A ROSE FOR EMILY

A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

This paper explores the concept and analyzes the story “A Rose for Emily” by “William Faulkner.” The main theme of William Faulkner short story “A Rose for Emily” is based on the past. When Miss Emily Grierson died most of the city attended his funeral the men with that kind of respectful devotion to a monument disappears women, mostly animated by a sense of curiosity to see inside the house in which no one had entered the last ten years, except an old servant, who was a cook and a gardener at a time. The house was a square, heavy, which had once been white, decorated with domes, spirals, and balconies in the heavy style of the seventeenth century, seated in the main street of the city in the days when it was built. It had been invaded later by garages and cotton mills that had gone so far as to erase the memory of the illustrious names of the neighborhood. Now, Miss Emily had gone to meet with representatives of those illustrious men who were resting in the shaded cemetery, between the line and anonymous graves of Union soldiers who had fallen in the battle of Jefferson. While living Miss Emily had been a tradition for the city, a duty and care a kind of inherited tradition dating back to the day when Colonel Sartoris Major-author of the edict ordering any black woman could go to the street without apron, exempted it from taxes, exemption that had begun when his father died and later was granted in perpetuity. Not that Emily was able to accept charity. But Colonel Sartoris invented a story, saying that Emily's father had made a loan to the city and the city was using this medium to pay the debt. Only a man of the generation and the mode of being of Colonel Sartoris had been able to invent such excuse, and only one woman as Emilia could have given good story (Allen, 1984).

After the death of his father, the ladies went to the house to visit. She dressed as always and without showing any shame in the face she put them in the door and telling them that their father was dead. In this attitude remained three days visiting ministers of the church and trying to persuade doctors to let them come ...