Short Story of William Faulkner "A Rose for Emily"

The novels Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury had been produce in 1929, and Sanctuary had been written but not however published.

The tale is simple, straightforward--and lurid--apparently told by a minor civil retainer who is explaining what townspeople had gossiped about and what he himself witnessed, with regard to Miss Emily Grierson's demeanor and death. Spinster daughter of one of the town's first families, Emily for a shortened time after her father's death appeared to have been on the doorstepsill of marrying a Yankee foreman named bell ringer Barron. It was not anticipate that this fine lady of the provincial South, would marry a Yankee working man from a Northern city. Anyway, he disappeared; Emily ne'er explained why. Over the years, Emily secluded herself from society, and the town gossip was that she was impoverished. But true to her first-family roots, she secluded herself in an imperious manner, more than or little consistent with the expectations of a small Southern town and more than once going so far as to wash off appeals from city fathers to pay her taxes or otherwise match the city fathers. Upon her death, the townsfolk discovered in her upstairs chamber the decomposed personate of Homer Barron--and evidence that she had been the bed partner of the body for many years.

Much of the action of "A Rose for Emily" turns on the town's unwillingness to challenge Emily. She is unapproachable, above the rest of t

In the matter of the taxes, crazed though she is, she is ne'er at a loss. . . . She dominates the rather frightened committee of officers who work out her. In the matter of her purchase of the poison, she completely overawes the clerk. She makes no pretense. She refuses to separate him what she wants the poison for (Brooks and Warren 228).

Millgate, Michael. "William Faulkner: The Two Voices." Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise. Ed. Philip Castille and William Osborne. Memphis: Memphis State UP, 1983.

A. Biographical book bindingground of Faulkner

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: low gear Encounters. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

1. Her "magnificent independence" of social convention

2. Homer Barron: her great love or her last hope?

Sullivan, poignancy Elizabeth.

"Some Variations on the Oedipal Theme in Three Pieces of fictionalization: 'A Rose for Emily,' 'Three Hours After Marriage,' and 'Christabel.'" Dissertation Abstracts International (Tufts U) 33 (1972): 4366.

[T]he scent out of guilt is an expression of the conflict due to ambivalence, of the eternal fight down between Eros and the instinct of destruction or death. . . . So long as the community assumes no other contour than that of the family, the conflict is bound to express itself in the Oedipus complex, to establish the sense of right and wrong and to create the first sense of guilt. When an attempt is made to run the community, the same conflict is continued in forms which are mutually beneficial on the past; and it is strengthened and results in a still intensification of the sense of guilt. . . . What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group (Freud 79-80).

The Oedipal image of the story is strong. Emily and her father had been strikingly unified, "a tableau, Emily a slender figure in clean 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" (Faulkner 11). This is a figuration o
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