a rose for emily essay pdf

A Summary and Analysis of William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Rose for Emily’ is a short story by William Faulkner, originally published in Forum in 1930 before being collected in Faulkner’s collection, These Thirteen , the following year. The story concerns an unmarried woman living in the American South who attracts the concern and suspicion of the townspeople after her father dies and she becomes romantically involved with a Yankee man from the North.

‘A Rose for Emily’ is a story that invites a number of different critical interpretations and has attracted a great deal of commentary and analysis. Before we analyse the meaning of Faulkner’s classic story, it might be worth recapping the plot.

‘A Rose for Emily’: plot summary

The story begins with the news that Miss Emily Grierson, a recluse living alone with a black servant in a large house in town, has died. The narrator, a kind of collective voice of the townspeople, tells us that everyone in the town attended the funeral, with many of the women being curious to see inside the woman’s house that nobody had been allowed inside for years.

We are told that ten years earlier, the aldermen of the town had gained access to her house in order to question her about failure to pay her taxes. She simply tells them that she does not owe any taxes to the town, and calls for her servant to show the men out. Thirty years before that, another group of men from the town had visited Emily Grierson’s home to sprinkle lime in the cellar and the outbuildings, in order to get rid of the smell coming from the house.

That was two years after the death of her father, a crayon portrait of whom stands on an easel in front of the fireplace. After her father’s death, Emily’s sweetheart had deserted her and Emily left the house only on very rare occasions. When the house had begun to smell a short while after, neighbours had complained to the mayor, but the mayor had been reluctant to confront Emily about such a delicate matter, hence the party of men sprinkling lime under and around the house.

The narrator tells us that the townspeople had always thought the Griersons held themselves in high regard, as if none of the men would be good enough for Emily. When her father died, the women turned up at her house to pay their condolences, but she denied that he had died. The doctors had to persuade Emily to bury the body.

Despite this odd behaviour, the townspeople didn’t consider Emily to be mad. They attributed her actions to her father’s controlling presence, and the way he had sent away all her potential suitors, forcing her to rely on him, even after his death.

After her father’s death, Emily was sick for a long while, and when she was seen again, she had cut her hair short to make her look like a girl. The following summer, a construction company arrived to pave the paths of the town, and the foreman, a Yankee from New York named Homer Barron, is seen out riding on Sundays with Emily. The townsfolk start to say, ‘Poor Emily’, believing that she cannot be seriously interested in a Northerner like Barron.

Emily purchases some arsenic from the local druggist, who assumes she will use it to kill rats. However, the rumour in the town is that Emily is planning to take her own life. People start to grow suspicious of the length of Emily’s courtship with Barron, with the minister intervening and the minister’s wife writing a concerned letter to Emily’s relatives in Alabama, and her cousins come to stay with her. Soon after this, the townsfolk became certain that Emily and Barron had married.

But then Homer Barron vanished, and nobody saw him again. Emily is barely seen either, and when she does reappear from the house, her hair has turned grey and she has put on weight. For a short while, Emily would give lessons in china-painting from her doorstep, but even this she eventually gave up. The townspeople grow up and move on and she becomes even more of a recluse. Her African-American servant loyally remains in her service, but nobody else goes into the house.

When Emily dies and her body is buried, the townsfolk finally venture into the upstairs bedroom in the house, where they discover the dead body of a man lying on the bed, surrounded by dust – presumably, the man is Homer Barron (though this is not stated). Next to the dead body is the indentation of a head and a long strand of Emily’s hair, suggesting that she was in the habit of lying next to the man’s body in the bed.

‘A Rose for Emily’: analysis

‘A Rose for Emily’ is a subtle story which blends first- and third-person narration, Gothic literature and realism, past memories and present events, to unsettle us as readers. The whole town appears to be the story’s narrator, a kind of collective ‘we’ which speaks together about – and against – Emily’s strange behaviour until we reach the chilling finale and Homer Barron’s body is discovered.

This means that Emily remains distant from us as readers, and we never learn about her inner life: we only ever see her from the outside, through the eyes of the townspeople. This is obviously fitting because Emily is an outsider in the town, but it also lends an air of mystery to the events recounted, because so little is understood of Emily’s motivations and emotions.

Because of this unnerving denouement, ‘A Rose for Emily’ is often regarded as an example of Southern Gothic : a literary mode, practised by writers of the American South (like Faulkner) whose stories and novels are characterised by macabre, horrific, or grotesque elements. Such fiction often also contains an accumulation of realist detail, and Faulkner allows the mood of uncanniness which pervades Emily’s house and her life to emerge gradually.

