A Rose for Emily Section 1 Summary Before we begin, we want to direct you to our discussion of the town's "Setting.

" If you get confused about when a given event is happening, our chronology should help clear things up. We should also note that the narrator of this story is a little odd. The narrator often refers to itself as "we," and seems to represent several generations of townspeople, both male and female, in Jefferson, Louisiana (see "Setting" for more on this). So, during the summary we might refer to the narrator as "the narrator," "the town," "the townspeople." Now for the summary: The story begins at Miss Emily Grierson's funeral. Apparently, everybody in town has come. The men, we are told, come because they have some good feelings for her, and admire her. The narrator says that the town sees her as a "fallen monument" (1.1). This is a confusing line. A monument is a structure or building created as a memorial to a specific person or event. (Don't worry. It will all sort of make sense in the end.) The women's reason for coming to the funeral (which is apparently being held at Miss Emily's home) is pretty simple: curiosity. It's been over a decade since anyone except for Miss Emily and Tobe, the black man who is her servant, have seen inside the house. Now we get a description of the house. It's a fancy house, originally white, with cupolas and spires. It was built in the 1870s on what used to be the best street in town. (Click here to see what the house might have looked like when built.) Now the street is an urban and industrial center, and the old house is an unattractive building in an unattractive neighborhood. When Miss Emily was living she was, for the town, "a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town" (1.3). (In other words, the townspeople have inherited her, and feel responsible for her. That she is a "tradition" also suggests that the townspeople pass on this inherited duty from generation to generation.) The "hereditary obligation" began in 1894 when Emily's father died. Apparently, Emily's father left her the house, but no money.

Colonel Sartoris, the mayor of the town, devised a scheme for not making Miss Emily pay taxes on her house, while not making her feel like she was being offered charity. He made up an imaginary loan from her father to the town, and said the town was paying it back by "remitting" (releasing her from) her taxes. The narrator also calls this a "dispensation" which means "exemption." When the "next generation" gets involved with running the town, they decided they want to collect taxes from Miss Emily after all. When sending her the tax bill, and writing her letters, doesn't work, a "deputation" (a group of representatives of the town) comes to her house to ask her to pay the debt. Now we get the story of that meeting: Miss Emily's servant lets them into her parlor. We learn that nobody from the town has been in her house in almost a decade, since Miss Emily stopped "giving china-painting lessons." The room is dusty and smelly and dark. Emily's servant lets in some light from a window, and they look at a portrait of Miss Emily's father. Enter Miss Emily. Everybody stands. She is "a small, fat woman in black" (1.6). Miss Emily is wearing a gold chain so long it disappears into the belt of her clothing. She's also sporting an elegant ebony cane complete with a golden head. The conversation takes place with everybody standing. Basically, they ask her the debt, and she tells them to see Colonel Sartoris, who apparently has been dead for about ten years. When they press her she is firm she doesn't have any taxes. Period. She calls her servant, Tobe, and asks him to get the tax collectors out of her parlor. A Rose for Emily Section 2 Summary The section begins by saying that Emily "vanquished," or beat those tax collectors, in the same way that she "vanquished" their dads some thirty years ago when they came to her house because of some mysterious "smell." This smell showed up about two years after Emily's father died, and pretty soon after her boyfriend left her.

