William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

William Faulkner – A Rose for Emily

Emily Grierson had shut her home off from the outside world a long time ago. Thirty years earlier, Emily went through a long dark illness after her father died. It took her three days to accept he was dead and have his body disposed of properly. The town had first thought Emily to have gone crazy. Emily later drew interest in a foreman named Homer Barron and was seen driving with him around town on Sundays. It was later assumed that Emily and Homer were to be married. The town’s people were drawn to fear when she went to buy rat poison, thinking she was going to kill herself with it. Homer had left town and returned again after three days, seen going into Emily’s house and never seen again. Emily had been

This style of writing mainly focuses on damaged and delusional characters. These were often stories consisting of hauntings, death, darkness and madness. There are many Southern elements in the stories, including dialect, habits and personalities and representation of the history of the South. The characters are almost always complex and mentally unstable or ill. (Katie Surber) In A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner chose to write with a Southern Gothic style. Faulkner uses a Southern Gothic writing style with a theme that includes heavy symbolism and Imagery to show tragedy, insanity, loneliness, unrequited love, death, changing of times, and the history of the south to engage the reader throughout the

An excerpt from "A Rose for Emily," validates the use of this technique when the new aldermen's attempt at collecting Emily's taxes prompts the narrator to recall the scene 30 years earlier, when Emily's neighbors complain about a smell coming from her property, and request the town do something about it. The two scenes are interconnected when Faulkner uses the particular verb vanquished to refer to Emily's actions, "So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the