![]() ![]() We are in a similar position, though it seems sensible enough to surmise that Emily fell in love with Homer – who, it is strongly suggested, had no intention of settling down with her. The townsfolk are appalled by the idea that Miss Emily, an aristocratic Southern lady, might seriously be considering marriage to a Northerner, whom they consider to be beneath her on the social scale (hence the reference to noblesse oblige: Emily should entertain Homer and be courteous to him, but the idea that she could marry such a man horrifies the Southern townspeople’s sensibilities).įaulkner leaves many specific details of Emily’s relationship with Homer as mere hints and speculations, in keeping with the narrative mode of the story: the townspeople, shut out from her house and, in many ways, from her life, can only conjecture as to what happened. Although the American Civil War ended in 1865, decades before Faulkner was writing, the sense of North-South divide, in terms of culture, class, and identity, proved long-lasting (and arguably persists to this day). Faulkner’s story instead hints at an altogether more morbid and unwholesome notion: that Emily has continued to ‘sleep’ with Homer even after he was dead (indeed, perhaps that was the only way she could sleep with him at all).Īnother reason that the Southern Gothic tag is important for ‘A Rose for Emily’ is that Emily, a Southern lady, falls for a ‘Yankee’: a man from the North of the United States. This offers a new, more domestic take on a traditional trope in Gothic fiction: the dark secret threatening to destroy a ‘house’ or family (see Poe’s ‘ The Fall of the House of Usher’ for one notable example from the nineteenth century), and (in many Gothic stories) the dead body that is only discovered at the end of the narrative.īut at least Poe’s protagonists managed to bury their bodies (although sometimes, as in the story just mentioned, before they were actually dead), or concealed them beneath the floorboards. ![]() ![]() The crumbling Gothic castle has become a house in the Southern United States, in which everything is ‘tarnished’ (note how often that word recurs), spoiled, fading (like Emily’s iron-grey hair), and falling to ruin. Her reluctance to give up her father’s body for burial, for example, foreshadows her (presumed) murder of her lover and concealment of his body in the upper bedroom, whom she killed when she realised that was the only way of holding onto him and ensuring he remained hers for good. ![]()
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