Name: A Rose for Emily
Rating: 4.3 (21 reviews)
Author: William Faulkner

What’s in it for me? A gruesome twist to a strange story.

If you’ve ever wanted to read Faulkner, this Blink to A Rose for Emily is a good place to start. Set in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the Southern Gothic tale is complex and thought-provoking.

It’s told in a nonlinear fashion, starting with Emily’s funeral and mining past moments for details that ultimately add up to the shocking final scene. You’ll get a full summary of each section of the story, followed by an analysis of the imagery and other literary devices used by Faulkner to build suspense.

In the end, you’ll have a working knowledge of the story and be able to form your own thoughts and theories about what’s happening between the lines. Spoiler alert: if you’d like to read a short summary right away, you can also skip to the very last section.

Miss Emily’s funeral

Miss Emily Grierson was a town fixture. When she passes away, people come to her funeral out of both respect and curiosity. After all, she didn’t let anyone besides her manservant inside her house for decades.

That house was once a showplace, its street once a prime location. But over the years, the aristocracy of Jefferson slowly decayed. Now only the traces of grandeur remain.

In the old days, after Emily’s father died, the town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, made an exception for her. He said she’d never have to pay taxes on the house she’d inherited, and created some excuse about her father having loaned money to the town. Emily willingly accepted the fabrication.

But time passed, and different people came into positions of power. The new mayor didn’t see the need to honor the agreement, and sent Miss Emily a notice to pay her taxes.

When she refused, a group of aldermen paid her a visit. Miss Emily’s manservant let them into the parlor. The house was dank and dusty, and Emily appeared both overweight and wasted away – more of a corpse than a living person.

She didn’t invite anyone to sit. Instead, she stood in the parlor’s entryway and listened to the men explain their purpose. She then informed them that she didn’t have any taxes in Jefferson. Against all their protests, she showed them to the door and told them to see Colonel Sartoris. Of course, Colonel Sartoris was long dead.

ANALYSIS

William Faulkner was never bound to chronology in his writing. He used the freedom of telling a story out of order to slowly reveal the characters and the surprising truth behind the mystery of Miss Emily and her fetid house.

In this first section, there’s a lot of death imagery. Obviously, there’s the funeral itself – but when we go back to the day when the aldermen call on Emily, she’s described as bulky but with a small skeleton. Faulkner says, “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water.”

We also see glimpses of an important trait of Emily’s – difficulty adjusting to change. It’s almost as though time is fixed to those years when Colonel Sartoris was mayor. She never moved past this period; in her mind, she only answers to the colonel and doesn’t have any taxes.

A popular interpretation of Miss Emily is that she’s a metaphor for the Old South. With her inability to adapt to modern times, she simply decays and deteriorates like the structures around her. Her house is described as once having been a place of prominence – but then “garages and cotton gins” made their way in. While there’s no real reason the rise of the cotton gin should do away with a street full of beautiful houses, the description takes on a different meaning when read as a metaphor. The cotton gin represents industrialization and modernity, while Miss Emily and her house represent ideals that no longer have a place in the new world.

In the story, modern people don’t understand Emily, but they have a lingering respect for her. They’re willing to let her finish out her life in her own way. At the same time, they’re curious about what kind of life that actually is – and what’s behind her closed doors.

We know from a small, purposefully dropped detail that Emily once gave porcelain-painting lessons in her home – which indicates that she used to be a social person. This detail will come back later in the story; it’s one of Faulkner’s ways of helping us keep track of time.

At this point, we’ve addressed four different eras of Emily’s life. Starting from the most recent, they are: Emily’s funeral, the last time anyone tried to collect taxes from her, the period of teaching porcelain-painting, and the day Colonel Sartoris remitted her taxes.

The rest of the story is told with these events as landmarks to help us know where – and when – we are in the story.

Crazy runs in the family

A few years after her father died and not too long after her sweetheart left, Emily’s home began to emit a distinctly unpleasant odor.

People blamed it on the fact that her manservant was the only one tidying up – what did a man know about keeping house? Others suggested that the manservant had killed a rat or snake, and it was decomposing and giving off a bad smell. Unfortunate, they said, but temporary.

What’s the poison for?

Miss Emily was sick for a while after losing her father – but then she got a haircut and was seen about town, looking younger than ever. Folks now pitied her, but she held her head high as though she were still one of the great Griersons of Jefferson.

It came to pass that a group of contractors was assigned to do the sidewalks in town. Their foreman was a man named Homer Barron. He was lively and boisterous, and he made people laugh. Pretty soon, he knew everyone in town.

When Homer went away

After the rat poison incident, folks began to wonder whether Miss Emily was planning to kill herself. Then they got to talking about how maybe she could still persuade Homer Barron to marry her. But Homer himself had claimed he wasn’t “a marrying man.”

As folks saw Emily getting more and more friendly with Homer, some began to worry about her. They called up the minister, and he went to speak to her. No one knows what happened, but he never went back. As a last resort, they called up her cousins – the daughters of her crazy aunt – who came to Jefferson and stayed with Emily.

That strand of hair

The cousins returned to conduct Emily’s funeral, and everyone came out to pay their respects. Once she was in the ground, some of the townspeople went into her house to help clean up – but also out of curiosity. They knew the upstairs was locked, and they wanted to see why.

They had to break down the upstairs bedroom door. The room was covered in dust, but it was evident that, long ago, it had been set up and decorated for a wedding night.

Kernaussagen in A Rose for Emily