Isolation and Repression in Faulkners A Rose for Emily - Research Paper Example

Isolation and Repression in Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily Some love stories turn macabre, when love is not equally returned. This is the plot of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” The Griersons have sheltered their daughter Emily from her suitors and the rest of the society, which the community perceived as a sign of conceit. Emily does not find happiness, until she meets Homer Barron. Unfortunately, Barron does not want to marry her, and everything goes downhill from there. The setting of the story represents the downsides of isolation and repression, which are pride, vulnerability to deception, lack of autonomy and self-esteem, and alienation of humanity. The setting of the Grierson’s house demonstrates the closed nature of their family, which resulted in overarching pride. The community, based on the first-person plural viewpoint, sees the Griersons as a people of arrogance and pride. Emily’s house is described as being haughty: “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps” (Faulkner 1). The tone and choice of words for the setting deride the Griersons for being like their house, stubborn in their own fading antiquity. Furthermore, the parlor’s dusty and cracked leather-covered furniture represents Emily’s continuity of her father’s tyrannical authority. Emily must not have noticed that despite the tribulations she experienced from her father’s overprotectiveness, she has become more like him, and that she would never care to admit, when she does not want to listen to what other people say, because she is used to getting her way. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren interpret Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” in their essay, “Interpretation: ‘A Rose for Emily’”. They assert that Emily’s pride arises from her “contempt for public opinion”, where she refuses the imposition of external will on her own independent will (55). She perpetuates the patriarchal order of power, although she is a woman, by acting like a man, tough and unrelenting to her detractors, like the cracked leather furniture that will never surrender to modern appliances. Her pride, nevertheless, is screened through social norms. She might think that their house is like her family, imposing and grand, but the community considers her family’s heritage as an “eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner 1). The more Emily sees highly of herself and her family, the less she is respected in the community, the community that values social interaction more than an aristocratic name and upbringing. Another way of exploring the effect of isolation on people is through openness to deception. Inside the parlor of the Grierson house, people might expect grandness, but all they see is the figurative decaying of the aristocratic social class. Faulkner represents the crumbling South and aristocratic families through Emily’s parlor, where “On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father” (1). The stature of the family’s name is eclipsed with a crayon portrait, as if the people realize how they are deceived. The Grierson’s power lies on old social connections, not on their present-day social capital. Despite losing her family’s former wealth, Emily does not remove her cloak of pride, as she relies on old agreements. She does not pay taxes, for instance, because she believes her family has made arrangements with Colonel Sartoris: “Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it” (Faulkner 1). Like the house that appears grand, Colonel Sartoris and Emily belong to the past era, where they think their social connections and agreements are enough to reinforce their social power. Moreover, the community sustains Emily’s self-deception by not questioning her actions. Her house already reeks, but noone wants to directly confront her, and instead, they resort to breaking into her property like criminals: “They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings” (Faulkner 2). They want to undermine Emily’s conceited attitude, but out of either fear or respect for her, they do this surreptitiously, further deluding themselves of the potential cause of the stench. The process of breaking into her property, moreover, stands for physical and psychological intrusion. They are infiltrating Emily’s psychological defense, but they cannot accept the potential truth of what happened to her – that she has completely lost her mind because of isolation, and she has killed the man she loves, but who wants to leave her behind. Emily is not only guilty of self-deception, because the entire community has deceived themselves too. Aside from representing isolation, the large house stands for oppression, a haunting symbol of traditional patriarchal power in the old South. Lois Tyson, in Learning for a Diverse World, asserts that the story presents “Jefferson’s patriarchal culture” in a small community setting (103). Gender oppression happens, when a father completely controls and dominates his daughter, in a community that condones stereotyped female roles and expectations. Faulkner illustrates the framing of the door, which includes the father and the daughter: “Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door” (2). The white clothing indicates her purity and innocence. The silhouette is the shadow of her father’s tyrannical control over her life. The horsewhip signifies the repression of her free will and independence through patriarchal ideology. They