Faulkner "A Rose for emily"

Essay by kthpow1College, UndergraduateB, June 2004

download word file, 6 pages 4.3 1 reviews

Downloaded 71 times

"A Rose for Emily" takes place after the Civil War in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi a town very similar to the one William Faulkner spent most of his life. It is a story of the conflict between the old and the new South. Emily and the things around her represent the dying old traditions and the present is represented through Homer Barron and the new board of aldermen. The issue of racism also runs throughout the story. Many of Faulkner's stories take place in Yoknapatawpha County a fictional place patterned after his familiar surrounding and childhood home of Oxford, Mississippi. John B. Padgett a professor at the University of Mississippi says, "Much of Faulkner's own family history makes its way into his fiction, just as places and events in his fiction seem patterned on real-life places and events in Oxford". His life and family history helped shape many of his stories and views of the south.

He liked to right about familiar place but many of the implications implied in his stories might not have been intentional.

Faulkner made a fictional world from his familiar world of Mississippi. In "A Rose for Emily", Faulkner wrote, 'When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created little dissatisfaction."(74) This was Faulkner's view on the new generation of Southerners rejecting the old traditions and wanting to change the South. Emily represents the old south, far removed and distant from the changing time, but still feels she has authority or influence over the south.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. He was the oldest of four brothers; he was named after his great-grandfather a Civil War colonel who died dueling a former business partner. His grandfather was a lawyer,