A Rose For Emily By William Faulkner
“A Rose for Emily”,
a gothic story, opens with the townspeople reacting in awe over Miss Emily
Grierson's death, post which the story travels in flashback. The entire story
is narrated from the townspeople point of view and not in Emily’s purview.
Emily, a burden for the
people, was send a notice for the due taxes. She sends a note in an old
handwriting/archaic shape, mentioning, that she doesn’t go out anywhere
anymore! Emily is domineering and menacing.
The town calls for a
special meeting of the Board of Aldermen, to figure out what to do with the lady
not paying her taxes. She downrightly and sternly refuses to take the ownership
of the due taxes, and sends them back. The people had issue with her smell,
they complained about it to the leaders, but not wating to argue with the intimidating
Emily, they take care of the smell on their own, by sprinkling lime in the
house.
Emily had a very
protective controlling father (like father, like daughter! 😊), and he
would drive away all the probable suitors for Emily, with a whip. In short,
her father never allowed a life for her! Her father had taken away all the
chances of her having a better life.
When he dies, she refuses
to acknowledge his death for three days. After the townspeople intervene and
bury her father, Emily is further isolated by a mysterious illness, possibly a
mental breakdown.
“After her
father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people
hardly saw her at all.”
The town is moving
towards industrialisation-
“The
construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman
named Homer Barron, a Yankee”
Finally, Homer becomes
her sweetheart. Town was happy that finally she would have someone in her life,
as father is not there to drive him away!
Finally, the scene shifts
to a drugstore, where she is buying poison/arsenic.
The druggist
looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained
flag. “Why, of course,” the
druggist said. “If that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what
you are going to use it for.”
But, “Miss Emily just stares at him, her head tilted
back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got
the arsenic and wrapped it up.”
Scares him away! She is controlling,
from not paying taxes, to not accepting father’s death, she has constructed a
world of her own.
The news of her buying poison,
spreads like wildfire, townspeople are surprised with her idea of a suicide,
when she has a sweetheart (Homer) along!
“Then we
said, “She will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked — he
liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’
Club — that he was not a marrying man.”
Maybe Homer was a Homosexual,
or wanted to remain a bachelor, and Emily couldn’t persuade her to stay back!
Subsequently, they realise
that she has made a big investment, on a man’s toilet set/shaving set in silver
and a nightsuit! They assumed, them being married and were glad.
She didn’t
appear on the streets for next 6 months, they thought, Homer has left her!
Meanwhile
the town is moving forward, they have sidewalks, and getting a post office. She
doesn’t let people attach any mailbox to her house, or to even repair her house.
And
suddenly, Faulkner shifts the scene, and introduces us readers -
And so
she died.
The
flashback finally ends!
Emily, is
representative of the old South that is dying away!
The town
waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before opening a room above
the stairs, lying untouched for forty years.
The room
looked like decorated for a wedding, and what ensues, is gothic, thrilling and
totally unexpected (staying
away from spoilers)
The story
is fairly morbid, and following no chronological order. The themes discussed –
Post-war
Southern society, classism, race, marriage, feminism, death, necrophilia,
insanity, isolation!
The incompressible nature of the time progression, enforces me to render 3.5 stars. Writing is simple and non-lurid.
Emily as a symbol
of old south, had to die for the town to move forward and grow. She fatally flawed
with mental problems!
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