Faulkner & A Rose for Miss Emily

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 personal and career context for the story and its salient points of the story, and then to discuss the manner in which psychological 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-Reconstruction 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

ect, that she protects private emotions and thoughts from being exposed and protects herself from having to develop meaningful coping strategies in a social environment that, as it turns out, she is ill-equipped to enter. In this regard, Brooks and Warren say her "firmness of will and this iron pride have not kept her from being thwarted and hurt" (228), first because her iron-willed father scared away all her young suitors and second, as the reader eventually discovers, because of Homer's abandonment of her. Deprived of access to emotional fulfillment, she enacts that fulfillment in a depraved way. Role-playing very much according to social expectations and conventions even while seeming to flout such conventions--and meanwhile enacting an authentic (i.e., not role-playing) dissociation from what could be called the moral value civil society attaches to life and death--confirms her determination to live life on her own terms. Brooks and Warren cite the "magnificence of her independence" (229), and her manner of maintaining it in public speaks to the psychology of an aristocrat surrounded by ruined finery. But her manner of enacting it in private conceals, until her death, an emotional truth marked by nothing like social supe