Emily as Symbol of the Historical Passage of Time in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, Essay Example

William Faulkner’s first published short story “A Rose For Emily” already demonstrates the author’s intense command of detail, his mastery of the development of a narrative, and the ability to grip the reader through an abrupt denouement. At the same time, one overlooks the deeper symbolic meaning of Faulkner’s story by merely focusing on its narrative structure. As Tatiana Morozova writes, “ ‘A Rose for Emily’ has always been a favorite of critics” since “its ambiguous subject matter and latent symbolism provide critics with ample opportunities for exercising their wits and imagination.” (277) In this regard, the story may be understood as a symbolic representation of the old American south, in which the central character of Emily embodies a way of life that has forever been lost. Faulkner does not make any explicit moral judgments as to the nature of this way of life; rather, he intends to portray a theme of loss and a certain motif of “time out of joint”, with his account of Emily as a character who belongs to another period of time and remains incapable of immersing herself in the present. Thus, Emily’s character can be read as a symbolic representation of a commitment to a particular way of life, despite the archaicness of the latter that inevitably surfaces through the march of time: such a way of life becomes a historical artifact to the present.

Faulkner diligently unfolds the story with an account of the funeral of Emily Grierson. By beginning the narrative with the death of the central figure, Faulkner foreshadows the main symbolic thrust of the piece in terms of the death of a particular tradition and a way of life: “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.” (1) The appearance of the entire town at Grierson’s funeral in terms of the commitment to the “fallen monument” suggests that Emily embodied something beyond an individual. Her death represents for the town the end of a certain era. That the women attended the funeral “to see the inside of her house” should not be read as a misogynistic commentary by Faulkner, as if he were to suggest that women are only concerned with domestic issues; rather, the home’s inside can be understood as symbolic of an artifact. That no one had seen the inside of the house for a decade recalls the symbolism of an ancient tomb that has finally been opened: when entering the house one essentially enters a different historical period. The death of Emily Grierson is a commentary on temporality and the inexorable historical passage of time: particular ways of life show themselves to be contingent as opposed to necessary through their very disappearance into history.

The theme of death central to the first part repeats itself in the symbolic death of the short story’s second part. In this passage, Faulkner concentrates on the relationship of Emily to her father. Faulkner explains the death of Emily’s father as the closure of a period of time, and moreover representative of a certain death of Emily herself: “After her father’s death she went out very little.” (2) That the loss of her father also meant a certain loss of her own existence symbolizes that Emily realized her own essence through her father. The death of her father meant a symbolic death for Emily, because it is precisely the way of life that her father represented for her that has become extinct. The failure to leave her home after her father’s death suggests that there is nothing in the outside world that may fulfill her existence. Emily’s father had created a particular world with his very presence; with his death, this world is no longer. Her refusal to acknowledge the death of her father to the fellow citizens of her town concedes this point: “The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead.” (2) Emily’s resistance to her father’s death symbolizes the resistance to the death of a tradition, a time period, of which Emily herself was a part. To acknowledge his death would be to acknowledge her own death. Thus, although she rejects this death, the fact that she rarely leaves the house afterwards shows her understanding of this significance.

The story’s concluding section describes the entrance of the townspeople into Emily’s house after her funeral. Of particular interest is one room in the house, which Faulkner notes, “no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced.” (5) The entrance into the room delivers the final shock of the story, as a “man himself lay in the bed….what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay.” (5) This third crucial death in the story is presumably the death of Emily’s lover. The fact that he had remained unburied and lay in Emily’s bed once again recapitulates the symbol of an ancient sarcophagus, in which the corpse of an old ruler lies. The room and the body are remnants of a historical past that have not survived to the present. It is a resting place for the burial of a particular way of life, completely separated from the conventions of the current time period. The symbol of Emily as a figure of an archaic past re-enforces itself with her connection to her lover, who becomes a re-iteration of her own symbolic meaning: her love has also remained consigned to another historical period. All that was close to Emily is a tradition that has become a lifeless artifact to the contemporary world.

Emily as symbol, and by extension, those closest to Emily, such as her father and her lover, designate a way of life that has been extinguished. They exist as mere museum pieces, unable to integrate themselves into the contemporary world, and thus living in an isolated state. The power of Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily” can be identified in precisely this usage of the human being as symbol for the inevitable disappearance of life and the contingency of all forms of life within history.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. “A Rose For Emily.”

Morozova, Tatiana. “Between God and Satan: Vision of the Human Predicament in Short Stories by Faulkner and Russian Authors”,  eds. E. Harrington and A.J.

Abadie, Faulkner and the Short Story. Oxford, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. pp. 271-281.