Rose For Emily Essay, Research Paper

Only when the present has become the past can we reflect on what we could have

or should have done. Yet our society is so obsessed with keeping track of time

that we spend millions of dollars a year to keep a set of atomic clocks ticking

the time. These clocks are so accurate that they must be reset once a year to

correct for the earth’s imperfect orbit. Our base-60 measure of time is an

abstract idea dating from the Babylonians. All this, and what most human minds

intrinsically understand about time is the past, present and future. I say most

minds, because not every mind does comprehend these abstract ideas. Many people

are able to survive in the present, but give little or no thought to the future,

and these people usually live in the past. Such a mind is the mind of Miss Emily

Grierson in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. Emily Grierson survives in the

present, but lives in the past. The morbid ending is foreshadowed by the story’s

opening with Miss Emily Grierson’s death and funeral. The bizarre outcome is

further emphasized throughout by the symbolism of the decaying house, which

parallels Miss Emily’s physical deterioration and demonstrates her ultimate

mental disintegration. Her life, like the house which decays around her is a

direct result of living in the past. Part of living is death, and the future

conjures life, the past, and death. Emily’s imbalance of past and present causes

her to confuse the living with the dead. Perhaps the most prominent example of

Emily’s confusion is the carcass of Homer Barron lying in the honeymoon room of

Emily’s house. This division is exemplified by the symbolic imagery of Faulkner.

The rose colored room, a color of life, is covered thickly with dust, a symbol

of death. Of course, this is not the first time we learn of Emily’s confusion.

Previous to Barron’s discovery, her father dies, and she denies that he is dead.

Faulkner gives the reader a taste of this confusion early on when Miss Emily

instructs the town tax-collectors to consult with Colonel Sartoris about her

taxes, though he had been dead for ten years. At this foreboding point in the

story, Emily seems to be a senile old maid; this could not be further from the

truth. The external characteristics of Miss Emily’s house parallel her physical

appearance to show the transformation brought about by years of neglect. For

example, the house is located in what was once a prominent neighborhood that has

deteriorated. Originally white and decorated in "the heavily lightsome

style" of an earlier time, the house has become "an eyesore among

eyesores". Through lack of attention, the house has evolved from a

beautiful representative of quality to an ugly holdover from another era.

Similarly, Miss Emily has become an eyesore; for example, she is first described

as a "fallen monument", to suggest her former grandeur and her later

grotesqueness. Like the house, she has lost her beauty. Once she had been

"a slender figure in white"; later she is obese and "bloated,

like a body long submerged in motionless water with eyes lost in the fatty

ridges of her face". Both house and occupant have suffered the ravages of

time and neglect. The interior of the house also parallels Miss Emily’s

increasing degeneration and the growing sense of sadness that accompanies such

decay. Initially, all that can be seen of the inside of the house is "a dim

hall from which a staircase mounted into still more shadow" with the house

smelling of "dust and disuse". The darkness and the smell of the house

connect with Miss Emily, "a small, fat woman in black" with a voice

that is "dry and cold" as if it were dark and dusty from disuse like

the house. The similarity between the inside of the house and Miss Emily extends

to the "tarnished gilt easel" with the portrait of her father and Miss

Emily "leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head". Inside

and out, both the building and the body in which Miss Emily live are in a state

of deterioration like tarnished metal. Finally, the townspeople’s descriptions

of both house and occupant reveal a common intractable arrogance. At one point

the house is described as "stubborn" as if it were ignoring the

surrounding decay. Similarly, Miss Emily proudly overlooks the deterioration of

her once grand residence. This motif recurs as she denies her father’s death,

refuses to discuss or pay taxes, ignores town gossip about her being a

"fallen woman," and does not tell the druggist why she is purchasing

arsenic. Both the house and Miss Emily become traps for that strongest

representative of the twentieth century, Homer Barron, laborer, outsider,

confirmed bachelor. Just as the house seems to reject progress and updating, so

does Miss Emily, until both of them become decaying anachronisms. Through

descriptions of the house that resemble descriptions of Miss Emily Grierson,

"A Rose for Emily" emphasizes the way that beauty and elegance can

become grotesquely distorted through neglect and lack of love. In this story,

the house deteriorates for forty years until it becomes ugly; Miss Emily’s

physical and emotional condition dissipate in a similar manner.