Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”: Summary and Analysis

A Rose for Emily is a short story by William Faulkner, one of the most renowned and revered writers in English of the twentieth century. A giant of American literature, Faulkner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice—in 1955 and in 1963— as well as the Nobel Prize in 1949.

While it is largely his novels that have received the most acclaim, A Rose for Emily is the most well-known and most frequently anthologized of Faulkner’s shorter works. It was first published on April 30, 1930, in The Forum, and then, a year later, was included in the author’s short story collection These Thirteen. A Rose for Emily was also the first story by Faulkner to be published in a national magazine. 

Born in the state of Mississippi, William Faulkner used the environs he encountered growing up to create the fictional Yoknapatawpha county, which served as the setting for several of his books. A Rose for Emily too is set in this county, in the fictional town of Jefferson. It also continues to explore several themes that are evident in Faulkner’s novels such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. However, the short story veers further into the Southern Gothic genre than most of the writer’s other works.

Plot Summary

Divided into five parts, A Rose for Emily is written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator. The only information that the reader has about the narrator is that they are one of the inhabitants of the town of Jefferson.

The short story also does not unfold in a linear manner, with the narrative shifting to various different points of time.

Part I

The story begins with the news that Miss Emily Grierson (the titular character) has died. Her funeral is well-attended but not because she was a popular figure in town. Rather, she was a recluse and hadn’t been seen by most of them for at least ten years; they came to her funeral out of curiosity to see the inside of her house. The neighborhood in which she had lived was once one of the most prestigious in the area. Over the years, however, its character had declined as factories and garages began to be set up there.

The story opens with the death of Emily Grierson, a reclusive spinster who lived in the town of Jefferson.

Though Miss Emily lived a life isolated from the rest of the town, the townspeople did feel a sense of responsibility toward her, especially after the death of her father in 1894. At the time, the then-mayor, Colonel Sartoris, remitted all taxes on her for life. Since she was not likely to accept charity, he invented a story about the town owing her father money; the remittance was a form of repayment of that amount. 

However, the mayors and administrations that came after Colonel Sartoris were not pleased with the arrangement. A tax notice was sent to her house but received no reply. After a few reminders, the sheriff’s office became involved, sending her a summons to appear there. A response was sent in the form of a note informing them that Miss Emily did not leave the house any more along with the original tax notice.

After a meeting discussing the matter, the aldermen sent a deputation to her address. They were let in by an old Negro manservant (who was the sole staff member of the house). The house was clearly not well-maintained. They were taken into the parlor where a portrait of Miss Emily’s father was kept on an easel in front of the fireplace.

When Miss Emily arrived, she did not invite the aldermen to sit. She stood silently as they stated their reason for the visit. Her only reply to this was that she had “no taxes in Jefferson” as explained to her by Colonel Sartoris years ago. When they attempted to question her, she interrupted them, telling them to speak with Colonel Sartoris instead. Colonel Sartoris had been dead for about ten years then.

Part II

The narrative shifts to an incident that had taken place nearly thirty years ago. This was two years after the death of her father, following which she was seen little around town. This was also a year after a man, believed to be her fiancé, had also left town. She rarely went out after that.

The only person to regularly see Miss Emily was the manservant. He did her shopping and gardening alongside maintaining her kitchen. The women in the town were skeptical of how good a job he was doing in the kitchen. After a while, a smell had developed around the property, which did not surprise anyone. 

The mayor’s office began to receive complaints about the smell from Miss Emily’s neighbors. The mayor, Judge Stevens, did not consider it good form to address the matter directly to Emily. He could not “accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad.” 

The solution devised instead was to send a group of four men to the house after midnight to sprinkle lime all over the property. While they were doing this, a light came on in one of the house’s windows, and they saw Miss Emily watching them. The smell went away about a week or so afterwards.

The town often did not find it easy to deal with Miss Emily directly but continued to feel responsible for taking care of her.

By this time, the townspeople of Jefferson had begun to feel sorry for Miss Emily. Before this, they mostly believed that the Grierson family was too self-satisfied, even though they had a history of mental illness—Miss Emily’s great-aunt Wyatt had “gone completely crazy.” Her father seemed to have believed that none of the young men in town were good enough for his daughter and had driven them all away. 

