Ph Vivian
August 2017
“When Miss Emily Grierson died,
our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful
affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the
inside of her house…” The scenario of the story begins at the funeral of Miss
Emily – the so-called last generation of the Grierson representing the last aristocratic
class of the South after their defeat in the Civil War – and ends with a
horrible discovery of the townspeople when they went upstairs to her secret dusty
room which was unknown for over forty years. The large majority of the story
reveals a numerous flashbacks of the townspeople about the period of Miss
Emily’s alienated and isolated life shortly after her father’s death.
The time was undergoing a vigorous change and there was also a
significant effect on society. After the Civil War (1861-1865), the South was
defeated by its counterpart. Although the white nobles’ positions in the South were
not remained and they were isolated by the large part of community, their pride
of once-powerful period was still held high inside themselves and in the eyes
of society: “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort
of hereditary obligation upon the town…”. “And now Miss Emily had gone to join
the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused
cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate
soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.”
Following the stream of consciousness, the townspeople recalled the time
when she had refused to pay taxes and when her father had died. “The day after
his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and
aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and
with no trace of grief on her face.” I wonder whether she was such a cold woman
that she could not express her sadness over her father’s death or her grief soaked
to its peak at which she could not shed tears as she should when she realized
that now she had nothing left. She would be fatherless like a little girl. No
one would care for her or be by her side. As far as I am concerned, I do
believe that she had her own feelings. She might be just as any other normal
women on earth by which I mean she also longed to love and to be loved by
others. However, life had bitterly encased Emily in a suffocating atmosphere of
alienation and isolation which she, albeit with all the power of her will,
could not escape. We just can’t help feeling pity for Miss Emily when it comes
to “She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut
short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angles in
colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.” There seems to be an
increasing weight of evidence that she was experiencing the utmost
heart-rending misery of her life. A large piece of her soul was incomplete and
she needed to be filled by someone or by the love from others. While the
society was going on the way of modernization, the community continued to step
forward, Miss Emily wanted to forget everything and seemed to be struggling to
find someone to be friends with. She went out with Homer Barron – a Northerner
who, despite being a so-called day labourer, came like a victorious warrior. In
the middle of rumour that Miss Emily and Homer Barron were going out together,
the town dwellers learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered
a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letter H. B. on each piece, a complete
outfit of men’s clothing, including a night shirt. The townspeople probably
thought that they were soon getting married until the time they did not see
Homer Barron any more. No one knew exactly why Homer Barron disappeared from
the last time seeing the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one
evening. From my perspective, I am convinced that just like me, a large number
of readers would wonder why she came up with such a horror manner to keep her fiancé
forever by killing him with arsenic she bought from the druggist and put his
corpse on the bed lying beside her for such a long time of her life. Miss Emily
could not make clear distinction between reality and illusion. She lived in the
illusion of the past, of her father and her lover. She refused any change during
the course of her life time. Time meant nothing to her though she could not
escape from it. It is believed that William Faulkner, through the character of
Miss Emily, wanted to convey the idea of disintegration of the Old South during
the Reconstruction in the early twentieth century.
We readers may not avoid feeling sympathetic for Miss Emily owning to the
fact that after all, we all are the products of our life’s setting.
A Rose for Emily!
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