ARoseforEmily-Sparknotes选注与评析,收集整理完整版
中央广播电视大学培训中心-大一学期总结
A Rose for Emily-Sparknotes
William
Faulkner
< Previous Section
Table of
Contents
Next Section >
Plot Overview
Context
William Faulkner was born in
New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. One of the
twentieth century’s
greatest writers, Faulkner
earned his fame from a series of novels that
explore the South’s
historical legacy, its
fraught and often tensely violent present, and its
uncertain future. This
grouping of major works
includes The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay
Dying (1930), Light
in August (1931), and
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), all of which are rooted
in Faulkner’s fictional
Mississippi county,
Yoknapatawpha. This imaginary setting is a
microcosm of the South that
Faulkner knew so
well. It serves as a lens through which he could
examine the practices, folkways,
and attitudes
that had divided and united the people of the
South since the nation’s inception.
In his writing, Faulkner was particularly
interested in exploring the moral implications of
history.
As the South emerged from the Civil
War and Reconstruction and attempted to shed the
stigma of
slavery, its residents were
frequently torn between a new and an older, more
established world
order. Religion and politics
frequently fail to provide order and guidance and
instead complicate
and divide. Society, with
its gossip, judgment, and harsh pronouncements,
conspires to thwart the
ambitions of
individuals struggling to embrace their
identities. Across Faulkner’s fictional
landscapes, individual characters often stage
epic struggles, prevented from realizing their
potential or establishing their place in the
world.
“A Rose for Emily” was the first
short story that Faulkner published in a major
magazine. It
appeared in the April 30, 1930,
issue of Forum. Despite the earlier publication of
several novels,
when Faulkner published this
story he was still struggling to make a name for
himself in the
United States. Few critics
recognized in his prose the hallmarks of a major
new voice. Slightly
revised versions of the
story appeared in subsequent collections of
Faulkner’s short fiction—in
These 13 (1931)
and then Collected Stories (1950)—which helped to
increase its visibility.
Today, the much-
anthologized story is among the most widely read
and highly praised of
Faulkner’s work. Beyond
its lurid appeal and somewhat Gothic atmosphere,
Faulkner’s “ghost
story,” as he once called
it, gestures to broader ideas, including the
tensions between North and
South, complexities
of a changing world order, disappearing realms of
gentility and aristocracy,
and rigid social
constraints placed on women. Ultimately, it is the
story’s chilling portrait of
aberrant
psychology and necrophilia that draws readers into
the dank, dusty world of Emily
Grierson.
Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1949 and the Pulitzer Prize in both 1955 and 1962.
He died in Byhalia, Mississippi on July 6,
1962, when he was sixty-four.
Plot
Overview
The story is divided into five
sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the
time of Emily
Grierson’s death and how the
entire town attended her funeral in her home,
which no stranger had
entered for more than
ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale
neighborhood, Emily’s house is the last
vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel
Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended
Emily’s tax responsibilities to the town after
her father’s death, justifying the action by
claiming
that Mr. Grierson had once lent the
community a significant sum. As new town leaders
take over,
they make unsuccessful attempts to
get Emily to resume payments. When members of the
Board
of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the
dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the
fact that she is
not required to pay taxes in
Jefferson and that the officials should talk to
Colonel Sartoris about
the matter. However, at
that point he has been dead for almost a decade.
She asks her servant,
Tobe, to show the men
out.
In section II, the narrator
describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily
resists another official
inquiry on behalf of
the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a
powerful odor emanating
from her property. Her
father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned
by the man whom the
townsfolk believed Emily
was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge Stevens,
the mayor at the
time, decides to have lime
sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson
home in the middle of
the night. Within a
couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the
townspeople begin to pity the
increasingly
reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt
had succumbed to insanity. The
townspeople
have always believed that the Griersons thought
too highly of themselves, with
Emily’s father
driving off the many suitors deemed not good
enough to marry his daughter. With
no offer of
marriage in sight, Emily is still single by the
time she turns thirty.
