Greetings from Louisiana! The state that first got Faulkner’s creative juices flowing. He met Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans and did not stop writing after that. Though he first thought he’d be a poet.
To get my thoughts flowing I’ll begin with my experience reading the short story, “A Rose for Emily.” For starters, Josh, James and I read it aloud one night. It was their first time ever reading the story, and we were all struck by different aspects. They made connections with “The Dead,” James Joyce’s famous short story. They noted, as well, the strange role of the narrator. I would like to know other people’s thoughts on the narrator, narrating voice, of the story. He or she (I think she) seems to be an active participant in the story and the town’s history, as well as the activities he/she describes. So we have a nonobjective narrator, thus an untrustworthy or unreliable narrator. Thinking about this, I began to make my own chart of what I thought to be the story’s chronology. More on this in a second.
The narrator often characterizes Emily using nouns not traditionally applied to humans: “a tradition, a duty, and a care” (119), “an idol,” “a tableau” (123). The narrator emphasizes that the town finds her to be a burden but also enjoys seeing her struggle. These sorts of paradoxes seem to reflect one of Faulkner’s main themes in the story — that of the generational clash in the South after the Civil War. The different code of ethics or honor between “General Sartoris’ generation” and “the rising generation” is stark and produces the main tensions of the story (120,122). This is highlighted most interestingly in the detail of Miss Emily and her father being viewed by the town “as a tableau”: their antiqued silhouettes are a sour reminder for the town of its past, a past that saw both grandeur and defeat. Miss Emily embodies both of these characteristics just as the South did after the war. This tableau bit is important to follow, for, as I learned it, Faulkner was inspired by the Keats poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” We will again see a type of tableau in As I Lay Dying, one that can be traced through the details back again to Keats’ poem. This is the most explicit usage of this motif by Faulkner, not surprisingly, as this is one of his earliest works.
I don’t want to go on too long, so I will stop myself there for now. I hope people will share their reactions – any at all, even if it’s just about the grossness of the storyline. Others have been intrigued enough to trace the timeline of the story as it is given in the text. If you find this difficult to do yourself, don’t worry, some have had to use “constraint logic programming” to figure it out. Also, other motifs in “A Rose for Emily” that you can look out for in later works include: dust, watches [ticking], windows, flags, and several others. We’ll identify some of these more as our reading group progresses, and maybe by the end of the summer we’ll have a sense of Faulkner’s use of various motifs throughout his career.
Wow, we sure picked a packed story to start off with. Despite how short “A Rose for Emily” is, there seems to be just way too much to talk about. So I’ll touch upon a few points Sarah raised and move on from there…
Firstly, I’ll just say that I love this story. I read it, as Sarah mentioned, for the first time just recently with Sarah and Josh. The four things that most struck me: (1) the narrator’s identity reminded me of so many of Dostoevsky’s third-person would-be omniscient narrators; (2) the story is really more about the town than about Emily; (3) the chronology of the story is masked and manipulated and falls on top of itself; (4) the final few paragraphs, as Sarah mentioned, made me think of “The Dead” (and, in my view, the third-to-last paragraph might rival the final paragraph of that great story).
