A Rose For Emily
Like so many American writers, Faulkner found himself again and again writing short stories, some of which are considered as equally important as his best novels. Good as his short stories are, they seem always at the threshold of being absorbed into the Yoknapatawpha saga — that legendary matrix which is Faulkner’s real achievement. However, for a beginner of Faulkner scholarship, his short stories may well be an easy start. “A Rose for Emily” is Faulkner’s first short story published in 1930. Set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknopatawpha, the story focuses on Emily Grierson, an eccentric spinster who refuses to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. Simple as it is in plot, the story is pregnant with meaning. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily is typical of those in Faulkner’s Yoknapatwapha stories who are the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past. In this story, Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic devices in narration, and, the deformed personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates in her relationship with her sweetheart is dramatized in such a way that we feel shocked and thrilled as we read along. In this story, Faulkner’s strong condemnation of the values of old tradition emanates from the pathetic life story of the central character, Emily Grierson dominated by her father and restrained by
his rigid ideas of social status, she has been prevented from getting married during his lifetime, and therefore after his death she is left alone and penniless. Her dependence on her father continues even after he dies. By delineating Miss Emily’s tragedy, Faulkner offers a strong denunciation of the morals of his own southern culture. Yet in “A Rose for Emily”, we can sense the underlying acclaim of the standard and moral values found in the South which have been destroyed by commerce and machinery. In spite of Emily’s insanity and grotesque actions, Faulkner chooses “A Rose for Emily” as the title of this story to show his admiration for Miss Emily who is a symbol of “tradition, duty and care; sort of hereditary obligation”. In addition, that Faulkner depicts Emily as dignified, valiant and literate; her serf as loyal and staunch; Colonel Sartories, generation as sympathetic and considerate is also a revelation of his applause of the glorious past which contains “the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and piety and sacrifice.”
In “A Rose for Emily”, we can feel that part of the emotional and psychological thrill and involvement is that the style is adapted to the subject. First, Faulkner’s handling of time in his story is most noteworthy. The displaced chronology undoubtedly allows the narrator to tell the story in the most dramatic way and also to fill in adequate background details, but it is also a way in which one of the
themes — denunciation of the sins and evils of the southern culture — can be illustrated and strengthened by the structure itself. The interruption of chronological order denotes the moral confusion and social depravity of the southern tradition. Emily is in agonizing conflict, with herself, with modernization, and with the past forces that lie beyond her control. In order to dissipate her inner tensions, she clings to her father’s memory and refuses to change. Emily’s house, in the narrator’s eyes, marks the declining and disintegrating values of the South. In spite of all her eccentricities, not to mention her serious mental illness, she is never laughed at or treated with contempt or disgust by the narrator. Instead her struggle to assert her will has something courageous and heroic which serves to remind us of courage, honor and pride that Faulkner acclaims. In “A Rose for Emily”, and his entire Yoknapatawpha saga, Faulkner penetrates deeply into the psychological motivations for man’s actions and investigates man’s dilemma in the modern world throughout his fictional world, we profoundly sense his inner conflict and his combined feeling of love and hatred for the South. Although his novels often contain a two-faceted motif which compounds the condemnation of the sins and evils of the South and a compliment of its great and noble qualities, they are structurally sound as being pitched in too high a key.
A-Rose-For-Emily英文读后感
