Darryl Hunn
Dr. Wesson-Martin
English 1302
November 11, 2015
A Modern Gothic Story:
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
When one thinks of a Gothic novel, the titles that usually come to mind are some of the classics such as Bram Stroker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. These are some of the more obvious stories that most people have either read or seen on the big screen. To even suggest, at first glance, that “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner should be considered in the same class of stories might seem a bit of a stretch. Once one has reviewed the basics of what constitutes a Gothic story, it will become clear that while there are differences between
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She lived a large house with her overbearing father until his death. After his passing, she has a failed relationship with a Northerner from out of town. Afterwards, she remains in the large gloomy house with no company except a single servant. On her passing, the town discovers the long kept corpse of her beau from decades earlier in an upstairs bedroom along with evidence that for some time at least, she was sharing the bed with her former …show more content…
When one looks for the elements such as the old, dusty castle, the mystery or intrigue, a domineering male, and clashing time periods, one will find these in abundance. As Louis Palmer notes, “By appropriating the Gothic, Faulkner attempted to write about the American South by way of an exotic genre” (Palmer, 122). After careful consideration of several of the motifs that make up the genre of Gothic stories, we find that Faulkner has indeed created a modern version of the particular genre. Works Cited
Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Ed. Greg Johnson, Thomas R. Arp, and Laurence Perrine. 12th ed. Stamford: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2015. 534-41. Print.
Robertson, Alice. "The Ultimate Voyeur: The Communal Narrator Of 'A Rose For Emily'." Eureka Studies In Teaching Short Fiction 6.2 (2006): 154-165.MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.
Spencer, Mark. "William Faulkner's 'A Rose For Emily' And Psycho." Eureka Studies In Teaching Short Fiction 7.1 (2006): 91-102. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.
Palmer, Louis. "Bourgeois Blues: Class, Whiteness, And Southern Gothic In Early Faulkner And Caldwell." Faulkner Journal 22.1/2 (2006): 120-139.Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Nov.
6. West, Ray B., Jr. "Atmosphere and Theme in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'." William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner. Michigan State University Press, 1973. 192-198. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 July 2011.
Gothic Literature was a natural progression from romanticism, which had existed in the 18th Century. Initially, such a ‘unique’ style of literature was met with a somewhat mixed response; although it was greeted with enthusiasm from members of the public, literary critics were much more dubious and sceptical.
In many of Faulkner’s stories, he tells about an imaginary county in Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha. He uses this county as the setting for his story “Barn Burning” and it is also thought that the town of Jefferson from “A Rose for Emily” is located in Yoknapatawpha County. The story of a boy’s struggle between being loyal to his family or to his community makes “Barn Burning” exciting and dramatic, but a sense of awkwardness and unpleasantness arrives from the story of how the fictional town of Jefferson discovers that its long time resident, Emily Grierson, has been sleeping with the corpse of her long-dead friend with whom she has had a relationship with.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2013. 549-51. Print.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose For Emily.” An Introduction to Fiction. 10th ed. Eds: X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New Yorkk: Pearson Longman, 2007. 29-34.
---. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Compact 4th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000. 81 - 88.
The Gothic horror tale is a literary form dating back to 1764 with the first novel identified with the genre, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Ontralto. Gothicism features an atmosphere of terror and dread: gloomy castles or mansions, sinister characters, and unexplained phenomena. Gothic novels and stories also often include unnatural combinations of sex and death. In a lecture to students documented by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner in Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958, Faulkner himself claimed that "A Rose for Emily" is a "ghost story." In fact, Faulkner is considered by many to be the progenitor of a sub-genre, the Southern gothic. The Southern gothic style combines the elements of classic Gothicism with particular Southern archetypes (the reclusive spinster, for example) and puts them in a Southern milieu.
Sullivan, Ruth “The Narrator in A rose for Emily”. Journal of Narrative Technique (1971): 159-178
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” has many gothic themes such as, when Emily buys the arsenic and the tomb that lay buried in her house. These themes show that gothic literature consists of cryptic and dark settings and tones. This mysterious story is filled with violent events and creates suspense and terror.
Growing up in Mississippi in the late Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth Century, young William Faulkner witnessed first hand the struggles his beloved South endured through their slow progression of rebuilding. These experiences helped to develop Faulkner’s writing style. “Faulkner deals almost exclusively with the Southern scene (with) the Civil War … always behind his work” (Warren 1310. His works however are not so much historical in nature but more like folk lore. This way Faulkner is not constrained to keep details accurate, instead he manipulate the story to share his on views leading the reader to conclude morals or lessons from his experience. Faulkner writes often and “sympathetically of the older order of the antebellum society. It was a society that valued honor, (and) was capable of heroic action” (Brooks 145) both traits Faulkner admired. These sympathetic views are revealed in the story “A Rose for Emily” with Miss Emily becoming a monument for the Antebellum South.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 5th ed. Ed. R.V.Cassill. New York: W.W. Norton & Comp., 1995.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose For Emily." The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Ed. Michael Meyer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 91-99. Print.
William Faulkner has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in the process, suggesting to others how it might be used, he has also been credited with sparking the Southern Renaissance of literary achievement that has produced much of the United States best literature in the twentieth century.
In "A Rose for Emily," William Faulkner's use of setting and characterization foreshadows and builds up to the climax of the story. His use of metaphors prepares the reader for the bittersweet ending. A theme of respectability and the loss of, is threaded throughout the story. Appropriately, the story begins with death, flashes back to the past and hints towards the demise of a woman and the traditions of the past she personifies. Faulkner has carefully crafted a multi-layered masterpiece, and he uses setting, characterization, and theme to move it along.