William Faulkners Barn Burning and A Rose for Emily: The Individual vs. the Community - Essay Example

William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and “A Rose for Emily The Individual vs. the Community William Faulkner (1897-1962) is one of America’s most highlighted and most unlikely authors. Eventually producing 26 books and a difficult to count number of short stories, Faulkner’s stories were full of such artistry and character that he has become recognized as a giant in world literature. “Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing” (Padgett, 2005). His creation of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, along with all the people in it, through stories such as “Barn Burning” and “A Rose for Emily” painted a precise picture of what life was like in the turn of the century American south. Rather than portraying his characters in keeping with the generally accepted and widely held view of the stereotypical farmer, for instance, Faulkner presented his characters, good and bad, with a strong degree of sensitivity and understanding (Cowley, 1977). By covering several aspects of living in Yoknapatawpha, telling stories from various different viewpoints within the town, Faulkner has an amazing repertoire of characters who drift in and out of focus and who can trace their lineage back to his first tale. A common theme among many of these characters, including ten-year-old Sartoris of “Barn Burning” and the already-deceased-of-old-age Emily Grierson of “A Rose for Emily”, is the struggle of the individual against the community. From the child struggling to discover his own individuality to the adult struggling to maintain it, Miss Emily Grierson is typically viewed as inflexible and unchanging as possible. According to C.W.M. Johnson (1948), the problem with Miss Emily is simply “her obstinate refusal to submit to, or even to concede, the inevitability of change.” Even the inanimate objects associated with Miss Emily are seen to be unchanging with the passing of years. The house is a “big, squarish frame house that had once been white” that lifts “its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores” (433). Miss Emily herself is often described in terms of unchanging marble as she struggles to maintain her sense of individuality. However, she is also seen, during one part of her life, as almost too wild in pursuing her own wishes and dreams. Following her father’s death, Miss Emily’s next appearance in public is quite different: “her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows – sort of tragic and serene” (438). At the same time, she is seen defying the old order of her class in her willing appearances on Sundays in the company of Homer Barron, “a Northerner, a day laborer” (438) so far beneath her station in life. Whether she is upholding the ideals of a by-gone age as expected of her or attempting to discover a new way of living, as she attempts in her courtship of Homer Barron, Emily continues to cling to her individual spirit as it exists in opposition to the crowded masses. Faulkner symbolizes this struggle between the individual and the community through the character of Homer Barron. To begin with, he is a Yankee, meaning he will never be fully accepted into the mainstream of society no matter what he does. Miss Emily’s behavior in dating this man suggests her eagerness to step outside of the constraints she’d lived under while her father was alive. Homer himself is quick with a laugh and makes friends with everyone in town, but does not conform to social expectations in any way. “Homer himself had remarked – he liked men, and it was know that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club” (440). Despite his irrepressible individuality, Miss Emily was undeniably making plans to marry him, having gone through the steps of ordering a man’s toiletry kit for him. In making herself over to be attractive to this gregarious man, Miss Emily is operating on the principles of individualism, in which it is held that “every person is an end in himself and that no person should be sacrificed for the sake of another” (Stata, 2002). She has abandoned the old ideals of her community in order to pursue her own interests. The strictures of the community as they tended to weigh on Miss Emily are symbolized through the figure and ideals of her father, upheld by the rigors of the watching community and reinforced by the appearance of her cousins, finally locking Emily into the rigid figure she appears to the townspeople in the end. “None of the young men were quite good enough to Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau; 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” (437). This created a situation in which Miss Emily “got to be thirty and was still single” (437), forced to live in her maidenhood forever, rigidly locked within the world of the Old South. Whether in her more recent incarnation as a representative of unbending change or in her long-ago incarnation as a woman reborn and independent following her father’s death, Miss Emily is continuously set up as someone removed and apart from the ambiguous ‘we’ who narrate the story. The group voice changes somewhat throughout the story, indicating a presently living and changing group of people continuously watching the activities of Emily Grierson throughout her life. Their scrutiny is revealed as they pass judgment on her every public action: “at first we were glad” (438) and “the next day we all said, ‘She will kill herself’; and we said it would be the best thing” (440). The intimate knowledge and constant interference of the community into Emily’s most private concerns instantly establish the community as agent of conformity, yet one that has moved beyond that which destroyed Miss Emily’s dreams of escape. It must not be forgotten that it was the town who finally sent for the cousins, fearing Miss Emily was ‘ruining’ herself by running around with a Yankee. The arrival of Miss Emily’s cousins in town unsurprisingly precipitates a withdrawal from Homer Barron in response. The narrative voice comments, “So we were not surprised when Homer Barron … was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins” (440-41) as if the town had not been involved in the oversight. Not permitted to escape the constraints of her father as a girl and not permitted to escape the constraints of her community as an ‘independent’ woman, Miss Emily resigns herself to the unbending rules of the town and the Old South. The public, as a communal group, is permitted to grow and change, presumably because they do so in an expected and communal direction. “We have admitted the change, accepted it, merged into it, become a part of the they” (Nebeker, 1970: 8). Having met with such intense opposition to allowing her to change, though, Miss Emily adopts the attitude expected of her, becoming the symbol of the unbending and unchanging past. “With the passage of years, only Emily, symbolic of the indomitable but dying Old South in all its decadence, pride, refusal to admit the changing order, remains distinguishable, definable” (Nebeker, 1970: 8). In her isolation, Miss Emily retains her individuality, but not without first ensuring that the symbol of her independence, Homer himself, remained truly symbolic of her life path. When the men of the town broke through the door of the upstairs bedroom following Miss Emily’s death, they describe a grisly scene. