Essay on A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner: A Mirror up to Time

The name of the Nobel Laureate, an outstanding American writer William Faulkner, rightfully occupies one of the most prominent places in the history of the American literature of the 20th century. The author of novels, short stories and poetry, the creator of the Yoknapatawpha cycle, William Faulkner made a serious contribution to the formation of modern English-language literary consciousness. Faulkner's short stories are as popular with the reader as his novels. The writer brilliantly manages to use the condensed literary form of a short story to take a close and objective look at the problems and challenges that the American South is forced to face in the 20th century. A Rose for Emily belongs to such short literary masterpieces. In this short story, the author ingeniously employs symbols, metaphors, and similes to explore the theme of the passage of time, the way tradition interacts with change and the intrinsic contrariety and duality of this interplay.

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The key symbol used by Faulkner to illustrate the impact of time upon society is the old house, in which Emily Grierson lived and died. The image of the house is being meticulously constructed by the author throughout the whole text. Thus, it effectively turns into an independent character, a certain double-ganger of the protagonist. This idea is introduced at the very beginning of the story, where Miss Emily is compared to a fallen monument (Faulkner 1066), something inanimate and dysfunctional, celebrating death rather than life, while the house is represented as a living creature with the help of vivid personifications. When Faulkner writes about garages and cotton gins which had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood like young and boisterous competitors (Faulkner 1066), he portrays the house as the patriarch of the area, majestic and respected, but too old and barely tolerated: only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps - an eyesore among eyesores (Faulkner 1066). The house with its cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies (Faulkner 1066) belongs to the nineteenth century. In the short story, it symbolizes the past of the American South with all of its faded glory and inability to come to terms with the passage of time, while cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps stand for the innovation and progress, not always sightly, but undoubtedly convenient. In this fragment, the author creatively documents the shift from useless, redundant beauty of elitist culture to the faceless, convenient practicality of mass production, characteristic of the 20th century.

The house is described by Faulkner in the best traditions of Southern Gothic. It is atmospheric, dark and gloomy with a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow (Faulkner 1068) and a parlor furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture (Faulkner 1068). The description of this ominous place introduces an important symbol, which helps the author explore the theme of the passage of time the smell. In the beginning, it is the smell of dust and disuse a close, dank smell (Faulkner 1068). Then the reader learns of a more sinister odor the one of decay and disintegration. The towns authorities are trying to secretly hide it with the help of lime until it goes away of its own accord. The lime symbolizes the way new generation leaders are often unable to assert themselves as the new command and seem to be inclined to conceal the problems inherited from the older generations rather than solve them. In a similar vein, the cause of the smell, arsenic, used by Miss Emily to kill her lover and keep him by her side forever, symbolizes desperate measures taken by the older generations who cling to their memories, heritage, and a comfortable place in the society and are unwilling to yield to the unpredictability of the future. Thus, gothic elements in Faulkners story (the house, the atmosphere, the mystery, the murder) do not only ensure the readers active engagement, but also serve as an effective means of psychological and social analysis.

One more crucial symbol closely associated with the house is the dust which covers all the surfaces in the old house. It is a complex symbol, related simultaneously to dying, aging and living. On the one hand, it can be found in places which have not been used for a long time, are neglected and forgotten. It covers things that have not recently been moved. But it is also a part of any human dwelling, especially the one actively lived in, as the bulk of dust is composed of the loose scales of human epidermis. In a remarkable and unexpected manner Faulkner turns prose into poetry when introducing the image of dust in the following fragment: When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray (Faulkner 1068). The word rose is used by the author as a verb, nevertheless, it inescapably evokes an allusion to the short storys title A Rose for Emily. When seen as a noun, this word produces a poetic and poignant image of a faint dust rose which embodies the character of Miss Emily herself, her striving for the sunray of love, beauty, and tenderness, her tragic spinning in the circles of loneliness and aging among the dusty furniture in an old crumbling house. The heroine dies a desolate old woman in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight (Faulkner 1073). Lack of sunlight symbolizes here a lack of love and happiness. The dust, a metaphoric witness and chronicle of Emilys life, tells the story of her desperate struggle to gain and keep both. When the town citizens force open the door to the locked room upstairs they find the dead body of Emilys lover covered in dust: upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust (Faulkner 1074). Here the author uses a personification, building Hamletian and Biblical allusions, inventively connecting the symbol of dust with the images of time and death, which are patient and biding companions of any human being.

The other important group of stylistic devices, used in the story to illustrate the passage of time and dwell on the effect it has upon human beings, is centered around the image of the protagonist. A number of vivid metaphors and similes are used by the narrator to convey the way the citizens of the town perceived her and interpreted her character. She is called a fallen monument (Faulkner 1066), an idol in a niche (Faulkner 1073), a part of a tableau (Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background (Faulkner 1070)), an angel in colored church windows sort of tragic and serene (Faulkner 1070). These comparisons explicate the characters connection with the past, her ability to personify the past and serve as a certain living avatar of the previous century. All these visual images speak of Miss Emily as a person looked at respectfully but rarely, sometimes worshiped but never touched, rather dead than alive. When the narrator describes the womans appearance, she is represented Ophelia-like as a drowned body, but if Shakespeares Ophelia is a beautiful white flower in a fast-moving river, Emily is shown from an opposite perspective: She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue (Faulkner 1068). Water is a symbol of movement and change. By connecting the image of Emily with motionless water the author highlights the way the old lady remained loyal to her own time and resisted change even though it could have served her own happiness.

Miss Emilys rejection of change and all things new, though obvious and well-supported with details, is at the same time a certain bifurcation point, the source of productive tension in the story. On the one hand, the heroine symbolizes antagonism between the tradition and innovation. When the town gets free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it, writes Faulkner (Faulkner 1073). She is seen not as a person, but rather as a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from 1894 (Faulkner 1068). She is clearly the embodiment of the past. Confined in the walls of her once majestic, now decrepit house, Miss Emily abhors change and progress. On the other hand, this interpretation is quite one-dimensional, while Faulkners design is much more complex. Having lived all her life under the shadow of her overpowering, domineering father, a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip (Faulkner 1070), after his death Miss Emily chooses to rebel in her own way. She cuts her hair short and initiates a premarital relationship with a man, who can be seen as a symbol of change. She defies the long-held social norms in her reckless and determined pursuit of happiness. But she is not strong enough to embrace the immanent nature of change, not ready to lose her balance in the face of uncertainty and insecurity. In an attempt to turn the change into its very opposite stability, and constancy, she kills her lover and stays by the side of his dead body. In this subtle metaphoric manner, Faulkner explores the way human consciousness struggles to embrace change, but the fear of the unknown prevents it from moving forward, throwing it back into the past.

William Faulkners A Rose for Emily is an early specimen of what in the theory of postmodernism is metaphorically called double-coding. On the surface, it is an intriguing short story, the appeal of which is largely based on the authors inventive usage of gothic elements. But a closer look at the symbols, metaphors, and similes shows that A Rose for Emily is also a profound, ironic and at the same time compassionate philosophical meditation on the problems of time, aging and death, as well as on the eternal dualism and dialectics of tradition and change.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. A Rose for Emily. American Literature, 1st ed., Holt McDougal, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Evanston , IL, 2010, pp. 10661074. Holt McDougal Literature.