Review of a Rose for Emily
A Rose for Emily is a very popular short story because of its style, climax, and plot. The author, William Faulkner, was a Southern writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner bases this story on the tale of Oxford's aristocracy Miss Mary Neilson. She married Captain Jack Hume, the charming Yankee foreman of a street-paving crew, over her family's shocked protests. The style of this story is false romance. Miss Emily's father, before his death, would run off every man that tried to court her. Because of this, she felt any man she loved would leave her. After falling in love with Homer Baron, she feared he would run off like the others. To keep this from happening, she poisoned him and kept his body upstairs in the bedroom. The climax focuses on the room where the corpse was found. After Miss Emily's death, the town people were cleaning up the house and found a room that was locked. They had to break down the door. To their surprise, they found Homer Baron's corpse lying in the bed dressed in a night shirt. As the story progresses there is no indication that he had died. When they found the toilet things sitting on the dresser with initials H.B., it was well known that the corpse was Homer Baron. I first thought it was her father in the bed, but I realized that her father was
already buried. I then knew it had to be her lover. I cringed on the thought of what she did while she was lying next to the corpse. Finally, the end of this story surrounds a woman's life from her mid twenties until her death at the age of seventy-four. It describes a prominent lady of a town who led a private life. I learned, while reading this story that this woman is crazy and had the mind of a child. She seemed to lose everything she loved.
But I still have a question. The question is “Where is the rose in the A Rose for Emily?” Emily was never given a rose, even when she died there was no mention of a rose. In the story the only time a scented thing was mentioned was lime to cover a smell. Emily like the insinuated rose is never present in the story. Even when Emily has a line of dialog it is spoken thought the filter of the narrator’s perspective. The narrator or the town is concerned with what role Emily is playing, although since Emily is not present in the story, but through hearsay, the reader has to decipher between the roll assigned to her by the narrator and actuality of the role Emily fulfills.
Everyone went to Emily’s funeral. No one went to the funeral out of respect for the dead. Emily became a person known only though hearsay between town folk. No one knew Emily. “Women went out of curiosity to see the inside of her house.” The women went to the funeral to fill a gap.
In a time where entertainment wasn’t prevalent, Emily became the late night drama and sole topic of conversation for the town. The town did not morn, the person, Emily they mourned the personified topic of
conversation. The town paid respect to the topic that took up time in their conversations.
The town saw Emily as inseparable from what she was. The town saw Emily as, “…a small, fat woman in black…” as opposed to a woman with a small skeleton. The town could not separate the Emily they knew from the Emily that was present. The juxtaposition was fused into the town’s notion of Emily. The druggist must have seen a hint of Emily’s shift in personality. The druggist either did not care about Emily or wanted her dead. The druggist gave her the poison thinking the probability that she was going to kill herself was likely. The druggist didn’t even consider another possibility before spreading the rumor to the town. The druggist would not have given up the poison to Emily before her father died, but now Emily was the same one the town sighed, “…Poor Emily…” for. Emily was a lady when her father was alive. Emily is only a lady, because of who her father was. She is a lady out of only legacy. The narrator knows what Emily did, yet the narrator sympathies with Emily up till the end trick the reader into sympathizing along with the story. In the end the reader and the narrator know Emily is a lady no longer, not
only because she is now dead but because she killed and kept a corpse for cuddling. Ladies don’t cuddle with corpses, but up until the discovery of the corpse Emily remained a lady in the eyes of the town. “They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before…” the town opened the door to the room Emily was keeping her corpse. The town waited because they knew they were going to find something off kilter in that room. Something which could and eventually force change on their opinion of Emily, the town did not wanted to keep what they knew about Emily while she was alive separate from what they knew about her when she was dead.
Upon the discovery of the body the fused juxtaposition the town carried with them was removed from their notion of Emily. Neither, the reader or the narrator can relate the Emily at the end of the story to the Emily that existed to hinted ideas of who Emily was before events of the story. There is no reconciliation between the two Emily’s. They share different traits. The first, being the lady, the father’s daughter. The second Emily being an off kilter person struggling with craziness the only way she knows how. But because the story is not written from Emily’s perspective the reader cannot see the shift into craziness directly until the end and is left wondering with the narrator what caused Emily to defy my notion of what a lady is supposed to be?
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