Blog 2 Miss Emily

I love "A Rose for Emily"! It's kind of grotesque to realize that (spoiler alert!) she has been sleeping next to a dead guy for a long time. Ah, love! :)

I'm teaching a gothic course also this summer, so maybe I'll write about the gothic elements in Faulkner's story. Gothic fictions tend to have a creepy, ancient, aristocratic house and family, both of which are decaying. The domestic spaces, which should be safest, are risky. Usually, the characters are pretty clearly defined: virginal woman at risk threatened by dark villain and rescued by gallant, handsome, unmarried hero. So, "A Rose for Emily" has some of the gothic elements and plays on the others.

Clearly, the house and family are decaying. The house is disappearing among "garages and cotton gins" with its "stubborn and coquettish deay" (30). The house has regal elements of a prior age that are being obliterated by time, but it is still clinging to them ("stubborn") and teasing ("coquettish") the community with wisps of memory and desire for times past.

In her earliest days, Emily might have seemed the virginal heroine, "a slender figure in white," and her father seems the dark villain, "a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip" (32). "silhouette" means he is shadowy and dark, and the whip suggests violence. Her white clothing put her in the innocent role. Her father will not let her marry, so she cannot escape. She is the victim trapped in a mouldering house by her father's violence.

Faulkner definitely turns the tables on the traditional melodramatic gothic theme by making virginal Emily into the villain. Homer Baron decides to leave, clearly not the gothic hero coming to the rescue, despite the obvious signs of Emily's affection: the "man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece" (34). She can't stand the shame and loneliness, so she poisons him to keep him forever. I can just hear the "a ha ha ha" of the villain laughing. And she doesn't get caught until she dies. Victory! The once victim has her last hurrah. There's something about the twist of making the innocent into the murderer that heightens the creepiness.