This past December, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a handful of books. Among them was a William Faulkner anthology called “Collected Stories.” I have personally been a fan of the author since I read “As I Lay Dying” in my early 20s and found the potential for literature cracking open. Given the girth of the volume, I knew it would be intimidating to just read the 42 short stories front to back, so instead I’ve decided to take my time. In doing so, I plan to cover one a week until completed. I will be using this space to share my opinions of each piece as well as any stray observations I may have picked up from the greater world of Faulkner mania.
When thinking about Faulkner’s short stories, there are two that often come to mind. “Barn Burning” has an airlessness to it that becomes more interesting the further that’s read into it. The way it depicts The American South’s socioeconomic divides creates a perfect time capsule of a world in transition. Whereas that story is an easy five-star masterpiece, “A Rose for Emily” is somewhere beyond in a timeless field, where every word is delicious and the ending is so staggering that it creates one of the most satisfying short story reads, possibly ever. It’s such a brisk read full of vivid detail that grows with every reread, leaving so much speculation that is bittersweet. Is Emily Grierson a good or bad person? Maybe a little bit of both. She’s definitely a tragic one.
A big reason this works is that Faulkner knows how to use point of view better than just about anyone. While this story is about Emily, it’s not presented from her perspective. If anything, she was dead the whole time. There’s no way for her to refute any of the points made. The reader has no insight into her every day or even thought process. All that is there is a house where the unnamed narrator stares and begins speculating. Questions emerge around who is telling this story and whether their intent is to defame Emily or plead sympathy. Faulkner paints her home as a museum of ancient artifacts without context. Everything is dusty and breaking. There’s the suggestion that the whole town came out, but what does it say about the citizens of Jefferson? Is it a small town where everyone knows each other’s business, or is the narrator already proving their unreliability by aggrandizing details?
This is done so subtly that first time readers may not even distrust how the story is being told. This is all a story of gossip, of trying to make up a story of the crazy old woman with a tragic life. Over the course of five chapters, there is an interwoven use of flashbacks to fill in the blanks and create a better sense of why Emily’s death seems important. In some respect, it’s not. She never did anything to improve Jefferson. If anything, she was a colorful character who inspired creative minds. Even as the author describes the changing hair color to something grey, there is the sense that people are more obsessed with wondering how and when she will die. The fact that both of those answers aren’t even answered only adds to the excitement of the story. She does have a Negro servant who probably knows these secrets, but he isn’t given any levity. He’s merely a tour guide, moving everyone from room to room, taking in the view.
So who is Emily Grierson? In short, she was a shut-in who had an Oedipal Complex for her father. There was a co-dependence that many could argue was unhealthy, finding this behavior lasting into her 30s. She should’ve been an independent adult, but it quickly becomes clear that she has no way of taking care of herself. There are suggestions that she has unpaid taxes in another town. The only redeeming part of her story is that she used to do arts and crafts with the neighborhood kids until they grew too old and she gained a reputation for being of ill repute. Again, Faulkner’s use of color fading from Emily’s life subtly plays into these pages, finding the arts and crafts having the greatest emphasis. She eventually meets a man named Homer Baron (more on him later) who many assume is her lover and gets caught up in a scheme that involves buying arsenic to poison rats. Following this, she is secluded and the audience is left to guess just what is going on until they notice she’s dead.
As the start of the “Collected Stories” section known as The Village, one must wonder what is being said about the community. Personally, I see it as two opposing viewpoints struggling to exist in Yoknapatawpha County at the same time. There is the side of the narrator, who is likely from a generation who came after Emily that has grown with Reconstruction into something more progressive. They are figures who are trying to find ways to make The American South into something more respectable and possibly form a closer relationship with The North. Even then, the presence of Homer Baron is treated as something queer, that is out of place (his surname translates. The transition hasn’t been flawless, but there’s some sense that the world has evolved. Even the architecture around The Grierson House has been updated with the times.
The other side is represented by Emily, whose connection is with a past that most would more like to have buried. A fun irony is that the town’s name is Jefferson, which could allude to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, reflecting another piece of history that is difficult to fully remove. Her home has become a tomb, waiting for her body to turn into brittle dust. When she is talked about, it’s almost shameful. The reason she’s pulled away from the children is because of her own decaying mind, as if prolonging ideologies that come from an old way of thinking. She is a product of her father’s likely racist ways. Even the presence of a negro servant named Tobe feels like a tie to owning slaves. She was never able to evolve with the times, whether because of some unseen details with her father, or because the community gave up on her.