The day after Mr.
Grierson’s death, the women of the town call on
Emily to offer their
condolences. Meeting them
at the door, Emily states that her father is not
dead, a charade that she
keeps up for three
days. She finally turns her father’s body over for
burial.
In section III, the narrator
describes a long illness that Emily suffers after
this incident. The
summer after her father’s
death, the town contracts workers to pave the
sidewalks, and a
construction company, under
the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is
awarded the job. Homer
soon becomes a popular
figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy
rides on Sunday
afternoons, which scandalizes
the town and increases the condescension and pity
they have for
Emily. They feel that she is
forgetting her family pride and becoming involved
with a man beneath
her station.
As
the affair continues and Emily’s reputation is
further compromised, she goes to the drug store
to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is
required by law to reveal how she will use the
arsenic. She offers no explanation, and the
package arrives at her house labeled “For rats.”
In section IV, the narrator describes the
fear that some of the townspeople have that Emily
will use
the poison to kill herself. Her
potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly
unlikely, despite
their continued
Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town
insist that the Baptist
minister talk with
Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what
happened and swears that he’ll
never go back.
So the minister’s wife writes to Emily’s two
cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an
extended
stay. Because Emily orders a silver toilet set
monogrammed with Homer’s initials, talk
of the
couple’s marriage resumes. Homer, absent from
town, is believed to be preparing for
Emily’s
move to the North or avoiding Emily’s intrusive
relatives.
After the cousins’
departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one
evening and then is never seen
again. Holed up
in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite
the occasional lesson she
gives in china
painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In
what becomes an annual ritual,
Emily refuses
to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes
up the top floor of the house.
Except for the
occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing
is heard from her until her death
at age
seventy-four. Only the servant is seen going in
and out of the house.
In section V, the
narrator describes what happens after Emily dies.
Emily’s body is laid out in the
parlor, and
the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the
service. After some time has
passed, the door
to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened
in forty years is broken down
by the
townspeople. The room is frozen in time, with the
items for an upcoming wedding and a
man’s suit
laid out. Homer Barron’s body is stretched on the
bed as well, in an advanced state of
decay.
The onlookers then notice the indentation of a
head in the pillow beside Homer’s body and
a
long strand of Emily’s gray hair on the pillow.
Character List
Emily Grierson - The
object of fascination in the story. A eccentric
recluse, Emily is a
mysterious figure who
changes from a vibrant and hopeful young girl to a
cloistered and secretive
old woman. Devastated
and alone after her father’s death, she is an
object of pity for the
townspeople. After a
life of having potential suitors rejected by her
father, she spends time after
his death with a
newcomer, Homer Barron, although the chances of
his marrying her decrease as
the years pass.
Bloated and pallid in her later years, her hair
turns steel gray. She ultimately
poisons Homer
and seals his corpse into an upstairs room.
Read an in-depth analysis of Emily Grierson.
Homer Barron - A foreman from the
North. Homer is a large man with a dark
complexion, a
booming voice, and light-colored
eyes. A gruff and demanding boss, he wins many
admirers in
Jefferson because of his
gregarious nature and good sense of humor. He
develops an interest in
Emily and takes her
for Sunday drives in a yellow-wheeled buggy.
Despite his attributes, the
townspeople view
him as a poor, if not scandalous, choice for a
mate. He disappears in Emily’s
house and
decomposes in an attic bedroom after she kills
him.
Read an in-depth analysis of Homer
Barron.
Judge Stevens - A mayor of
Jefferson. Eighty years old, Judge Stevens
attempts to delicately
handle the complaints
about the smell emanating from the Grierson
property. To be respectful of
Emily’s
pride and former position in the community, he and
the aldermen decide to sprinkle lime
on the
property in the middle of the night.
Mr.
