A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner | Part 1

Professor Bill Yarrow of Joliet Junior College provides an in-depth summary and analysis of Part 1 of William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily.


The deliciously macabre A Rose for Emily begins with the funeral of Miss Emily Grierson, an old spinster in the post-Civil War South. She becomes a topic of speculation and performative pity for the residents of a small Southern town.

In the present, she is cloistered in her family home. Years before, she was courted by the Yankee Homer Barron, and then jilted by him after he rejected her overtures of marriage. In the wake of this disappointment, she retreated from society and became increasingly eccentric.

Following her death, it emerges that she killed Barron and arranged his corpse in a bridal suite, living with it for decades like a homicidal Miss Havisham or Norman Bates.

Laden with detailed descriptions of the changing society of the post-Civil War South and memorably evoking the prurient curiosity of small town life, the story evokes a deeply creepy and darkly amusing view of romance and its discontents.

Mississippi native William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily was first published in 1930. Though Faulkner’s short stories were popular, he viewed them as a means of quick income between novels such as The Sound and the Fury. His disturbing short story A Rose for Emily epitomizes the Southern Gothic.

The short story contains many powerful symbols including the Griersons’s house, representing Miss Emily’s broken dreams as it slides into disrepair; gray hair, representing the passage of time; and a man’s toilet set, embodying hope for Miss Emily’s relationship with Barron. Important themes include tradition versus progress, the post-Civil War south, and the patriarchy.


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