Emily Grierson Tableau

Miss Emily is hidden in the fragmented description of William Faulkner’s story. She left an ineffective impression to people even though there are only few appearances of her in William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” and those outside characterizations of Miss Emily highly indicate her inner status. She is a “tableau”, a topic that people living in Jefferson will talk about on street, a symbol of a fallen nobility, “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse”.

Emily Grierson was born in a southern influential family, which was reputable in a southern town of Jefferson in Yoknopatawpha. When Emily was in younger age, she was the living in people’s illusion as William Faulkner wrote: “We had long thought of them as a tableau,

Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background…” She lost her mother when she was at young age and grew up under her father’s strict dominating attitude. Her father had drove all the pursuers of Emily since he believed that restraining Emily was the best way to protect the dignity of Griersons’ family therefore Emily was born with arrogance and remained unmarried all her life until her died. Living as a declining aristocrat, Emily inherited the Griersons that “a little too high for what they really were”. After the death of her father, Emily had been sick for long time and when she showed up in front of people, “…her hair was cut short…”, “…with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.” She had nothing but the house her father left, and the dignity as being one of the Griersons. However, she even held her head higher, inopportunely maintaining that last remaining dignity.
She refused to people’s aid and sympathy; she refused to pay taxes, when the aldermen came to her house to convince her, she repeated telling them that “I have not taxes in Jefferson” rather than letting them sit; she refused to listen to the complaint of neighbors and clear away the smell of her house; she refused to let people put metal numbers and a mailbox on her door. All she did was for isolating herself from people. The distance between Emily and others was always reminding her aristocratic statue. No matter she became “small”, “fat”, and “bloated”, or even “grown fat” with “her hair was turning gray”, she was still cold and aloof.
The only time she put her status aside was for love.

When approaching middle age, Emily met and easily fell in love with Homer Barron, a worker came from Northern American to build the rail way. For Emily, love was the only reason to step out the “big, squarish frame house that had once been white” house. At first, she held her head high sitting on the chaise with Homer crossing the streets while people living in the town were all whispering “Poor Emily” and she even carried her pitiful dignity after he finally left her. As William Faulkner wrote: “She carried her head high enough even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness.” After that, people saw her again when she was buying poison. “She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look.” As the druggist asked her the purpose of buying arsenic, “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up.” Dignity is for people to see. Miss Emily only longed to love, but if she could not have love, then she kept it with

her.
Emily Grierson is not only “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse”, but also innocent. She has an old woman figure with iron grey hair outside but a tiny and innocent girl inside, however, her youth as well as everything brought by the youth, such as brightness, romantics and beauty, are fading from the story, as the rose motioned at the end as “…upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights…”