Analysis of William Faulkners A Rose for Emily free essay sample

Analysis of William Faulkner’s â€Å"A Rose for Emily† In â€Å"A Rose for Emily†, William Faulkner uses symbolism, imagery, simile and tone. Faulkner uses these elements to lead his characters to an epiphany of letting go of out-dated traditions and customs. The resistance to change and loneliness are prominent themes within â€Å"A Rose for Emily†. Faulkner uses â€Å"A Rose for Emily† to caution his readers that things are not always what they appear to be. The tone of â€Å"A Rose for Miss Emily† could be described as one of complicity and guilt.Note how often Faulkner intrudes with the pronouns our and we, throughout the story, even in the first sentence: our whole town went to the funeral. (30). Guilt and complicity can be seen in the way Emily is treated while alive. Once part of a proud and wealthy Southern family, she is considered a fallen monument (Faulkner 30) when she dies. Mistreatment, in the form of negligence, â€Å"We did not even know she was sick† (Faulkner 34), eventually compounds their guilt after Emilys death. The pieces come together. She was lonely, needed help, not judgment and isolation.At the close of the story, Faulkner once again uses we to evoke the townsfolk’s universal guilt: For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. † (35). The tone of the story also reflects Miss Emily’s resistance to change. The resistance to change in â€Å"A Rose for Emily† is symbolized first by the state of the Grierson home. It stands unkempt among a neighborhood that has forged into the present. Faulkner uses imagery to symbolize both Miss Emily’s and the South’s decay through the Grierson house.The narrator says of the house: â€Å"It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; 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. † (Faulkner 30).Faulkner uses simile here: â€Å"She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (30). This imagery was used to ascertain Miss Emily as a washed up relic of some long ago time. This, in turn, symbolizes the way that she still clings to and tries to live a way of life which has long been surpassed by the ever changing forward march of time and more modern ways of thinking.Just as Miss Emily’s resistance to change is symbolized by the Grierson house so is Miss Emily’s loneliness. The Grierson house is so symbolic because it had once been a hub of activity with china painting lessons and guests. After the death of Emily’s father, the house was shut off from the rest of the world, very much like Miss Emily herself. The narrator tells us that â€Å"From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china painting. (Faulkner 34). We can tell, and perhaps understand to some degree, that Miss Emily has a very real fear of being left alone. This is first revealed by her denial of her father’s death for several days. â€Å"She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days† (Faulkner 32) before she finally accepted the truth. The narrator shares with us her father’s interference in her love life when the narrator said â€Å"We remember all of the young men her father had driven away† (Faulkner 32).It was probably a combination of her father’s interference in her love life and her resistance to change that caused her to still be alone when she died. This is most likely the cause of her obvious mental breakdown that is evidenced by keeping Homer Barron’s body in her bed for decades after his death. She was so afraid of being left alone again, by a man that she loved, that she completely lost her mind and killed Homer Barron so that he could never leave her. The townspeople come to an epiphany by the end of â€Å"A Rose for Emily†.Faulkner uses imagery and tone to portray Miss Emily as a lonely old lady. This changes when the townspeople have found a dead body in the bed of Miss Emily’s upstairs bedroom. The narrator says â€Å"Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head† (Faulkner 35) and â€Å"We saw a long strand of iron-gray hair† (Faulkner 35). We know from earlier in the story that Miss Emily’s hair had turned iron-gray early on and stayed that way until her death.The townspeople go from feelings of sympathy for a lonely old lady stuck in a by-gone era to feelings of horror and disgust for a mentally-deranged old lady as they realize that she had been sleeping with the dead and decaying body of her sweetheart, Homer Barron, for decades. The narrator said previously that â€Å"Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town† (Faulkner 30). The townspeople’s epiphany was that, like Miss Emily, they were holding onto something long after they should have been, just as Miss Emily had with her father and Homer Barron.When Tobe, Miss Emily’s black man-serva nt, â€Å"walked right through the house and out the back door and was never seen again† (Faulkner 35) at the same time as Miss Emily’s death, it symbolizes the passing of the old order of the South that Miss Emily herself symbolized. William Faulkner’s use of simile, symbolism, imagery and tone depicts the themes of resistance to change and loneliness that were Miss Emily’s life. The townspeople’s epiphany represents a realization that it is time to let go of out-dated traditions and customs that have something wrong with it; something rotten about it.