After his death, news went around that Miss Emily had inherited only the house and no money. This inclined the townspeople to feel more kindly toward her—she was as poor as they were, and it humanized her to them. 

The day after Miss Emily’s father died, the women of the town visited the house to offer their condolences. However, they were met by a Miss Emily who was not bereaved; in fact, she refused to accept that her father had died. This went on for three days, as various people tried to convince her otherwise. They were just about to force their way into the house to carry the corpse away for burial when Miss Emily broke down and allowed them in herself.

Miss Emily denied the fact of her father’s death for three days after it happened.

At the time, the people attributed her behavior to the fact that she had nothing and no one else left and did not think that she was crazy. 

Part III

After her father’s death, Miss Emily fell ill for a long time and remained secluded in her house. By the time she recovered and began to be seen out and about, a construction company had begun work on paving sidewalks around town. The foreman for this project was a man named Homer Barron, a Northerner, who soon became well-liked and popular in Jefferson. The townspeople soon noticed that Miss Emily and Barron went out, driving together on Sunday afternoons.

Homer Barron was a Northerner who came to Jefferson as the foreman of a construction crew paving sidewalks.

The idea that the two might be a couple elicited various reactions from people—some thought that it would be good for Miss Emily, though they did not think it was a serious relationship, while others disapproved of it even as they pitied her, believing that she should not be abandoned by her extended family. These relatives lived in Alabama and had grown estranged over some argument with Miss Emily’s father about property. 

Over a year after this, two female cousins did come to visit her. At this time, Miss Emily had bought poison from a druggist. When he tried to clarify with her why she was buying it, she’d refused to give a straightforward answer, asking for arsenic. Intimidated by her cold manner and unable to get a clear response, the druggist eventually sold her the arsenic, insisting that it was to be used against rats only.

Part IV

The day after the purchase of the arsenic, the town knew about it and believed that she intended to kill herself. By this time, her relationship with Homer Barron seemed to have come to an end. According to the townspeople, Miss Emily had been unable to convince him to marry her—he had clearly stated several times that “he was not a marrying man.” 

The fact that the two had continued to see each other publicly for such a long time had also annoyed some of the women who thought that it was setting a bad example to the youth. They eventually convinced the town’s Baptist minister to talk to her about this but to no avail. Eventually his wife wrote to Miss Emily’s cousins in Alabama, and this led to the two female cousins coming to live with her for a while.

Miss Emily‘s extended family remained estranged after her father‘s death and only returned when the minister‘s wife wrote to them about her relationship with Barron.

When they first arrived, the town assumed that this meant Miss Emily and Barron would be married. Miss Emily’s orders for accessories and a suit of clothing for men seemed to confirm these rumors. However, Homer Barron himself appeared to have disappeared from town. Opinion was once again split about the reason for his departure; some thought he’d broken up with Miss Emily, while others thought that it was a temporary exit, until the cousins left. 

The latter opinion appeared to have proven correct when, three days after the cousins left, Barron was back. He was seen going into Miss Emily’s house. That was the last anyone saw of the two for a long time. 

Miss Emily’s long absence from the town, about six months, was taken to be a sign that Barron had left for good now.

After this incident, the front door of the house remained almost permanently shut. Once in a while, Miss Emily could be glimpsed through the windows of her house. And for a period of about six or seven years, when she was around forty, she had given china-painting lessons in one of her rooms. This eventually died out due to a lack of students. 

The next time she was properly seen, Miss Emily had turned from a thin, dark-haired woman into a fat, gray-haired one. The gray continued to progress but never turned white, even at the time of her death at the age of seventy-four.

Miss Emily was a recluse to such an extent that the people of the town saw her after stretches of time that amounted to years, almost decades.

She refused to allow any new development to cross the threshold of her property; when Jefferson got free postal delivery, she did not allow the installation of a mailbox on her estate or the metal numbers that went with it. The town simply watched as the only activity around the house became that of the aging servant making his daily run to the market. Tax notices addressed to Miss Emily arrived and lay unclaimed at the post office until they were eventually returned. 

Eventually, she died in that still and dusty house.

