"A Rose for Emily"
William Faulkner's classic short story, "A Rose for Emily," has been noted as an excellent example of Southern Literature. In this mythical county of Yaknapatawpha, Faulkner contrasted the past with the present era. The past was represented in Emily Grierson, Colonel Sartoris, the Board of Alderman, and the Negro servant. Homer Barron, the new Board of Alderman, and the new sheriff represented the present. Homer was the main representative of Yankee views towards the Griersons and the entire South, a situation of the present. Emily held the view of the past as if it were a rose-tinted place where nothing would ever die. Her world was already the past.
Whenever the modern times were about to take hold of her, she retreated to that world of the past, and took Homer with her. Her room upstairs was the place, a place where Emily could stay with dead Homer forever as though no death nor disease could separate them.
Blei Emily Rose CRP
Film poster for The Exorcism of Emily Rose - Copyr...
English: Emily RoseHomer had lived in the present, and Emily eventually conquered that.
Emily's family was a monument of the past; Emily herself was referred to as a "fallen monument," she was a relic of Southern gentility and past values. "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the woman mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant-a combined gardener and cook-had seen in at least ten years" (page 28). She had been considered fallen because she had been proven susceptible to death and decay like the rest of the world. As for the importance of family, Emily was really close to her father. He
was very protective of...