Narrative Subjection of Emily Grierson from A Rose for Emily - Book Report/Review Example

Narrative ion of Emily Grierson William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" is a fascinating example of how society seems to possess a natural predisposition toward the subjectification of individuals. What makes Faulkner's story so interesting is that it also manages to do this at the same time it is providing a lesson on how literature can accomplish the same thing without necessarily being noticed that it is doing so. One of the most common topics of debate over this story deals Emily Grierson's apparent refusal or inability to change with the passing times; the core of this dilemma, however, is that the prevailing view of Emily's supposed lack of adaptability is based entirely on what we know about Emily as a result of a subjective third person perspective that eventually is revealed to represent himself as an unquestioned universalized "we" best symbolizing the viewpoint of the entire town. The opening salvo in this unreliable narration instantaneously places the narrator as the mouthpiece for the common thought: "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral." The size of the town is left unexplained, but the central idea is already in place that Emily Grierson was a figure of renown and was in possession of either fame or infamy. Carefully, the narrator goes on to build up Emily's character with a bit more depth and precision, while also subtly carrying out his intention to devalue her as a person and construct her as a subject. This he does by applying descriptive words that bypass her humanity and lay the groundwork for turning Emily into a thing. Emily, the narrator says, was a "tradition, a duty and a care." Describing someone in these ways can be ambiguous, but the full meaning of these terms is indicated by the last word. Rare is the person described as "a care" who is described that way due to loving flattery. Several of the words the narrator prefers when describing Emily designate an estimation toward her that is at the least of two minds, and most clearly presume a viewpoint that attempts to alter reality, or at least authenticity, the better by which the narrator can ingrain the allegedly collective and universal perspective of the town toward its most famous resident (Staton 54) . Regardless of what the unvarnished reality of Emily Grierson had been during her life, the reader's approval or disapproval of her is entirely dependent on the subjective perspective of one person claiming universal acknowledgement. Everything that is known about Emily has been sifted through the narrator's opinions and distortions. Indeed, narrator goes further by consistently presenting his personal view as a communal view, serving to construct a definitive view of Emily despite providing precious little detail about her through personal recollection. Miss Emily's tale has as its setting the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi and it takes place during that time of America's history in which every action in the southeastern region was in either a small or large way informed by the Civil War. This choice for a time and place is thematically important as it sets an undertone for a state of mind that is given full expression in the specifics and details of the story. The story is about the refusal to change with the times, as well as the placement of value on that stubbornness by those from the outside. A famous saying has it that the winners of war write history. The teller of Emily Grierson's inability to adapt to changing times is a symbolic figurehead for all those writers of history books who created the universal view of southern gentility among people who owned other human beings. Faulkner uses an almost impossibly subtle and specific detail to further this thematic concern when he has the narrator observe that it wasn't really that long before that "no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron", demonstrating that progress rolls on and times change and so do most people. Most people change, but not all. The narrator also describes how his time advanced into a more industrial city with the appearances of such signs of progress as garages, cotton gins, wagons and gasoline pumps. Clearly, then, Miss Emily is intended by the narrator to be a symbol for the south that existed prior to the Civil War and this idea is complimented by small touches that serve to reinforce this stereotype. Emily resides in her family's old house along with her Negro servant Tobe. Emily has been a resident of Jefferson and its most famous townsperson for as long as anyone can remember. Of course, that antebellum idea of the south is also charged with the last remaining vestiges of ancestral entitlement in America. The concept of southern aristocracy is one of privilege and the stubborn clinging to unfounded ideas of moral superiority (O'Conner 48). Miss Emily is the prototypical ideal of that stubborn refusal to willingly give up the world into which she was born and raised. An example of this is her continued refusal to pay her taxes. Miss Emily tells people she doesn't have to pay taxes, but her way of explanation is woefully inadequate and further compounds the narrator's placement of her outside the realm of the community. Hr reasoning when asked why she thinks she doesn't have pay taxes begins and ends with the emptiness of merely stating that Colonel Sartoris had explained it to her (Fetterley 40). The full effect of the thematic chain that links the larger idea of the Civil War milieu with Emily's story is one of the passage of idealizations of outdated and outmoded societal concepts. Miss Emily had been considered a pillar of the community at one point in time, but times and circumstance change. Whereas in the past the Griersons must surely have been