Ⅰ.Introduction

“A Rose for Emily” is a classic story representing Faulkner’s favorite subject, theme and style. The story is set in the town of Jefferson in his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, the “mythical kingdom”. The story begins with a funeral of the eponymous Miss Emily. It does not follow a particular order of chronological time. The narration flows backwards or forwards in a line of reality, revealing significant details of Emily’s life and the murder of the Homer Barron by Emily, which are suspended till the end of the story. The narrative is also divided into five parts, allowing for flexible shifts in time and displays of Emily’s image at various stages of her life. Through the story about Emily, the author tries to pinpoint an unavoidable fate of the aristocracy and various changes in the South America after the Civil War.

In this story, Emily Grierson, the main character, is a victim. Dominated by her father and his rigid ideas of social status, she has been prevented from marrying during her lifetime. One year after her father’s death, she falls in love with a northerner. When she finds that her lover is not going to get married with her, she poisons him so that she can keep him with her forever. Though the plot of the story is not complicated, yet it can be considered as a minor program of his works. In it are examples of Faulkner’s artistic preoccupations and techniques: the exploration of psychological reality, the social structure and mores of a southern community, the nature of time, and the relation of the past to the present. This paper will approach the story from the following aspects: analysis of Emily’s character, the root causes of her characters and her destiny.

Ⅱ.Analysis of Emily’s characters

Emily is the main character, the protagonist of the story. In this story, the author mainly focuses and reveals the main character—Emily. In order to analyze Emily’s character, some questions have at first to be answered: What type is this story or what kind of theme this story plans to reveal? When answering these questions, it becomes much easier to analyze her character. Miss Emily is kind of quiet and

perverse, proud and aloof, haughty, brave and tough, a representative of traditional convention and so forth. The followings are going to expatiate on them.

2.1 Miss Emily’s haughty character

At the very first, Emily is easy to be regarded as a haughty woman. In the story, the writer not only reveals the abnormal phenomenon of Emily’s grotesque character and her ill-sexed psychology, but also lively portrays her as a strong figure of haughtiness. Miss Emily Grierson is the socialite of her town. Naturally with this status there is a certain reputation she has to withhold. She not only represented her family name but, in a sense the people of her town. Because she was such a dominant figure the townspeople had put her on a pedestal and were very attentive to her actions. During the time in which her father was alive Emily was seen as a figure to be admired but never touched. Many wooers she had but according to her father’s standard, none were suitable enough.

2.2 Miss Emily’s isolated and eccentric character

Besides, Miss Emily is isolated and eccentric. From the whole story, there is no doubt that she was an isolated one from the beginning of the story to the surprising end. All her life is the town people’s topic after meals. They regard her as a monster. And because of her family, in particular, her father, she nearly get separated from her neighbors, which adds more pressure to her personal affairs to fall in love with the Yankee, Homer Barron, which, at last, creates the tragedy. On the other hand, she is eccentric at the same time. When the men from the government want to tax her after

her father’s death, but they are refused by Emily. The reason is quite simple, that is, when her father is alive, in Jefferson, they need not to pay taxes. She just tells the government that she has no taxes in Jefferson. What she said was the matter several years ago. And there was once a man called Colonel Sartoris explained it to her about her tax-free privilege. She does not respect the truth, that is, her so-called Colonel died ten years ago and new policy comes into practice. The narrator arranges the specific detail on her behavior of buying Arsenic. The druggist can not imagine her purpose in buying the poison and just thinks that she might use it for rat and such things. Miss Emily just stares at him, her head tilts back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looks away and goes and gets the arsenic and wraps it up for her. How strange and eccentric she is. She does not allow anyone to ask about her matter, even though it is a dangerous affair which is forbidden by law.

2.3 Miss Emily’s necrophilia

Miss Emily is a necrophilia, too. Greatly surprised at the sight of the last paragraph of Faulkner’s short-story “A Rose for Emily”, the town people find that Miss Emily is not only a murderer, but also sleeps with Homer Barron after she kills him. Then it is noticed that in the second pillow is the indentation of a head. One of the townspeople lifts something from it, and leans forward, finding the faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, and a long strand of iron-gray hair. Horribly, she kills her lover and sleeps next to him for a long time until being found out. As for

the whole passage, the narrator refuses to dismiss Emily as simply mad or to treat her life as merely a grotesque, sensational horror story.

Instead, his narrative method brought us into her life before we hastily rejected

her, and doing so offered us a complex imaginative treatment of fierce

determination and strength coupled with illusions and shocking eccentricities.4

…… 此处隐藏：25111字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……