Grierson - Emily’s father. Mr. Grierson is a
controlling, looming presence even in death, and
the community clearly sees his lasting
influence over Emily. He deliberately thwarts
Emily’s
attempts to find a husband in order to
keep her under his control. We get glimpses of him
in the
story: in the crayon portrait kept on
the gilt-edged easel in the parlor, and
silhouetted in the
doorway, horsewhip in hand,
having chased off another of Emily’s suitors.
Tobe - Emily’s servant. Tobe, his voice
supposedly rusty from lack of use, is the only
lifeline
that Emily has to the outside world.
For years, he dutifully cares for her and tends to
her needs.
Eventually the townspeople stop
grilling him for information about Emily. After
Emily’s death, he
walks out the back door and
never returns.
Colonel Sartoris - A former
mayor of Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris absolves
Emily of any tax
burden after the death of her
father. His elaborate and benevolent gesture is
not heeded by the
succeeding generation of
town leaders.
Analysis of Major Characters
Emily Grierson
Emily is the
classic outsider, controlling and limiting the
town’s access to her true identity by
remaining hidden. The house that shields Emily
from the world suggests the mind of the woman
who inhabits it: shuttered, dusty, and dark.
The object of the town’s intense scrutiny, Emily
is a
muted and mysterious figure. On one
level, she exhibits the qualities of the
stereotypical southern
“eccentric”:
unbalanced, excessively tragic, and subject to
bizarre behavior. Emily enforces her
own sense
of law and conduct, such as when she refuses to
pay her taxes or state her purpose for
buying
the poison. Emily also skirts the law when she
refuses to have numbers attached to her
house
when federal mail service is instituted. Her
dismissal of the law eventually takes on more
sinister consequences, as she takes the life
of the man whom she refuses to allow to abandon
her.
The narrator portrays Emily as
a monument, but at the same time she is pitied and
often irritating,
demanding to live life on
her own terms. The subject of gossip and
speculation, the townspeople
cluck their
tongues at the fact that she accepts Homer’s
attentions with no firm wedding plans.
After
she purchases the poison, the townspeople conclude
that she will kill herself. Emily’s
instabilities, however, lead her in a
different direction, and the final scene of the
story suggests
that she is a necrophiliac.
Necrophilia typically means a sexual attraction to
dead bodies. In a
broader sense, the term also
describes a powerful desire to control another,
usually in the context
of a romantic or deeply
personal relationship. Necrophiliacs tend to be so
controlling in their
relationships that they
ultimately resort to bonding with unresponsive
entities with no resistance or
will—in other
words, with dead bodies. Mr. Grierson controlled
Emily, and after his death, Emily
temporarily
controls him by refusing to give up his dead body.
She ultimately transfers this control
to
Homer, the object of her affection. Unable to find
a traditional way to express her desire to
possess Homer, Emily takes his life to achieve
total power over him.
Homer Barron
Homer, much like Emily, is an
outsider, a stranger in town who becomes the
subject of gossip.
Unlike Emily, however,
Homer swoops into town brimming with charm, and he
initially becomes
the center of attention and
the object of affection. Some townspeople distrust
him because he is
both a Northerner and day
laborer, and his Sunday outings with Emily are in
many ways
scandalous, because the townspeople
regard Emily—despite her eccentricities—as being
from a
higher social class. Homer’s failure to
properly court and marry Emily prompts speculation
and
suspicion. He carouses with younger men at
the Elks Club, and the narrator portrays him as
either
a homosexual or simply an eternal
bachelor, dedicated to his single status and
uninterested in
marriage. Homer says only that
he is “not a marrying man.”
As the
foreman of a company that has arrived in town to
pave the sidewalks, Homer is an emblem
of the
North and the changes that grip the once insular
and genteel world of the South. With his
machinery, Homer represents modernity and
industrialization, the force of progress that is
upending traditional values and provoking
resistance and alarm among traditionalists. Homer
brings innovation to the rapidly changing
world of this Southern town, whose new leaders are
themselves pursuing more “modern” ideas. The
change that Homer brings to Emily’s life, as her
first real lover, is equally as profound and
seals his grim fate as the victim of her plan to
keep him
permanently by her side.