viewed with admiration and envy, by the time of Emily's passing all but the latter has eroded. Now, the townsfolk are of the collective view-if one accepts that that narrator speaks universally-that it was only the Griersons themselves who had an inflated opinion of their family. The Griersons were the very symbolic representation of the town. The narrator of the assembles Emily as a symbolic idea that is formulated not as a result of an actual close acquaintanceship and knowledge of her, but to fulfill a view that he and perhaps many others in the town already had constructed. The purpose of his story is to devalue Emily as a specific human being and to attach to her state a larger idea of ideology: "Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less." Only at the point that Emily becomes as poor as the masses in Jefferson does she gain the ability to be described as human. It may be said that what the truth lies at the heart of what Emily Grierson was or was not, she arrived at that truth in part because of the denial to extend to her a semblance of normalcy by the very people now represented by the narrator; participation in the progress of the town was disallowed for Emily as a result of her status as a symbol. When the readers wonder about the motivations behind Emily's actions, their attention should be directed towards Miss Grierson's upbringing. The Griersons were proud and cherished their conservative values, they thought very highly of themselves and they never lowered themselves to the level of ordinary townspeople. Emily's father was a strict, dominating man, considered to claim that "none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily", so he apparently discouraged them in rather effective ways from courting her. When he died Emily was over thirty years old and had very little, aside from the Grierson's family home, in her possession. Therefore, the townspeople were not really surprised by her fierce defiance of her father's death: "We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will." As the story of Emily proceeds, the perceptive reader will gradually come to realize the full import of the fact that he arrives at an understanding of Emily only through the narrow lens of the narrator. The quotations attributed to Emily, it must always be remembered, are the literary equivalent of hearsay. For that reason, the reader must be constantly aware that when Emily seems to confuse the past with the present, as well as remain resistant to recognizing the changes taking place, it is not actually Emily's words that provide this glimpse into her personality, but the narrator's appropriation of these and her language (Happel 68). The narrator admits that the townsfolk of Jefferson saw Emily in terms of a figure forever frozen in an artificial tableau. Emily's seeming inability to change, therefore, may actually have been a case of not so much the inability to change as the impossibility of being allowed to change (Inge 27). Long before the narrator had put it down in words, the people of her town had committed the societal interpellation of Emily. Emily Grierson's family is considered upper crust, and the fact that a special tax dispensation is created for her only serves to increase how the other town members come to view her as a subject rather than an individual; that dispensation also serves to inculcate in Emily a need to reproduce and reinforce that view for her own reasons. At every point, the distinction between Emily and "them" grows starker and she responds by embracing the perspective that she is not just different from the rest, but above them, despite being poor and living in a house that is permeated by an overwhelming stench. Emily refuses to change because the societal assumption is that she has no need; she has special privileges. In concert with that, of course, since she does have special privileges, why should she want to change According to the narrator, Emily could not accept any changes in her life and disregarded them with pride and confidence. Emily's alleged rejection of the regular rules and laws that applied to them can be seen as symbolic of the rejection of moral laws and rules that many of the southern aristocracy went to the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietem to die for. Emily Grierson's legendary stubbornness is more complex than it might seem on an initial reason. In fact, William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" belongs to that genre of literature in which the facts of the case that support opinionated supposition can never be fully known for sure. Everything that is thought to be true about Emily Grierson is really just one man's subjective opinion, but that opinion is reinforced throughout by his attempts to impose a collective and universal authenticity of his individual perspective. Works Cited Brooks, Cleanth and Warren, Robert Penn. "An Interpretation of A Rose for Emily." Inge, M. Thomas, ed. A Rose for Emily. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970. Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978. Happel, Nikoleus. "William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily." Inge, M. Thomas, ed. A Rose for Emily. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970. O'Connor, William V. "History in A Rose for Emily'". Inge, M. Thomas, ed. A Rose for Emily. