Gilded Age Essay

The city of Jefferson, Mississippi in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is an allusion to the American South from the Post-Antebellum Era to the Gilded Age. The Antebellum Era began after the War of 1812 and ended before the Civil War started, and the Gilded Age began after Civil War. As the Civil War reached an end, there was a new need for jobs and income, so there had to be Industrial Growth in the United States. A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is an excellent example of the beginning of the transitions from two different eras. A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner enables the theme of Post-Civil War reconstruction from the setting. A Carpetbagger is defined as “A person from the northern states who went to the South after the Civil War to profit from the

The Antebellum Period lasted from about 1812-1861 and was a time of growth. During this period, manufacturing began to boom in the north whereas the south was an agrarian society consisting of cash crops and plantations. In 1793 Eli Whitney created the Cotton Gin which increased production on Southern Plantations by removing the seeds from the picked cotton. This invention began an industrial spark that would lead to the flame of the Gilded Age. In Section I of A Rose for Emily it says “But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; 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”. This quote shows that Emily refuses to let Jefferson grow because she had grown up in a simpler time and the only way Jefferson would leave the Antebellum Period and enter the Gilded Age was for Miss Emily Grierson to die. Much like in history the only way for the economy in the south to progress was for the agrarian society to move on and allow northern industrial influence take over in the