A Rose for Emily

1. A Rose for Emily William Faulkner

2. William Faulkner

3. American Civil War • Occurred between 1861 and 1865 in the United States. • The northern states were going through an industrial revolution and desperately needed more people to work in its factories. • The South was still mainly agricultural and purchased a lot of goods from abroad and was therefore against import tariffs.

4. American Civil War • 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America, known as the Confederacy. • The other 25 states supported the federal government and formed the Union. • After four years of warfare, mostly within the Southern states, the Confederacy surrendered and slavery was outlawed everywhere in the nation.

5. Historical points in A Rose for Emily • Emily represents the southern aristocratic family, she had class and power, and according to her father, none suitor was suitable enough. • Homer Barron, a laborer from the north, known by his sense of humor, came to Jefferson to construct sidewalks.

6. Historical points in A Rose for Emily • The relationship between them was very criticized by the society: “At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, ‘Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.’ ”

7. Historical points in A Rose for Emily • Tobe, the Negro, represents the slavery once the society sees him just as a slave. He doesn’t talk, his opinion doesn’t matter, he just serves Emily during her life.

8. A Rose for Emily

9. A Rose for Emily • Originally published in the April 30, 1930, issue of Forum; • It was the first Faulkner’s short story published in a major magazine; • A slightly revised version was published in two collections of his short fiction, These 13 (1931) and Collected Stories (1950).

10. SummaryChapter I • The story begins at the huge funeral for Miss Emily Grierson;  •  Her house is now old, but was once the best house around;  • Since 1894 Emily has had a special arrangement with the mayor and her family and her paid no taxes; • the "newer generation" wasn't happy with it and tried,unsuccessfully,  to get her to pay the debt.

11. Chapter II • Thirty years before her death, thetaxcollectingtownspeople, paid Emily a visit and complained about a bad smell at her place; • Thebadsmellbegan 2 yearsafterherfatherdiedanda short time after her lover disappeared from her life; •  the stink got stronger and new complaints were made; • The authorities sprinkled lime around the house and the smell was eventually gone;

12. Whenherfatherdiedeverybodyfeltsorry for Emily, becauseheleftherthehousebut no money. • Emily refused to admit her father’s death for three whole days; • She almost never left the house; And it got worse when her lover died. • the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man.

13. People in town judged her and could not understand why she was still single in her 30’s. • They also often said that her father had stolen her youth, because he had driven away a lot of the young men who tried to approach her; • But they did not say she was crazy then.

14. Chapter III •  The story doubles back and tells that not too long after her father died Emily begins dating Homer Barron, who is a Yankee and is in town on a sidewalk-building project; • The town heavily disapproves of the affair and brings Emily's cousins to town to stop the relationship; • She was sick for a long time. When the town saw her again, her hair was cut short.

15. One day, Emily is seen buying arsenic at the drugstore, and the town thinks that Homer is cheating on her, and that she plans to kill herself. • “She was over thirty then,still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes”.

16. Chapter IV • Emily buys a bunch of men's items, and everybody believes that she and Homer are going to get married; • Homer had a reputation and people judged him as either a homosexual or an eternal bachelor; • Homer leaves town and the cousins went back home;

17.  Homer comes back and he is last seen entering Miss Emily's house. • Emily rarely leaves the house after that, except for a period of half a dozen years when she gives painting lessons.  • When people next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. • Emily diesand the story cycles back to where it began,at her funeral;

18. Chapter V • Tobe, miss Emily's servant, lets in the town women and then leaves by the backdoor forever; • After the funeral, and after Emily is buried, the townspeople go upstairs and break into the room that they knew had been closed for forty years. • Inside, they find the corpse of Homer Barron, rotting in the bed;

19. On the dust of the pillow next to Homer they find an indentation of a head, and there, in the indentation, a long, gray hair.