The neighbors complain to Judge Stevens, the mayor, but he can't think of a way to politely tell Miss Emily (a southern lady) that her roses aren't smelling so sweet. So, four guys go to her house and sprinkle lime (see "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory" for a discussion of lime) everywhere they can reach. They can see Emily watching from an upstairs window. She is described as "motionless as that of an idol" (2.10). (You might have to chew on that one before it resonates. It's a confusing line.) Anyhow, the smell goes away in a matter of weeks. Around this time, the town begins to pity Miss Emily. She is more proof that the Grierson family wasn't as superior as they thought they were. We learn that Emily's great-aunt, old lady Wyatt, had gone insane, and that Emily's father didn't think any of the men in town were "quite good enough for Miss Emily" (2.11). Speaking of Emily's father, the man didn't leave her much more than the house when he died (though the reason isn't given). Emily's poverty gives the town a reason to feel sorry for her, and to see her as a human being. When the town ladies learned that Emily's father was dead, they went over there to give her their condolences and were met with an Emily in complete denial. For about three days she refused to admit that her father was dead. The preachers and the doctors worked with her and finally Emily faced the facts and broke down in grief and let them take the body and bury it. The town didn't think Emily was insane for being in denial over her father's death. They knew that even though the man had "robbed her" (2.14) (by scaring off her suitors), he was really all she had. A Rose for Emily Section 3 Summary After her father's death, Emily is ill for a good while. When she next emerges from the house, she has a short haircut and a sad, angelic look about her. Around this time, in the summer after the death of Emily's father, Homer Barron enters the picture. He's in town overseeing a crew of men in a project to pave the town's sidewalks. Homer is a "Yankee" (he's from the North) and seems to be a real "life of the party" kind of guy.

Everybody in town is aware of his presence, and soon enough they start seeing him giving Emily rides in his buggy. Some townspeople are happy she found somebody, even if he is a northerner. But other people think she is shirking her "noblesse oblige" (the notion that wealthy people shouldn't associate with a person of lower rank) (3.3). They think she needs family to help her, and consider contacting some obscure cousins, relatives of old lady Wyatt. During the time these cousins are staying with Emily, when Emily is "over thirty" (3.6), she goes to the pharmacy and forces the pharmacist to give her arsenic (poison) but won't tell him why she wants it. We'll just quote you the final lines of this section, since summary just won't do: "When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: 'For rats'" (3.15). A Rose for Emily Section 4 Summary The town immediately hears about Emily's arsenic purchase, and immediately assumes she will kill herself. They also think this is the best solution to her problem. When Emily and Homer first became an item, the town thought they would get married. Later, the town begins to believe that Homer is gay he likes to have drinks with "younger men" (4.1) and admits he isn't the marrying kind. The town feels sorry for Emily whenever they see her riding with Homer. Some of the women become worried that Emily's relationship with Homer is a bad example for the town youths. Then, the meddling begins. First the town gets the minister to talk to Emily about the Homer Barron problem. She must have really told off that minister, because he refuses tell anybody what Emily said to him, and she doesn't stop seeing Homer. So, they bring out the big guns: Emily's two female cousins from Alabama, relatives of old lady Wyatt. For a little while, the town doesn't think the cousin plan was successful. When Emily buys a shaving kit with Homer's initials on it, and "a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a

nightshirt" (4.3), they think that Emily and Homer either are married or soon will be. The town is happy about this, because they like the cousins way less than they like Miss Emily and want to see the cousins fail at what they had set out to do. Homer's project finishes, and he isn't in town. They think he'll be back once Miss Emily's cousins leave, and they're right. A few days after the cousins took off, Homer Barron comes back on the scene. He is seen entering Miss Emily's house, but never seen after that. Other than the occasional glimpse in the window, the town doesn't see Emily for about six months. When she emerges after the six months, she's put on lots of weight, and her hair has turned gray. It gets grayer and grayer until it is "an even pepper-andsalt iron gray" (4.6). At this point, she goes back into her home and doesn't come out of her house until she dies, except for when she gives china-painting lessons. She gives the lessons for about six or seven years, beginning when she is about 40. But when the younger generation takes over the town, they stop sending their kids to Miss Emily and her door stays closed. The town then watches Tobe's hair go gray, as he goes back and forth from the house with the shopping. The town sends Miss Emily a bill for her taxes every December, and it is always returned. She is only seen, from time to time, in a downstairs window. Somehow, the town knows that Miss Emily had "shut up the top floor of her house" (4.9). The narrator says she looked "like the carven torso of an idol in a niche" (4.9). (An idol is a worshiped, and usually feared, object. Such an object might be placed "in a niche," a spot. And since Emily is in the window, only her torso is visible.) Then the narrator tells us that this image of Emily in the window is seen by generations of townspeople. To all these generations she is "dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse" (4.9). Emily dies like that in a dusty, old, dark house, with just the aged Tobe for company and care. Nobody even knew Emily was sick before she died. The town had stopped asking Tobe about her long ago, knowing he wouldn't tell them anything.

