An Analysis of Miss Emily Grierson in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

The story “A Rose for Emily” was William Faulkner’s first published and is one

of his most widely read stories. First appearing in The Forum in April 1930 (Brooks 7),

“A Rose for Emily” is a horror story regarded as one of the most “gothic” Faulkner ever

had written (Brooks 51). It is the story of a woman, Emily Grierson, whose life is

recalled by an anonymous narrator who represents the attitudes and ideas of the

community. When suppressed by her father until his death, she takes up with a Northern

laborer, Homer Barron. When she is faced with desertion from her love, she turned to

murdering him by poison. It was later discovered after Emily’s own death that Homer’s

rotting corpse was in a loving embrace from forty years before after the door was forced

open in the upstairs bedroom with an iron gray hair lying on the pillow beside him. By

examining Emily’s relationship with her father, her place in the community, and her

problem with distinguishing the present from the past, a lot is revealed about the

character of Miss Emily in the story.

The Grierson family had a streak of general insanity along with an insane pride.

Miss Emily’s father, a selfish and dominating man, thought that none of the young men

who came courting her were good enough for their name. So he discouraged them –

really drove them away – and when he finally died, his daughter was still unmarried and

with little more left to her than the house itself. In a way, the narrator says, “People were

glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being alone, and a pauper, she had become

humanized” (Faulkner 244). Now she would know like other people, what it felt like to

count pennies.
 Some have found in Homer, Emily’s suitor, his strong masculine presence and

whip-welding skills are an interesting resemblance to Emily’s domineering father. They

see Emily’s crime as a second attempt to keep a father figure from deserting her. The

tragedy in the story was shown in Emily’s inability to escape the influence of her

repressive father (Hamblin 32).

Miss Emily’s relation to the small community is of great significance in the story.

Everyone had looked up the Grierson’s in the small community of Jefferson, Mississippi.

They held their heads high – some of the townspeople felt too high. The feelings of the

community towards Miss Emily are very complicated. For in the community’s eyes, her

story is no mere case history. It comes close to being called a legend, a fable, even a

parable (Brooks 41).

Miss Emily is denied normal participation in the life of the community because

she represents a traditional aristocracy of a higher social class than most people. This

situation, created by her heredity, is accentuated by the community, which denies Miss

Emily a normal life by regarding her as their symbol of the past. Miss Emily is “a

tradition, a duty, and a care” (Faulkner 242); the town prefers that she remain intact

within her old house, an idol, “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse”

(247). She had become part of the history of the town. She was kind of a monument, a

landmark. Jefferson is smugly pleased at possessing a symbol of a long gone, but

honorable time; when Miss Emily dies, she becomes their “fallen monument” (Page 100).

The narrator in the story plays an important role also. He is clearly the

spokesman for the community and his story is about what Miss Emily’s life and death

meant to the community (Brooks 32). The nameless narrator uses phrases such as “We
believed”, “We knew”, and so forth, instead of “I believed”, or “I know.” He was

speaking consciously for the community.

The narrator moves smoothly from the mention of Miss Emily’s funeral at the

beginning of the story to when, in 1894, Colonel Sartoris had used a flimsy reason to

remit her taxes. Then, he moves to the new generation of aldermen expecting Miss Emily

to pay her taxes like everyone else, and then he jumps back thirty years to when the awful

smell came strongly from Miss Emily’s house and Judge Stevens, a gentleman of the old

South wouldn’t tell her to her face that she smelled bad so he arranged a private clean-up

done at night with men throwing lime at the cellar openings of her house. “After a week

or two, the smell died away” (Faulkner 244). The smell gives the narrator an opportunity

to tell the readers that it was about this time that “people had begun to feel really sorry for

her.” (244)

When Miss Emily purchased the arsenic at the drugstore, the news spread rapidly

throughout the town. The townspeople believed that she meant to kill herself after the

disappearance of her beloved Homer, for an aristocratic lady would prefer death to

dishonor. But she does not kill herself, clearly though Homer Barron had not married

her, and it seemed like he had left town for good.

Miss Emily’s proud independence and disregard for bureaucratic regulation

brought about a certain admiration from the community itself. But Miss Emily’s absolute

defiance of what others think, and her insistence to meeting life solely on her own terms,

ignoring custom tradition and law, ended in a horrifying deformation of her own psyche.

