Finding the Door in A Rose for Emily - Book Report/Review Example

Finding the Door commonly use symbols as a means of reinforcing the major theme of their story. This is found in the story of Sleeping Beauty, for example, when the witch offers the beautiful princess a red apple. This is a Christian-dominated symbol for sin and temptation and every child knows the girl shouldn’t eat the apple, but she does and she suffers a fall as a result. The prince (who hasn’t tasted the apple) is eventually able to rescue her, but the symbol has done its work and the children remember giving in to this temptation is evil. Not all symbols are so well defined, though, or so simply used. In many cases, the same symbol can be used for completely different effects. How one symbol can be used for two different ideas is revealed when one compares a short story such as William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” in which a door represents the danger of a closed mind to another short story such as “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates in which a door reveals the illusion of security. William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” features the story of Miss Emily, widely considered the town oddity because she is unbending in her ways and adamant about keeping everything exactly the same. This represents a kind of madness in keeping with the treatment she had received from her father, who insisted she always remain his little girl and always remembered her high birth status. The world of the present is strange and unrecognizable to Miss Emily, so she struggles continuously to keep it in the realm of the safe and ‘normal’ she knows – her mind is closed to new possibilities. Miss Emily Grierson is introduced as a woman who has never been provided an opportunity to become comfortable or familiar with the world outside of her father’s old world ideals. “None of the young men were quite good enough to Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white 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” (437). This created a situation in which Miss Emily “got to be thirty and was still single” (437), alienated from her society behind the closed door of her home. Miss Emily’s inability to relate to the real world outside this alienation is first manifested completely when she refused to acknowledge her father’s change of state upon his death. “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (437). This reaction was considered strange and unusual by the people of the town who are narrating the tale, but justified by the way in which she’d been treated by this man. “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (437). While her preference to hold a dead body within her home is decidedly grotesque, the townspeople understand her need to cling to what is familiar and normal even when that is no longer possible. Her willingness to give in on the matter in the end evokes sympathy among her neighbors rather than disgust. In spite of her entrapment within the closed mind of her father behind the closed door of her home, Miss Emily did make an attempt to break beyond the door in her courtship with Homer Barron yet met with the same kind of closed-minded resistance on the part of the townspeople. Rumors had been flying about town that Miss Emily was going to marry the handsome, lively man from the North despite his wild nature and questionable roots. However, the arrival of Miss Emily’s cousins in response to the townspeople’s summons precipitates a withdrawal from Homer Barron. “So we were not surprised when Homer Barron … was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins” (440-41). That Homer remained as changeable as the present is evident in that he returned “within three days” as a “neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening” (441). However, Miss Emily was not accustomed to change and could not overcome the training of her unchanging past. As the narrators tell it, “that was the last we saw of Homer Barron” (441). As the story unfolds, the reader learns that Miss Emily brought Homer Barron into her world in the only way she knew how. She could not bear to be alienated from the one man who had shown interest in her. When the men of the town broke through the door of the upstairs bedroom following Miss Emily’s death, they describe a grisly scene. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, … what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust” (443). Miss Emily committed an incredible act of evil, deliberately taking the life of another to ensure he never walked out her door again driven by her alienation to society. At the same time, her actions inspire revulsion and disgust in others as it is realized that Miss Emily slept next to this decaying corpse for many years following his death, as evidenced by the single “long strand of iron-gray hair” (444) found on the pillow beside him. However, in the end, the townspeople seem to have realized a depth of sympathy for the old woman, purposely not investigating the house until after she’d been honorably laid to rest and then telling her story in an oddly respectful manner that enables others to feel for her as well. She had lived her entire life behind the closed door of her father’s thinking and then the thinking of the townspeople who must have felt they shared some of the blame. Failing to escape the door, Emily did the only thing she could think of to ease her loneliness. At the beginning of Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Where are you going, where have you been?”, Connie is characterized as a typical teen-ager. She is completely self-absorbed on a superficial level, concerned with the way she looks and how others perceive her. “She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right.” Connie’s age presumes a certain degree of innocence, which is supported by her description. Her interests include boys, fashions, hair styles and makeup. Contrasted against this image of innocence, she lives a double life. “Everything about her had two sides to it; one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out.” In this characterization, Oates illustrates that her character is at once very innocent in her experience, but also rebellious and ready, so she imagines, for much more exciting and adult experiences. Within the story, the screen door to Connie’s house was like a door to her fantasy world, leading out into a world full of excitement and power until the day Arnold Friend arrives. Throughout the daytime hours, Connie is described as a normal teenager causing her mother endless exasperation in her wish to be out in the world and doing something more exciting than the prosaic duties of housewives and children. “Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams.” As Oates explains Connie’s behavior inside her house, she indicates that for Connie, the real world exists in her fantasies and outside of her screen door. When she is not out at night with her friends, “Connie spent around the house – it was summer vacation – getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.” Her emotions about that world are revealed as she lies in the sun on the fateful last day of the story just after her parents have left for their barbeque. “Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if there were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was.” She assumes she knows everything she needs to know about life outside the screen door and can’t wait to get out there and get on with it. However, then Arnold Friend arrives and the screen door is no longer so exciting. As she talks with Arnold, Oates indicates “She couldn’t decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn’t come down or go back inside.” While she hangs onto the screen door as if hanging onto her childhood, Arnold “drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her. They were maybe ten feet apart. After his hand feel back to his side the X was still in the air, almost visible. Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it.” Although she attempts to lock the door to keep that outside world away, Arnold points out the futility of the action. “But why lock it,” Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. “It’s just a screen door. It’s just nothing.” As she realizes that the safe world of her childhood has dissolved around her to let that daydream world that she’d been wanting in, Connie begins to panic. “Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room.” When Arnold Friend announces that things are all over for her there at the house, she realizes that he’s right. She can no longer escape back into the protective world of her parents and must go out through the screen door into a world that has taken on new dimensions from her imagined space. In the end, Connie exits through the same screen door that she had previously imagined led to a world of soft caresses and intoxicating power now realizing that it also leads to a world of danger that she might not survive. She never imagined that this dream world could turn nightmare the instant someone else realized their power. However, when Arnold Friend shows up at her house, the screen door that separated her dream world from her parent’s world is no longer sufficient to maintain the separation. Arnold Friend won’t allow the screen door to stand as a barrier and forces the dream world into her house, changing it into something that no longer looks familiar to her and no longer provides the kind of protection and isolation it once did. Her action at the end of the story, as she “put out her hand against the screen” and “watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway,” reinforces the concept that Connie herself invited the dream world into her life without ever having considered the possibility of demons existing in it and cannot now return home. While both authors use the symbol of the door to stand as the dividing line between good and evil, they do so to different effect. Faulkner uses it to show the dangers of keeping things locked up on the inside while Oates demonstrates the fragility of the security such a door actually has to offer. In Faulkner’s story, the closed door represents safety – as long as the door remains shut, Miss Emily is safe from the common townspeople and the town is safe from the knowledge of what she’s done. In Oates’ story, it reveals its uselessness in keeping the dangers of the outside world at bay as Connie is forced to step through it into the world of the adult. However, in both cases, the door, or rather the doorway, becomes a symbol for the transition between innocence and knowledge. Works Cited Faulker, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Anthology of American Literature – 8th Edition. Ed. McMichael, George, James S. Leonard, Bill Lyne, Anne-Marie Mallon and Verner D. Mitchell. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2004. 433-444. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where are you going, Where have you been?” The Ontario Review. 1991. Read More