Irony in ‘A Rose for Emily’: Clinging to the Past in a Changing World

Deciphering Miss Emily: The Town’s Perception in a Time of Transition

‘A Rose for Emily’ is a short story written by American Author William Faulkner and published in 1931. It starts with her death and goes back through flashbacks about events of Miss Emily Grierson, the main character’s life that shaped who she was and what drove her to commit her actions. It touches on a darker theme and the possible psychological disorder that the main character, Miss Emily, has, which is the inability to let go of what she once knew and adjust to the new changes that her town is partaking in.

The setting for a ‘Rose for Emily’ takes place in the South in a fictional town named Jefferson.

The time period that the story takes place is after the Civil War. During this time, the South was going through a ‘reconstruction’ stage where the Southern states had abolished slavery and had to pay their war debts but were free to reconstruct and oversee their own communities. This is why in ”A Rose for Emily,’ Mayor Colonel Sartoris is able to decree that ‘no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron”(Faulkner 82). At the beginning of the story, the narrator, who seems to be a neighbor or someone who resides in the same town as Miss Emily, the town of Jefferson, subjectively gives the reader a glimpse about whom Miss Emily Grierson is as a character through the outside townspeople’s perspective; how the town saw her and how they reacted to her and her actions.

A Rose for Emily’s Irony: Clinging to the Past Amidst Modern Decay

In the story, the narrator tells the audience that ‘. [our] whole town went to her funeral’ (Faulkner 82). To the men of the town, she seemed like a fallen monument to be respected (Faulkner 82), which symbolized tradition, a way of life, and certain ‘old’ morals that Miss Emily represented in some way. Through the narrator of the story, the audience learns that her house stood in a rotting neighborhood, ‘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 wagon and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores’ (Faulkner 82).

Perhaps, Miss Emily was not ready for change, and she tried to cling to her past as much as possible. The author, Faulkner, choose a very peculiar way of point of view to tell this story. The narrator gives the readers the opportunity to let their imagination wander and create their own conclusions through the story. The audience kept seeing Miss Emily through the eyes of the townspeople.

Shadows of the Past: The Unveiled Mysteries in Faulkner’s Perspective

If Faulkner had written the story from Miss Emily’s point of view, the story would have lacked mystery, and it would have lost its shock value at the end because the reader would have known everything that Miss Emily was doing, why she was doing these things, and the emotions that she was dealing with; one of them being fear. Overall, Faulkner’s main theme and conflict of the story ‘A Rose for Emily’ is the inability to move on. Miss Emily’s character, since the beginning, had trouble letting go of her past. Miss Emily still refused to accept this death, even though the Colonel had been dead for ten years.

References

1. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage, 1995.
2. Watson, James G. “Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’.” Explicator, vol. 42, no. 2, 1984, pp. 59-63.
3. Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. “Understanding Fiction.” Appleton-Century, 1979.
4. Fryer, Judith. “The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel.” Oxford University Press, 1976.
5. Gwin, Minrose C. “Miss Emily After Dark.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 47, 1994.
6. Moreland, Richard C. “William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha.” University of California Press, 1996.
7. Weinstein, Philip M. “Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction.” Cornell University Press, 2005.

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