A rose for emily by William Faulkner - Essay Example

“A Rose for Emily” embodies the subtle correlation between Southern Gothic and Faulkner’s interest in the moral inferences of history. William Faulkner’s story, “A Rose for Emily”, is a famous example of southern gothic literature because of its rich gothic elements such as sense of horror, gloomy setting, signs of understated violence, uncertainty of point of view, the unidentified narrator, and necrophilia. Faulkner’s story is fraught with dark imageries and actions such as Emily’s effort to prevent her father’s corpse from burial, her necrophilia (attraction to Barron’s corpse), the decaying mansion, the strange vanishing of a servant and the murder of Barron.

These gothic elements inevitably facilitate the development of the theme of the story: the gradual decay and death of the aristocratic old society and the emergence of the new class. In fact, Faulkner’s protagonist, Emily herself symbolizes the dying aristocracy in the first half of the 20th century. She wants to cling to her aristocratic superiority as well as seclusion. Though she falls in love with Baron, a layman, she fails to cope with the class-gap between her and her lover. Faulkner has kept the motif of Baron’s murder secret and left it to the readers’ assumption.

In fact, this technique of keeping the motif open to interpretation necessarily allows the readers to investigate deep into Emily’s motif behind the murder in relation to her aristocratic social status. Indeed, there is a number of possible motifs behinds Baron’s murder: Baron’s homosexuality, his non-marriageable nature, Emily’s mental sickness, etc. But whatever the reasons are, they are all related to a central reason: that is the status-gap between Emily and Baron. Faulkner uses mainly three literary techniques -point of view, unidentified narrator, characterization- to