In “ A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner’s use of language foreshadows and builds up to the climax of the story. His choice of words is descriptive, tying resoundingly into the theme through which Miss Emily Grierson threads, herself emblematic of the effects of time and the nature of the old and the new. Appropriately, the story begins with death, flashes back to the near distant past and leads on to the demise of a woman and the traditions of the past she personifies. Faulkner has carefully crafted a multi-layered masterpiece, and he uses language, characterization, and chronology to move it along, a sober commentary flowing beneath on the nature of time, change, and chance—as well as a psychological narrative on the static nature of memory.
Faulker begins his tale at the end: after learning of Miss Emily’s death, we catch a glimpse of her dwelling, itself a reflection of its late owner. The house lifts “its stubborn and coquettish decay” above new traditions just as its spinster is seen to do, “an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner 666). The narrative voice suggests the gossipy nature of a Southern town where everyone knows everyone else, and nosy neighbors speculate about the affairs of Miss Emily, noting her often antiquated ways and her early retirement. In fact, it appears as if the town itself is describing the events of Miss Emily’s life, the first-person plural “we” a telling indication. The first explicit example of this occurrence takes place during the flashback in the second section, when, in speaking of her sweetheart, the narrator parenthetically adds “the one we believed would marry her” (667).
In the opening characterization, many descriptive words foreshadow the ultimate irony at the climatic ending: “her skeleton was small and sparse,” “she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue” (667). We learn that “her voice was dry and cold” and that she did not accept no for an answer (667). Her house, a fading photograph, “smelled of dust and disuse—a closed, dank smell,” and when her guests are seated a “faint dust” rises “sluggishly about their thighs” (667). All of these terms suggest neglect, decay, entropy: each of these elements tie in with the surface layer as well as the deeper themes upon which Faulkner tiers.
After carefully building such descriptive statements, Faulkner flashes back in time and examines the events that lead up to the moment of death. This toggling of events has been skillfully constructed, building suspense in a way that a straight forward chronology could not. The first unusual element that catches the curiosity of the reader is the mention of “the smell,” which happened “thirty years before” (667).
The smell, however, continues to persist, rapping on the reader’s curiosity for attention: What is the significance of this infernal “smell”? Faulkner chooses to tell us only enough to keep us guessing, diverting us with the four men who “slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork” with a single man forming a “regular sowing motion” with the lime in his hand (668). No sooner is this done, however, than the light comes on and Emily’s “upright torso [sits] motionless as that of an idol” (668). Here we see the first instance of this “idolatrous” description. We again are shown this image (as well as the first person plural narrator) after the mysterious smell leaves in several weeks and Emily has aged to the point of near death, her image in the window “like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which” (671). Not only does this form an interesting snapsnot, but we learn that (again note the first person plural narrator) “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” (668). It would seem that Faulkner is trying to tell us something on another level if we will pay careful attention. Is Emily a portrait, a tableau vivant of a past that clings on in its own tenacious ways, disturbing the otherwise tranquil flow of the future? We will come back to this idea in a moment.
In describing the death of Emily’s father, Faulkner again foreshadows or alludes to the tragic ending: “She told them that her father was not dead,” and “did that for three days,” until she finally broke down and allowed him to be buried properly (669). To this end, the “town narrator” comments “We did not say she was crazy then,” hinting perhaps that “we” do say she is crazy now (669). From here, Faulker brings forth Homer Barron, a largely flat character who nonetheless plays an integral part, for it is he that supplies the cadaver so imperative to the plot. According to the collective narrator, he is “a Northerner, a day laborer,” “a big, dark, ready man,” he laughs a lot, and he curses “the niggers” (669).
In this case, Faulkner again returns to Miss Emily’s austere characterization: when she purchases the arsenic, she looks through her “cold, haughty black eyes” which peer from a “face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and the eye-sockets” (670). Just as Faulkner deftly employs Miss Emily’s haughtiness to keep important details from the reader, so too does he use her elusive habits to suggest a mysterious element that helps heighten suspense. These “haughty black eyes” effectively stare down the druggist, and for good reason, because if they did not, Faulkner would have forced Emily’s hand and ruined the suspense. Since he does not but rather allows her silence to reign supreme and enigmatic, the next day “we all said, ‘She will kill herself,’” but she doesn’t (670). The reader is further engaged, wondering where all these individual details might lead: first the smell, then the arsenic, and now it appears that she is to marry Homer Barron—if we are inclined to trust the collective narrator—though he soon disappears out of the story as another odd detail wonting further explanation (671).
Miss Emily emerges as a historical figure frozen in a sort of stasis, though throughout it all, Faulkner never makes her any less complex and ambiguous. Resistant to change though she may be, even she cannot hold back the effects of aging, growing steadily older: “the next few years” her hair “grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning” (671). This emphasis on the graying of Miss Emily and its final state of “iron-gray” is crucial to determining with surety just whose “long strand of iron-gray hair” we find in the indented pillow next to Barron’s remains at the end of the story (672). Within this exposition is again juxtaposed the concept of Miss Emily (representative of the old) versus the new: “then the newer generation became the backbone and spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from ladies’ magazines” (671). It would seem that Miss Emily, along with the China she taught children to paint, had become something of a relic herself, resistant to the demands of the younger generation.
Her Negro manservant also remains impervious to the ebb and flow of time, though the years gray his hair down just as readily, leaving him increasingly stooped and haggard (671). In fact, we watch this process happen “daily, monthly, yearly,” which seems a clear parallel to Faulkner’s interest in the role of time and the interplay of the new versus the old (671). It is here that we read Miss Emily described for the second time as “an idol in a niche,” a metaphor that would further bear out Miss Emily’s defiance in the face of a changing world that might not be able to change her habits, but nonetheless changes her as is the wont of time and entropy (671). This “idol in a niche” is the last living portrait Faulkner paints of Miss Emily before she dies (671).
It is interesting that she does not die in the fateful room, but instead is found in a room downstairs “in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped up on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight” (672). The ladies from the town come over with their “hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances,” apparently oblivious to the manservant’s stealthy exit out the back door (672). At her funeral the ladies are once again “sibilant”—snakelike?—and “macabre,” both suggestive of the final suspenseful outcome (672).
The manservant—not a particularly important character though without him the plot would have lacked an added layer of richness—has finally outlived his usefulness and Faulkner handily shuffles him off the story board, adding one last element of mystery to the tale in the process: “Why did the Negro disappear?” Faulkner realizes that the discerning reader will likely question this disappearance and total it with the mounting evidence in the series of unusual events preceding, only to catch the unwary reader off guard with the conclusion.
At the funeral, some of the very old men were “in their brushed Confederate uniforms,” suggesting something of the historical undercurrent running through Faulkner’s piece (672). Perhaps, however, the deeper meaning to Faulkner’s thoughts is found in the description of these men who have confused “time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, [and] to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years” (672). This description would seem to explain the static nature of an unchanging Miss Emily—“the carven torso of the idol in a niche” (671)—the tableau vivant framed by the “back-flung front door” (668) through which the secret might be unlocked—and the unchanging nature of the manservant. It would seem Faulkner has woven a multifaceted tapestry with its warp and woof firmly anchored to universal—and therefore timeless—truth, while his historical particulars form the aesthetic shag bedecking its surface: the changeless world of being beneath, the straining world of becoming above.
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