A Rose for Emily: An Analysis
of Style
The excerpt vividly
captures the mood at the funeral of Miss Emily, a reclusive spinster whose
death the narrator mentions at the beginning of the short story. It is a
foreshadowing technique present throughout the entire story. The paragraph has
two sentences that are completely different, with the first being a simple
sentence that reflects the relationship of the few remnants of a once noble
family that can generously be described as a sense of duty and tolerance. This
sentence is an example of use of figurative language, in this case visual imagery,
which is evident throughout the work.
Despite
the family having fallen on hard times, the funeral witnesses ‘the town coming
to look at Miss Emily’, more figurative language that captures the status befitting
Miss Emily. The personification of the many mourners as ‘the town’ that comes
‘to look’ because of respect and curiosity befits the status of the monumental
woman. Even the portrait of Emily’s father is at the funeral, a ‘crayon face…
musing profoundly above the bier’. This personification of the metaphor
reflects the relationship between father and daughter, with the proud father seemingly
regretting having dismissed all her daughter’s suitors.
The
ladies at the funeral are ‘sibilant and macabre’. Apart from reflecting the
prevailing mood at the funeral, this onomatopoeic rhetoric is a metaphor for
the hushed life of the reclusive lady. The town’s ladies various attempts to
help haughty Emily are shunned. And so they have nothing else to say or do for
Emily but attend her funeral with feelings of this onomatopoeia for ‘the dance
of death’. The ‘sibilant and macabre’ atmosphere accompanies the mourners when
they later knock down one of the rooms in Emily’s house.
There
are also very old men at the funeral whose mood is captured in the rest of the
paragraph. Some wear “Confederate uniforms’ which metaphorically describes
Emily’s lifespan, the period covered in the story glimpsing three critical
phases of the deceased woman’s life. These men are ‘on the porch and lawn’,
where nearly all men who have visited Emily’s house have ended. They are
‘talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs’, a simile
that introduces the comparison between Miss Emily and men.
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But
could the romanticizing old men be delusional in their thinking as captured in
the metaphor ‘confusing time with its mathematical progression’? These men have
not only lost their sense of time, they have simply lost their senses to
imagine romantic situations that never happened. The metaphor further explains
the deluded relationship between Miss Emily and men throughout her life; from
Colonel Sartoris who deluded the town that Emily needed not pay taxes, the
judge who was deluded to send men to her house, the men deluded they were
discreetly working under cover of darkness, her father deluded that Emily was
too good for men who came to betroth her, the men deluded they would marry her,
the authorities deluded they would coax Emily to pay her taxes, and Homer
Barron deluded to his death.
The
narrator gives a clue as to what is to follow in the phrases that follow, ‘as
the old do, the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow
which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow
bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.’ This metaphorically describes the
experience of the aged that the past is not to be forgotten, but is a well of
experience to be imbibed from. People only peep into the recent past through ‘a
narrow bottleneck’ and so the townsfolk were attending Emily’s funeral because
of respect and curiosity yet her life and death were a miserable indictment on certain
societal values and trends.
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Faulkner’s
story has detailed description for vivid recall as reflected in the funeral scene.
This is aided by strong imagery as
reflected in such phrases as ‘beneath a mass of bought flowers’, ‘crayon face
musing profoundly above the bier’ and ‘danced with her and courted her”.
Whereas
the second sentence in the paragraph is a complex-compound sentence, it is
easily understandable because of the syntactical structure of the work that
adds rhythm and balance. The clauses, which are separated by commas, are made
up of simple, short words.
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William
Faulkner. “A Rose for Emily.” The Harbrace
Anthology of Short Fiction. 4th ed. Ed. Jon C. Stott, Raymond E. Jones, and
Rick Bowers. Toronto: Nelson, 2006. 187-194. Print.
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