20. Analysis

21. Analysis • Title • Plot devices • Characters • Symbolism • Plot • Subplot • Setting • Point of view

22. Title “That was an allegorical title; the meaning (…) was a woman who had had a tragedy (…), and I pitied her and this was a salute, just as if you were to make a gesture, a salute to anyone; to a woman you would hand a rose...” (Faulkner, in: OUTÓN, 1999, p. 63)

23. Title “Oh, it’s simply that the poor woman had no life at all. Her father had kept her more or lesslocked up and then she had a lover who was about to quit her, she had to murder him. It wasjust “A Rose for Emily”—that’s all.” (Faulkner, in: Gwynn, 1959, p. 87–88)

24. Title • Getty (2005): • The only rose Emily actually receives; • Possible interpretations: • Symbol: Homer, a relic of the past; • Symbol: combination of petals – the elements in the story; • A tribute to Emily from the narrator: either preserving her secret or ignoring what may lead to it; • A tribute to Emily from the author: the sub-rosa concept.

25. 2. Plot • “Plot is the author's arrangement of incidents in a story. It is the organizing principle that controls the order of events. this structure is, in a sense, what remains after a writer edits out what is irrelevant to the story being told” (MEYER, 1998, p. 60)

26. 2. Plot • PlotElements Exposition – Miss Emily’s funeral and a storyabout taxes. Raisingaction – The deathof Miss Emily’sfatherand Homer Barron’sappearance, whichturnedthemoodofthetown. Climax – Miss Emily’shidden agenda: poisoning Homer Barron. The imageofthepoisonpackagewith a skullandcrossboneswherewaswritten: “For rats”.

27. 2. Plot Falling action – The gossip and suspense generated by the possible outcome of the strange and unknown relationship between Miss Emily and the “missing” Homer Barron. The subsequently years of isolation left for Miss Emily. Dénouement – The death of Miss Emily, which opened an opportunity for the townspeople to enter the bedroom that has been locked for 40 years, only to find the rotting corpse of Homer Barron, alongside a strand of iron-gray hair.

28. 2. Plot • Non-linearity – The story’s arrangement is out of the chronological order. It is based on the techniques called: • In media res – a narrative mode on which a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion. • Stream of consciousness - a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's or collective joint (or not) point of view expressed through written thoughts and/or memories put together by monologues intertwined and alternated with past and present actions or events.

29. 2. Plot • Functions They are used in orderto do notgiveawaysomethingsurprisingandimportanttothestory’sdevelopmentorresolutionstraightforwardly, helpingintobuildingup suspense andrelativizingthefactsandeventswhichtook(ortake) place. In thestory, the “consciousness” isoriginatedfromthehabitantsandthetownitselfmergedinto a stream. It’sbeginningisalsowhatwassupposedtobetheend(notonlyofthestoryitself): Emily’s funeral.

30. 2. Plot • Plotstyle: character-based The story revolves more aroundthecharactersinnerconflicts, a “big picture” oran abstract themeormessage; theactionitselfisofsecondaryimportance, as time itselfmaynotbe off utterimportanceorthe setting is a “dreamworld” of its own. The point ofviewandthecharactersmindsmakethestorygoeson, slowerperhaps.

31. 2. Plot • Conflicts External – Emily X Society • Judgement – Restrain - North • Gossip – Control – Tradition Internal – Emily X Herself • Shoulderangel – Victim • Madness - Father

32. 3. Characters • Types of characters: • Round: when a person suffers changes inside a story and when this person is complex. Ex.: Emily Grierson • Flat and static: a person does not suffer changes and he/she is not complex. Example: all the other characters in “A Rose for Emily”

33. 3. Characters • Miss Emily Grierson: • The main character; protagonist; • Mysterious character, once that she kept her life in secret; • She was born in an old southern aristocratic family; • Only child and lived with her father until his death; • Her life was totally controlled by her father;

34. 3. Characters • Miss Emily Grierson: • Her youth image was innocent and beautiful, for she had many suitors: She was described as “a slender figure in white” (p. 123), “which is typical of the virginal quality young women are expected to have at the time” (QUN, 2007, p.67). • She never got married, because her father thought “none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such” (p. 123).

35. 3. Characters • Miss Emily Grierson: • After her father’s death she became object of pity for the townspeople; • Change in appearance: short hair making her look like a little girl or an angel  lack of sexuality, contrasting to what people might expect from a woman who was 30 years old.