The Village is likely going to be a section that comes to terms with this cross-section. There will be a need to enter the 20th century with a more progressive mindset. At the same time, there is a need to grapple with the past in ways that aren’t just burying it under a rug, hoping that people just forget that it exists. Emily is a figure many probably want to forget. Returning to the opening line, “the whole town” could be a play on words, suggesting something cratered, like the reader is witnessing a burial. The morbid curiosity is not out of empathy, but a sympathy of the freak show that came before.
So what can be made about Homer Baron? He is one of the few characters to get a significant word count here and also someone who exists outside of the community. He is from The North and is helping to reconstruct The South. It’s easy to correlate him as some tie to the change, a need to bond both halves of the country. But then why does it seem like Homer is mostly seen as a love interest to Emily? The few times she is seen out in public finds her laughing with him, possibly rejuvenating her will to live. That, or maybe she is some sort of grim reaper drawing him into her trap with the hopes of destroying his progressiveness. It’s hard to really know because Homer seems antithetical to her father, or most of the people in her life for that matter.
The easiest read is that Emily loves Homer for his vitality and is trying to hold onto him. While it’s unclear if the arsenic was actually used to murder him, the correlation is there. Again, how reliable is the narrator? The passage of time isn’t exactly clear. All that is known is that Homer disappeared sometime after meeting Emily. When it’s revealed that his body lied on her bed next to a ghostly outline that has a strand of her hair, there is something to suggest a sexual relationship going on. Did Emily’s body decay there? Is Emily a necrophiliac? Compared to the other stories “Collected Stories” has covered so far, it’s a jarring change of tone.
As a commentary on necrophilia, there is some validity in suggesting that it symbolizes Emily’s attraction to something gone. If she murdered Homer, it was to halt reconstruction and hold onto a past symbolized by her father. If that is true, then a lot of her other moments read now as affirmed reasons to be repulsed by her. She likely suffered some mental problems from the death of her father and codependency on certain types of men. Again, it’s difficult to know how much is true because it’s never from Emily’s perspective. It’s mostly like looking through a window of her home and expecting to know the whole story from a silhouette.
A more complicated read of Homer is one that’s hinted at in the text. There are suggestions that Homer likes to fraternize with men. Given how this is worded, there’s the suggestion that he could’ve been a homosexual. Very little else directly suggests this, but certain tropes of “confirmed bachelors” begin to pop up after. The most notable is marrying Emily not so much for love, but as some status symbol. He can’t be gay because he is married to a woman. Maybe Emily loves him and he doesn’t reciprocate. His queerness symbolizes a disconnect from what The South stands for, reflecting what a change of ideals could look like. It’s repulsive in a different way, very hard to understand from a traditional standpoint.
Whatever the read ultimately is, adding queer subtext to Homer makes it even more tragic for Emily. Maybe Emily wanted to believe that Homer was her sanctuary, that there was love there. A specific read that is even more implied than stated is that Homer bonds with Emily because both are homosexuals who don’t fit in with The American South. They are outcasts because of their identity. If this is the case, reading Emily as someone who had to repress her identity and be shamed by it around her father and townspeople is even more tragic. Maybe she wanted to evolve with the times, but without a strong support group, she just never felt secure enough. While it doesn’t fully explain an outcome where Emily murders Homer, it does reflect how open-ended Faulkner’s approach is here.
“A Rose for Emily” is a perfect story because over 11 pages, he manages to convey a whole world within the confines of a creaky old home. It’s history incarnate. There is no surety whether any of these events actually ever happened or if the narrator is simply saying this to make Emily look much worse than she was. Because there is no change for her to refute, we’ll just have to take their word. After all, the Negro servant is still there doing his duties. There’s something that ties everything to a past. It’s just unclear what Emily has to do with any of it.
The title is also a mystery because there is no clear use of a rose in the text. At most, Emily buys Homer monogrammed gifts, but she never receives flowers. There’s nothing agricultural about it, only the imagery of dust choking life away. What is the rose? Why did Faulkner choose that wording? Even the play on words with “arose” doesn’t make sense unless it suggests that everyone arose that morning to attend the funeral. Maybe it’s again implied as a gift from Faulkner himself, giving his respect to Emily and trying to do her story justice even within an unreliable context.
