Diaries of an Angry Fangirl

☞ a rose for emily

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

published in 1930

Quick opinion: I was assigned this short story in my duel enrollment class and I honestly loved it. It's a very different style and leaves a lot open for discussion, but it's an intriguing idea and it's fun to contemplate it's meaning. It's a little long and sort of dark, but I hope you like it!

★★★

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: themen through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, thewomen mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which noone save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seenin at least ten years. 

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decoratedwith cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily light somestyle of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street.But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even theaugust names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons andthe gasoline pumps--an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily hadgone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay inthe cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous gravesof Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson. 

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort ofhereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 whenColonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negrowoman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted hertaxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on intoperpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. ColonelSartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father hadloaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business,preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generationand thought could have invented it, and only a woman could havebelieved it. 

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayorsand aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. Onthe first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, andthere was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call atthe sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote herhimself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply anote on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in fadedink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice wasalso enclosed, without comment. 

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputationwaited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor hadpassed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten yearsearlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which astairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnishedin heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds ofone window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when theysat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning withslow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before thefireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father. 

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thingold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaningon an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small andspare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness inanother was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body longsubmerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost inthe fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressedinto a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while thevisitors stated their errand.