Tobe's voice sounded like it was rarely used. The town doubts he even talked to Emily. Miss Emily died in a bedroom downstairs in an old bed that hasn't seen sun in a very long time. A Rose for Emily Section 5 Summary Tobe opens the door to the women of the town on the day of the funeral, and then he leaves by the back door. He isn't seen again, as far as anyone knows. The cousins show up right away and hold the big funeral, on the day after Miss Emily's death. The narrator says that the town women are pretty grim. Some of the older men at the funeral wear their old Confederate soldier uniforms, and believe they are about the same age as Emily. They may even have danced with her and dated her when she was young. (Since Emily was seventy-four when she died, these guys must be near that age or older.) The narrator says that these men are confused about time, because they don't see the past as a "road" that they get father and farther away from, but as "a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches" (5.2). This meadow of the past is only "divided from them by" the last decade (5.2). (We think that the narrator is basically saying that for these men, the past is a huge lush playground that never changes. Since the men aren't actually in that past literally, they still feel separated from it by time.) Anyhow, the narrator says that town already knows that upstairs in Miss Emily's house there is a certain room, a room that "no one had seen in forty years" (5.3). They know they will have to break down the door to get in there. Out of decency, they wait until after Miss Emily is buried before they do the deed. (You really should check out our "What's Up the Ending?", where you'll find a break-down of the story's final moments.) OK, so they've broken down the door. It's dusty in here! A deathliness seems to cover everything in the room, which is set up like a bridal suite. This deathliness covers the curtains, which are "of a faded rose color," and the light covers are "rose-colored" (5.4). It even colors the old, silver shaving-kit on the dressing table.

Also on the dressing table we have a collar (in those days most men's shirts had removable collars), and a tie. In the bed, we have Homer Barron! He's wearing a smile and his body looks like it "had once lain in the attitude of embrace" (5.6). (So he died hugging Emily?) We'll quote the next little bit for you: "*B+ut now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him" (5.6). Let's take a closer look at this line: the "sleep that outlasts love" is death, right? To cuckold is to cheat on your significant other. So, we think the basic meaning of the passage is that death has finally cheated on him with Emily and/or that Emily has cheated on Homer with death. There isn't much left of Homer. He's just about rotted into the bed, nightshirt and all. There's a pillow next to him. On the pillow is "an indentation of a head" (5.7). One of the townspeople picks something up off of the pillow. It's a hair, a "long strand of iron-gray hair" (5.7). A Rose for Emily Themes Little Words, Big Ideas Isolation There's no getting around the fact that "A Rose for Emily" is a story about the extremes of isolation by physical and emotional. This Faulkner classic shows us the process by which human be... Memory and the Past Gavin Stevens (a William Faulkner character) famously says, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This idea is highly visible in all Faulkner's work, and we definitely see it here, in "A Ro... Visions of America "A Rose for Emily" doesn't look at America through rosecolored glasses, even though many of its characters do. In the aftermath of slavery, the American South shown in the novel is in bad shape. T... Versions of Reality By showing people with skewed versions of reality, "A Rose for Emily" asks us to take off our "rose-colored" glasses and look reality in the face. What we confront is the reality of America in the...