(1) How old is the narrator relative to Emily? Is (s)he old enough to remember the death of Emily’s father, or has the story passed along in the consciousness of the town such that the narrator, though younger, speaks as if remembering it? Either way, the narrator’s memory is so tinged by the prejudices and judgments of the society of the town, we can’t just take it as authoritative. This reminded me of Dostoevsky because, for example in The Brothers Karamazov, sometimes he creates a narrator who for a while strikes us as blandly authoritative, but gradually, and only slightly, reveals his/her nescience. That is to say, again with The Brothers Karamazov as a shining example, the narrator turns out to be just some nosy person who lives in town with the main characters, and who, despite often very persuasively describing and expressing the inner lives of various characters (as well as very private encounters between characters), nevertheless occasionally claims not to know a certain detail… We as readers are forced in these moments to wonder: how much of what you claim to know so well is untrue, falsely remembered, skewed, or embellished? Alas, Dostoevsky is clever enough to make such questions unanswerable – we are left with possibilities haunting our readings, and we have little choice but to accept everything as basically true and respond accordingly, despite the fact that all of it must also be held in doubt. The narrator of Faulkner’s short story works, in my view, similarly, only with a slight difference:
(2) In Dostoevsky’s novels and stories the focus of the plot really is on, e.g., the Karamazov brothers and the other main characters of the story. In “A Rose for Emily,” at least in my reading, the opposite is true. While the status of Dostoevsky’s narrator casts a certain kind of light on the characters about whom the narrator speaks, in “A Rose for Emily,” Miss Emily and her odd status in town casts a certain light on the narrator and the other townspeople. As we wonder more about the narrator’s biases, we also can’t help but accept some of the morbid truths about Emily. The final, somewhat gruesome scene, can’t be denied (at least not the mere facts entailed by it), and it’s impossible not to re-interpret Emily’s life in terms of the murder she committed… But even this scene, so very beautifully described, raises questions: the narrator says the men went into the room – does that include the narrator himself? Or was (s)he not there, but only heard about it second- or even third-hand? Either way, this, like almost every other detail in the story, tells us something out the town and its people and culture, which includes the narrator. Seemingly private moments, like Emily’s purchase of arsenic is immediately public: “So the next day we all said, ‘She will kill herself’; and we said it would be the best thing” (126). She didn’t kill herself (in fact, their estimation of her character and intentions was wildly off), but never mind, we learn something about the town. Indeed, in terms of the town’s collective consciousness and gossip, the narrator seems rather reliable.
(3) But this consciousness is difficult to track, because the story is told in the sort of order in which one tells stories: the order in which it comes into the narrator’s mind according to the narrator’s biases. That’s one reason this story is so striking – we are so interested in Emily, in the town, in the events, but we are also just struck by the narrator: whoever it is, the narrator is a good storyteller. (S)he begins with Emily’s death, but saves the actual point (s)he wants to mention for the very end, and in the meantime allows associations to move the story around in time according to what details the narrator wants to focus on at any given point. Of course the final, morbid tableau is the last thing the narrator wants to mention, but the arsenic, e.g., is also extremely cleverly placed. I’ll leave the specifics of the chronology for someone else to tackle, but suffice it to say it’s a bit of a mess, and very significantly so.
(4) Finally, just the comparison: I’ve long held the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” to be the best paragraph of English I’d ever read. As I’ve gone on quite long enough, I won’t draw out the comparison at length. I just want to point out that the final section of the story, especially the paragraph beginning “The violence of breaking down the door…” (129), resembles some of the stylistic and structural aspects of that glorious paragraph, and may, for me, even surpass its glory. Anyone familiar with “The Dead,” especially if you dig that last paragraph, I’d love to know your thoughts.
And finally, as Sarah said, I’d also just like to know anything that struck readers of this story. What a great one!
Greetings from Manhattan, home of the Homer Barrons.
James and Sarah both, above, alluded to the chronology of the story while at the same time bracketing it off. I think I understand why. I just re-read “A Rose for Emily” in my mom’s kitchen, and my re-reading experience, my second experience of the story, actually speaks to the rule, or at least a rule, of my normal experience of brilliant stories, of their time, I mean, though it’s certainly no less bizarre for it. I’ve only truly experienced it in Joyce’s Dubliners, and to a smaller extent in some of Borges (Borges’ genius, I think, is less in making you feel this way than in describing for you what it’s like to be made to feel this way: a reader, writing of reading): this experience of the words on the page having gone and shifted around since my first coming to them. Even almost literally being shifted around the second I put my eyes on them again. Sitting here rereading “A Rose” I knew — not sure how — that I was reading the same story that James, Sarah, and I read at James and Sarah’s dining room table, but the arrangement of the words felt entirely altered. This isn’t quite to echo that line about love about how, “Every time’s the first time,” but more like, man, I don’t know …
Every time — oh, I’m bracketing it off, too.
Anyway, thinking of tables and arrangements, I want to pick up on one of Sarah’s points. This thing the story does — or should we assign the agency here to our increasingly (that is, with talking about it/him/her) interesting narrator? — by characterizing Emily using nouns not traditionally applied to humans, as Sarah puts it. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care” (119) — first, this is a funny type of objectification, or, dehumanization (the story’s later use of “humanized” [123] is plain weird, almost academic). It’s not that Emily’s being seen as an inanimate object so much as she’s being seen as a sort of abstraction. And not an Ideal: she’s not being seen as Tradition, as Duty, as Care, but as a tradition, a duty, a care. (What on Earth’s normally described as “a care”?) Emily’s an indefinite lower case noun, an impersonality, either an instance of an Ideal, or, if you’re not that sort of believer, an abstraction exemplifying nothing (a tradition, in a sense, without Tradition) — more on that in a second.