are framed by the front door, where the door does not open to anyone, but only to the select few. The door underscores the tiny opening to the emotional turmoil that Emily has endured under her father’s vigilant and obsessed parenting style and her community’s strained gender expectations. Faulkner further describes the closed nature of the house: “…a big, squarish frame house that had once been white” (1). Square suggests a blocked psychology to the outside world, which encapsulates the imposition of one man’s will over another, such as a will of father over her daughter, and of an aristocratic family over their community of working class people. Moreover, the house stands for the old power of the South. In the article, “Use of Literary Elements in Characterization and Theme Presentation: Comparison and Contrast of John Steinbeck's ‘The Chrysanthemums’ with William Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily’”, Yang Hong-mei analyzes the meaning of the setting in the story, where she depicts the house as “a symbol of the South’s past glory” (73-74). This inference is based on the description of the decoration of the house and its street. The house is “decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street” (Faulkner 1). The cupolas, spires, and scrolled balconies are symbols of the power of the South, when aristocratic families ruled communities through their wealth and political influence. Thus, isolation happens when communities and families control women through patriarchal norms and expectations. When someone is suppressed for a long time, they produce lack of self-esteem and autonomy. The changes in the community represent the clash between the modern and the old South. Homer represents the intrusion of silence in the quaint community: “Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group” (Faulkner 3). He stands for the ongoing changes in the community, where it is established to give way to what is flexible and new. He is the new South, proud and confident. On the contrary, many of the people in the community remain loyal to their Southern norms. Dieter Meindl, in the book American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque: 1960-1980, asserts the strengths of the “aristocratic code” (143). When Faulkner depicts the community people as pitying Emily, with the “rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies” (3), they are not willing to let go their traditional inhibiting values and beliefs. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell call this as the mentality of small towns, where “intense scrutiny” of others is the norm (140). As a result, Emily withstands the scorn and judgment of her society, who abhor her first, because of her power and status in life, and later on, because of her defiance of social norms as she dates a commoner. Furthermore, the setting of the pharmacy indicates something that is broken and cannot be fixed, an illness that has no cure. Emily has lost her autonomy a long time ago and cannot recover it, but she shows a demeanor of strong will in front of others. When the druggist insists in determining the reason for her purchase of arsenic, Emily gives him a look that measures his status and finds it wanting of her time and energy: “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up” (Faulkner 3). Emily uses her intimidation strategies to cover up her emptiness inside. The poison, after all, is not literally for her, although it is also for her. Killing someone she loves is her desperate attempt of preserving her autonomy, even if it goes beyond the laws of humanity and morality. Isolation represents the detachment of an individual from the society that leads to alienation of Emily’s humanity. Faulkner uses the elements of the house to explore the meaning and implication of isolation. Being isolated is like closing something, wherein the house, after Emily’s cousins left and Homer returned “… the front door remained closed” (4). Emily has closed the door to her life, where no one comes in physically and psychologically. Furthermore, the changes in Emily’s house indicate the changes in her mental and emotional state. Hong-mei argues that “the descriptions of Miss Emily’s house and how it changes over the years also suggest a great deal about her character, her isolated, repressed state of mind, her desire to stay in the past, and thus, they help to convey the story’s central theme” (74). Emily is tired of being judged all her life, so she stops connecting with others completely. Faulkner illustrates the final chapter of Emily’s life and compares it to a closed floor of the house: “… she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house – like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which” (4). On the one hand, Emily sees herself as an idol, someone to be venerated and admired because of her heritage. On the other hand, like an idol, she looks down on those around her. She has completely extricated herself from the society, including its norms and judgments of her life. Emily might have achieved free will, but she has lost her humanity. Humanity is also lost with the blurring between reality and illusion. The house is decaying, but Emily insists on not changing anything because the past is her anchor to reality. She has gone mad, nevertheless, as she shows inability to deal with reality. For instance, she does not pay taxes because she believes in ancient agreements. She tells the council people repeatedly: “I have no taxes in Jefferson” (Faulkner 1). She refers them to Colonel