Blog about “A Rose for Emily.” What is the point of view of the story? Who is telling the story? How is this unusual? Why would Faulkner select this point of view? How does the point of view fit with the theme of the story? What specific lines in the story give you clues about who is telling the story? Quote them and include page numbers.

Just like the previous story I blogged about (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor), “A Rose for Emily” is a story with a title as misleading as could be. Both titles, in my opinion, suggest stories with light content and a happy nature. I have become accustomed to the fact that Southern-style authors use misleading, seemingly innocent titles to further highlight the dark and subtly grotesque content of the actual stories.

I found “A Rose for Emily” to be suspenseful, partly because of the slow pace of the story, but mostly because of the mysterious nature of the arrogant and eccentric protagonist, Emily Rose. The story is told from the white townspeople’s (white because the black people in the story were referred to as Negroes) point of view. This is apparent from telltale lines in the story, such as “People in our town… believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were (36)” and “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 tow of them framed by the back-flung front door. (36)” Another giveaway is the fact that Emily is referred to as “Miss Emily” throughout the story. This signifies that Emily and the narrator are acquaintances. It is logical to deduce that the narrators are the townspeople.

The townspeople narrating the story seem to hold Emily in high regard. When Emily was alive, she was described as “…a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town… (34)”, and when she died, the whole town attended her funeral, with the men having a “respectful affection for a fallen monument (33)” while the women were just curious to see the inside of Emily’s house, which no one but an old black manservant had seen in at least ten years (33).

I find it interesting that Faulkner chose to group the townspeople into one narrator and one voice. It suggests that these Southerners share similar attitudes and a similar point of view of the life of Emily. The townspeople, as a collective bunch, are very ordinary curious neighbors who place Emily on a pedestal – probably because of her glaring oddities among their thoroughly ordinary lives. They like gossiping among themselves about Emily’s activities, and even knew what she bought when she visited the druggist. Of course, it could just be that Faulkner had to use such detail to make the story more interesting, and not because the townspeople were spectacularly nosy.

Emily is quite a character. She seems unable to accept the passing of time and the changes that come with it. Her house was described to be covered in dust, a metaphor for the Emily’s desire for time to be still. When the next generation with its more modern ideas (34) visited her home to notify her of taxes, she said, “See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”, even though the Colonel had been dead for almost ten years.

Another event that showed her unwillingness to accept change was her father’s death. When the town’s ladies came to her house to offer their condolences, Emily “met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them her father was not dead. She did that for three days… (36)”

The story became more suspenseful when Emily visited the druggist and purchased arsenic for rats. By then, Homer Barron had already appeared in the story, and I immediately thought that the eccentric Emily could have bought the arsenic to murder him. Homer himself said that “he was not a marrying man (38)” and it is already apparent in the story that Emily has an interest in him – “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. (37)”

My suspicions were half-confirmed when later on in the story, the townspeople saw the last of poor Homer Barron, and they were fully confirmed when the townspeople discovered the remains of his body in the dust-filled room which had “not been seen in forty years (40).” The last sentence of the story, “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. (41)” has a special significance because Emily died with iron-gray hair. The strand of hair was lifted from a pillow next to where the corpse lay. This probably means that Emily slept next to this corpse up until her death.

This story is as grim and sinister (though not quite as sinister as “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) as I expected from an author writing in the Southern style. The relation of the title to the story is difficult to infer, although it seems to suggest the townspeople’s farewell to Emily, like a rose they place upon her grave. The townspeople’s regard, then, holds throughout Emily’s life, even when they discovered that she murdered Homer Barron. The title “A Rose for Emily” echoes their respectfulness for this woman who filled their ordinary town with much gossip that carried throughout the generations.