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A Rose For Emily Reconstruction Essay

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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 …show more content…

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

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The previous lavishness of the “big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies…set on what had once been [the] most select street” (437) indicates that Emily came from a well-off family that was probably highly respected. The whiteness of the house can be taken to symbolize the innocence of her youth, and that as she got older her macabre habits manifested themselves and polluted that innocence, leaving the house dingy and tainted. The condition of the house when Emily dies is that of a worn down vestige to the past, “an eyesore among eyesores” (437), representing how the towns people saw her. She was a curiosity, a clandestine entity that could only be unraveled after her death when there was no one left to safe guard the dark secrets of her house. The house stands as a monument to a lost time and a testament to tradition that has no place in the modern era, much like Emily

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By using unconventional plot structure, Faulkner has created a complex method of storytelling to explore the moral shortcomings of Southern values and ethics during the American Civil War through the means of Emily, a character who is socially and mentally trapped in the old

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In many situations, the people within the town notice Miss Emily’s odd behavior, but they choose to maintain peace with her instead of helping her when she clearly needs it the most. However, this need to preserve the respectful image of Miss Emily ultimately leads to her emotional breakdown of isolation and

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Miss Emily in the story is still very much the old generation. She has not updated her home ever. It was left in “stubborn, coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps” (244) condition. Construction workers started to work on the town, pave sidewalks,

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In his short story, “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner intends to convey a message to his audience about the unwillingness in human nature to accept change and more specifically the secretive tendencies of aristocrats in the South during the early 20th century. In order to do this, Faulkner sets up a story in which he isolates and old aristocratic woman, Miss Emily, from her fellow townspeople and proceeds to juxtapose her lifestyle with theirs. In doing this he demonstrates her stubborn refusal to change along with the town, but also Among several literary devices the author employs to achieve this contrast, Faulkner sets up his narrator as a seemingly reliable, impartial and knowledgeable member of the community in which Miss Emily lives by using a first person plural, partially omniscient point of view. The narrator is present for all of the scenes that take place in the story, but does not play any role in the events, and speaks for the town as a whole. Faulkner immediately sets up his narrator as a member of the community in the first line of the story, saying that when Miss Emily died “our whole town went to her funeral.”

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Even the narrator’s often disjointed accounts of the past all push towards a fond remembrance and need without a want in today’s society. “an eyesore among eyesores” Miss Emily’s house was called, that was to show that even with its cobwebs and peeling paint this building stood as a testament to an age long gone, a

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Symbolism is one literary device Faulkner uses and has major importance to the story. One big symbol in the story is Emily’s house. For most of the townspeople they only saw the house from the outside in never the inside out. Faulkner gives a good description of the house by saying, “it was a big squarish frame house that once had been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on

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