The purpose of this research is to examine the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, as a story of conflict between values of the old South and a woman's desperation for love. The plan of the research will be to set forth the per sonal and career context for the story and its salient points of the story, and then to discuss the manner in which psycho logical factors appear to influence the conflict of the story.
Born in Mississippi in 1897, Faulkner was largely confined to the small town of Oxford until a Yale Law School graduate from the Oxford area guided his reading habits and encouraged his writing (Millgate 54; Blotner 105-6). Thus he "grew up in the provincial milieu of North Mississippi but transformed himself to a citizen of the larger world beyond it" (Blotner 105). Faulkner's work is distinguished by his Yoknapatawpha County stories, produced mainly from the late 1920s to the learly 1940s, which employ repeated use of the same setting (Jefferson, which stands for Oxford) and characters from story to story. Faulkner's environment is one of the post-Reconstruc tion and early-twentieth-century South in transition and in tension with itself, but critics cite themes worked out "not in terms of the South against the North, but in terms of issues which are common to our modern world" (Warren 129).
"A Rose for Emily" is set in Jefferson. Published in 1930, this was his first printed short story; he had been a published writer for four years, with Soldier's Pay the first novel and The Marble Faun the first collection of poetry (Brooks 5). The novels Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury had been published in 1929, and Sanctuary had been written but not yet published.
The tale is simple, straightforward--and lurid--apparently told by a minor civil servant who is explaining what towns people had gossiped about and what he himself witnessed, with regard to Miss Emily Grierson's life and death. Spinster daughter of on...