The community learns how horrifying only after her funeral when an exploration of the

upper rooms of the house is undertaken. The narrator is careful to note that they “waited
until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened” (247) the locked room

and the intruders discovered what was left of her lover from over forty years before. It is

as if the town recognized that she had earned a right to this extension of her hard-won

and bitterly maintained privacy to wait until she was buried before going through her

house.

Emily is a source of mystery and intrigue for the community part due to the

oddity of her behavior derived from her isolation and resistance to change, but there is

also a curiosity brought about by her class. As a member of one of the oldest families in

Jefferson, Emily embodies, for the community, the vision of the “lady” as incorporated in

the myths and the reality of the antebellum South. The community respects her position

while it also delights in her eccentricities and her fall from grace. In this context her

isolation, her assumptions about the power of class, and her increasingly bizarre behavior

suggests the dangers of clinging too closely to the past and refusing to accept change.

The principle contrast in the story is between past and present time. The past is

represented in Emily herself, Colonel Sartoris, the old Negro servant, Tobe, and in the

Board of Aldermen who accepted the Colonel’s attitude toward Emily and rescinded her

taxes. The present is depicted though the unnamed narrator, the new Board of Aldermen,

and in Homer Barron.

Emily was forced to become engaged in a defiance of time and reality. She

refused to live in the real world, ignoring the tax office, the post office, the law, and even

death itself. When her father died she refused to admit he was dead. After three days

and a lot of persuasion, she finally allowed the body to be taken out of the house

and buried.
 Also, when the new Board of Aldermen came to explain that she had to pay taxes

on her property just like everyone else, Emily refused to admit she owed any taxes. She

denied the authority of the tax notice sent to her and she told the men to see Colonel

Sartoris. “ I have no taxes in Jefferson” (243). Colonel Sartoris had been dead for nearly

ten years. Cleanth Brooks states, “Had Miss Emily lived alone for so long that she had

not heard that he was dead? Or are the dead for her alive than the living?” (Brooks 9)

Just as Emily refused to acknowledge the death of her father, she also refused to

acknowledge the death of the Colonel. He had given her his word, and according to the

“old” view, “his word” knew no death. It was the past against the present – the past with

its social decorum, the present with everything set down in “the books.” Emily lived in

the past, always a world of unreality to the people in the present (West 68).

Miss Emily’s large Southern Victorian house also mirrored her resistance to

change as it gradually came to stand alone among the utilitarian structures of industry and

commerce that mark the neighborhood’s changing character. “The stubborn and

coquettish decay” of the mansions exterior, the dark shadows that pervaded its interior,

and the persistent dust are some of the signs in the story of the ever presence of death

(Page 102).

Emily was living behind barricaded doors, protecting herself from a world that

was too much for her. As Danforth Ross stated, “She had become a tiny island of the

past surrounded by the ocean of the present. Whenever the present lapped too high, she

hurled back the waves. Hence, “a rose for Emily” – an accolade for her.” (Ross 36).

Man must come to terms with the past and the present. For to ignore the past is to be

foolishly innocent, to ignore the present is to become monstrous and inhuman (West 73).
 Emily’s place in regard to the specific problem of time is shown in the scene

where the old soldiers appear at her funeral. There we are told two different views of

time. The first being the world of the present in which time is viewed as a mechanical

progression in which the past is seen as a diminishing road, never to be ran across again.

The second view is the world of tradition where the past is viewed as a large meadow

where no winter ever quite touches, divided from the present by a narrow bottleneck of

the most recent decade of years. Emily holds the second view, but for her there is no

bottleneck dividing her from the meadow of the past (West 70).

In conclusion, Miss Emily Grierson is a victim of her own pride. Her mania is a

manifestation of her pride, her independence, and her iron will. She did not crumble

under pressures exerted upon her; she did not give in. She insisted on choosing a lover in

spite of the criticism of the town. She refused to be jilted. She was not to be scorned or

pitied. She led an idle and useless life. She was driven to criminal acts in desperate

attempts to stimulate something of love’s fulfillment. These acts were neither life giving

or redeeming; on the contrary, she was led into a life of frustration, perversion, isolation,

and decay.