What Does A Rose For Emily Grierson's House Symbolize

William Faulkner was born September 25, 1897. He was an esteemed author who was awarded with two Pulitzer Prizes and the Noble Prize for Literature. According to Donald Aker, “Faulkner’s novels and stories about the South include dark, taboo subjects such as murder, suicide, and incest.” (1). In both of Faulkner’s short stories, A Rose for Emily and Barn Burning, he uses symbolism, characterization, and imagery to develop his theme of social criticism of the deep south. William Faulkner loved using symbolism in a lot of his work. For example, Emily Grierson’s house is one of the main symbols in A Rose for Emily. As he stated, “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily

For example, “the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.” (2). The blood that is being talked about here is the blood relationship between Sarty and his father. Another example is, “You’ve got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you” (29). Faulkner is talking about the same kind of blood here with the familial blood. It is saying in that quote that if one does not stick to their own family no one in their family is going to stick with them. According to Robert Briggs, “It seems that Faulkner wants us to see through the child’s eyes the fact that each of us must choose our own path, that life is a series of decisions that start early in our childhood and define who we will be later in life. We control our course, not the blood of ancestry, not familial relation, and we can change our direction if we will stay true to our convictions and choose to do good as apposed to doing evil.” (1). Faulkner also uses characterization to develop his theme of social criticism