Essays on A Rose for Emily

April 30, 1930

William Faulkner

Short Story

Fiction

Emily Grierson, Mr. Grierson, Judge Stevens, Homer Barron, Tobe, Colonel Sartoris

The story is based on the author's explorations of isolation and the mental illnesses.

It deals with isolation, privacy, anger, mental instability, and the conflict between the past and the present. The symbol of rose speaks about love, romance, and seeking love through the total lock down.

As the book is made of constant flashbacks to the past, the symbol of rose is like an irony of dreaming through the lens of taxes, challenges, payments that must be paid. The moral lesson of this short story is wearing the rose colored glasses and the dangers that always come along.

The story revolves around Emily and her father who keeps her isolated from suitors, keeping her life under control until her death. She struggles with the loss, madness, and isolation, which drives Emily to take the life of a person (Homer Barron) who was planning to marry her.

• A Rose for Emily is the first story that has been published by the author in the major magazine.
• William Faulkner always referred to his writing as the "Ghost Story".
• The narrator's personality is never revealed in the story, which has added more emotion to it.
• Faulkner was a high school dropout.
• William Faulkner wanted to be a pilot in World War I, yet he was rejected for his small size.
• He was always more focused on becoming a poet and wrote more poetry than prose.
• Emily's part has been based on author's cousin Mary Louise Nelson.

• “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.”
• “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant— a combined gardener and cook— had seen in at least ten years.”
• “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.”
• “They rose when she entered— a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.”
• “So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing.”

The main impact of the "A Rose for Emily" story is isolation and being overly focused on a single person. The role of Miss Emily's insanity is given through the sheltered life that has been created by her father.

A Rose for Emily is an allegorical writing, which is why it can be used for essay writing when dealing with the topics of isolation, relationship between past and the present, being in control of someone else, and ignoring the problems. It also speaks of wearing the rose glasses, which is partially the reason why the rose for Emily has a double meaning in terms of symbolism.