William Faulkner

William Faulkner was one of the leading novelists of this century, and he drew upon his own town of Oxford, Mississippi for his stories, his setting, and his themes. The Civil War was the defining moment in history for the South, and the fact that the South had lived by slavery before that was an indictment of the old families of the South and a reason for the people of the new South to atone. The heavy hand of the past can be seen as having a hold on the present in stories such as "That Evening Sun," "Barn Burning," and "A Rose for Emily," and in each case Faulkner infuses the story with a political and social structure related to the slave-owning past of the South and showing the effect of that past on the present. Jean-Paul Sartre noted the way Faulkner treated past and present:

The past here gains a surrealistic quality; its outline is hard, clear, and immutable. The indefinable and elusive present is helpless before it; it is full of holes through which past things, fixed, motionless, and silent, invade it (Tuck xiv).

In many ways, "A Rose for Emily" is unusual for Faulkner. He said he was trying to write a ghost story, which would make it very different from the realism of his novels. Emily is a woman who is separated from her neighbors by a terrible secret, and the mere fact that she is so separated creates a tension between herself and her neighbors. The people of the town view Emily as a person who is not a complete human being. At the same time, her so

ates him just as ruthlessly as her father might have done. There are other guardians of the past in the story, such as Colonel Sartoris and the Board of Aldermen, who accept the Colonel's attitude toward Emily and rescind her taxes. The conflict between past and present is indicated in the change in government in the town: When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction (Abrams 2044). Emily lives in the past, and she maintains the past in her home and never leaves that home. The new Board of Aldermen are forced to come to Emily when they want to try to collect her taxes. Emily has frozen time by simply refusing to acknowledge that time passes. She refuses to admit that her father is dead, for instance, and she also refuses to recognize the death of Colonel Sartoris. Sartoris gave his word to her, and that word should be inviolate through all time. To Emily, the world of the past remains alive and real, while to the people of the present, the past is somewhat unreal and clearly dead. The effect of this story differs from that of many of Faulkner's stories because it is so dependent on shock in the final line. Some critics see the st

Category: Literature - W