Her reluctance to give up her father’s body for burial, for example, foreshadows her (presumed) murder of her lover and concealment of his body in the upper bedroom, whom she killed when she realised that was the only way of holding onto him and ensuring he remained hers for good. The crumbling Gothic castle has become a house in the Southern United States, in which everything is ‘tarnished’ (note how often that word recurs), spoiled, fading (like Emily’s iron-grey hair), and falling to ruin.

This offers a new, more domestic take on a traditional trope in Gothic fiction: the dark secret threatening to destroy a ‘house’ or family (see Poe’s ‘ The Fall of the House of Usher ’ for one notable example from the nineteenth century), and (in many Gothic stories) the dead body that is only discovered at the end of the narrative.

But at least Poe’s protagonists managed to bury their bodies (although sometimes, as in the story just mentioned, before they were actually dead), or concealed them beneath the floorboards . Faulkner’s story instead hints at an altogether more morbid and unwholesome notion: that Emily has continued to ‘sleep’ with Homer even after he was dead (indeed, perhaps that was the only way she could sleep with him at all).

Another reason that the Southern Gothic tag is important for ‘A Rose for Emily’ is that Emily, a Southern lady, falls for a ‘Yankee’: a man from the North of the United States. Although the American Civil War ended in 1865, decades before Faulkner was writing, the sense of North-South divide, in terms of culture, class, and identity, proved long-lasting (and arguably persists to this day).

The townsfolk are appalled by the idea that Miss Emily, an aristocratic Southern lady, might seriously be considering marriage to a Northerner, whom they consider to be beneath her on the social scale (hence the reference to noblesse oblige : Emily should entertain Homer and be courteous to him, but the idea that she could marry such a man horrifies the Southern townspeople’s sensibilities).

Faulkner leaves many specific details of Emily’s relationship with Homer as mere hints and speculations, in keeping with the narrative mode of the story: the townspeople, shut out from her house and, in many ways, from her life, can only conjecture as to what happened. We are in a similar position, though it seems sensible enough to surmise that Emily fell in love with Homer – who, it is strongly suggested, had no intention of settling down with her.

Like Emily, he is a perpetual singleton, but whereas Emily is single because of the controlling influence of her father (an influence which persists, in its psychological hold on her, even after her father’s death), Homer is single by choice: a stark reminder of the gender differences between men and women in Southern society at this time.

Women like Emily attract concern and rumour if they remain unmarried, while the bachelor Homer Barron – whose name summons Greek heroism and nobility, while also hinting at the ‘barren’ nature of Emily’s would-be relationship with him – charms the townsfolk and becomes popular, despite being, like Emily, an outsider set apart from them.

Why does Faulkner title his story ‘A Rose for Emily’? In an interview he gave at the University of Virginia, he suggested that Emily deserved to be given a rose 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.

<script id=”mcjs”>!function(c,h,i,m,p){m=c.createElement(h),p=c.getElementsByTagName(h)[0],m.async=1,m.src=i,p.parentNode.insertBefore(m,p)}(document,”script”,”https://chimpstatic.com/mcjs-connected/js/users/af4361760bc02ab0eff6e60b8/c34d55e4130dd898cc3b7c759.js”);</script>

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily

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.

Share this:

Categories: Literature , Short Story

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , criticism of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , essays of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , guide of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , Literary Criticism , notes of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , plot of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , summary of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , themes of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , William Faulkner , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily appreciation , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily criticism , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily essays , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily guide , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily notes , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily plot , William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily themes

Related Articles

You must be logged in to post a comment.

A Rose for Emily

William faulkner, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Post Civil-War South

Before the American Civil War (known as the “antebellum South”), the South’s economy relied on the agricultural output of plantations, large farms owned by wealthy Southern whites who exploited black slave labor to keep operating costs as low as possible. By its very nature, plantation life gave rise to a rigid social hierarchy—one in which wealthy white farmers were treated like aristocrats, middle-class and poor whites like commoners, and blacks like property. Along with this…

Tradition vs. Progress

Even as white Southerners in the short story cling to their pre-Civil War traditions, ideals, and institutions, the world around them is quickly changing. Agriculture is being supplanted by industry, and aristocratic neighborhoods with their proud plantation-style houses like the Grierson’s are being encroached upon by less grandiose but more economically practical garages and cotton gins. Likewise, the post- Sartoris generation of authorities in Jefferson—those men who belong to the Board of Aldermen that governs…

Patriarchal Authority and Control

Members of Jefferson’s Board of Alderman, whether old and gallant and nostalgic for the Old South like Sartoris or young and business-like such as the newer generation of authorities, all have something in common: they are all male and govern over—and to the exclusion of—women. Faulkner foregrounds this dynamic when he has his narrator recall Sartoris’s law requiring all black women to wear their aprons in public, and dramatizes it in Miss Emily’s relationships with…

