A Rose For Emily Reconstruction Essay

Miss Emily’s Reconstruction

The short story A Rose for Emily is about a small town in Mississippi that is struggling to get over there racist and antiquated ideals and turn towards more progressive thinking. This grows seemingly harder with Miss Emily being the outlier of their community but also being a reminder of the town’s dark history. Throughout A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, Miss Emily becomes an expression for the antebellum period and the South’s resistance to progress during Reconstruction. He also uses a female character for this story to bring up the issue of women’s rights during this era and how they were enslaved to conformity and arbitrary standards of the time. From the very first sentence Faulkner

The quote “only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores” (1) shows that her house was the last one standing in the neighborhood as if it were the last of a dying breed. Faulkner is trying to show that she was one of the final pillars left from the prewar South. Just as described above it was an “eyesore” in the literal view and conscious of the town, they no longer wanted to have their community’s reputation tarnished with the bloody stain of what the South once stood for. Miss Emily’s house staying the way it was and never changing relates to the mentality many had after the war and their stubborn attitudes towards Reconstruction. The town wanted to move on from the war and not to have the constant reminder of a darker time that Emily and her house symbolized. Miss Emily and the house are both described as unsightly throughout the story this shows how the locals view them together as blemish on the newly progressive town. The town of Jefferson is trying to progress into the modern age, but Miss Emily is the nagging reminder that their community was not always the angelic and accepting environment they believe it to