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1970. Staton, Shirley F., ed. Literary Theories in Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Staton: LITERARY THEORIES IN PRAXIS Edited by Shirley F. Staton The University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia In order to answer this question, we shall have to examine rather carefully some of the items earlier in the story. In the first place, why does Miss Emily commit her monstrous act Is she supplied with a proper motivation -- a matter which we concluded was handled rather weakly in "The Fall of the House of Usher." Faulkner has been rather careful to prepare for his dnouement. Miss Emily, it becomes obvious fairly early in the story, is one of those persons for whom the distinction between reality and illusion has blurred out. For example, she refuses to admit that she owes any taxes. When the mayor protests, she does not recognize him as mayor. Instead, she refers the committee to Colonel Sartoris, who, as the reader is told, has been dead for nearly ten years. For Miss Emily, apparently, Colonel Sartoris is still alive. Most specific preparation of all, when her father dies, she denies to the townspeople for three days that he is dead: "Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly." Miss Emily is obviously a pathological case. The narrator indicates plainly enough that people felt that she was crazy. All of this explanation prepares us for what Miss Emily does in order to hold her lover -- the dead lover is in one sense still alive for her -- the realms of reality and appearance merge. But having said this, we have got no nearer to justifying the story: for, if Faulkner is merely interested in relating a case history of abnormal psychology, the story lacks meaning and justification as a story. His interest in this case is as "clinical" as is the interest of Poe in Roderick Usher. If the story is to be justified, there must be what may be called a moral significance, a meaning in moral terms -- not merely psychological terms. Incidentally, it is very easy to misread the story as merely a horrible case history, presented in order to titillate the reader. Faulkner has been frequently judged to be doing nothing more than this in his work. The lapse of the distinction between illusion and reality, between life and death, is important, therefore, as helping supply the motivation for the story, but a definition of this in itself is not a complete definition of the author's intention. We shall have to go behind it if we are to understand what Faulkner is about. Suppose we approach the motivation again in these terms: what is Miss Emily like What are the mainsprings of her character What causes the distinction between illusion and reality to blur out for her She is obviously a woman of tremendous firmness of will. In the matter of the taxes, crazed though she is, she is never at a loss. She is utterly composed. She dominates the rather frightened committee of officers who see her. In the matter of her purchase of the poison, she completely overawes the clerk. She makes no pretenses. She refuses to tell him what she wants the poison for. And yet this firmness of will and this iron pride have not kept her from being thwarted and hurt. Her father has run off the young men who came to call upon her, and for the man who tells the Fetterley THE RESISTING READER A Feminist Approach to American Fiction Judith Fetterley INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington1978 exposes. The form of Faulkner's title establishes a camaraderie between author and protagonist and signals that a distinction must be made between the story Faulkner is telling and the story the narrator is telling. This distinction is of major importance because it suggests, of course, that the narrator, looking through a patriarchal lens, does not see Emily at all but rather a figment of his own imagination created in conjunction with the cumulative imagination of the town. Like Ellison's invisible man, nobody sees Emily. And because nobody sees her, she can literally get away with murder. Emily is characterized by her ability to understand and utilize the power that accrues to her from the fact that men do not see her but rather their concept of her: "'I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. . . . Tobe! . . . Show these gentlemen out.'" Relying on the conventional assumptions about ladies who are expected to be neither reasonable nor in touch with reality, Emily presents an impregnable front that vanquishes the men "horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before." In spite of their "modern" ideas, this new generation, when faced with Miss Emily are as much bound by the code of gentlemanly behavior as their fathers were ("They rose when she entered"). This code gives Emily a power that renders the gentlemen unable to function in a situation in which a lady neither sits down herself nor asks them to. They are brought to a "stumbling halt" and can do nothing when confronted with her refusal to engage in rational discourse. Their only recourse in the face of such eccentricity is to engage in behavior unbecoming to gentlemen, and Emily can count on their continuing to see themselves as gentlemen and her as a lady and on their returning a verdict of helpless noninterference. Inge: But this, still, hardly gives the meaning of the story. For in all that has been said thus far, we are still merely accounting for a psychological aberration--we are still merely dealing with a case history in abnormal psychology. In order to make a case for the story as "meaningful," we shall have to tie Miss Emily's thoughts and actions back into the normal life of the community, and establish some sort of relationship between them. And just here one pervasive element in the narration suggests a clue. The story is told by one of the townspeople. And in it, as a constant factor, is the reference to what the community thought of Miss Emily. Continually through the story it is what "we" said, and then what "we" did, and what seemed true to "us," and so on. The narrator puts the matter even more sharply still. He says, in the course of the story, that to the community Miss Emily seemed "dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse." Each of the adjectives is important and meaningful. In