Themes,
Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
Tradition versus Change
Through the
mysterious figure of Emily Grierson, Faulkner
conveys the struggle that comes from
trying to
maintain tradition in the face of widespread,
radical change. Jefferson is at a crossroads,
embracing a modern, more commercial future
while still perched on the edge of the past, from
the
faded glory of the Grierson home to the
town cemetery where anonymous Civil War soldiers
have
been laid to rest. Emily herself is a
tradition, steadfastly staying the same over the
years despite
many changes in her community.
She is in many ways a mixed blessing. As a living
monument to
the past, she represents the
traditions that people wish to respect and honor;
however, she is also a
burden and entirely cut
off from the outside world, nursing eccentricities
that others cannot
understand.
Emily lives in a timeless vacuum and world of
her own making. Refusing to have metallic
numbers affixed to the side of her house when
the town receives modern mail service, she is out
of
touch with the reality that constantly
threatens to break through her carefully sealed
perimeters.
Garages and cotton gins have
replaced the grand antebellum homes. The aldermen
try to break
with the unofficial agreement
about taxes once forged between Colonel Sartoris
and Emily. This
new and younger generation of
leaders brings in Homer’s company to pave the
sidewalks.
Although Jefferson still highly
regards traditional notions of honor and
reputation, the narrator is
critical of the
old men in their Confederate uniforms who gather
for Emily’s funeral. For them as
for
her, time is relative. The past is not a faint
glimmer but an ever-present, idealized realm.
Emily’s macabre bridal chamber is an extreme
attempt to stop time and prevent change, although
doing so comes at the expense of human life.
The Power of Death
Death hangs
over “A Rose for Emily,” from the narrator’s
mention of Emily’s death at the
beginning of
the story through the description of Emily’s
death-haunted life to the foundering of
tradition in the face of modern changes. In
every case, death prevails over every attempt to
master
it. Emily, a fixture in the community,
gives in to death slowly. The narrator compares
her to a
drowned woman, a bloated and pale
figure left too long in the water. In the same
description, he
refers to her small, spare
skeleton—she is practically dead on her feet.
Emily stands as an emblem
of the Old South, a
grand lady whose respectability and charm rapidly
decline through the years,
much like the
outdated sensibilities the Griersons represent.
The death of the old social order will
prevail, despite many townspeople’s attempts
to stay true to the old ways.
Emily
attempts to exert power over death by denying the
fact of death itself. Her bizarre
relationship
to the dead bodies of the men she has loved—her
necrophilia—is revealed first when
her father
dies. Unable to admit that he has died, Emily
clings to the controlling paternal figure
whose denial and control became the only—yet
extreme—form of love she knew. She gives up his
body only reluctantly. When Homer dies, Emily
refuses to acknowledge it once again—although
this time, she herself was responsible for
bringing about the death. In killing Homer, she
was able
to keep him near her. However,
Homer’s lifelessness rendered him permanently
distant. Emily and
Homer’s grotesque marriage
reveals Emily’s disturbing attempt to fuse life
and death. However,
death ultimately triumphs.
Motifs
Watching
Emily
is the subject of the intense, controlling gaze of
the narrator and residents of Jefferson. In
lieu of an actual connection to Emily, the
townspeople create subjective and often distorted
interpretations of the woman they know little
about. They attend her funeral under the guise of
respect and honor, but they really want to
satisfy their lurid curiosity about the town’s
most
notable eccentric. One of the ironic
dimensions of the story is that for all the gossip
and theorizing,
no one guesses the perverse
extent of Emily’s true nature.
For most
of the story, Emily is seen only from a distance,
by people who watch her through the
windows or
who glimpse her in her doorway. The narrator
refers to her as an object—an “idol.”
