A Rose For Emily

a story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, with a view toward clarifying a single, important issue of plot: what really went on in the upstairs room. The plan of the research will be to set forth the salient points of the story, and then to discuss the opinions of various scholars regarding the plot at issue.

"A Rose for Emily" was Faulkner's first published short

story, appearing in 1930, four years after his first novel,

Soldier's Pay (Brooks, First Encounters 5). The tale is simple

and straightforward, apparently told through the eyes of a minor

civil servant in Jefferson, Mississippi who is explaining what

people in town had gossiped about and what he himself witnessed,

with regard to Miss Emily Grierson's life and death. Spinster

member of one of the first families of the town, Miss Emily for a brief time appeared to have been on the brink of marrying a

Yankee fellow. Then, unaccountably he disappeared, leaving her

alone. About the same time, a mysterious odor emanated from her

house for a few weeks, but disappeared. Over the years, Miss Emily gradually secluded herself from society. Upon her death, the townsfolk discovered in her upstairs bedroom the decomposed body of her erstwhile putative fiancTe and evidence that she had been the bed partner of the body for many years.

Much of the action of "A Rose for Emily" concerns specula-tion about Miss Emily's activity behind the upstairs window. Mi

. . .
204). Elsewhere, he notes that she "is the true aristocrat: let others strive to keep up with the Joneses . . . she is the 'Jones' with whom others will do well to keep up" (Brooks, First Encounters 13). To the degree that Miss Emily may have been driven to keep up appearances, murdering her lover was preferable to being perceived as having been deserted. In this view, she was "romantically obsessed" (Brooks, Yoknapatawpha 205), and the ultimate expression of equating the accidentals of romantic love with reality would have to be pathological. For Brooks, there is little ambiguity in "A Rose for Emily." He says that Miss Emily's actions, are an "extreme instance of such [courtly] love, one in which the love madness has moved across the line into actual insanity. Miss Emily Grierson poisons the lover who was about to desert her and keeps his body in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the house in which she lives alone" (Brooks, Yoknapatawpha 205). The character of Miss Emily's love obsession can be related to the concept of courtly love, indeed the concept of courtly society that permeated the South. The courtly ideal must be seen as a psychological benchmark for intercourse at all levels. It may be accidental, of course, that Homer
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Approximate Word count = 2793
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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