Part V

When the people went to see her house, they were let in wordlessly by the old servant. After letting them in, he walked straight through the house and out the backdoor and was never seen in Jefferson again.

The servant, who had worked for the Grierson family all his life, left almost immediately after Miss Emily’s death.

Miss Emily’s cousins came in from Alabama and organized the funeral. 

A room in the upper floor of the house had clearly not been opened for years, and the door was stuck. After Miss Emily’s burial, this door was torn down. The room was like a tomb; a thick layer of dust and gloomy air sat on everything within it—the men’s accessories and clothing that Miss Emily had bought for Homer Barron, laid out. And in the bed, was the corpse of the man, posed as if embracing someone. On a pillow next to the body was an indentation left by someone’s head and a strand of gray hair.

Analysis of A Rose for Emily

The Gothic literary genre was a European creation and was popular during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was inspired by imposing architecture and medieval ruins which also frequently served as the backdrop for these tales of horror, gloom, and supernatural mystery. 

In America, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft count among Gothic literature’s most prominent practitioners. However, traveling down South, especially after the Civil War, the genre took on a flavor unique to the region.

Southern Goth, as the name suggests, is a subgenre that developed in the American South.

Southern Gothic literature recreates the morbid and suspenseful atmosphere that is a characteristic feature of classic Gothic novels. However, the subgenre infused this with the uneasy history of the region and used it to explore the darker aspects of human psychology, in particular those that come to the fore during clashes between individual traits and societal norms and expectations. It typically features lone outsiders and their interactions with the societies that they live on the fringe of. Prominent writers of Southern Goth include Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Zora Neale Hurston, and Flannery O’Connor.

In A Rose for Emily, Faulkner weaves a more grotesque and mysterious tale than in his other writings. Death is prevalent throughout the story, not only in the form of the actual deaths that take place—Emily’s father, Homer Barron, and Emily herself—but also in the Grierson house, which has a perpetually dust-covered interior and gives off an air of deterioration and decay.

“A Rose for Emily” is one of Faulkner’s more macabre tales and deals with themes of decay and loneliness.

In a non-linear manner, the life of an old reclusive spinster after the death of her father is laid out. The Griersons were an old and aristocratic family, but their lineage seems to have dwindled and eventually come to an end with the death of Emily. The decline, however, has been a long time coming as the neighborhood they live in has gone from being a prestigious area to an industrial one taken over by factories and garages. The house itself was once grand. Now, it has grown “tarnished” and is crumbling. Barely anybody besides Emily and her servant have seen its inside for years. And just as the two age, so too does the house become dusty and neglected. Without any change or refreshing, its state becomes a metaphor for clinging on to tradition and fading values in a rapidly changing world.

The consequences of holding on to something that has essentially faded out is extended into an even more macabre metaphor—necrophilia. Foreshadowing the story’s end is Emily’s complete denial of her father’s death; for three whole days after the event, she refused to acknowledge this change that had taken over her life. The resulting breakdown and sickness may have brought to the fore already present familial tendencies toward mental instability (as displayed by her great-aunt Wyatt).

While he was alive, Emily’s father had driven away any of Jefferson’s young men that had come forward as suitors, most likely because he believed them to be below the Grierson family. To the townspeople, her continued unmarried state appeared to be almost like a curse left on Emily by her father. Even the one person she chose for a brief while, Homer Barron, was not only an unusual choice (being a Yankee construction foreman and probably even more inappropriate than others to her father’s eye), but also an unavailable one as he’d openly declared many times that he was “not the marrying kind.”

However, unknown to the town, Emily had found a bizarre way to hold onto this last relationship and remedy her loneliness when she presumably murdered him and kept the corpse. The gray hair found on the pillow next to it indicates that she spent time with it for years after he died, possibly continuing up until her own death.

The choice of narrator and non-linear structure of the story ensure that the mystery remains intact until the end. At the same time, the reader is also given the chance to build sympathy for Emily before the horrifying reveal. Emily lives a deeply isolated life (by her own choice), and this results in the narrator, who is a part of the town’s community, having no insights into her character at all. Like the reader, they too can only observe Emily from a distance, catching occasional glimpses of her through her windows and watching her servant making his daily run to the market.

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