a sense, Miss Emily because of her very fact of isolation and perversity belongs to the whole community. She is even something treasured by it. Ironically, because of Emily's perversion of an aristocratic independence of mores and because of her contempt for "what people say," her life is public, even communal. And various phrases used by the narrator underline this view of her position. For example, her face looks "as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face /353/ ought to look," like the face of a person who lives in the kind of isolation imposed on a lighthouse-keeper, who looks out into the blackness and whose light serves a public function. Or, again, after her father's death, she becomes very ill, and when she appears after the illness, she has "a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene." Whatever we make of these descriptions, certainly the author is trying to suggest a kind of calm and dignity which is supermundane, unearthly, or "over-earthly," such as an angel might possess. Miss Emily, then, is a combination of idol and scapegoat for the community. On the one hand, the community feels admiration for Miss Emily --she represents something in the past of the community which the community is proud of. They feel a sort of awe of her, as is illustrated by the behavior of the mayor and the committee in her presence. On the other hand, her queerness, the fact that she cannot compete with them in their ordinary life, the fact that she is hopelessly out of touch with the modern world--all of these things make them feel superior to her, and also to that past which she represents. It is, then, Miss Emily's complete detachment which gives her actions their special meaning for the community. Miss Emily, since she is the conscious aristocrat, since she is consciously "better" than other people, since she is above and outside their canons of behavior, can, at the same time, be worse than other people; and she is worse, horribly so. She is worse than other people, but at the same time, A Rose for Emily Edited by M. Thomas Inge Virginia Commonwealth University The Merrill Literary Casebook Series Edward P. J. Corbett, Editor Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company A Bell & Howell Company Columubs, Ohio Nikolaus Happel William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" * The perspective of presentation in "A Rose for Emily" is not centralized. Although the event is quite objectively recorded by the narrator, he often relinquishes the objective point of view and becomes a participant in the story's action. He doesn't emerge as an "I" in the foreground, but he places himself as the "we" within the circle of the townspeople, and becomes a participatory witness and observer. By means of the directness of the experience, the presentation receives a heightened credibility and intensity. But just who is included in the circle of the "we," however, is not clearly delineated. Here too uncertainty dominates, as it does in several other aspects of the story. From the first sentence the collective "we" is disclosed by the possessive form of "our town," but then the narrative tone becomes objective until the second chapter; at the end of which it is again replaced by the subjective "we." At first the narrator's circle of participants seems to be designated by the "we," for it appears next to "people," "the ladies," and "older people" (but later, with the benefit of hindsight, this idea seems no longer tenable). Then the feelings and observations of the "we" group so completely blend with those of the other people that the impression of a larger collective emerges, a collective group which includes most of the townspeople. At another time the whole of the town, originally termed as "our," is clearly, referred to as "we." The subjectively weak "our town," which still invests the narrator with a certain aloofness from the group, gives way to the "our" which allows the narrator to merge entirely with the collective: "The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom." The participation in the event grows ever more intensive, and the group of participants William Van O'Connor History in "A Rose for Emily" That [ Malcolm] Cowley's reading of the Faulkner canon seems to have the /183/ author's benediction might seem implied by the map of Yoknapatawpha and "biographical" accounts of members of the Compson family which Faulkner furnished for the Portable. And more recently, in Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner has done a straight documentary account (although in the old master's voice) of the history of the jail, the courthouse and Jefferson as backdrop or flow of history against or in which to see poor Temple Drake. (That she should find the flow a foreign substance and drown in it does not seem to be Faulkner's intention!) Could it be that Cowley's interpretation not merely pleased Faulkner but influenced him Was he consciously trying to write the history which Cowley extracts There is, of course, a major sense in which Faulkner is a kind of Mississippi Balzac: characters reappear, most frequently the settings are Jefferson and its environs, there is a sense of history, from the Chickasaws to the present, and the "problems" of the South are important parts of the subject matter. But many of the short stories and some of the novels (for instance, Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, and the love story part of The Wild Palms) have nothing to do with Yoknapatawpha, or thematically have little or nothing to do with being set there (for instance, As I Lay Dying, and the "Old Man," part of The Wild Palms). And the period from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War certainly is not greatly developed by Faulkner, as one might expect it to be if he were consciously doing a history. Read More