Question

7. In an interview, Faulkner described the conflict of Miss Emily: she “had broken all the laws of her tradition, her background, and she had finally broken the law of God too. . . And she knew she was doing wrong, and that’s why her own life was wrecked. Instead of murdering one lover, and then to go on and take another and when she used him up to murder him, she was exploiting her crime.” How might this story be seen as expiation?

Answer 1

The story is narrated by a plural demotic narrator (us), and the fictitious world will be described taking into account the perspectives of all citizens, the narrator has the quality of a witness either because he heard comments or witnessed the facts personally.

For a sad and depressing person like Emily, love and possession go completely together and there is not another form of possession than death, the only one capable of suspending time. Death was the only possible outcome for Emily's sad and melancholy loves because only she gave him a definite form of possession.

One of the characteristics of "A rose for Emily" is the amount of temporary jumps that occur during the story which breaks the timeline. This is a twentieth-century narrative innovation. The first of these takes us to 1894, the year in which Colonel Sartoris, had exempted her from paying taxes with the false argument of a significant contribution of Emily's father to the city of Jefferson. The next temporary jump takes us to a closer time "when the new generation, then says" went to see her a deputation, knocked on the door that no visitor had crossed since she stopped giving painting lessons on porcelain eight or ten years before.

The relationship of the young woman with the father had been so strong that during his life, Emily had not had a boyfriend, and at age 30, when he died, she was still single.

The father figure who remembers the people in Jefferson, his portrait standing out in the room and covering the corpse of his daughter symbolizes the power of the past, a power that invades or destroys the individual, guiding him to self-destruction. It is for this reason that Emily manically denies the death of her father and opposes for several days to bury him: "We did not say then as always happens".

The story has a much deeper scope. Emily is a symbol not only of the southern woman, but also of the South and of her cult raging for a past that is definitely dead and, therefore, unrecoverable. Like Emily, every culture that stops and closes to becoming is doomed to madness, loneliness and death.