Hidden Depths, Essay Example

The Women of “The Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily”

A wide variety of factors separates Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” so much so that, at least initially, it may seem that there are no points of comparison between the two.  On one level, Chopin’s story is as confined as its title implies; everything that occurs takes place in that brief time, as the cast of characters is minimal and the setting is simple.  “A Rose for Emily,” conversely, requires an entire town as its cast of characters, and the action takes place over the long lifetime of the lady of the title.  These are striking differences, and added to them is a further difference regarding setting.  Chopin’s story in no way relies on place.  It is understood that Mrs. Mallard, the chief character, lives with her husband in some sort of town, but the location of it is completely unimportant.  She is, in a very real sense, a woman from anywhere.  Faulkner’s Emily, on the other hand, is as much a product of her Southern town as are the people who monitor her life.  A great deal happens in “A Rose for Emily” over the years, and it could be argued that all of it could only occur as it does in that specific, Southern locale.  It is true that the two stories each centers on a female protagonist but, beyond this, it is easy to feel that they have no other similarities.

There are, however, two, and these are as important as the differences in setting and character are in making them distinct from one another.  The first is the tone of the authors.  Both are, with some variation, distanced and dispassionate.  This goes beyond only the third-person narration, particularly as the voice of “A Rose for Emily” is clearly that of someone of the town.  Chopin lets her narrator get descriptive regarding Mrs. Mallard’s state of being: “She was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.”   Similarly, the narrator in Faulkner indulges in reflection and description along the way, although this is strangely omniscient for someone who could not possibly have been at all the scenes described.  There is a precise recounting, for instance, of Miss Emily’s appearance when she defies the town council about her taxes: “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged under water,” and there is no reason to believe the narrator could have witnessed this.  However, these expressions of description and the ambiguity of Faulkner’s narrator aside, both stories are still presented in strictly episodic ways.  If they record the feelings of the main women, or the emotional  reactions of others to them, they do so from a distance.

The second similarity goes to the natures of Mrs. Mallard and Emily Grierson themselves.  As extremely different as this married woman and the strange, Southern spinster are, they share a powerful connection; they are both women of mystery, and of mysteries largely unknown in the worlds around them.  With Mrs. Mallard, in fact, the essence of her mystery is unknown even to herself, in that she had no real idea of how chained she felt until she was told that her husband was dead.  The revelation is strictly personal, as well, because the circumstances of the story make it a great secret that must die with her.  Nonetheless, this does not lessen the meaning and power of the mystery, even as its revealing of itself to Mrs. Mallard overwhelms her: “Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.”  With Emily, the mystery is greatly compounded by the duration of time the story covers, as well as by how the Southern town both respects and sneers at Emily’s advancing state of decay.  What matters is that absolutely no one has any idea of what Miss Emily has done, in regard to the man once thought to be her fiance.  Clearly, Emily, unlike Mrs. Mallard, has engineered her life to preserve what she felt was her due, no matter how grotesque a form this would take.  She knows, even if she is deranged, what it is she most desires, and this is not known to Mrs. Mallard until its existence is right before her.  All of this aside, however, the fact remains that the two stories are linked by an element critical to each of their chief protagonists.  In “The Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily,” two women lives lives built around mysteries that dominate their lives, and those outside their immediate worlds have no idea of them.