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A Rose for Emily
William faulkner.
Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
A Rose for Emily: Introduction
A rose for emily: plot summary, a rose for emily: detailed summary & analysis, a rose for emily: themes, a rose for emily: quotes, a rose for emily: characters, a rose for emily: symbols, a rose for emily: literary devices, a rose for emily: theme wheel, brief biography of william faulkner.
Historical Context of A Rose for Emily
Other books related to a rose for emily.
- Full Title: “A Rose for Emily”
- Where Written: Oxford, Mississippi
- When Published: April 30, 1930
- Literary Period: American Modernism
- Genre: Southern Gothic
- Setting: The fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, located in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, where many of Faulkner’s works are set
- Climax: The townspeople’s discovery that Miss Emily murdered Homer Barron and lived with his corpse
- Antagonist: Southern society’s paralyzing nostalgia for a glorified past, as well as its rigid customs and conventions
- Point of View: First-person plural (“we”) limited
Extra Credit for A Rose for Emily
A Rose for the Title. Readers will notice that, though the story is entitled “A Rose for Emily,” Emily never receives a rose. Faulkner explained in an interview: “Oh, that was an allegorical title: the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it. And I pitied her and this was a salute. Just as if you were to make a gesture, a salute to anyone: to a woman you would hand a rose.”
A Family Legacy. Colonel Sartoris, a minor character in “A Rose for Emily,” appears in other works by Faulkner, including the novels Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished ; he is modeled on Faulkner’s own great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, a Confederate colonel in the Civil War, a businessman, and an author.
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A Rose for Emily Essay
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A. English Literature 26 September 2016 The Tragic Life of Emily Grierson In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner describes a true outsider, concealed from society behind the walls of a dank and dusty old house. While remaining constrained by the traditions of the long-forgotten Southern aristocracy, the impervious main character Emily Grierson demands the control she was never allowed by refusing to give in to the laws her town attempts to force upon her. Emily’s stubborn qualities and absurd familial pride allow the townspeople, who avoid the obvious murder like one does a bad Justin Bieber song, to simply regard her as an eccentric mystery when suspicions begin to arise. Through symbols of imagined love and timelessness, Faulkner characterizes Emily Grierson as a tragic outsider deserving pity, in order to further comment on how a person’s environment can drive her to immoral actions that break laws of conscience. Emily created her own reality, impenetrable to the laws of the ever-changing town around her. Miss Emily’s father holds great power over her, even in death. However, his cruel, suffocating grasp on her life eventually pushes her into rebelling against every law she knows — laws of tradition and background, of familial obligation, and finally, laws of God (Faulkner, Interview). Her lawlessness begins in simply refusing to pay taxes; she falls for a story told to her when she was younger, a story that the narrator says “only a woman could have believed” (Faulkner 29). When the deputation visits to inquire about the unpaid taxes, Miss Emily simply repeats that she has “no taxes in Jefferson” and to “see Colonel Sartoris,” who had died nearly 10 years prior to this encounter, comments that suggest that she has lost all sense of time. This
could also explain her refusal to allow the town to number her house for the mailing system. Her fear of changing times leads Emily to see her world through the same perspective all throughout her life; she becomes the town’s living monument, where the past and the future are too intertwined to separate as two distinct concepts. Though once harmless and innocent actions, Emily’s disregard for the law soon takes her on a much darker path, as she takes the life of the man she thinks is going to leave her. Having never been shown real love from her father, characterized by the narrator as a man so controlling he may as well have been carrying around a whip, Emily refuses to accept abandonment once more. She fosters a boundless sense of love, the kind that can only be stopped by her own death. The laws of God that tell humans not to take another’s life become mere suggestions when compared to the lawless idea of love. Using physical symbols of the Grierson home to show the barrier between Miss Emily and the townspeople, Faulkner further develops the tragic story. Through domestic symbols of love and the past that characterize Emily as a town monument, the author explains the human condition, always searching for happiness, no matter the cost. Several times throughout the story, the narrator refers to Emily as a physical symbol of the Old South, “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris ... remitted her taxes” (29). In a very similar way to how Emily is described, the once-great Grierson home seems the only thing left of the Civil War era, other than a few Confederate soldiers. Dark and dusty like Emily’s soul after years of feeling so desperately alone, the house sits like a shrine to the past — a shrine that one can only assume the Baptist minister had good reason to run out of and never look back. Carefully placed before the living-room fireplace stands the crayon portrait of Mr.
Works Cited Faulkner, William. Interview. Rector and Visitors, U of Virginia, people.virginia/~sfr/DYResources/AUDIOFILES/EmilyAudio5. Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, by X. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, Fifth Edition ed., London, Pearson Longman, 2009, pp. 28-34. Originally published in The Forum, 30 Apr. 1930.
- Multiple Choice
Subject : AP English Literature & Composition
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