![]() | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Emily Grierson is a fictional character in the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner.
Grierson is a spinster living alone in Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi with an overbearing father. The townspeople feel sympathy for her after her father's death and try to help her cope with life alone. However, they underestimate Grierson's zealous need for her father and Homer and the measures she was willing to take to keep them with her.
Miss Emily is seen as a “hereditary obligation upon the town” in which she lived. [1] The townspeople find themselves ostensibly looking after her following her father's death. She is often misunderstood as she is portrayed as incapable of being alone while also exhibiting a sense of authority over the town by disregarding the laws of which they live by -- not paying her taxes, not putting numbers on her mailbox for the federal mail service, refusing to disclose a reason to the druggist for her purchase of arsenic, and parading around town with Homer Barron. [1]
As new town leaders take over, they make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks the family retainer, her black servant Tobe, to show the men out.
After purchasing the arsenic, some townspeople thought she was going to kill herself, but, misunderstood as always, she had other plans. Her physical appearance also displays her true inner character. Her actions cause readers to view her cautiously and apprehensively as a result of her increasingly radical behavior. Readers will find themselves sympathetic towards Miss Emily in the beginning but far less so, if at all, by the end of the story due to her disturbing actions and obdurate character. [2]
Miss Emily's character symbolizes the fall of the chivalric American South as the industrial, modern South begins to rise. The description of the decay of both herself and the house slowing becoming "decaying eyesores" add to the imagery of things associated with Miss Emily. [3] The town is evolving but Emily obdurately refused to change. Later in life, she is described as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water...her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough”. [4] The reoccurring reminder that Miss Emily is stuck in the past symbolizes a South not ready to embrace industrialization and fully let go of its bygone antebellum past. [3]
Emily had a father who sought to stifle and control her with rules, regulations, and demands. This was apparent when Miss Emily was “thirty and ... still single.” [4] He believed that no one in town was good enough for his daughter and that she had to be protected from dishonor and those beneath her. [5] The town “had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her clutching a horsewhip.” [4] Despite Mr. Grierson ruling a huge aspect of Emily's life, it was clear that Miss Emily truly loved and cared for him when he died. “The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house … as is … custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual … with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead.” She proceeded to do this for three days until “she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.” [4] This passion and love for her father contributed to the impact that loss had on her heart in the future.
Emily lives in Jefferson, Mississippi. Her home "was a big, squarish frame house", and she did not have to pay taxes on it. Colonel Sartoris decided to allow her to be waived from taxes after the death of her father, a situation she regarded as permanent. [1] The home was described as one "that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies.” [1] As the town began to modernize, "only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps -- an eyesore among eyesores." [1] The house "smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell", [1] and "furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture". As the people in the community move around her house, “a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.” [1]
At one point, the townspeople also complained of a mysterious odor coming from her house. They later on find that this odor was coming from the corpse of Homer Barron, decaying in the house. This home held the body of Homer in a room that was locked up for several years, which was not discovered until the death of Miss Emily, when people began to look through her home. [1]
Many people found that when Miss Emily's father died, “at last they could pity Miss Emily.” [6] “Being left alone, and a pauper”, she was now completely alone. [6] She feared being alone because her father who was once always there was no longer and she didn't have a companion to fall back on after “all the young men her father had driven away.” [6]
In that room, the longest kept secret, and the biggest surprise was then found: “The man himself lay in the bed.” [7] The greatest shock, however, came not from the rotting body but from what they saw next to this decaying corpse. The people in Miss Emily's house “noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head.” [7] After looking closely they then found “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” [7] Miss Emily had loved this man, and loved having him in her life. In order to keep him permanently around, she bought poison from a druggist. [7] Many of the people in the community assumed that this poison would be for Miss Emily to kill herself. [8] The community then realized, after coming upon this secret, that this poison was to keep Homer in Miss Emily's life. [7] One writer, Gary Kriewald, notes that Miss Emily's "strategic retreat into the sanctuary of her house after Homer Barron's 'desertion' of her is as defiant as it is self-protective, an act of passive resistance directed against a society." [9]
Emily's life was spent mostly in isolation, not only physically but emotionally. Her father's strict, authoritarian parenting style did not let her socialize to meet friends or possible love interests. Once her father died, Emily felt the loneliest she was in her life, as he was all she had. [3]
It is evident that Emily suffered psychological trauma from her relationship with her father, which suggests why she acted the way she did later on in her life, keeping the body of her fiancé after he died. [3] It is implied that she suffered from necrophilia as she felt so connected still to Homer; enough to keep his dead body in her home from his death until hers many years later and a strand of her hair is discovered next to his corpse. [3] She wanted to be happy with Homer for the rest of her life, could not handle the rejection, so she killed him with poison, and kept his body in her home. [8] Her refusal to give up her father's body for days after his death, then keeping Homer's for years suggests that she was too stubborn to let go and believed she could still have a connection with them even after their deaths. [3]
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Light in August is a 1932 novel by the Southern American author William Faulkner. It belongs to the Southern gothic and modernist literary genres.