Second, alive. That word “alive” working as an adverbial clause all on its own, gracious. Emily is these non-human abstractions, for the town, for the looming community that both Sarah and James identify in their posts (and which we, reading the story, are somehow implicated in), precisely while alive. Inhuman (or, dehumanized) while alive, if dead. This, for me, points to Sarah’s pointing us to Emily and her father being seen by the town “as a tableau,” two antiqued silhouettes (in that scene [123], however, Emily’s dad is a “spraddled silhouette” set against Emily, in white: she’s his background, not herself a silhouette). A tableau, a scene on stage comprised of self-silencing unmoving figures, whom you know’re alive, flesh and blood, only because they’re before you on stage, costumed for the occasion, trembling while frozen, chests perceptibly breathing, playing dead: un tableau vivant, a living picture. But also, maybe, and James you hint at this when you mention a “morbid tableau,” a still life? Une nature morte? A particular arrangement, a mise-en-scène, of objects in space, and not entirely out of time. (Weren’t movies coming into being around the time the story’s implied to be taking place?) For whom? Is the narrator’s community the metteur-en-scene, arranging and re-arranging Emily and her dad for themselves? (I think, James, that you assign more control or individuality to the narrator than I would — it really seems more to me like the story is telling itself, or, that the town is collectively, in that sort of dreamy, automatic, and powerful but low-level way that gossip flows, telling it.) What for? Their viewing pleasure? Entertainment?
For now, I really just want to add to Sarah’s planting of the tableau motif/strategy the possibility, well, of the living dead, of the inhuman, exhumed, and/or dehumanized human. Their antiqued silhouettes are reminders to the town of its past (maybe even memento mori), yes, and living reminders at that. They’re the dead past in the living present (betraying the falsity of the idea of any past as purely “dead,” and any present as purely “living,” for that matter), which the town somehow needs to keep fixed, in place, before their/our eyes, in order to thrive. (Keats’ ode is to an urn, not its contents, right?) Those eavesdropping ears and peeping eyes and wagging tongues work, I think in a pretty painful way, like a type of attention as life support for the attended-to. Antiques being precious, after all.
(Makes me think of Kafka’s hunger artist, too. If he asks for the attention, Emily doesn’t, not exactly.)
James, you suggest something a little different; you invert it, almost. I think you’re suggesting that, at some point, or at least on some level, it’s not Emily and her dad who are foregrounded; it’s not they who are the silhouettes, but rather the town and townspeople who are. The focus on Emily — Emily is, I think we remarked when reading the story together, in the end not all that captivating — giving way to a focus on her admirers (of sorts). Much could be said about this, but I’ll finish up with just a thought. You identify the townspeople as, somehow, foregrounded by the story (as opposed to how, in the Brothers K, it really is the main characters who we’re meant to keep our eyes on, to love), and it feels right to me. There is a really serious impersonality to this story. I don’t mean a coldness, or even a dehumanization of its human subjects, but more, like, an indifference, almost (but not quite) a nondifferentiation. Emily’s private purchase of the arsenic is, instantly, you note, public. And I think that’s right. We could speak of das Man (boy, I can’t seem to escape this guy), the “they” that speaks, that we internalize, then externalize, and over again. (Who’s “we,” here? That old question.) The town, the public, is somehow the irreducible element of this story, not its hero so much as its condition. Now, there’s a paranoia in this reading: total exposure, poor Emily always only ever subjected to the monotonous hunger of the living “it” of the town. Unavoidable publicity. But there’s also, I think, something weirdly affirmative in Faulkner’s deeply impersonal tale. Without any one hero to cling to, any single interiority to explore, or any individuality to identify with, you could say that time is freed, a little, to flow throughout the town, across and over its terrain, through its people, even, like conduits, forming and re-forming them along the way. Both of you, James and Sarah, suggest that the town’s history is the subject of the story, the object of its telling; it’s history, I think, like stratigraphy.
