A Rose for Emily
Directions: Write a paragraph of 150-300 words on one of the topics below. You must include the topic # and description (but this is not included in the word count) in your initial post. You must include a MINIMUM of 2 quotes from the short story.
- Miss Emily is such an offbeat character, use that to your advantage and try diagnosing her in the story “A Rose for Emily”; even though she never receives medical treatment, it is obvious that she has some characteristics for mental issue. This most obvious is in her bizarre character and the withdrawn stance she has when it comes to society.
- The structure of a story can be sometimes dull, but Faulkner used a very interesting structure for this story. Take a fresh look at the story and analyze why he doesn’t use events in a chronological order but rather he mixes things up. Why does this make his story successful or would it be even better in chronological and linear fashion?
- In 1894; what was it that the colonel had done for Miss Emily? Analyze the reasons and the action.
- The day after her father’s funeral what did Emily tell the visitors and more expressly why did the townspeople seem unfazed by what could be possibly something so strange.
- No one has seen the room upstairs for forty years; after Emily’s funeral the townspeople break down the door, what do they find?
- On Emily Grierson’s personality, what factors do you think either shaped or warped her? Make a list and pick the top two most influential characteristics and analyze them.
- How is Miss Emily “a fallen monument” (para 1)? To what is she a monument? Why does the narrator repeatedly call an Emily an “idol”?
A Rose for Emily
by William Faulkner
I
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
man-servant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at
least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been
white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies
in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on
what had once been our most select street. But garages and
cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august
names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was
left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the
cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among
eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives
of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery
among the ranked and anonymous
graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the
battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care;
a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from
that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor–he who
fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets
without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from
the death of her father on into
perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted
charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the
effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the
town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred
this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation
and thought could have invented it, and only a
woman could have believed it.
When the next generation, with its more modern ideas,
became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created
some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed
her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply.
They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the
sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week later the mayor
wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her,
and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape,
in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that
she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed,
without comment.
They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen.
A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through
which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting
lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted
by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a
stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust
and disuse–a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into
the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture.
When the Negro opened the blinds of one window,
they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they
sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs,
spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished
gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait
of Miss Emily’s father.
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.
She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and
listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling
halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end
of the gold chain.
Her voice was dry and cold. “I have no taxes in Jefferson.
Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can
gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.”
“But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily.
Didn’t you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?”
“I received a paper, yes,” Miss Emily said. “Perhaps he
considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in
Jefferson.”
“But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see
We must go by the–“
“See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”
“But, Miss Emily–“
“See Colonel Sartoris.” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead
almost ten years.) “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!” The
Negro appeared. “Show these gentlemen out.”
II
So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had
vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
That was two years after her father’s death and a short time
after her sweetheart–the one we believed would marry her
–had deserted her. After her father’s death she went out
very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly
saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call,
but were not received, and the only sign of life about the
place was the Negro man–a young man then–going in
and out with a market basket.
“Just as if a man–any man–could keep a kitchen properly,
“the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the
smell developed. It was another link between the gross,
teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.
A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge
Stevens, eighty years old.
“But what will you have me do about it, madam?” he said.
“Why, send her word to stop it,” the woman said. “Isn’t
there a law? “
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge Stevens said.
“It’s probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed
in the yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”
The next day he received two more complaints, one from
a man who came in diffident deprecation. “We really must
do something about it, Judge. I’d be the last one in the world
to bother Miss Emily, but we’ve got to do something.” That
night the Board of Aldermen met–three graybeards and
one younger man, a member of the rising generation.
“It’s simple enough,” he said. “Send her word to have her
place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if
she don’t. ..”
“Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a
lady to her face of smelling bad?”
So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss
Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing
along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while
one of them performed a regular sowing motion with
his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke
open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the
outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that
had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light
behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an
idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow
of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the
smell went away.
That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for
her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her
great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed
that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what
they really were. None of the young men were quite good
enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of
them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in
the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the
foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the
two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when
she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased
exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family
she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they
had really materialized.
