Theme in Faulkners: A Rose for Emily - Book Report/Review Example

According to the book report "A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner" findings, right from the very beginning, the dynamics for Miss Emily’s deceased are built into the story. Miss Emily is viewed by the town as the ideal of southern feminine graciousness. The ancestral house in which she lived was everything romanticists would like to believe about the old south. But when the war and defeat came, “Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

” It is in a way a symbolic representation of Miss Emily herself. The house is once again compared to the graying Miss Emily when the town complains of the foul smell. Judge Stevens, the moral custodian of Southern ideals remarks, “Will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?” Minor images clustered around one main metaphor, the decaying mansion of Miss Emily, lends the story intensity and complexity. In the words of Ruth Sullivan, “throughout the story, the reader is aware that these events are taking place during a time of transition: The town is finally getting sidewalks and mailboxes.

More important, values are changing. The older magistrates, for example, looked on Miss Emily paternally and refused to collect taxes from her; the newer ones try, unsuccessfully, to do so. Caught in these changing times, Miss Emily is trapped in her role as the genteel spinster. Without a husband, her life will have no meaning. She tries to give lessons in painting china. but cannot find pupils for this out-of-date hobby and finally discontinues them." Misplaced pride of her aristocratic Southern father had never allowed her a chance to get married.

This constant denial of a normal life left her lonely and sexually repressed. After her father's death and almost a lifetime of repression, she meets Homer, a Yankee day-laborer. Despite the gaping differences in their background, Miss Emily actively pursues him as her love interest. When threatened by his departure, she is driven to insanity and murder by family and social dynamics. According to James B. Carothers, "A Rose for Emily is among other things, an expression of moral outrage, an indictment of those conventions and customs which drive Miss Emily to murder Homer Barron".

The fractured sense of time which traps Miss Emily is once again mentioned in the final part of the story. Here, the reader encounters two different views of time - one in which "the past is a diminishing road" suggesting the linear movement of time and the other is "a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches" indicating that the traditional and romanticized past is always alive in the memory. Both these views are divided "now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade