a rose for emily ap lit essay

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Analysis of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 12, 2021

Initially published in Forum on April 30, 1930, and collected in These Thirteen in 1931, “A Rose for Emily” remains one of William Faulkner’s most read, most anthologized, and most significant stories. From every imaginable perspective, critics have scrutinized the components of Faulkner’s literary technique: The story has been viewed as an allegory of southern history, a metaphorical depiction of NorthSouth relationships, feminist nightmare or feminist victory, a gothic horror story, a sociological portrayal of individualism squelched or individualism triumphant, a bleak fictional tale of determinism. Faulkner’s uses of structure, tone, point of view, and imagery play key roles in his depiction of Miss Emily Grierson. The fact that readers and critics still engage in interpretive debates over its meaning merely ensures that it will continue to be read.

Told from the perspective of Jefferson, in Yoknapatawpha County, in a narrative voice that consistently relates the details that “we”—the smug and gossipy townspeople of Jefferson—have observed, the story is intriguing on the level of plot and character alone: Miss Emily has just died, and we learn that she lived alone after her father died and Homer Baron, her Yankee lover, apparently abandoned her. Suspense continues to build when we learn that a mysterious odor emanated from her house at the time that Homer disappeared. Faulkner employs a number of clues to foreshadow both denouement and motivation, including the “tableau” of the imperious father with a horsewhip overshadowing his white-clad young daughter Emily; the portrait of her father that Emily displays at his death, despite his thwarting of her natural youthful desires; her defiant public appearances with the unsuitable Homer Baron; her sense of entitlement; and the arsenic she buys to rid her house of “rats.” Despite these and other devices, however, new generations of readers still react in horror when Emily’s secret is revealed: She not only murdered her lover but slept with his corpse in the attic bridal chamber she carefully prepared.

If Miss Emily is crazy (and most critics agree that she is), Faulkner implies that she has been made so by the constrictions of a father who refused to let her marry and by the conventions of a society that eagerly filled the void at his death. Numerous critics have suggested that behind the gothic horror of necrophilia and insanity in this classic story, Miss Emily Grierson is the oddly modern hero. Indeed, one critic asserts that we cannot understand any of Faulkner’s heroes if we do not understand Miss Emily, for she is the “prototype” of them all (Strindberg 877). As with other troubled Faulknerian protagonists, death literally frees Miss Emily—from patriarchy, from society’s conventions, from sexual repression, from the class structure she was taught to revere, from the useless existence of privileged women of her era, even from the burdens of southern history and slavery: With her death, her black servant, mysteriously complicit in his relation to Miss Emily, walks out of her house at the end of the story. In an interview at the University of Virginia, Faulkner suggested that Miss Emily deserved a rose for all the torment she had endured, and, whatever else they feel, most readers appear to agree with this sentiment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 Vols. New York: Random House, 1974. Rev. ed., New York: Random House, 1984. Carothers, James. Faulkner’s Short Stories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” In Collected Short Stories. New York: Random House, 1940. Ferguson, James. Faulkner’s Short Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Strindberg, Victor. “A Rose for Emily.” In Reader’s Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, 577. Detroit: St. James Press, 1993.

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'A Rose for Emily' Questions for Study and Discussion

William Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily' - a Favorite American Tale

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"A Rose for Emily" is a favorite American short story by William Faulkner. 

The narrator of this story represents several generations of men and women from the town.  The story begins at the huge funeral for Miss Emily Grierson. Nobody has been to her house in 10 years, except for her servant. The town had a special relationship with Miss Emily ever since it decided to stop billing her for taxes in 1894. But, the "newer generation" wasn't happy with this arrangement, and so they paid a visit to Miss Emily and tried to get her to pay the debt. She refused to acknowledge that the old arrangement might not work anymore, and flatly refused to pay. Thirty years before, the tax collecting townspeople had a strange encounter with Miss Emily about a bad smell at her place. This was about two years after her father died, and a short time after her lover disappeared from her life. Anyhow, the stink got stronger and complaints were made, but the authorities didn't want to confront Emily about the problem. So, they sprinkled lime around the house and the smell was eventually gone. Everybody felt sorry for Emily when her father died. He left her with the house, but no money. When he died, Emily refused to admit it for three whole days. The town didn't think she was "crazy then," but assumed that she just didn't want to let go of her dad.

Next, the story doubles back and tells us that not too long after her father died Emily begins dating Homer Barron, who is in town on a sidewalk-building project. The town heavily disapproves of the affair and brings Emily's cousins to town to stop the relationship. One day, Emily is seen buying arsenic at the drugstore, and the town thinks that Homer is giving her the shaft, and that she plans to kill herself. 

