. I need a good grade for this paper and i have till wednesday to revise it and my english is not so good. So i just need opinions on what i should do with this paper. thank you so much!Modernism in “A Rose for Emily”
A popular short story, “A Rose for Emily”, was written by William Faulkner during a time when modernism emerged questioning and investigating. They were used to redefine human’s nature and nature. Issues of sex, class, and race are used to explore by interdisciplinary techniques (Lowe 1). A short story “A Rose for Emily”, was published for more than fifty years, and has proved to be one of the most frequently anthologized and analyzed of Faulkner’s short stories (Petry 1). So how did William Faulkner—as modernist writer—carefully planned out this great short story to give the reader a shocking ending?
The way the story is told is determined by the narrator. In the process of telling the story, he implies the cultural values that he shares with his society. Which also influenced Emily’s attitudes, and behaviors implicate the narrator and the townspeople in her fate. When alive, Emily was a Southern—who passed the usual age for courting—because her father wanted her to be his housekeeper. Sometime after Emily father’s burial, Homer Barron, a Northern Yankee arrives in town and courted her. She allows for it to happen when she’s known better than anyone it is against the tradition. At first, all of the townspeople didn’t bother to interfere with their relationship; they thought Emily would not think seriously of a day laborer Northern, a foreman. But they soon find to see that she was serious, the townspeople—mostly the older townspeople—were upset at the prospect of her marrying a lower-class Northern (Dilworth 1). Before the killing of Homer Barron, the townspeople had wanted to preserve the values of the old South alive in Emily as a representative of idealized southern womanhood (Dilworth 1). “The reader might well wonder why he tells the story at all or why he tells it the way he does, although, to my knowledge,….,he narrates in order to hide his and his neighbors’ collusion in the killing of Homer Barron (1),” Dilworth points out the narrator’s intentions. By telling the story now, the narrator wants to preserve as much of the values as possible. It is an attempt at preservation that entails his hiding his part and that of his neighbors in concealing the crime (Dilworth 1).
The narrator also conceals his and his neighbors’—his society—conspiracy with Emily by presenting evidence selectively and by focusing attention, at the end of the story, on necrophilia. This final, shocking revelation distracts the reader from accumulated evidence of the town’s prior knowledge of the killing (Dilworth 1). Most readers, find it difficult to find Emily’s motives to kill Homer Barron—who she loves dearly—in the manner which the narrator has narrated in this story. Faulkner uses the “we” point of view to indicate that the events are being described by a resident of Jefferson—he is a representative of the community’s collective understanding of Emily’s life (Scherting 1). The narrator gives only limited facts; this forced the reader to search beyond the surface of the narrative for an explanation of Emily’s behavior (Scherting 1). His random narrative, which incorporates a substantial amount of local gossip, is of necessity incomplete because Emily seldom left her house and because the only person who could have described what actually went on inside that house is her ran off Negro servant.
Also, the exposition narration scrambles the chronology of the story, leaving readers with the task of reconstructing the sequence of events from casual references to time (Scherting 1). For example, Emily purchased poison during her cousins’ visit. Homer re-entered the Grierson house “within three days” of their departure and that was the last time they saw Homer Barron. Another one is that, the narrator tells the readers Emily Grierson and Homer Barron had been carrying on for two years, only because Emily met Homer in the summer following her father’s death, and because the smell of Homer’s decaying corpse was noticed about two years after her father dies (Scherting 2). Faulkner did not intends to infer that Homer Barron had or intended to jilt Emily, the reader would have known or expect the author to provide some substantive evidence as a basis for such an inference. But there is only one allusion to jilting in the history of this lengthened affair—Homer’s disappearance—the people assumed that Homer deserted her. This assumption is not reinforced anywhere else in the story. However, the evidence strongly suggests that Homer had not deserted her, that he was just taking a long sleep in an upstairs bedroom (Scherting 2).
The title of the story, “A Rose for Emily” in fact, gives a hint to the reader to why Emily killed Homer. Roses are known to carry for a young woman in the South in the late 1800s, and have been given as tokens of love. Still today, the young and romantic press a rose between the pages of some seldom used book, to dry and preserve the token. The rose is out of sight and often out of mind, but memories of that special individual return whenever one discovers it while thumbing through the book. Faulkner would undoubtedly have known of this practice which typifies the romanticism of the Southern tradition (Kurtz 1). This also explained why she killed her lover Homer Barron. She wanted to secure him as her lover forever when she realized that Homer is not a marry man type. That shock destroys her fragile emotional equilibrium (Kurtz 1). As a rose is proof that love once flourished, as looking at and holding that preserved rose are ways to revive precious memories. Homer Barron in this case, is like her rose, who becomes a token for Emily. Reality and symbol are gothically confused. She keeps him tucked away in a seldom used, a rose colored room which at times can be opened to allow the memories of her love to temporarily wipe away her loneliness (Kurtz 1).
An old Southern as she is, Emily Grierson central character trait in the story is denial of change. She insists that Colonel Sartoris, who “had been dead almost ten years,” will explain why she pays no taxes (Kurtz 1). She refuses for three days, to admit that her father is dead. She wants to keep him as she has known him, instead, of allowing him to return to dust. This is also connects to the murder of Homer. Emily Grierson poisons her lover and conceals his corpse from the public for more than forty years. Once in a while, she would go to the bedroom and allow her memories to come back. The narrator in the story recognized and comments perceptively on the superficial aspects of Emily’s bizarre conduct, but he does not attempt to explain the nature of Emily’s derangement nor is he bale to offer a motive which would clear up the mystery (Scherting 1). Faulkner skillfully uses the Freudian principle of Oedipal fixation as a means of depicting Emily’s character, and informing the story with its powerful theme—a theme intimately connected with the incestuous nature of Emily’s love for Homer. Emily Grierson was possessed by an unresolved Oedipal complex. After her father’s death, her libidinal desires for her father were transferred, to Homer Barron. Her deceased father was the subject of her sublimated desire. Homer is merely the living object on which that desires have been fixed and from which she evidently received considerable gratification. Faulkner offers hints of this parallel between Mr. Grierson and Emily’s lover. They both are characterized as strong willed men, and in separate scenes, both are described holding horsewhips. Emily replaces the corpse of her father with Homer’s. She is unable to discriminate between a Southern gentleman and a Yankee laborer, between past and present, between sleep and death. She seems like she is in her own world, and in her fantasy time. Times can become psychological time—time as innerly experienced—not the time of realism. Time is used as well more complexly as a structuring device through a movement backwards or forwards through time.
Altogether, Faulkner did a great job in mismatching or rearranging the past and the present—the disordered chronology by an anonymous narrator in the first plural—included the symbolic of a rose, and Emily’s psychological stages to give the readers a perfect suspense short story. “A Rose for Emily”, is a perfect example for everyone to realize that time will passes by very quick. Memories are just memories; they can only be look back but can’t really touch it. Reality is what Faulkner suggested. A person in his/her own world only suffers more and more and will eventually lead to death, causes by the detachment from reality. Like Emily Grierson, she killed her lover and preserved him in her upstairs bedroom, so that he could always and forever be her lover. But is she really happy? This shown that she has been detached herself from the present and put herself in the past, she confused with the world of reality and fantasy. This short story gives such a shocking ending to find out who was in the Greirson’s upstairs bedroom.