This
pattern changes briefly during her courtship with
Homer Barron, when she leaves her house
and is
frequently out in the world. However, others spy
on her just as avidly, and she is still
relegated to the role of object, a distant
figure who takes on character according to the
whims of
those who watch her. In this sense,
the act of watching is powerful because it
replaces an actual
human presence with a made-
up narrative that changes depending on who is
doing the watching.
No one knows the
Emily that exists beyond what they can see, and
her true self is visible to them
only after
she dies and her secrets are revealed.
Dust
A pall of dust hangs over
the story, underscoring the decay and decline that
figure so prominently.
The dust throughout
Emily’s house is a fitting accompaniment to the
faded lives within. When the
aldermen arrive
to try and secure Emily’s annual tax payment, the
house smells of “dust and
disuse.” As they
seat themselves, the movement stirs dust all
around them, and it slowly rises,
roiling
about their thighs and catching the slim beam of
sunlight entering the room. The house is a
place of stasis, where regrets and memories
have remained undisturbed. In a way, the dust is a
protective presence; the aldermen cannot
penetrate Emily’s murky relationship with reality.
The
layers of dust also suggest the cloud of
obscurity that hides Emily’s true nature and the
secrets her
house contains. In the final
scene, the dust is an oppressive presence that
seems to emanate from
Homer’s dead body. The
dust, which is everywhere, seems even more
horrible here.
Symbols
Emily’s
House
Emily’s house, like Emily herself,
is a monument, the only remaining emblem of a
dying world of
Southern aristocracy. The
outside of the large, square frame house is
lavishly decorated. The
cupolas, spires, and
scrolled balconies are the hallmarks of a decadent
style of architecture that
became popular in
the 1870s. By the time the story takes place, much
has changed. The street and
neighborhood, at
one time affluent, pristine, and privileged, have
lost their standing as the realm
of the elite.
The house is in some ways an extension of Emily:
it bares its “stubborn and coquettish
decay”
to the town’s residents. It is a testament to the
endurance and preservation of tradition but
now seems out of place among the cotton
wagons, gasoline pumps, and other industrial
trappings
that surround it—just as the South’s
old values are out of place in a changing society.
Emily’s house also represents alienation,
mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the
living past,
and the sealed upstairs bedroom
is her macabre trophy room where she preserves the
man she
would not allow to leave her. As when
the group of men sprinkled lime along the
foundation to
counteract the stench of rotting
flesh, the townspeople skulk along the edges of
Emily’s life and
property. The house, like its
owner, is an object of fascination for them. They
project their own
lurid fantasies and
interpretations onto the crumbling edifice and
mysterious figure inside. Emily’s
death is a
chance for them to gain access to this forbidden
realm and confirm their wildest notions
and
most sensationalistic suppositions about what had
occurred on the inside.
The Strand of
Hair
The strand of hair is a reminder of
love lost and the often perverse things people do
in their pursuit
of happiness. The strand of
hair also reveals the inner life of a woman who,
despite her
eccentricities, was
committed to living life on her own terms and not
submitting her behavior, no
matter how
shocking, to the approval of others. Emily
subscribes to her own moral code and
occupies
a world of her own invention, where even murder is
permissible. The narrator
foreshadows the
discovery of the long strand of hair on the pillow
when he describes the physical
transformation
that Emily undergoes as she ages. Her hair grows
more and more grizzled until it
becomes a
“vigorous iron-gray.” The strand of hair
ultimately stands as the last vestige of a life
left to languish and decay, much like the body
of Emily’s former lover.
Faulkner and the
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a
literary tradition that came into its own in the
early twentieth century. It is
rooted in the
Gothic style, which had been popular in European
literature for many centuries.
Gothic writers
concocted wild, frightening scenarios in which
mysterious secrets, supernatural
occurrences,
and characters’ extreme duress conspired to create
a breathless reading experience.