Thought had in shower: it’s almost more like a landscape, rather than a still life/dead nature or a tableau vivant, that’s being given way to. Will try to flesh this out more as we go on …
a.c., there is so very much here in your post to discuss, but I will limit myself to your closing thoughts for now. Your reference to stratigraphy (my first encounter with that word, which, upon encountering it, I for some reason immediately uttered aloud in my finest and properest English accent (naturally, not terribly fine or proper)) got me thinking of a directly related term: geological time. Geological time, of course, often makes us think of the oft-noted tininess of human history when seen in relation to: everything. The planet is older than we are by four orders of magnitude and then some, and that’s if you use the higher estimate of our humble history. Geological time makes us seem like a minor passing surface occurrence. Then again, let’s flip the scales: inside our guts are a perhaps unimaginable number of bacteria. Interestingly, when we first think of bacteria in our guts, we imagine them to be as insignificant and tiny as geological time makes us feel we must be in terms of the earth’s broader history. Then again, they seem to have a rather significant impact on our health, on our tastes, and on our personalities. What if we are, to the earth, something vaguely similar to the bacteria in our guts? Of course, the earth has plenty of actual bacteria for itself, too, but the scale is worth a momentary consideration. Perhaps only momentary. Anyway, what’s my point re Emily?
I like that you call the stratigraphy of “A Rose for Emily” affirmative. Considering my above analysis, I don’t think a lot of people’d take a story with no hero, and which demonstrates a kind of impersonal ongoingness, as affirmative. I wouldn’t exactly call this ongoingness progress; doesn’t ‘decay’ seem more fitting, all things considered? And yet, decay of what, exactly? Sarah mentions the contrasted ‘generations’ in the story; are the fading Confederate uniforms reminiscent of something we should not let decay? Maybe the story is so grim because the perspective of the narrator (whether male, female, or non-singular/impersonal) is still steeped in that older generation, even as it makes fun of Emily’s failure to transition (or appear to transition) from one to the next. Maybe it takes a certain kind of act of creativity to find affirmation in the impersonality of “A Rose for Emily.” But maybe that’s the challenge Faulkner leaves us with: find life in this. So we find life by affirming what’s awfully true in the story, yet by allowing it to itself be affirmative. Maybe there’s something in this story about how we’re really quite like ants, after all…
It’s taken me a time to build the strength to weigh in to such intellectual high cotton. Faulkner caused me to squirm in conflict at my first attempt ages ago at The Sound and the Fury. The verbose style, very long involved sentences and complex adjectives were distractions. The youth in me wanted to punctuate every turn-of-phrase and compress every other paragraph, while the reader/would-be writer in me wanted to hang on every word.
Decades later I’m relieved to find such pleasure from this near perfect little gem. a few thoughts on A Rose for Emily:
The narrator does come with agenda. (Clearly from “her” tone she was not in Miss Emily’s camp, Sarah. A once rebuffed neighbor, maybe?). I don’t find her bias a deterrent to the storytelling because she serves obvious purpose guiding readers through the town, street, the house, introducing past and present forms of each with great detail, almost making them living characters. (Miss Emily’s aging house “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons.”) I started to rely on her references of the three for clues to what had to be a mystery.
I have to point out that the narrator’s dismissal of Miss Emily as a “fallen monument” is overstatement and shortsightedness. Faulkner maybe uses the pettiness in the phrase to tease readers into focusing on the town’s advancements politically and industrially? It was easy for unaffected bystanders to get a bit slaphappy about Miss Emily’s decline, according to Miss Narrator. The Southern Belle of the 20th century arguably would be hard-pressed to claim Miss Emily’s tenacity under the circumstances.
(I would be remiss if I did not pay tribute here to my dear friend and Alabama native Maryln Schwartz, author of A Southern Belle Primer, Or Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be A Kappa Kappa Gamma and New Times In The Old South: Or Why Scarlett’s in Therapy & Tara’s Going Condo.)
Maryln, who passed away almost a year ago, enjoyed Faulkner and would be quick to point out with her signature laugh that it is Miss Emily Grierson that has the final say in this charmer.
