A Rose for Emily Response

(source)

      In the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, the author uses Miss Emily’s house to represent various themes of the book.

    One theme that is prominent in the story is change. This story takes place after the Civil War, during a time when the South was rapidly becoming more industrialized and moving away from its traditions. An example from the story that shows this is when the construction company - led by “Homer Barron, a Yankee” (para 29) - came to pave the town’s sidewalks. The town was becoming more and more modernized with each new generation, yet Miss Emily remained “a tradition, a duty, and a care” (para 3). Miss Emily’s house represents this refusal to go along with these changes because it was the last one left in the neighborhood that was built “in the lightsome style of the seventies” (para 2). It was grand and elaborate, but stood out once the “garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood” (para 2). As the narrator reminisces about the mysterious woman’s past, he says that, “when the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it” (para 51). This is a clear example of how she is stuck in the past, like a stationary stone in the middle of a fast-moving river.

    Another theme in the book is secrecy. Miss Emily is definitely a strange and eccentric character, and no one knows much about what she is really like. “After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her” (para 16). Once she stopped giving her china-painting lessons, “the front door closed upon the last [student] and remained closed for good” (para 51). The house and the door represent Miss Emily’s secrets. She shut herself off from the world, and no matter how much the residents of the town tried to understand her, to peek through her windows, she remained an enigma. At one point the neighbors realized that she had “evidently shut up the top floor of her house” (para 52). They did not realize that the reason for this was more grim than they could have ever imagined (Emily had murdered Homer Barron and was keeping his deceased body up there). The physical closing of the floor represents Emily’s desire to keep Homer to herself. This ties back to the other theme I discussed, change. Emily wanted to stop time, in a way, to keep Homer from leaving her, and the best way she could think of to achieve that was to murder him. An eternal sleep, the ultimate stopping of the clock.

    Though Miss Emily’s character is mentally disturbed, and her thoughts and actions can be hard to understand, a careful analyzation of these recurring themes and symbols helps to make sense of this story.