying man in Emily's house.

The next thing that I noticed was when Emily went to the drug store to purchase some poison. When the druggist asked Emily what she wanted the poison for she changed the subject and avoided the question. She simple stated, "I want some poison." It's funny to me that all of the townsfolk assumed that Emily would kill herself. Why would she kill herself, she was not acting suicidal nor did she seem depressed. She just simply liked to stick to herself and I can't blame her.

The next thing that I thought was pretty obvious foreshadowing was when the narrator was discussing Homer Barron. The narrator is talking about the last time they saw him and he says, "A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron." I immediately thought that is where the smell has come from. She has killed the man and he is rotting away. I thought this the first time I read the story and I was right.

Sabrina

In this story, re-reading is effective in helping the reader determine the significance of the way the story is told and how this relates to the impact of the narrator's point of view. Even though the identity of the narrator is not directly revealed, they/he play a major role in this story. Through the narrator's description of Miss Emily Grierson's life, we can determine what kind of person they/he were and how this relates to how we view Miss Emily.

Had the narrator been an outsider, meaning someone not from the county of Yoknapatawpha, this story may have been quite different. From the beginning of the story, there are clues that prove that the narrator was a representative of the town, by Faulkner's use of the term we; "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral" (275). As the story progresses, the narrator paints a more detailed picture of Miss Emily, in the manner that only someone who knew her could.

Miss Emily, the daughter of a prominent member of society, is the epitome of fallen grace. A member of the prominent Grierson family of Yoknapatawpha County, she never lived an ordinary life. Having been denied the freedom to establish many relationships with people other than family, it is no surprise that when Miss Emily's father dies, she does not know what to do, "being left alone, and a pauper." Trying to maintain the dignity of her family, Miss Emily must learn to live on her own; "She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted to touch the earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness" (279).

Even when the townspeople began to question Miss Emily's behavior, the narrator does not allow the reader to become too judgmental of her. On the day of her father's funeral, when Miss Emily refused to accept that her father was dead, the narrator's description of her is evidence of the sympathy they felt toward her: "We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will" (278).

Although Miss Emily's actions may cause us to condemn her, the perspective of the narrator is important in this story, because it prevents us from doing so. She is a representative of the older class in her society and although her attempts to maintain the dignity of her family were ill-fated, Miss Emily was still revered in this town and maybe even loved: "Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson" (276).

Tamika

One of the things of most interest to me in this story was the townspeople. Although only one person was telling the story, they referred to themselves as We, so as to include all of the people of the town. This lets the reader know that the characters were given names out of necessity (Madam, Judge Stevens, The Druggist), instead of characterization. I thought this was particularly interesting. It is obvious that the author wanted to define specific characters in the town, and at the same time make the town seem like only one person. In making the town seem like only one person, it was easy for the author to give the idea that all of the townspeople thought alike. Also, when the author gives the impression that all of the townspeople think alike, the impression is that what they are thinking must be true. It may be easy to assume that the logic of one person may be incorrect. However, it is not as easy to believe that a lot of people can be incorrect. The author was counting on our natural human way to assume that because a lot of people do it, then it must be right.

Dadrika

There is some foreshadowing that Miss Emily had killed Homer Barron. In section II of this story we read, ". . . just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart . . . had deserted her." It gives a hint that something happened but the reader may see this as her sweetheart left her. But further on the story progresses in section III, "Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic," after she had been with Homer Barron for about a year or so. But she wouldn't say what the poison was for. Arsenic is often used in murder mysteries by the murderer. Later in section IV, after Homer had left town then came back, "A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron." This is another hint that ties the first two together. It wasn't said in the text that anyone saw Homer ever leave the house. Then the smell developed.

One last thought, after reading "A Rose for Emily," I honestly think that the "rose" for Emily was Homer Barron. A rose often is used as a symbol of love. When Homer Barron came to town with the work force, Miss Emily fell in love with him. What made me think of this was a paragraph in section V at the end of the story, as quoted below:

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and funished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

Faulkner describes the bed in rose colors, and Homer is lying in that bed. The rose is a sign of remembrance also. I remember at my grandmother's funeral, each of us placed a rose on her coffin. And the entire story was about the people remembering Miss Emily's life.

Trevor

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