The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It employs several narrative styles, including stream of consciousness. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later said was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.
As I Lay Dying is a 1930 Southern Gothic novel by American author William Faulkner. Faulkner's fifth novel, it is consistently ranked among the best novels of the 20th century. The title is derived from William Marris's 1925 translation of Homer's Odyssey, referring to the similar themes of both works.
Sanctuary is a 1931 novel by American author William Faulkner about the rape and abduction of an upper-class Mississippi college girl, Temple Drake, during the Prohibition era. The novel was Faulkner's commercial and critical breakthrough and established his literary reputation, but was controversial given its themes. It is said Faulkner claimed it was a "potboiler", written purely for profit, but this has been debated by scholars and Faulkner's own friends.
Hammer House of Horror is a British horror anthology television series produced in Britain in 1980. Created by Hammer Films in association with Cinema Arts International and ITC Entertainment, it consists of 13 hour-long episodes, originally broadcast on ITV.
"That Evening Sun" is a short story by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1931 in the collection These 13, which included Faulkner's most anthologized story, "A Rose for Emily". The story was originally published, in a slightly different form, as "That Evening Sun Go Down" in The American Mercury in March of the same year.
The Moving Finger is a detective novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the USA by Dodd, Mead and Company in July 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence.
Dumb Witness is a detective fiction novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 5 July 1937 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year under the title of Poirot Loses a Client. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00.
"A Rose for Emily" is a short story by American author William Faulkner, first published on April 30, 1930, in an issue of The Forum. The story takes place in Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi, in the equally fictional county of Yoknapatawpha. It was Faulkner's first short story published in a national magazine.
The Hamlet is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1940, about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi. Originally a standalone novel, it was later followed by The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), forming the Snopes trilogy.
The Mansion is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1959. It is the last in a trilogy of books about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi, following The Hamlet and The Town.
The Unvanquished is a 1938 novel by the American author William Faulkner, set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. It tells the story of the Sartoris family, who first appeared in the novel Sartoris. The Unvanquished takes place before that story, and is set during the American Civil War. Principal characters are Bayard Sartoris, John Sartoris, Granny, Ringo (Morengo), Ab Snopes, Cousin Drusilla, Aunt Jenny, Louvinia, and the lieutenant.
The Thirteen Problems is a short story collection by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by Collins Crime Club in June 1932 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1933 under the title The Tuesday Club Murders. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00. The thirteen stories feature the amateur detective Miss Marple, her nephew Raymond West, and her friend Sir Henry Clithering. They are the earliest stories Christie wrote about Miss Marple. The main setting for the frame story is the fictional village of St Mary Mead.
"The Possibility of Evil" is a 1965 short story by Shirley Jackson. Published on December 18, 1965, in the Saturday Evening Post, a few months after her death, it won the 1966 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery short story. It has since been reprinted in the collections Just an Ordinary Day (1996) and Dark Tales (2016).
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a 1962 mystery novel by American author Shirley Jackson. It was Jackson's final work, and was published with a dedication to Pascal Covici, the publisher, three years before the author's death in 1965. The novel is written in the voice of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, who lives with her agoraphobic sister and ailing uncle on an estate. Six years before the events of the novel, the Blackwood family experienced a tragedy that left the three survivors isolated from their small village.
Pembroke (1894) is a novel written by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. It is set in the small town of Pembroke, Massachusetts in the 1830s and 40s. The novel tells the story of a romance gone awry and the dramatic events that follow, which entertain the residents of the small town for years after. As one of Freeman's first novels, Pembroke experienced great success in its time and, although it has only recently experienced a comeback in the academic sphere, it is known for being an exemplary piece of New England local color fiction.
Chime is a 2011 young adult fantasy novel by Franny Billingsley. The book was published by Dial on March 17, 2011. Chime was selected as a finalist in the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The book was also selected as one of Publisher Weekly's Best Books of 2011 and was one of the American Library Association's 2012 Best Fiction picks for both the audiobook and hardback.
History of Wolves is a psychological fiction novel published in 2017 written by American author Emily Fridlund. The novel blends the genres of bildungsroman and thriller to tell the story of a teen navigating through life-altering events. The novel is told from the perspective of the protagonist, Madeline Furston (Linda), as an adult recounting the events that occurred during the summer when she was fifteen.