According to The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, Faulkner began writing this as early as February 1927. He said that he was working on “a collection of stories of my townspeople.” It is said that this was inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 book “Winesburg, Ohio.” Some suggest that it was actually written in 1929 with the first known appearance being in Scribner’s Magazine when they wrote him a rejection letter. It finally appeared in April 1930 in Forum Magazine. Other renditions would be made and appear in different versions. What may be the most impressive detail is that it wasn’t immediately praised as one of his greatest works and would take later assessment to fully appreciate.
In the original version, her name was Emily Wyatt and featured a deleted scene involving the Negro servant. The gist of it is a conversation that happens right before she dies where she tries to offer freedom to him that would allow him to travel to Chicago. He refuses, believing that because 30 years had passed that he wouldn’t be able to live a prosperous life. It’s a moment of sympathy that makes Emily more dimensional, but it also raises questions of usefulness. The reader is still seeing it from the outside in, but at the same time, the ambiguity adds so much curiosity to the larger text.
This is an example of Faulkner having too much affection for his subject. As much as giving Emily dignity in character is helpful to understanding authorial intent, it doesn’t improve the reader’s relationship to the text. Even the suggestion of letting people see what’s behind a door works in strange ways. On the one hand, it adds suspense and foreshadowing for the finale, but given that the rest of the story is set in the house, the surprise ending works better without unnecessary rumination. There could be a subtext that suggests more compassion or even Emily finally accepting Reconstruction ways (arguably only after murdering Homer), but is it necessary? More than anything, I just want to be treated as an outsider to Emily’s plight. This moment feels too invasive, allowing sympathies to feel misplaced. I don’t begrudge Faulkner for writing this section as it helps to build understanding, but I’m thankful that it was removed and strengthened the impact of every other piece.
Another interesting fact is that where most of the stories in “Collected Stories” so far feature some greater continuity, The Grierson Family doesn’t have any other significant appearances. With that said, Colonel Sartoris makes an appearance in the text briefly and is featured in 17 other works. As the mayor of Jefferson who tells Emily that she doesn’t have to pay taxes, he has a small but significant role. It is likely that The Sartoris Family will appear again later. For now, this is their latest appearance with John Sartoris in “Barn Burning” and “Shall Not Perish.” It will be interesting to see how their lineage evolves.
There have been a handful of references to “A Rose for Emily” throughout pop culture. In the world of film, the most noteworthy adaptation is director Lyndon Chubbuck’s A Rose for Emily (1983), created for PBS. This version features Anjelica Huston as Emily along with Jared Martin as Homer and John Carradine as Colonel Sartoris. There is another version of A Rose for Emily (2018) directed by Kelly Pike that features Marianna Palka as Emily and James Franco as Homer. A fun side tangent is that Franco has multiple credits involving Faulkner including directing adaptations of As I Lay Dying (2013) and The Sound and the Fury (2014). While not direct references, there’s also an actress named Emily Rose and a film called The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). Very little about them overlap besides similar names.
There also have been songs written based around the plot. The most noteworthy can be found on The Zombies’ “Odyssey and Oracle” album called “A Rose for Emily.” It’s a sympathetic retelling that tries to understand her struggles. Meanwhile, My Chemical Romance’s “To the End” takes more creative license, mixing it with a plotline that runs throughout “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” that includes references to elevators and other idiosyncratic details (the lyrics change arsenic to cyanide). With that said, Gerard Way suggests in the lyrics that his Homer counterpart is in fact gay and that there was ingestion of poison.
So long as Faulkner deserves to be discussed in literary academia, “A Rose for Emily” will remain one of the most essential texts. While it’s yet to be seen if this is my favorite from “Collected Stories,” there is a reason that it’s an undoubtable classic. It has a brisk pace that never lets up, leading to a conclusion so satisfying that it only inspires a close reading. Unlike other stories, this feels less a chore than a chance to dig into the ambiguity of the details and realize how important word choice is. Are we reading the truth, or is there’s some fabrication going on? By the end of the story, I don’t believe that we’re any closer to understanding Emily. Is that in itself symbolic of The South’s personal history, reflecting how complicated moving on really is? I don’t know, but depending on how read, it’s either a cautionary tale, a historic condemnation, or a love story that ends in the depths of some unfathomable loneliness. Whatever it is, Faulkner made it count and I can only hope there’s a few more stories as creatively challenging as this. Finally, a fun coincidental detail is that the next story in this anthology is “Hair,” which is the final word written here. Will there be another connection, slowly roping everyone along?
Coming Up Next: “Hair”
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