Finally, I was left haunted by Tobe. I wish he had had a say after all was done. Part of the lure throughout the story was what did he know? And in the end, why did he keep the secret? The scene of his exit keeps playing in my head. Why didn’t Tobe, Keeper of the Secret, tell the story?
My lingering is Faulkner’s genius.
I too am intrigued by Tobe. He is, not surprisingly, a shadow figure for Ms. Emily in the story. He is silent and always present, the keeper of family secrets. He is loyal in the idealized image of the loyal slave. Why does he stay? Would he have nowhere to go in a town that seems to view him as an oddity? He is called the “old Negro” by the narrator but Judge Stevens calls him “that nigger of hers.” Otherwise the only other black people in the story are from outside of town: “The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery.” Faulkner often pairs mules and black people. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Look for it!
Perspectival. Narration notwithstanding, and yet put into sharp relief vis-à-vis narration, I would like to suggest more of a focus on the town patriarchs’ attitude and thus stance in relation to Emily (the scene where they throw lime around her house is brilliant!). There is an ostensible and actual deference, and thus fear of Emily, engendered, of course, in what Emily “represents.” Faulkner’s accretional process of showing how deeply interconnected and rooted the societal mores and beliefs are in this culture both eclipse and override individuality. Faulkner’s intuitive dismantling of an old paradigm structure is shown in his heightening narratological elements, such as in the narrator’s peculiar telling of events and ideas/opinions, as you have all pointed out. What I experience is this constant shifting between representation (in the particulars) and the pushing through to the larger contextual truth and beauty of interconnectedness revealed in paradigmatic propositions (that we the readers are inspired and thus responsible to generate). In this way, we get to directly experience (see) the contextual process of accretion and thus hopefully keep ourselves honest, open, and transparent. Lastly, let’s not forget the rose, the most personal and psychological aspect of faulkner’s showing, and expression of sorrow and affinity for Emily, the person. In reading, I felt myself both dying and dead, from a past “not even dead” and whose toxic stench can only be purified and refragranced in allegory, with a gifted rose “desiring to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.”
Paul, just briefly:
Die Rose ist ohne warum;
sie blühet weil sie blühet.
[The rose is without why;
she blooms because she blooms.]
Not sure how to relate this directly to Faulkner, Emily, at the moment, but your comment immediately made me think of it (almost as if I’d been waiting to be made to think of it).
Sorry to post so late, but Jean and Sarah encouraged me to jump in, so here I am. I loved this story. I remember many years ago studying Faulkner in college and being blown away by his brilliant language and his characters. Being a native New Yorker, I’ve had an odd fascination with the South. Faulkner’s characters and his fictional Jefferson deeply satisfy my curiosity, although I am feeling a little bit like the women in the story who arrive to peek inside the house when Miss Emily dies.
I agree with Sarah – I believe that the narrator is female. I think she is one of the town women, but I don’t think she’s Miss Emily’s contemporary. I’m not quite sure what I can point to in the text to support this other than the narrator’s tone, but I think she could be a tad younger and definitely of a less haughty social station.
The narrator toys with the reader throughout – in some places, she seems an observer, someone who knows the town’s history and its people, and is simply telling the story. (And I agree, James, she is an excellent storyteller.) Other times, she is a participant in the action. And as she relays this morbid tale, she also toys with chronology, as Sarah so astutely pointed out – so much so that I had to reread or pay closer attention to the graying of her hair and then of the aging of the Negro man, as she calls him. By the story’s end, though, the narrator is front and center. When the upstairs room is broken into, she is there: “For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin.” (130)
There is so much to say about this one extremely well-crafted layered story, as you have all noted, but I suppose it’s really time to move on to “As I Lay Dying.” (I found my yellowed college copy with my name neatly signed on the first page!) One last thought, though. One of the things I liked most about this story is how it comes full circle. The story begins with the town people arriving at the literally rotting house when Miss Emily dies and ends with them finally having their curiosity satisfied. Be careful what you wish for! As I read the story, I kept thinking about Norah Jones’ new CD and a track entitled Miriam. It is easily one of the creepiest songs I’ve ever heard – its lyrics are brilliant. They seep into your brain and then twist. Perhaps this is what Miss Emily would sound like if she told her tale from her point of view. Here’s a link so you can hear, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnBnzP_nQ3g