A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
Opposite sides of change
William Faulkner, a longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, did not attend any literary school. His work, A Rose for Emily, explored southern history and legend while delving into sensitive insights into human character. It’s about how Emily, the main character, refused to accept the change. In it, she captured her spirit of the time and conveyed the past and present in relation to the rejection of change and the rejection of progress.
Set in the post-Civil War period of the late 1800s and early 1900s, A Rose for Emily features the two opposing sides of change: the townspeople who accepted it, and Emily who rejected it. Her father influenced his attitude toward any transformation; while his house; the servant, Tobe; Colonel Sartoris; and his lover, Homer, symbolized the past. Emily was raised very traditionally; her father was a very old-fashioned man who did not believe in equality between men and women. Even in the changing world of equality, he taught Emily that a woman’s place takes a backseat. Her adoration for him was made evident by keeping her “pencil portrait” of her, and her influence on her is best portrayed in her death, a death that took him 3 days to recognise. After her death, Emily refused to accept that something had changed: her father was gone.
This refusal to accept the change is also seen in her care of the servant, Tobe. Even after all the transformations that postwar brought, a war that was fought primarily to end slavery, Emily refused to give Tobe her freedom. She had kept it until the day of his death: when “[s]he died…[t]The black went through the house and out the back and was never seen again.” Emily stayed in her ways and nothing, not even people’s ambivalence toward her, changed that. She was pitied, scorned, scrutinized, and there They were the ones who rejoiced when she had fallen: “she had become human”, they said. Emily did not move: she was still the reclusive, mysterious, eccentric, who rejected change.
Change is a concept Emily wouldn’t understand. When the “next generation” of city leaders tried to force her to pay her taxes, she clung to Colonel Sartori’s old agreement that her taxes be forgiven. Colonel Sartori’s death, like the other neighborhood changes, was rejected, and she was firm in reiterating that “[she] do[es] having no taxes in Jefferson.” She had dismissed them the same way she had dismissed her parents “thirty years before…” By not accepting her civic duties and rejecting fellowship, Emily preserved the past by denying the present.
Tradition and old ways aren’t the only things Emily preserved. When a scandalous relationship began between her and Homer (the Yankee), she eliminated the feeling of abandonment that she felt after the death of her father by murdering Homer. There, in that room upstairs, lay Homer’s remains, unchanged from the day she had put him there. He’s put in the bedroom upstairs”[t]the body [that] Apparently he had once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that vanquishes even love’s grimace, had cuckolded him. -color room upstairs in his house.
A personification of Emily, the Grierson house was a “[a] stubborn, flirtatious decadence.” Emily, like her home, the symbol of grandeur, of southern aristocracy, is the only one left of her kind in the neighborhood. While “…garages and cotton gins they had invaded and destroyed…the neighborhood,” she resisted and rejected the change, living a life like a time capsule that was never buried. She was caught between the past and the present and stood still, just like her home, she stayed there unaffected by the changes around her Emily refused and resisted change, in essence, she rejected progress.
Progress is necessary for our joy and satisfaction. It is essential that we learn from the past and use it to make things better for the future. Emily typified postwar Southerners who strenuously rejected the change as useless. She lived her life by living in the past, stubbornly rejecting the changes around her and remained secluded. She was isolated to the end, which she could have avoided if she had been a bit open-minded and malleable to change, because change is inevitable. As the former UK Prime Minister, the late Harold Wilson, said: “He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution that rejects progress is the graveyard.”