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This document provides biographical information about American author William Faulkner and summarizes his short story "A Rose for Emily". It discusses how the story is divided into five sections chronicling Emily Grierson's life and death in a changing post-Civil War Mississippi town. It then analyzes Emily's character, noting how she attempts to exert power over death by denying it and having disturbing relationships with the corpses of deceased loved ones, representing the decline of the old Southern social order. Her buying of arsenic also foreshadows the story's climax.
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English prose.pptx cc
- 2. I WOULD LIKE TO EXPLAIN PSYCHO ANALYZE OF SHORT STORY A ROSE FOR EMILY BY William Faulkner
- 3. BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM FAULKNER William Faulkner The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realm of American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. More than simply a renowned Mississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth centurys greatest writers, one who transformed his postage stamp of native soil into an apocryphal setting in which he explored, articulated, and challenged the old verities and truths of the heart. During what is generally considered his period of greatest artistic achievement, from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in 1942, Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing. It is one of the more remarkable feats of American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in the same small Southern county novels that include As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all, Absalom, Absalom! that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever written by an American. The Early Years William Cuthbert Falkner (as his name was then spelled) was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons born to Murry and Maud Butler Falkner. He was named after his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, the Old Colonel, who had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with his former business partner in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi. A lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil War colonel, railroad financier, and finally a best- selling writer (of the novel The White Rose of Memphis), the Old Colonel, even in death, loomed as a larger-than-life model of personal and professional success for his male descendants.
- 4. SUMMARY Short story of A rose for emily The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily Griersons death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for more than ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emilys house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the towns previous mayor, had suspended Emilys tax responsibilities to the town after her fathers death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out. In section II, the narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity. The townspeople have always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves, with Emilys father driving off the many suitors deemed not good enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is still single by the time she turns thirty.
- 5. PSYCHO ANALYZE Emily stands as an emblem of the Old South, a grand lady whose respectability and charm rapidly decline through the years, much like the outdated sensibilities the Griersons represent. The death of the old social order will prevail, despite many townspeoples attempts to stay true to the old ways. Emily attempts to exert power over death by denying the fact of death itself. Her bizarre relationship to the dead bodies of the men she has loved her necrophilia is revealed first when her father dies. Unable to admit that he has died, Emily clings to the controlling paternal figure whose denial and control became the only yet extreme form of love she knew. She gives up his body only reluctantly. When Homer dies, Emily refuses to acknowledge it once again although this time, she herself was responsible for bringing about the death. In killing Homer, she was able to keep him near her. However, Homers lifelessness rendered him permanently distant. Emily and Homers grotesque marriage reveals Emilys disturbing attempt to fuse life and death. However, death ultimately triumphs. When the town noticed Emily and Homer spending time together, the town frowned upon the union. Emily, in spite of her lack of money, was still revered with old-fashioned Southern expectations. Homer was a working class fellow, not good enough for Emily by most standards. Also, that Emily and Homer were dating without any talk of marriage was considered scandalous. The narrator describes Emily as a fallen woman. A fallen woman is a woman who has been guilty of adultery or sex before marriage. It's an outdated term. This is just an example of how society judged women at this point in history. The climax of the story takes place in part three, when Emily decides to buy arsenic from the local pharmacy. While she allows the pharmacist to assume it's for killing rats, there's definitely a red flag here for the reader.