36. 3. Characters • Miss Emily Grierson: • In the final scene: necrophiliac person; • “Necrophilia means sexual intercourse with or attraction toward corpses”; • Her necrophilia is revealed when her father died: she was unwilling to admit that he had died and stayed with the corpse at home for 3 days;

37. 3. Characters • Miss Emily Grierson: • Necrophiliacs tend to be controlling in their relationships: Emily was unable to find a traditional way to express her desire to possess Homer; • She decided to take his life away to achieve total power over him, keeping his body hidden for years.

38. 3. Characters: • Mr. Grierson: • Emily’s father; • Nobody was enough for his daughter; • Controlled his daughter’s life even in death; • Faulkner: “He was a selfish man who didn't want his daughter to leave home because he wanted a housekeeper (...)”; (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008) • A selfish man in a selfish society.

39. 3. Characters • Homer Barron: • A foreman from the North who went to Jefferson to work on a sidewalk-paving project; • Sexuality: people judged him as either a homosexual or an eternal bachelor: “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.” (p. 126);

40. 3. Characters • Homer Barron: • A demanding boss, admired in the town because of his sense of humor; • Distrusted by some of the townspeople because he was both a Northerner and a day laborer; • He started going out with Emily every Sunday in a yellow-wheeled buggy.; • Disappeared in Emily’s house and decomposed in an attic bedroom after she killed him.

41. 3. Characters • Colonel Sartoris: • Previousmayor of Jefferson, he absolved Emily of paying any taxburdenafter her father’s death; • Despite this kind attitude, Colonel Sartoris had shown some prejudicial remarks: “he fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron” (p. 119-120); • The coexistence of these behaviors was normal during that time among powerful political figures and elites.

42. 3. Characters • Judge Stevens: • Previous mayor of Jefferson portrayed as an older because of his age (80 years old); • A typical southern man; • He did not absolve Miss Emily of paying the taxes; • He and the aldermen decided to sprinkle lime on Emily’s property in the middle of the night in order to solve the problem of the smell emanated from her house.

43. 3. Characters • Tobe (The Negro): • A Negro manservant, “combined gardener and cook” (p. 119), who carefully took care of Emily and her needs; • Loyal and discreet, he protected Emily’s privacy from the Jeffersonians; • His skin color isolated him from the world: people did not accept him as a socialized person; • He probably had the answers Miss Emily’s mysteries in the story, but he disappeared after he death.

44. 3. Characters • Old Lady Wyatt: • Emily’s aunt; • She is described for the townspeople as a "completely crazy" (p. 123) person before her death; • She seems to be in the story to alert the readers that insanity happens in Emily’s family.

45. 4. Symbolism “A symbol is a person, object, or event that suggests more than its literal meaning. A literary symbol can be a setting, character, action, object, name, or anything else in a work that maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings. Symbols cannot be restricted to a single meaning; they are suggestive rather than definitive.” (MEYER, 1998, p. 215 e 216)

46. 4. Symbolism • Symbolism is very prominent throughout “A Rose for Emily”, playing a big role in the underlying meaning of the entire story. 

47. 4. Symbolism • The Grierson’s house’s mirroring: a symbol of Miss Emily’s physical attributes when compared chronologically:

48. 4. Symbolism • The Grierson’s house’s mirroring: • The house: "white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies“ (p. 119); built to impress and engage the townspeople’s attention. • Miss Emily: regarded as her father’s property, she used to dress in a similar manner; representation of the Old South; considered a “monument” of Southern manners and an ideal of past values.

49. 4. Symbolism • The Grierson’s house’s mirroring: As time goes by…. • Both the house and Miss Emily decay; • Both were seen as empty and also lifeless at the time of Miss Emily’s death: “an eyesore among eyesores” (p. 119), and “a fallen monument” (p. 119).

50. 4. Symbolism • The Grierson’s house’s mirroring: a symbol of Miss Emily’s change in social status: • The house: “big, squarish (…) set on (…) Jefferson’s most select street” (p. 119); extremely solid, impervious to the insignificant problems of the common people. • Miss Emily: powerful and strong; symbol of the Southern tradition and rich past.