Gothic style
focused on the morbid and grotesque, and the genre
often featured certain set pieces
and
characters: drafty castles laced with cobwebs,
secret passages, and frightened, wide-eyed
heroines whose innocence does not go
untouched. Although they borrow the essential
ingredients
of the Gothic, writers of Southern
Gothic fiction were not interested in integrating
elements of the
sensational solely for the
sake of creating suspense or titillation. Writers
such as Flannery
O’Connor, Tennessee Williams,
Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, Erskine
Caldwell, and
Carson McCullers were drawn to
the elements of Gothicism for what they revealed
about human
psychology and the dark,
underlying motives that were pushed to the fringes
of society.
Southern Gothic writers
were interested in exploring the extreme,
antisocial behaviors that were
often a
reaction against a confining code of social
conduct. Southern Gothic often hinged on the
belief that daily life and the refined surface
of the social order were fragile and illusory,
disguising
disturbing realities or twisted
psyches. Faulkner, with his dense and multilayered
prose,
traditionally stands outside this group
of practitioners. However, “A Rose for Emily”
reveals the
influence that Southern Gothic had
on his writing: this particular story has a moody
and
forbidding atmosphere; a crumbling old
mansion; and decay, putrefaction, and
grotesquerie.
Faulkner’s work uses the
sensational elements to highlight an individual’s
struggle against an
oppressive society that is
undergoing rapid change. Another aspect of the
Southern Gothic style is
appropriation and
transformation. Faulkner has appropriated the
image of the damsel in distress
and
transformed it into Emily, a psychologically
damaged spinster. Her mental instability and
necrophilia have made her an emblematic
Southern Gothic heroine.
Time and Temporal
Shifts
In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner
does not rely on a conventional linear approach to
present his
characters’ inner lives and
motivations. Instead, he fractures, shifts, and
manipulates time,
stretching the story out
over several decades. We learn about Emily’s life
through a series of
flashbacks. The story
begins with a description of Emily’s funeral and
then moves into the
near-distant past. At the
end of the story, we see that the funeral is a
flashback as well, preceding
the unsealing of
the upstairs bedroom door. We see Emily as a young
girl, attracting suitors whom
her father
chases off with a whip, and as an old woman, when
she dies at seventy-four. As Emily’s
grip on reality grows more tenuous over
the years, the South itself experiences a great
deal of
change. By moving forward and backward
in time, Faulkner portrays the past and the
present as
coexisting and is able to examine
how they influence each other. He creates a
complex, layered,
and multidimensional world.
Faulkner presents two visions of
time in the story. One is based in the
mathematical precision and
objectivity of
reality, in which time moves forward relentlessly,
and what’s done is done; only the
present
exists. The other vision is more subjective. Time
moves forward, but events don’t stay in
distant memory; rather, memory can exist
unhindered, alive and active no matter how much
time
passes or how much things change. Even if
a person is physically bound to the present, the
past
can play a vibrant, dynamic role. Emily
stays firmly planted in a subjective realm of
time, where
life moves on with her in it—but
she stays committed, regardless, to the past.
The Narrator
The unnamed narrator of
“A Rose for Emily” serves as the town’s collective
voice. Critics have
debated whether it is a
man or woman; a former lover of Emily Grierson’s;
the boy who
remembers the sight of Mr.
Grierson in the doorway, holding the whip; or the
town gossip,
spearheading the effort to break
down the door at the end. It is possible, too,
that the narrator is
Emily’s former servant,
Tobe—he would have known her intimately, perhaps
including her secret.
A few aspects of the
story support this theory, such as the fact that
the narrator often refers to
Emily as “Miss
Emily” and provides only one descriptive detail
about the Colonel Sartoris, the
mayor: the
fact that he enforced a law requiring that black
women wear aprons in public. In any
case, the
narrator hides behind the collective pronoun we.
By using we, the narrator can attribute
what
might be his or her own thoughts and opinions to
all of the townspeople, turning private
ideas
into commonly held beliefs.
