A Rose For Emily Literary Analysis

William Faulkner 1931 excerpt ‘’A Rose for Emily,’’ a woman named Emily had died years after being lonely and isolated. Her father, Mr. Grierson, was very strict he wouldn’t let her marry any man. Colonel Sartoris remitted Miss. Emily’s taxes. Mayors and aldermen arranged many

In “A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner uses setting, character development, and stylistic devices to express the mystery of Emily and the somewhat gossip-obsessed attitude the townspeople have towards Emily.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” starts out at Emily’s funeral and then goes onto a story about taxes, which Miss Emily is exempt from paying for life by Colonel Sartoris. During her life, Miss Emily’s father kept her isolated and ran off any potential suitors with a horsewhip. When her father died, Miss Emily refused to acknowledge the fact for three days. Soon after, Miss Emily met and started dating Homer Barron, “a northerner and a day laborer.” The town goes from being happy about the relationship to thinking of it as indecent. Homer seemingly deserted Miss Emily shortly after she bought poison. All is quiet for the next 40 years until Miss Emily’s death when Homer’s corpse is found sealed in an upstairs room (Faulkner 323-327). This paints a picture of a lonely, desperate woman. Miss Emily was isolated with just a butler for company. That does not make her a murder. Emily Grierson is innocent of murder because any evidence is circumstantial or illegally obtained, Tobe cared for Miss Emily enough to kill for her, and Miss Emily is legally insane.

Tradition controls the actions of both the town and Emily herself.  “A Rose for Emily” captures the importance tradition holds for her Southern community.  The Civil War was an issue of lifestyle.  Southerners hung to the lifestyle they had, with the slaves. Tradition was the reason Emily didn’t pay her taxes. Her father was aristocracy and paid no taxes , therefore , Emily refused. When the slavery era passed, the South fell, the lifestyle was torn apart and the economy changed.  Old-time families, like Emilie’s, lost their position with their

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.

William Faulkner is a well-known author, whose writing belongs in the Realism era in the American Literary Canon. His writing was influence by his Southern upbringing, often setting his stories in the fictional Southern town, Yoknapatawpha County. “A Rose for Emily” was one of Faulkner’s first published pieces and displays many of the now signature characteristics of Faulkner’s writing. The short story provides commentary through the use of many symbols. In William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily”, the author uses the townspeople as a representation of societal expectations and judgments, Emily and her house as symbols for the past, and Homer’s corpse as a physical representation of the fear of loneliness.

Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal

Throughout her life, her father had always been controlling and dominating her life up until his death. After her father’s death, it left her deeply distressed and more isolated than ever refusing to give up her father’s dead body possibly because she was use to her father’s presence and being in control of everything in her life which made it almost impossible for her to cope and leaving her in denial of her father’s death. Some years after, Emily meets a man by the name of Homer Barron, whom she grew to love, but sadly the irony of this fate is that he wasn’t attracted to her and also rejected her proposal of wanting to marry him. Another saying of the townspeople is “After her father’s death she went out very little, after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her,” and this shows how unfortunate she was. It’s hard to imagine losing the ones you love most especially because they made such an impact in your life which is probably how Miss Emily felt. After all, her father and Homer Barron played a significant role in her life and for that reason she couldn’t bear the absence of both her father and lover which made her stay unhappy living in her house. Although, Mr. Grierson appearance in the story was little, his dominating and controlling way was clear from the beginning of the story. For instance, he didn’t allow Emily to get into a relationship

In the short story “A Rose for Emily,” author William Faulkner shows a woman, Miss Emily Grierson, who is seen as an upholder for tradition by the community. Emily lives on her own with a butler in her old, dusty mansion and has her story told by the viewpoint of unnamed narrators in a total of five sections, each depicting her life from someone one in the community's perspective. The story demonstrates Emily's life through the eyes of bystanders. We are introduced to the main character through her funeral being hosted in her home in which has not been seen in over ten years, excluding the single servant. Miss Emily had a special relationship within the community since 1894 when they remitted her taxes.

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 the early 1900’s women were treated as property, they had never caused trouble and nobody had suspected trouble. Women were not taken seriously and they were never questioned. Emily Grierson plays the role of the villain in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner because she is a murderer, she gets away with her crimes, and she manipulates societies views of women in her favor. For instance, in this short story the life of Emily was described just before her death and bit after to give a glimpse of Emily’s true self to the reader. This true self is not exposed to the reader until the last page of the short story after one room in Emily’s house is locked to the public right up “until Miss Emily was decently in the ground”(Faulkner 5) and it had been opened.

“The narrator’s stream-of-consciousness narration reflects the free-flowing, unstructured form of her thoughts and reveals her struggle to make sense of her situation and find logic among the fragments of her past.” The mother is attempting to make sense of all of the things she recalls doing, or not doing, during her child’s life, she is having a moral battle and is trying to justify her actions. The main conflict in this story is Man vs. Self, as she reflects upon the formative years of her child’s development, and what she could have done differently if only she had tried harder or had been wiser at the time. The mother ultimately looks at Emily as a receipt showing all of her shortcomings as a mother, she shows remorse toward what her daughter has gone through even if it was caused by an outlying factor, one which she could not change even if she wanted to. The tone that the mother uses tells us that she does not try very hard to change her circumstances, “I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything.” The world has beaten her into a submissive victim of misfortune. She assumes that Emily will, inevitably, also feel this ultimate

William Faulkner wrote the short story “A Rose for Emily”, in 1931. This is a short story about the life of a woman with a tragic history. Miss Emily is the only person remaining in the Grierson family, a family seen as mighty, as it used to be wealthy and had a prominent position in the town, and therefore she considers herself more appealing than the other townspeople. Faulkner displays feminist, which is the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economical equality t men (webster.com). “A Rose for Emily” can be analyzed by readers as a feminist tale while critically thinking by using aspects of the narration, Miss Emily’s way of acting, and her appearance.

The reason I chose to analyze “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is because I am a lover of suspense and terror. The story totally caught my attention because the general tone is one of violence, gloom, and terror. The setting also plays an important role because it gives the reader a better understanding of the different situations. The main character, Emily, plays the role of a tragic figure that seems to be seen only from the outside. Sometimes people judge others from the outside, but they do not realize about the inside of the person. In the story, Emily is constantly judged by the townspeople because of her physical appearance, but they do not understand what she is going through emotionally. Another important character in the

When Emily Grierson was alive, she was known as somewhat of “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (309). In 1894, the mayor of the town, Colonel Sartoris, admitted Miss Emily’s taxes. He claimed that Miss Emily’s father had loaned the town money, and this was his way of returning the favor. Only the people of Colonel Sartoris’ time would believe a story like this. When the next generation came along, they weren’t very fond of Miss Emily not paying taxes, so on the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. She ignored it. A week later, the mayor himself sent Emily a letter. Once again, she ignored the tax notice. The towns Board of Aldermen then held a meeting and decided they would go to her home and speak with Emily personally. Once they