Style Of Gothic Horror In Literature - Book Report/Review Example

? “A Rose for Emily” – Story Analysis A Rose for Emily is a remarkable story, written by William Faulkner (1930) that is widely read and debated. William Faulkner is one of the greatest American authors, who always discerned universal themes with a technical sense of writing. A Roe for Emily is strange narrative of love, obsession, and death, which several critics have identified as a tale of Gothic horror and tragedy. Gothic horror refers to a kind of fiction which illustrates incidents of dark, mystery, shadows, and terrifying occurrences happening in depressing and ethereal surroundings. This expression of illustration drew its name from the Gothic architectural trend that prevailed in the Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. This short story illustrates a forlorn Mississippi woman who surrendered to mental illness while living solitarily with the obsolete conventions of Old South aristocrats. The author’s use of symbolism and the absence of a clear standard chronology create a story that has undergone many interpretations among various readers. Most of the interpretations, though all not precisely connected with Faulkner’s idea, concentrate on many widespread elements of the story, and a few of them could exactly touch upon the author’s original intentions. The other two major characters in the story are Emily’s father Mr. Grierson and Homer Barron; significant not just because of their association they maintain with Emily, the central character, but because of the impacts created out of their relationship with her. The author constructs the story in five short sections. In the first section, he depicts the funeral and burial of Emily and brings background information about her house, her servant, her tax status and standard of living. Through the second section, author explains incidents like the fouls smell coming out from her house and the city maintainers distilling with lime to defuse it. It is in this part where Faulkner focuses on the insanity that runs in Emily’s family. Her father thought that the men were not good enough for her and so refused to allow young men to call on her. Finally, the death and burial of her father also takes place in this section. Coming to the third part, the author introduces a Northerner, Homer Barron who came to the town with a construction team. He meets Emily and later he takes her for buggy rides on Sunday evenings. And here we see Emily buying arsenic, the rat poison at the local drug store. Later on, in the fourth section, the author illustrates the townspeople as thinking that Emily is setting a bad example by constantly maintaining company with Homer Barron. It is in this section where Barron seemed suddenly disappearing from the story. It provides a brief description about the years when Emily taught china paining for six or seven years. And author explains of the death of Emily in this section. Finally, the fifth section portraits the incidents taking place at Emily’s funeral and the grotesque findings in an upper room of her house. The author uses simile to convey a macabre tone. For instance, the readers get a first impression of Miss Emily when the aldermen visit her house to ask for her taxes, she is portrayed as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motion water, and of that pallid hue” ( Faulkner, 1930). This comparison about her drowned body conveys a message that she had been dead inside the house for a long time now. In the same way, the narrator reports that “a thin, acrid pall as of the tome seemed to lie everywhere upon this room…”( Faulkner, 1930). The projection choice of “tomb” gives intimation to the reader that the reader is soon going find the room is, indeed a burial place for Homer Barron. In the same way, the theme of the gap between generations is evident through the narration. Miss Emily is caught struck with the traditions of Colonel Sartoris and his contemporaries. She faced difficulty in adapting her to changes, and "thus she passed from generation to generation - dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse" (Faulkner, 1930). The narrator of the story is of a general voice in the town, using anecdotes to illustrate the story of Miss. Emily’s life as watched by the people living around her. This technique of narration is used to surpass the limitations of time, to easily go through the incidents like, Emily’s death, time around her father’s death, her youth, etc. In the same way, the author uses the foreshadowing style to allude to the ending, where the townspeople find out that Miss Emily had been living with the body of her beloved for several years. Faulkner explained the story about how the house began to smell takes place "a short time after her sweetheart - the one we believed would marry her - had deserted her" (Faulkner, 1930). As she buys the arsenic from the druggist, she does not explain that the thing is not for killing rats. The author does not provide explanation right away, rather provokes the readers to assume later on that it was used to poison Homer Barron, her beloved. Emily had a real hard time facing her lover and her father’s death. In fact, she did not possess the individual confidence and self-esteem, and the self-worth to think that she had the ability to accomplish something, on her own, mainly as her life keeps changing. Throughout her whole life, she has been depending on men, first on her father and later on Homer Barron. However, the few acts of individuality depicted her ability to act to the occasion, to defeat her dependence on other, when the only solution was to act on her own, like buying the poison. Life is often miserable and dreadful, some portion of which is made for and the rest we make ourselves. Emily’s father might have thought that every man she came across was not suitable for her. In fact, the people around her even talked about the death of her father. They commented how “the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized” (Faulkner, 1930). Works Cited William Faulkner. A Rose for Emily. (1930). Web 9 Nov 2011 http://flightline.highline.edu/tkim/Files/Lit100_SS2.pdf Read More