Sartoris, who has been dead for nearly a decade. Like her house, she has forgotten reality by living in the past. The same applies to her denial of her father’s death. Emily does not accept her father’s death at all: “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead” (Faulkner 2). She neglects the pangs of reality for the glory of her cherished past. The worse of all blurring happens, when Emily cannot accept the reality of her permanent seclusion. Homer is not the marrying type, so she poisons him. In his death, she can be with him forever, a horrific version of marriage. The description of the bed suggests a married life, but a married life that never began, but ironically lasted eternally: “A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal” (Faulkner 5). The bedroom of the couple has been turned into a tomb of love, a love so powerful that it kills Emily’s sense of reality about morality. With reality extinguished, her humanity dies with her. The rose color in the bedroom indicates that Emily’s cloistered life is like a rose for she is a rose with thorns outside, but so delicately weak inside. The bedroom, closed for so many decades, houses the tomb of Homer. Emily uses rose-colored motifs to express her love for Homer: “upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured” (Faulkner 5). The lights and curtains are all rose-colored, where the light represents the revelation of Emily’s mental and emotional weaknesses, while the curtains signifies what she wants to hide. She does not want to reveal that she is vulnerable and weak inside, so outside the community, Emily manifests the spirit of a strong black woman. Others mistake it for her arrogance as Grierson. Inside the tomb of love, however, they realize that Emily is like any other human being who is hungry for companionship, love, humor, conversation, and warmth. The layout of Homer’s things indicates that Emily wants to take care of someone and to be taken care of too. Faulkner includes details about Homer’s shoes: “Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks” (5). Emily must have folded the suit herself and fixed her beloved’s shoes. The impact is orderliness and control over her life. And yet in reality, she has slipped away. Like a rose, her stem is broken and her flower is wilted dry. She has lost touch of rationality and morality. Emily sleeps everyday beside a dead man’s corpse, whom she wanted badly to be her husband, her only friend, and the pillow with her “long strand of iron-gray hair” (Faulkner 5) signifies her hollow spirit. Emily is a rose with thorns, misunderstood and misjudged. The dramatic irony of her funeral, furthermore, stresses that humanity is like a rose too, always trying to cope with reality through thorns, never accepting people for who they are. Judith Fetterley remarks that the community has treated Emily, not as a person, but as a “cultural artifact” (35). As a result, they remember her heritage, but not perceive her as an individual person. In the funeral, they behave as if nothing is wrong with Emily’s life and death: “and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her…” (Faulkner 5). No one wants to be accountable for Emily’s death because her death symbolizes the decay of traditional values and relations. Her death marks their failure as a society. They did not guide her with support and understanding, and instead, they ridiculed and persecuted her with further social isolation. The setting supports the themes of isolation and repression. These themes manifest in the decaying of the house that stands so physically different from the rest of the houses in the community. The Grierson house, furthermore, as it rots, stands for a dying symbol of past glories and the challenges of maintaining patriarchal and aristocratic norms. Emily is at the center of the tornado of clashing individualistic and traditional and patriarchal values. She dies in isolation from the community that has treated her with both loathing and veneration, as if she is a cultural product, but not a human being in need of social connection and love. In the end, the rose for Emily is a rose for the community too, a community that mocks the same past that it has made and continues to perpetuate. The dramatic irony is that they are not aware that the rose is for them too, and so their delimiting norms continue to live on, producing new Emilys along the way. Works Cited Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. “Interpretation: ‘A Rose for Emily’.” Literary Theories in Praxis. Ed. Shirley F. Staton. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania UP, 1987. 53-56. Print. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” 1930. Web. 23 Mar. 2013. < http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html>. Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Massachusetts: Massachusetts UP, 1978. Print. Hong-mei. Yang. “Use of Literary Elements in Characterization and Theme Presentation: Comparison and Contrast of John Steinbeck's ‘The Chrysanthemums’ with William Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily’.” US-China Foreign Language 6.5 (2008): 71-75. Print. Kirszner, Laurie G., and Stephen R. Mandell. Fiction: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Print. Meindl, Dieter. American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque: 1960-1980. Missouri: Missouri UP, 1996. Print. Tyson, Lois. Learning for a Diverse World: Using Critical Theory to Read and Write About Literature. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Read More