A rose for emily Critical Analysis

Getting into the Faulknerian world of Emily Grierson would take an incubation of thought and lots of heart. The title itself invokes a certain feeling of thrill on wanting to know who Emily is and to what prestige is the rose for, only to make us realize in the end how we could be no different from the people we would learn to detest in time.

The beginning of the story is its end – the death of the ‘fallen monument’. So from the very start, the author had warned the readers to the complexity of the paradoxical overlay. And true enough, as we continue to delve into her life, we have learned to offer our own rose for Miss Emily as we began to see her frailty as her strength and her failure as her success.

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She ‘was’ a picture of beauty, and prestige was embossed in her name that ‘none of the young men were quite good enough’ for her. Her father drove them all away.  For a long time, people looked for a reason to pity her. At last when her father died, ‘people were glad’. ‘Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized’.

The plot also led us to her affair with Homer Barron, a Yankee day laborer. As expected, the whole town buzzed about ‘Poor Emily’ while ‘she carried her head high’ still to reaffirm her ‘imperviousness’.

These two instances are crucial in examining the course of Miss Emily’s life; her questioned sanity and the manner she ‘chose’ to live it all until the end.

It is incontestable that being brought up in a commanding patriarchal environment took a toll on her behaviour towards people and circumstance. She was bounded to two authorities; her father at the foreground and the Southern society’s eyes at the back.

For more than 30 years, she let these two command her life.

Thus the coming of Homer Barron, a Northern foreman, only ignited her rebellious manifestation. What could ever top the love story between a noble woman and a day laborer? It was unacceptable, even appalling to the ‘older people’ who said nothing but ‘Poor Emily’.

But that one man who could’ve renewed her cling to life was not the type of man a damsel in distress should cling to. He was a flirt. ‘Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere… Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. ‘He was not the marrying type’. There is even a hint of his homosexuality since ‘Homer himself remarked – he liked men and that … he drank with the younger men in the Elk’s Club’.

Again, she was bounded to a man, only this time, she stood at the foreground of the social stresses. She refused to bow like the Grierson she is. Finally, she took the matters to her hands; she killed that one man she longed to marry and imprisoned him in her doors that remained closed from anyone else.

Was Emily a victim of time, her father, Homer and the society’s imposed values?

Yes, she was. But she won them all.

First, looking at the odd chronology of events, a reader finds it difficult to see order, yet, with each piece patched from one recollection to the other, we would begin to see how Faulkner views the frivolity of time (or age) and order. Much emphasis was given to her iron-gray hair and her obese yet small skeleton.

This play of language turns Miss Emily into a picture of a living dead. Hence, clock time is not essential; rather, time is captured by experience and consciousness. Like a kaleidoscope, this opens us to the understanding of Miss Emily’s denial of her father’s death and Homer’s rotting corpse at the bridal chamber.

Second, Miss Emily rejected her father’s patriarchal values upon developing affection towards Homer. She, who was brought up to reject any lover, for once chose to take one for herself. Her buying of a ‘man’s toilet set in silver… and clothing’ may have created hysteria of gossips but she refused to care anymore.

Taking on Faulkner’s approach to the murder (delaying the matter until the end), the author tries to appeal for the reader’s sympathy than judge and loathe her directly for the crime. He rapt the readers first in his spell-binding narrative and let them reserve their judgment for later. She sought for love and whether it came in sanity or madness, she welcomed the consequences, even if it means living an individual life. Homer was at last hers… and hers alone.

Third, she overcame Jefferson – the setting and the antagonist, as we begin to feel the thriving of compassion of the narrator towards her. The narrator is the voice of the society, its representation. She was judged in the beginning, pitied in the process and was saluted in the end.

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