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, … what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust” (443). Like Miss Emily’s individualism and attempt to break out of the bonds of her past, Homer Barron is trapped within the confining and spiritually deadening aspects of Southern expectations. The narrator in “Barn Burning”, young Sartoris, has a similar issue of independence vs. community as he pieces together the actions of his father and begins to differentiate himself from what he has always known. The story opens with Sartoris already singled out in front of a crowd of the community, before he’s even provided a name, and asked to testify against his father. In his private thoughts, he identifies himself as an extension of his father and assumes he will have to do whatever it is that his father expects of him. This is shown in the first paragraph of the story as the boy looks over the crowd in the courtroom: “He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!)” (1621). Being placed on the stand and knowing he’s expected by the others to tell the truth, Sartoris knows his father expects him to lie and knows that he will do so because he considers himself part of the father. This sense that he is an inextricable part of this community of his family is reinforced in the constant moves that are undertaken by the family and the way in which the greater community also links him in with a particular class and associated expectations. The house that his father Abner moves his sad little family to is emblematic of this class and is described as “a paintless two-room house identical almost with the dozen others it had stopped before even in the boy’s ten years” (1624). As the sisters look at the structure, they remark how it is probably not fit for hogs to live in, but it is the only shelter they have. It is typical of what Sartoris has always known throughout his entire life and is symbolic of a particular element of the community. “Wretched men, including veterans, looked for work, hawked apples on sidewalks, dined in soup kitchens, passed the time in shantytowns dubbed ‘Hoovervilles,’ and some moved between them in railroad boxcars. It was a desperate time for families, starvation stalked the land, and a great drought ruined numerous farms, forcing mass migration” (Avery, 2007). There was often very little hope of escape from this sort of life and many people, including Abner, raged against the injustice of their situation, thus making it worse than it needed to be. The increasing interest his father has in indoctrinating Sartoris into the ‘family business’ brings Sartoris into a more intimate understanding of the processes that have served to keep the family down. It is primarily through this association that Sartoris begins to differentiate himself from the group. One of the first eye-opening elements Sartoris experiences is his keen observation of the differences between his home and family and the home and family of Major de Spain. The de Spain house is described in segments as Sartoris and his father approach through “a grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs … They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars” (1624). As he compares his family, particularly his father, with the family of de Spain, particularly with the character of Major de Spain himself, Sarty begins to understand the various ways in which society has held his father down and the rage his father feels as a result, but also to understand how his father’s actions have served to reinforce social beliefs regarding his social class. While he knows he is expected to lie on the stand at the opening of the story, Sarty is never actually forced to reach the point of lying in this scene. As he watches his father deliberately destroy the wealthy man’s rug, first by dragging his dirty boots across it and then giving it to Sarty’s incompetent older sisters to clean, Sarty begins to distance himself from the family. Finally understanding that his father intends to burn down de Spain’s barn in revenge for the justified, and tempered, penalty imposed by de Spain over the carpet, Sarty’s individuality bursts through as he decides to warn de Spain and run away from his family. “Sarty’s final, climactic decision to break away from his father’s rule is seen as proof of his own ultimate moral correctness against the demonic qualities of Ab (Zender cited in Pinion, 2003). Sarty has become a full individual, disassociating himself from the community of his family and actively seeking a society more in keeping with his own inner nature. Through both Miss Emily and Sartoris Snopes, William Faulkner presents us with examples of individuals struggling to emerge from the general press of their society. In Sartoris, he presents the struggle of the child attempting to escape the pressures and expectations of the family. Because of his youth and his lack of strong attachments, he is able to break away to discover a new life for himself. Miss Emily, however, spends her entire life under the watchful eye of her community, who take up much the same attitudes of her father where she’s concerned, and dies incapable of ever escaping the bounds placed upon her. Works Cited Avery, Steve “Social Issues The Great Depression 1929-1942” Online Highways Florence, OR (April 13, 2007). November 5, 2008 Cowley, Malcolm. “Introduction.” The Portable Faulkner. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” The Portable Faulkner. New York: Penguin Books, 1977, pp. 433-44. Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4td Ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989, pp. 1621-1633. Johnson, C.W.M. “Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’.” Explicator. Vol. 6, I. 45, May 1948. Nebeker, Helen E. “Emily’s Rose of Love: Thematic Implications of Point of View in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’.” The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. Vol. 24, N. 1, (March 1970): 3-13. Padgett, John B. “William Faulkner.” University of Mississippi English Department. (2005). November 5, 2008 Pinion, Randy. “Literary Analysis: Faulkner’s ‘Barn Burning’.” Helium. (2003). November 5, 2008 Stata, Raymie. “What is Individualism?” Introductory speech delivered at MIT Radicals for Capitalism. (January 1992). November 5, 2008 Read More