Compassion and Forgiveness "Compassion and Forgiveness" is another major theme that we can find in almost any Faulkner story. At first, it might not be apparent in this case. We almost have to be told that these sentiments a... Miss Emily Grierson Miss Emily is an old-school southern belle trapped in a society bent on forcing her to stay in her role. She clings to the old ways even as she tries to break free. When she's not even forty, she's on a road that involves dying alone in a seemingly haunted house. At thirty-something she is already a murderer, which only adds to her outcast status. Miss Emily is a truly tragic figure, but one who we only see from the outside. Granted, the townspeople who tell her story know her better than we do, but not really by much. This is why Emily is called "impervious." We can't quite penetrate her or completely understand her. But, perhaps there is a little Emily in all of us. In the spirit of finding the human being behind the mask, lets zero in on a few aspects of Emily, the person. Daughter and Woman As far as we know, Emily is an only child. The story doesn't mention any siblings. It also doesn't mention her mother. It strikes us as odd that the narrator doesn't say anything about her mother at all. We can't really think of a reasonable explanation for this, other than that the narrator wants to emphasize just how much Emily was her father's daughter, and just how alone she was with him when he was alive. From all evidence, he controlled her completely until his death, and even continued to control her from beyond the grave. By separating her so severely from the rest of the town when he was alive, going as far as to make sure she didn't have any lovers or a husband, he set her up for a way of life that was impossible for her to escape, until her death. We might think of her as weak, or as unwilling to take a stand against her father in life. This assessment is kind of like blaming the victim though. The bare sketch we have of her father shows a man who was unusually controlling, domineering, and perhaps capable of deep cruelty, even toward his only daughter. This theory also disguises her behavior after his death, when she tried desperately to

shed the image of dutiful daughter, and, probably for the first time, at thirty-something, pursued her own desires for love and sex. When this attempt at womanhood failed miserably, she reverted back to the life her father created for her a lonely, loveless, isolated life. Except now, with Homer Barron rotting away upstairs, there are two men that haunt her. Artist We don't know for sure if Emily's artistic ability extended beyond china-painting. Some readers and critics seem to think that Miss Emily is responsible for the "crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father" (1.4) that sits on an easel in the parlor. This may well be the case. (Also, it should be noted that "crayon" here could refer to black or colored charcoal, chalk, or oil crayons.) Even though we don't have the full lowdown on Emily's art, thinking of her as an artist helps us to see the tragedy of her life, and also provides us a bit of a hopeful angle of vision. On the tragic side, we see that while Emily's art was at first a link to the town, a way to be a member of the community and to have some contact with the outside world. Once the "newer generation" pieced together her secret, even this last link was gone. On the hopeful side, there is some possibility that Emily was able to turn to her art as a source of comfort and for something to do. Maybe after the townspeople found Homer Barron's corpse, they found a houseful of Miss Emily's art as well. Miss Emily's Legacy In "What's Up With the Ending?", we discuss that the townspeople aren't at all surprised to find Homer Barron's body rotting in the closed off room. They broke into the room to confirm what had probably become common knowledge over the years. When Emily didn't kill herself with the arsenic, and when the smell appears, they drew the logical conclusion (passed down from one generation to the next) that Emily must have used the poison on Homer. There is some indication that the townspeople were surprised to find Miss Emily's hair on the pillow beside his body. The imprint of a head in the dust suggests that she might have lain there in the not so distant past.

It's possible that she left this "evidence" there on purpose, her final comment on life before she died. It's not much of a will, but perhaps it's still an important legacy for the townspeople, whose parents had cruelly interfered in Emily's happiness, and who themselves further isolated her out of fear, disgust, and general spite. Everyone pitied Emily, but that's a lot different than loving her. What she left them was the legacy of just how human she was, of just how much she wanted love, and just how warped and twisted the desire for love can become when it is declared off limits. Miss Emily Grierson Timeline Tobe Tobe, first described as "an old man-servant a combined gardener and cook" (1.1). He is an even more mysterious character than Emily, and, ironically, probably the only one who knows the answers to all the mysteries in the story. He's also a major connection to the theme "Compassion and Forgiveness." Read on to see what we mean. Caregiver Tobe gave his whole life to the care of Miss Emily. We don't know what kind of relationship they had beyond that of employer and servant, but there isn't any indication that either of them abused the other. Perhaps they have us all fooled, and there in the haunted old house they carried on a loving, caring relationship. Whatever the case, we have to hand it to Tobe for taking care of Miss Emily for most of her life, and most of his (as we talk about in the next section). He also must have been the one to alert the town to both Emily's father's death, and also to her own death. Loyal and discreet, he protected her privacy from the prying eyes and ears of the town. This might be part of why he split after her death, to avoid having to divulge her secrets to the town. Of course, he probably also left because his duty was finally done, and he could escape the stinking, rotting crypt of a house. The Tragedy of Tobe In the section above, we speculate about Tobe. That analysis doesn't really get at the tragedy of his life. He was probably born around the same time as Emily

