A Rose For Emily 's House As A Symbol And Or Metaphor Essay

In the beginning, the audience gets a glimpse of the house belonging to Miss Emily. The exterior of the house was beautiful, but aging. When it was first built in the post-civil war era, it was lovely. However, after revolution and change, Miss Emily’s home was the last standing house on the block. This is vital to the story because it paints a picture for the reader’s mind. The interior of the house was dusty and unclean after the change. This demonstrates how cooped up Miss Emily truly is. She never

Symbolism in literature is using an object to portray a different, deeper meaning in a story. Symbols represent ideas or qualities that the author has maneuvered into his or her story that has meaning. There can be multiple symbols in a story or just one. It is up to the reader to interpret the meaning of the symbols and their significance to the story. While reading a story, symbols may not become clear until the very end, once the climax is over, and the falling action is covered. In William Faulkner’s, “A Rose for Emily,” there are multiple examples of symbolism that occur throughout the story.

In light of Homers feelings toward marriage Emily had been seen in town at the jewelers purchasing a men’s toilet set in silver with the letters H.B. on each

In "A Rose for Emily," William Faulkner's use of setting and characterization foreshadows and builds up to the climax of the story. His use of metaphors prepares the reader for the bittersweet ending. A theme of respectability and the loss of, is threaded throughout the story. Appropriately, the story begins with death, flashes back to the past and hints towards the demise of a woman and the traditions of the past she personifies. Faulkner has carefully crafted a multi-layered masterpiece, and he uses setting, characterization, and theme to move it along.

“Like Miss Emily it stands “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay” alone amidst alien surroundings. When the town complains about the smell emanating from the house, the judge equates house and woman: “Will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?” Miss Emily becomes a fallen woman where she lived in a house that had “once been white… set on what had once been our most select street…lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps an eyesore among eyesores.” The house, like Miss Emily, has fallen from purity and like Miss Emily it is an eyesore, for

There are many instances where Emily resists change, unable to let go of the Southern, antebellum lifestyle she grew up with. This creates a contrast between Emily and the rest of the town, which is progressing and modernizing as time goes by. Emily’s traditional nature puts an emphasis on her representation of the past. She actively resists modernization, choosing to reply to the mayor’s offer to call with a letter “on paper of an archaic shape, [written with] thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink” (Faulkner 1). Emily’s actions represent the past and an inability to let go of it. She is stuck in the past, unwilling to accept the change that the future brings. Emily and her house are the last glimpses of the past in her town; as the town progresses, her house stood unmoving, “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons” (Faulkner 1). The house continues to display the style of the past, despite the decay and progression of style. Emily and her house represent the past, when her house was new and in style. Emily’s resistance to change and longing for the past is appropriate, considering her age and upbringing. She is an older woman, who grew up during the Civil War era in the South. The reason the South fought in the Civil War was to protect their lifestyle at all costs. The South was unwilling to change, stubbornly clinging to the antebellum way of life. This philosophy shaped the

Faulkner’s use of southern gothic writing style helps the reader build a mental depiction of Miss Emily. When the town sent their ambassadors to discuss the taxes that were owed, Faulkner described Miss Emily as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water” (2182). This description gives the reader the sense that the character is not well. Faulkner’s description that Miss Emily looked bloated achieves the desired effect on the reader to show how hideous she appears. This graphic description, combined with the author’s depressing description of the parlor (2182), makes the reader think of death. The reader gets the sense of being in a funeral parlor which helps to strengthen Faulkner’s narrative.

Emily’s town is at a crossroads, accepting a modern future while still balanced on the edge of the past. Emily firmly stays the same over the years despite many changes in her community. As a symbol of the past, she represents the beliefs that people wish to respect and honor; however, she nursed eccentricities that others could not understand. Emily lives in a timeless period and in a world of her own. The struggle between the past and her present is represented at the beginning of the story with this description, "only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps" (Faulkner 250).

In 1930 William Faulkner published his very first story, “A Rose for Emily.” The story emerges with the funeral of Emily Grierson and discloses the story out of sequence; Faulkner brings into play an anonymous first-person narrator thought to be the representation of Grierson’s municipality. Miss Emily Grierson’s life was read to be controlled by her father and all his restrictions. Grierson was raised through her life with the thought that no man was adequate for her. Stuck in her old ways, Grierson continued with the Old South’s traditions once her father had passed. Awhile following her father’s death, Emily aims to put the longing for love to a stop and allows Homer Barron to enter her life. Faulkner portrays the literary movement of Modernism utilizing allegory through the post-bellum South after the American Civil War. In the short story “A Rose Emily,” William Faulkner uses a series of symbols to illustrate the prominent theme of the resistance of the refinement of life around Miss Emily.

The main symbolism running throughout A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, is the theme of how important it is to let go of the past. Miss Emily clings to the past and does not want to be independent. The Old South is becoming the new South and she cannot move forward. The residents of the South did not all give in to change just because they lost the Civil War. In A Rose for Emily time marches on leaving Miss Emily behind as she stubbornly refuses to progress into a new era. In the story, symbolism is used to give more details than the author actually gives to the reader. Symbolism helps to indicate how Emily was once innocent but later changes, how her hair, house, and lifestyle, helped to show her resistance to change. The story is not

At the beginning of the story, the reader learns that Miss Emily “is portrayed as ’a fallen monument,’… because she has shown herself susceptible to death (and decay) after all” (West 264). The house can also be perceived as a “fallen monument”(Faulkner 81) as the narrator

In “A Rose for Emily” and “A Doll House” the woman faced several courses of different imbalances such as gender inequality, social issues, and sacrifices in each story. The men in the stories entrapped the women into oppressive roles in their society. The sacrifices the women in each story that they had to face were the inequalities of how women were treated and belittled. In “A Doll House” Nora was treated like a doll, her husband was very controlling in their relationship and sheltered her from society. In ‘A Rose for Emily” her father controlled her completely throughout her whole life up until his death. So how is “A Rose for Emily” and “A Doll House” Similar for the women? What Sacrifice did they have to give up?

With the new things kept emerging in people’s life in the South, great changes took place in the town. “Garages and cotton gins were established on the street …..”. While the whole street was becoming modern and commercial with the cotton wagons, gasoline pumps, and other industrial ornaments surround it, only Miss Emily’s house remains the same. She had become a tradition because she represented the aristocracy of the Old South. “…lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores.” Emily’s house, like herself, is an emblem of the remaining dying world of Old South aristocracy and represents alienation, isolation, and death. The changing surroundings showed that the glory the aristocrats once owned had gone and a new modern time has come. The house is obsolete with the new things surrounded, just like the decay of South’s old values in a changing

How does the narrator and (and the town) view Miss Emily? Find passages that represent more than one view of her and explain their significance.

Death and transformation are the main theme in Faulkner’s short story, being a sign of the crumbling of the Old South after their military defeat by the North, as Emily’s suggested necrophilia echoes the desire to hang on to the past and its traditions. Through flashbacks and foreshadowing, Faulkner addresses the struggle of traditional versus progress in Jefferson, the south being a region bound by history and tradition, class and social influence. Emily represents to generations before and after her old South nobility. Even the town 's people are having a hard time letting go of old southern societal ideals. Their obsession with Emily and her family is a sign of society 's way of holding on to these old values. The narrator