Time and Narrative

“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…

Gossip, Social Conventions, and Judgment

“A Rose for Emily” is narrated by a plural “we” voice, which stands in for the memory of the collective town. In this way, the story can be read as the town’s collective, nostalgically tinged, darkly disturbed memory. And yet that collective voice has a darker edge than a simple collective memory. Because of that collective narrator, “A Rose for Emily” is also a collection of town gossip centering on Miss Emily , generated by…

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Society — A Rose For Emily Theme Analysis

A Rose for Emily Theme Analysis

• Categories: Mental Health Society

About this sample

Words: 607 |

Published: Mar 19, 2024

Words: 607 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

I. introduction, a. "a rose for emily" by william faulkner is a timeless classic that delves into the complexities of human nature and societal norms. set in the fictional town of jefferson, the story follows the life of emily grierson, a reclusive woman whose mysterious actions captivate the townspeople., b. thesis statement: the theme of isolation in "a rose for emily" highlights the impact of societal expectations on an individual's mental health. throughout the narrative, faulkner skillfully portrays the consequences of isolation and the detrimental effects of conforming to societal standards., ii. emily's isolation from society, a. from the outset, signs of emily's isolation are evident. she is portrayed as a recluse, rarely seen in public and shrouded in mystery. her secluded lifestyle raises questions among the townspeople, leading to speculation and gossip., b. various factors contribute to emily's isolation, including her domineering father's influence and the town's rigid expectations of her. the pressure to adhere to societal norms and maintain her family's reputation weighs heavily on emily, pushing her further into seclusion., c. the effects of emily's isolation on her mental state are profound. as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that her solitude has taken a toll on her psyche. her erratic behavior and detachment from reality point to the damaging consequences of prolonged isolation., iii. society's role in emily's isolation, a. society's expectations play a significant role in emily's isolation. the townspeople hold her to a high standard, expecting her to uphold the traditions of the past and conform to their ideals of propriety. this pressure only serves to exacerbate emily's feelings of isolation and alienation., b. the consequences of society's treatment of emily are far-reaching. she is judged and ostracized by the community, forced to live up to their unrealistic expectations while grappling with her own inner turmoil. the town's collective judgment further isolates emily, driving her deeper into seclusion., c. in comparison to other characters in the story, emily's isolation stands out as particularly tragic. while others may experience moments of loneliness or alienation, emily's isolation is all-encompassing, shaping her entire existence. faulkner uses emily's character to explore the devastating impact of societal pressure and the toll it can take on an individual's mental health., d. emily's struggle with tradition and change is a central theme in "a rose for emily." throughout the story, emily resists the changing world around her, clinging to the traditions of the past. her refusal to adapt to societal norms and embrace progress ultimately leads to her isolation and downfall., e. the tension between tradition and progress is palpable in the story, highlighting the clash between old ways and new ideas. emily's inability to reconcile these conflicting forces results in her alienation from society and ultimately her tragic demise., f. emily's struggle with tradition and change also impacts her relationships with others. her refusal to conform to societal expectations creates a barrier between herself and the townspeople, making it difficult for her to form meaningful connections. this isolation further deepens her sense of loneliness and detachment from the world around her..

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Karlyna PhD

Verified writer

• Expert in: Nursing & Health Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 496 words

2 pages / 856 words

1 pages / 523 words

4 pages / 1787 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Society

There are many sites which facilitate the sharing of media throughout a community, but a prominent one is YouTube. YouTube is a free video sharing website that makes it easy to watch online videos. You can even create and [...]

Within our world, women and men are expected to achieve a level of masculinity and femininity. These expectations help label their certain gender. Men and women are based on interests, roles, and behaviours, that originate from [...]

The movie Coco is a film full of Mexican Culture and takes place during the Día de Muertos, Day of the Dead celebration. It’s directed by Lee Unkrich and released in 2017. The main character, Miguel Rivera loves music and [...]

The concept of race is a social construct that has played a significant role in shaping human history, societies, and interactions. Despite its pervasive influence, scientific evidence and historical analysis reveal that race is [...]

Now let me tell you. There certainly are annoying people on the public busses. People who sit next to you on an empty bus, people who talk loudly on their phone and people who try to talk to you when you are clearly not in the [...]

Functionalism can be defined as the ‘Structural-consensus theory’. Functionalism presents the idea that each aspect of society is necessary in regard to the stability of society as a whole. Emilie Durkheim visualised society [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free