(approximately 1861) and so was almost definitely born a slave, probably on a plantation that Emily's father may have owned. Assuming he was born with the family or was with them from a young age, he stayed with them through the Civil War, and, as we have seen, through all the rest, too. As a black man in the South his options were limited, maybe even more limited than Emily's. Like her, he might have become convinced that the world outside that house was not the place for him. He might have felt intense loyalty to Miss Emily, and maybe even, like the town, an obligation to her. If they were raised together, they might easily have developed a kind of brother-sister relationship. Alternatively, he might have despised her, or been disgusted and horrified by her. He might have wished for her death. As a human being in a completely bizarre situation, he might have felt a complex tangle of all of those things, and more. Homer Barron Homer is the man Emily murderers. Yet, somehow, the focus of the tragedy is on Emily. Given the information we know about Homer, he isn't a very sympathetic character. This is partly because the town, as represented by the narrator, doesn't like him. Jeffersonians don't like him because he's a rough-talking, charismatic northerner and an overseer in town working on a sidewalk-paving project. How involved with Emily he was, we don't know. He may have intended to marry her, but became dissuaded by the wacky antics of her cousins and the town. Why he went to her house that last time, and how exactly he ended up dead in the bed, we don't know. We don't even know if he really did, or was about to, break off his relationship with Emily before she killed him. Homer's Sexuality We also don't know if he was gay. We bring this up because this is one of the big questions students have after reading the story. The following line is the source of this confusion: Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked he liked men, and it was known

that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club that he was not a marrying man. (4.1) What a strange sentence to unpack. Remember also, that it's gossip, in the most hard-core gossip section of the story. In this fragment, the town seems to be saying that even though Homer is gay, and even though he isn't the marrying kind, Emily will still manage to hook him. Unpacked, we can really see the spite. Their comments means that she definitely won't succeed, but that if she does, he's not the kind of man she thinks he is. Nothing in the story tells us whether Homer was gay or not, but you can be pretty sure that's what the town people were insinuating. The Guy Deserves Some Compassion It's hard to find anything nice to say about Homer, but that doesn't mean we can't extend to him that compassion this story tries (in it's macabre way) to bring out in us. Whatever he did, whoever he was, he didn't deserve to be murdered. In over-sympathizing with Emily, and with the town's rationalization and cover-up of the murder, we run the risk of erring where they erred. While Emily probably would have ended up in an awful insane asylum had the town investigated the disappearance of Homer Barron officially, Homer Barron might have had family or friends that never learned about what happened to him. Even if he didn't, isn't it important that the justice speak for those victims who can't speak for themselves? Miss Emily's Father Emily's father is the guy with the gigantic horsewhip. He's only referred to as "Emily's father." Faulkner himself didn't approve of the man at all. In an interview, Faulkner expounds on this character: In this case there was the young girl with a young girl's normal aspirations to find love and then a husband and a family, who was brow-beaten and kept down by her father, a selfish man who didn't want her to leave home because he wanted a housekeeper, and it was a natural instinct of repressed which you can't repress it you can mash it down but it comes up somewhere else and very likely in a tragic form, and that was simply another manifestation of man's injustice to man, of the poor tragic human being

