The Meaning of A Rose For Emily - Essay Example

Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” may be only a few pages long but those pages contain a wealth of meaning. The meaning of the story, reflected in its various interconnecting themes, is highly complex, insofar as it embraces all of the interaction between the past and the present, human loneliness and isolation, the search for love and companionship, the escape from the present and the truth, and death versus life. Each of these themes contributes to the reader’s fuller understanding of the story but, given the impossibility of dealing with more than one in any satisfactory manner within the limits of the space offered, this essay will focus on the theme of the past versus the present. In While the theme of the past versus the present assumes numerous forms in this story, as in the clash between the two or the way in which the one intermingles and intersects with the other, this essay will focus on Faulkner’s modes of symbolizing the past and the theme of the past’s subsuming of the present. The past assumes various symbols in “A Rose for Emily,” with the most predominant being the past as the Old South. The story may be interpreted as a narrative about the Old South, a South which has been battered and defeated by the North and by abolition. It is, however, a South which stubbornly and quite illogically insists on clinging to its former glories and, indeed, one which refuses to accept the passage of time or confront the changes which have been wrought upon it. The South is Miss Emily, personified in her refusal to pay taxes and her failure to acknowledge the new reality which surrounds her, culminating in her dismissive treatment of the town’s authorities and her rejection of the very concept of the mailbox/postal services. The South is also the decaying mansion; the mansion which is falling into disrepair but, despite the ravages of time, maintains its haughty, superior demeanor. Last, but not least, the South is Miss Emily’s “negro” servant; the man who silently goes about his duties, keeps Miss Emily’s darkest secrets and when she dies, disappears. The implication here is that the past, as represented in this story, is personified in Miss Emily and her servant and symbolized in the house. She is, as the unnamed narrator insists, “tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” Miss Emily is, thus, symbolic of the South’s traditions and heritage. In his symbolization of the South as the old, isolated and alienated woman and her `coquettishly decaying’ mansion, Faulkner depicts the old South as, not only dying and decaying but, as a horrific and horrifying anomaly to the present and to the norm. The stated is evident in a long list of descriptors and incidents. In one passage, for example, the unnamed narrator describes Miss Emily’s “skeleton” as “small” while, at the same time, paints an image of an obese, “bloated,” figure with a “pallid hue.” The skeleton descriptor gives the impression of thinness; an impression immediately dismissed by the subsequent depiction of Miss Emily as “bloated.” When readers put the two together and recall Miss Emily’s “pallid hue,” the image which comes to mind is that of a dead body; a pale and bloated figure whose flesh will soon decay and leave behind nothing but a skeleton. This, as the tale seems to symbolically suggest, is that which the Old South left behind it. Within the context of the above interpretation, Miss Emily is akin to the un-dead, or death in living. This impression is only solidified by the later horrifying revelation, not only of how she murdered Homer Barron but of how she slept with his decaying corpse, then grotesque skeleton. In the days following her death, the `mourners’ open a room which had been supposedly sealed for years to discover, not only the skeletal remains of the murdered Homer Barrett, but evidence that Miss Emily had inhabited this room with the dead. As the narrator says, on the “second pillow was the indentation of a head. 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.” Horrifying as that image may be, its plot value lies less in its shock-effect than in the fact that it stands out as a powerful symbol of the perversity of allowing the past to subsume the present. The perversity which Miss Emily’s actions symbolize lends itself to the theme of the preserve refusal to acknowledge reality. Miss Emily and all that which belong to her, whether the house or the Negro, are a defiance of the norm. The people of Jackson pay taxes but she does not; the townsfolk, the living, intermingle with one another but she refuses to interact or have contact with anybody; while all the old houses have been pulled down or transformed for other uses, hers stands as it is, an anomalous symbol of the past in the present. As such, she is the Old South which, despite the fact that it has died and is buried, refuses to acknowledge it and, accordingly, persistently and insistently makes its presence known in the present. Proceeding from the above stated, “A Rose for Emily,” does not only withstand interpretation as a story whose main theme is the extent to which the past and the present may be viewed as coterminous but as one whose theme is the degree to which the boundaries between the two can, quite terrifyingly, overlap. Indeed, within the context of this narrative, overlapping is to the point of insanity whereby, knowing that she cannot marry him in life, Miss Emily murders Barron and marries him in death. Sexual perversity bordering on necrophilia aside, the fact that she sloe with a decaying corpse/skeleton in a room which she fashioned as a bridal bedroom, is indicative of the degree to which death and life are one and the same, as far as she is concerned. When reflected upon from this perspective, her refusal to accept her father’s death for a full three days after he passed away or her insistence that the town authorities speak to Colonel Sartoris about her tax situation a full decade after his death, evidences the degree to which she lives among the dead, in the past, and the extent to which she does not distinguish between the dead and the living. Life and death are not two sides of one coin here but they are the interchangeable faces of a single side and it is precisely from this that the story derives its Gothic, somewhat horrifying, theme. In the final analysis, “A Rose for Emily” may be interpreted as a commentary on the potential consequences of allowing the past to overwhelm the present or of clinging to memories, as opposed to living in the present. To a degree, the stated is symbolic of the Old South at a certain period in history but, apart from that, it assumes wider and more human-centric meaning from the fact that the tendency to reject the present in favor of more comfortable and familiar memories of the past is an innate human tendency. As such, “A Rose for Emily” is not about the Old South nor about a murderess disconnected from reality but is about the tension between the past and the present. Read More