When she buys a bunch of men's items, they think that she and Homer are going to get married. Homer leaves town, then the cousins leave town, and then Homer comes back. He is last seen entering Miss Emily's house. Emily herself rarely leaves the home after that, except for a period of half a dozen years when she gives painting lessons.  Her hair turns gray, she gains weight, and she eventually dies in a downstairs bedroom. The story cycles back to where it began, at her funeral. Tobe, miss Emily's servant, lets in the town women and then leaves by the backdoor forever. After the funeral, and after Emily is buried, the townspeople go upstairs to break into the room that they know has been closed for 40 years. Inside, they find the corpse of Homer Barron, rotting in the bed. On the dust of the pillow next to Homer they find an indentation of a head, and there, in the indentation, a long, gray hair.

Study Guide Questions

Here are a few questions for study and discussion.

• What is important about the title of the short story, "A Rose for Emily"? What are the multiple meanings for the "rose"?
• What are the conflicts in "A Rose for Emily"? What types of conflict (physical, moral, intellectual, or emotional) do you see in this story?
• How does William Faulkner reveal character in "A Rose for Emily"?
• What are some themes in the story? How do they relate to the plot and characters?
• What are some symbols in "A Rose for Emily"? How do they relate to the plot and characters?
• Do you find the characters likable? Would you want to meet the characters?
• What is significant about the gray hair at the end of the short story?
• What is the central/primary purpose of the story? Is the purpose important or meaningful?
• How essential is the setting to the story? Could the story have taken place anywhere else?
• What is the role of women in the text? What about single/independent women? What about the role of wife and mother?
• Would you recommend this story to a friend?
• Significance of the Gray Hair in "A Rose for Emily"
• "A Rose for Emily" Quotes
• Understanding the Title of "A Rose for Emily"
• 'Wuthering Heights' Questions for Study and Discussion
• 'The Devil and Tom Walker' Study Guide
• 'The Gift of the Magi' Questions for Study and Discussion
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• 'The Story of an Hour' Questions for Study and Discussion
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• 5 of the Best Plays Written by Tennessee Williams

The Symbolism of ‘A Rose for Emily’ Explained

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Rose for Emily’ is one of the most widely studied American short stories of the twentieth century, but the subtle narrative style and William Faulkner’s use of symbolism are often difficult to interpret. Starting with the ‘rose’ in the story’s title, the text is rich with symbols whose significance can only be determined through careful analysis.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most prominent symbols and images in ‘A Rose for Emily’ and explore how – and why – Faulkner uses them in his short masterpiece of Southern Gothic literature.

Emily’s House.

The narrator of ‘A Rose for Emily’ tells us that Miss Emily’s house was the only old house left in the street, and that ‘garages and cotton gins’ had sprung up and replaced the other houses that had once stood alongside Emily’s dwelling.

Emily’s house, then, symbolises the Old South, which is (literally) decaying and dying out. And replacing the pastoral homeliness of the old, post-war South is the new industrial America: cotton and gasoline are now the way the townspeople make their money. The new industrial South is replacing the older, simpler bucolic South.

The Locked Room.

But it is worth remembering that ‘A Rose for Emily’ is, at bottom, a Gothic story: an example of the subgenre known as Southern Gothic literature, which is associated with writers like Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Faulkner himself.

And if Emily’s house symbolises a kind of modern, urban equivalent to the secluded Gothic castle in classic Gothic horror novels, then the locked room in the house’s attic is a kind of inversion of the crypt harbouring a dark secret beneath the castle. The room does indeed contain a terrible secret which will only be revealed at the end of the story, once Emily herself is dead and the townsfolk can gain access to the house.

But as well as being a narrative device, the locked room is also another symbol for Miss Emily’s determination to cling to the past (of which more below). She sets up the room as a bridal chamber for a wedding that will never take place, and then keeps her would-be groom – or his corpse, at any rate – inside the room, a symbol of her reluctance to let go of her romantic bond with him.

Emily Herself.

Miss Emily Grierson is herself a symbol of this faded glory of the South: a land that had been defeated militarily in the Civil War and whose old ways were being ousted by the new, industrial, mechanical age (those cotton wagons and garages selling gasoline for motorcars).

At the beginning of ‘A Rose for Emily’, the narrator describes her as a ‘monument’ for whom the men of the town have a kind of ‘respectful affection’. She has endured in the town during a time when many new generations have grown up and taken over the running of Jefferson. She remains largely unchanged; her death symbolises the death of another piece of that old world.