struggling with its own heart, with others, with its environment, for the simple things which all human beings want. In that case it was a young girl that just wanted to be loved and to love and to have a husband and a family. (source) That description is pretty straightforward. The story is meant to show a very selfish man in a very selfish society. He's kind of a one-note fellow, and that note is Me, me, me, me, me! The Colonel is the guy who initially dreamed up the scheme to relieve Emily of her tax obligations when her father died. That was a nice thing to do. But, this same Colonel, the mayor, "who," we are told also "fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron" (1.3). That's not so nice. Unfortunately, the coexistence of these two modes was the norm in those days among powerful political figures Judge Stevens Judge Stevens gets one of the best lines in the story: "Dammit, sir, will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" (2.9) Given everything the town knows at this point, the smell should have generated a warrant to inspect her home. He's portrayed as an older, (he's 80), powerful, and a very southern man, and he raises a little question.OK, we know that Colonel Sartoris was the mayor when Emily's father died, and we know that it was two years later that the townspeople began complaining about the smell. The town could have changed mayors in two years, but would they have elected a mayor that was eighty years old? We challenge you to figure this out. Old Lady Wyatt Old lady Wyatt is Emily's great-aunt (on her father's side, we believe). Before her death, according to the townspeople, old lady Wyatt is "completely crazy" (2.11). She seems to be in the story to suggest that insanity runs in Emily's family. The Cousins The town thinks Miss Emily's "two female cousins are even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been" (4.4). That is definitely not a compliment. These cousins from Alabama are relatives of old lady Wyatt and had been estranged from Emily's father since the time of old lady Wyatt's death. In fact, they were so estranged that they didn't even show up to Emily's father's funeral. The situation with the cousins exposes some of the dark

irony of the story. The townspeople call in the cousins to stop Emily from dating Homer, but when they decide they hate the cousins, they switch sides and try to push Emily and Homer together. A Rose for Emily Analysis

What's Up With the Title? You probably noticed that there is no rose in the story, though we do find the word "rose" four times. Check out the first two times the word is used:When the Negro opened the blinds of one window,... What's Up With the Ending?

Literary Devices in A Rose for Emily Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory Miss Emily's house is an important symbol in this story. (In general, old family homes are often significant symbols in Gothic literature.) For most of the story, we, like the townspeople, only see... Setting Setting is usually pretty rich in Faulkner. SimCity-style, William Faulkner created his own Mississippi County, Yoknapatawpha, as the setting for much of his fiction. This county comes complete wit... Narrator Point of View The fascinating narrator of "A Rose for Emily" is more rightly called "first people" than "first person." Usually referring to itself as "we," the narrator speaks sometimes for the men of Jefferson... Genre Even before we see the forty-year-old corpse of Homer Barron rotting into the bed, the creepy house, and the creepy Miss Emily let us know that we are in the realm of horror or Gothic fiction. Comb... Tone We can think of a bunch more adjectives to describe the tone of the story, these seems to be the dominant emotional tones the narrator is expressing as Miss Emily's story is told. (Keep in mind tha... Writing Style While Ernest Hemingway boils things down to the essentials, his friend William Faulkner lets the pot boil over, spilling onto the stove, down onto the floor, and maybe somehow catching the kitchen...

It's funny that a story as out of sequence as "A Rose for Emily" ends at the end with the discovery of the fortyyear-old corpse of Homer Barron. Readers and critics often feel that if the... Plot Analysis Death and TaxesAs we discuss in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory," Faulkner might be playing on the Benjamin Franklin quote, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," in... Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis: Tragedy Meeting Homer BarronAlthough she doesn't quite fit the profile a Booker tragic hero, Miss Emily has often been thought of as a very special tragic case. We think that applying Booker to her present... Three Act Plot Analysis The curtains open on the huge funeral of Miss Emily Grierson, which is taking place on the grounds of a decrepit southern house. The fact that nobody in town has been in Emily's house for a decade...