When her father died, it got about that the house was
all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At
last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a
pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would
know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or
less.
The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at
the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom
Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with
no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father
was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers
calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to
let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to
resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried
her father quickly.
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.
III
SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her
hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague
resemblance to those angels in colored church windows–sort of
tragic and serene.
The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks,
and in the summer after her father’s death they began
the work. The construction company came with niggers and
mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron,
a Yankee–a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes
lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups
to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time
to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in
town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the
square, Homer Barron would be in the
center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss
Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled
buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.
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.”
But there were still others, older people, who said that even
grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige-
–
without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said,
“Poor
Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her.” She had some kin
in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with
them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman,
and there was no communication between the two families.
They had not even been represented at the funeral.
And as soon as the old people said, “Poor Emily,” the
whispering began. “Do you suppose it’s really so?” they said
to one another. “Of course it is. What else could . . .” This
behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind
jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the
thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: “Poor
Emily.”
She carried her head high enough–even when we believed
that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever
the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it
had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness.
Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a
year after they had begun to say “Poor
Emily,” and while the two female cousins were visiting her.
“I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was
over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than
usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of
which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as
you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to
look. “I want some poison,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d
recom–“
“I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.”
The druggist named several. “They’ll kill anything up
to an elephant. But what you want is–“
“Arsenic,” Miss Emily said. “Is that a good one?”
“Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want–“
“I want 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.”
Miss Emily just stared 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. The Negro
delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn’t
come back. When she opened the package at home there
was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For
rats.”
I
V
So THE NEXT day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we
said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun
to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, “She will marry
him.” 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. Later we said,
“Poor Emily” behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday
afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head
high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in
his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.
Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace
to the town and a bad example to the young people. The
men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced
the Baptist minister–Miss Emily’s people were Episcopal–
to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened
during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The
next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the
following day the minister’s wife wrote to Miss Emily’s
relations in Alabama.
So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat
back to watch developments. At first nothing happened.
Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned
that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a
man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece.
Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete
outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said,
“They are married.” We were really glad. We were glad
because the two female cousins were even more Grierson
than Miss Emily had ever been.
So we were not surprised when Homer Barron–the
streets had been finished some time since–was gone. We
were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off,
but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for
Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of
the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all
Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure
enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had
expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was
back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at
the kitchen door at dusk one evening.
And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of
Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out
with the market basket, but the front door remained closed.
Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment,
as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but
for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then
we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality
of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many
times had been too virulent and too furious to die.
When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and
her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it
grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt
iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at
seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray,
like the hair of an active man.
From that time on her front door remained closed, save
for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty,
during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted
up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the
daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’ contemporaries
were sent to her with the same regularity and in the
same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with
a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile
her taxes had been remitted.
Then the newer generation became the backbone and
the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and
fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes
of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the
ladies’ magazines. The front door closed upon the last one
and remained closed for good. When the town got free
postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten
the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to
it. She would not listen to them.
Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer
and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket.
Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be
returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and
then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows–she had
evidently shut up the top floor of the house–like
the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking
at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation
to generation–dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and
perverse.
And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and
shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her.
We did not even know she was sick; we had long since
given up trying to get any information from the Negro
He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice
had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.
She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy
walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow
yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
V
THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and
let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick,
curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right
through the house and out the back and was not seen again.
The two female cousins came at once. They held the
funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look
at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the
crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier
and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men
–some in their brushed Confederate uniforms–on the porch
and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a
contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with
her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical
progression, as the old do, to whom 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.
Already we knew that there was one room in that region
above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would
have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily
was decently in the ground before they opened it.
The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill
this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the
tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and
furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded
rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table,
upon the delicate array of crystal and the man’s toilet
things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that
the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and
tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon
the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung
the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes
and the discarded socks.
The man himself lay in the bed.
For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the
profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once
lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep
that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love,
had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath
what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable
from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the
pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and
biding dust.
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.