Why does Faulkner title his story ‘A Rose for Emily’? No roses appear in the story itself, although the attic room which features at the end of the story, the would-be bridal chamber in which Homer Barron’s body rots, is described as having valance curtains of a faded rose colour and rose-shaded lights.

Note that the curtains are ‘a faded rose colour’, not only because they have been in the attic room for decades (since Emily planned to marry, and then ended up murdering, Homer), but because they symbolise the faded dreams of sexual fulfilment and marital love which Emily, through her engagement to Homer Barron, had entertained.

But these rose-coloured details convey more than Emily’s thwarted sense of womanhood and romantic love.

William Faulkner himself provided us with a clue, and suggested, in an interview he gave at the University of Virginia, that Emily deserved to be given a rose as a ‘gesture’ or ‘salute’ because of all of the torment she had endured: at the hands of her father, perhaps at the hands of Homer as well, and as a result of the townsfolk treating her like an outsider. A rose is a decidedly romantic gift, one which a man might give to a lady as a mark of admiration or respect.

Indeed, roses are rich in symbolism : they are associated with love and romance, but also with an overly romantic view of the past, as in the phrase ‘rose-tinted spectacles’. ‘A Rose for Emily’ is a story about a woman who is, in a sense, trapped in the past: she is reluctant to give up the dead body of her father when he dies, and she is unwilling to let Homer leave her, being prepared to kill him in order to keep him in her life.

For the next few decades, she keeps him in the attic chamber so she can, in effect, arrest the passage of time and keep him close to her.

So the ‘rose’ for Emily also symbolises the romance of the Old South: a land of idealism and tradition, looking back to a feudal European past of the Middle Ages (as Mark Twain pointed out , it was Sir Walter Scott’s medieval romance Ivanhoe , more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin , that was really the book that caused the Civil War).

Emily’s Hair.

When the rotting body of Homer Barron is discovered in the bedroom of Emily’s house, the narrator observes that the pillow next to the body showed signs of an indentation, suggesting that Emily had been in the habit of lying next to the body with her head resting on the pillow next to his head (although not everyone believes this theory). One lock of her iron-grey hair is found on the pillow, confirming this.

The hair is described as iron -grey, symbolising the iron tenacity of Emily in keeping Homer close to her – in death, if that’s what it took (and it clearly did take that). The ‘iron’ is appropriate, since Emily is a character who is seen to be clinging to other things: to her father’s body when he dies (she is reluctant to give it up to the ministers for burial), to Homer when he rejects her, and, most of all, to a past that no longer exists.

The lock of her hair is also a symbol of Emily’s strange tenderness towards Homer – a man she killed in an act of mad, obsessive love. But Emily’s hair is significant throughout the story: earlier, the narrator told her that she cut her hair short after her father died.

This can be interpreted as a declaration of her independence – one cannot imagine her father letting her wear her hair in such an unladylike fashion – but as with so many of the details in the story, her actual motives are inscrutable.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — A Rose For Emily — A Rose For Emily Setting Analysis

A Rose for Emily Setting Analysis

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A Rose for Emily

William faulkner, everything you need for every book you read..

“A Rose for Emily” is not a linear story, where the first event treated brings about the next, and so on—rather, it is nonlinear, jumping back and forth in time. However, there is a method to this temporal madness: the story opens with Miss Emily’s funeral, then goes back in time, slowly revealing the central events of Miss Emily’s life, before going back forward in time to the funeral. There, in the story’s final scene, the townspeople discover in Home r’s corpse and the strand of Miss Emily ’s hair the facts that make sense of all the events described before—for example, that Miss Emily bought arsenic from the druggist while in her thirties not to commit suicide as the townspeople suspected, but rather to murder her defective sweetheart.

So, why does Faulkner structure his story like this? Toward the end of the story, its narrator makes a generalization about time that can be brought to bear on this question: for old people “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 bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.” Looked at in this light, doesn’t the non-linear nature of the story present the past it describes less as a “diminishing road” and more as a “meadow”, in which one might meander backward toward a glorified past? It is almost as if the townspeople’s nostalgia for the Old South, their desire to go back to a time they remember or mythologize as better, infects their storytelling practices. Perhaps—at least for now—it would be better if Jefferson got back onto the road of time, paved and lined with garages, and left their increasingly irrelevant social conventions in the dust. If only the past had been a diminishing road for Ms. Emily, rather than a huge rose-colored meadow where only corpses and the dust grow.

Time and Narrative ThemeTracker

Time and Narrative Quotes in A Rose for Emily

It [the Grierson family house] 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 But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of the neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps…

She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days… 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.

…and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talk[ed] 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 bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

For a long time we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.

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 irony-gray hair.