The
narrator deepens the mystery of who he is and how
much he knows at the end of the story,
when
the townspeople discover Homer’s body. The
narrator confesses “Already we knew” that an
upstairs bedroom had been sealed up. However,
we never find out how the narrator knows about
the room. More important, at this point, for
the first time in the story, the narrator uses the
pronoun
“they” instead of “we” to refer to the
townspeople. First, he says, “Already we knew that
there
was one room. . . .” Then he changes to,
“They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the
ground before they opened it.” This is a
significant shift. Until now, the narrator has
willingly
grouped himself with the rest of the
townspeople, accepting the community’s actions,
thoughts,
and speculations as his own. Here,
however, the narrator distances himself from the
action, as
though the breaking down of the
door is something he can’t bring himself to
endorse. The shift is
quick and subtle, and he
returns to “we” in the passages that follow, but
it gives us an important
clue about the
narrator’s identity. Whoever he was, the narrator
cared for Emily, despite her
eccentricities
and horrible, desperate act. In a town that
treated her as an oddity and, finally, a
horror, a kind, sympathetic gesture—even one
as slight as symbolically looking away when the
private door is forced open—stands out.
Important Quotations Explained
1. Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a
duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation
upon the town . . .
Explanation for
Quotation 1 >>
This quotation appears near the
beginning of the story, in section I, when the
narrator describes
Emily’s funeral and history
in the town. The complex figure of Emily Grierson
casts a long
shadow in the town of Jefferson.
The members of the community assume a proprietary
relationship to her, extolling the image of a
grand lady whose family history and reputation
warranted great respect. At the same time, the
townspeople criticize her unconventional life and
relationship with Homer Barron. Emily is an
object of fascination. Many people feel compelled
to
protect her, whereas others feel free to
monitor her every move, hovering at the edges of
her life.
Emily is the last representative of
a once great Jefferson family, and the townspeople
feel that they
have inherited this daughter of
a faded empire of wealth and prestige, for better
or worse.
The order of Faulkner’s words
in this quotation is significant. Although Emily
once represented a
great southern tradition
centering on the landed gentry with their vast
holdings and considerable
resources, Emily’s
legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an
obligation than a
romanticized vestige of a
dying order. The town leaders conveniently
overlook the fact that in her
straightened
circumstances and solitary life, Emily can no
longer meet her tax obligations with the
town.
Emily emerges as not only a financial burden to
the town but a figure of outrage because
she
unsettles the community’s strict social codes.
Close
2. Then we noticed that in the
second pillow was the indentation of a head. One
of us lifted
something from it, and leaning
forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and
acrid in the nostrils,
we saw a long strand of
iron-gray hair.
Explanation for Quotation 2
>>
These lines end the story. Emily’s secret,
finally revealed, solidifies her reputation in the
town as
an eccentric. Her precarious mental
state has led her to perform a grotesque act that
surpasses the
townspeople’s wildest
imaginings. Emily, although she deliberately sets
up a solitary existence for
herself, is unable
to give up the men who have shaped her life, even
after they have died. She
hides her dead
father for three days, then permanently hides
Homer’s body in the upstairs
bedroom. In
entombing her lover, Emily keeps her fantasy of
marital bliss permanently intact.
Emily’s
excessive need for privacy is challenged by the
townspeople’s extreme curiosity about the
facts surrounding her life. Unsatisfied with
glimpses caught through doorways and windows, the
townspeople essentially break into the
Grierson home after Emily’s death. Convincing
themselves
that they are behaving respectfully
by waiting until a normal period of mourning has
expired, they
satisfy their lurid curiosity by
unsealing the second-floor bedroom. There is no
real moral
justification for their act, and in
light of their blatant violation of Emily’s home
and privacy,
Emily’s eccentric, grotesque
behavior takes on a layer of almost sympathetic
pathos. She has done
a horrible, nightmarish
thing, yet the confirmation of the townspeople’s
worst beliefs seems sad,
rather than
satisfying or a cause for celebration.