A Rose for Emily

1.      Give significant background information about the author or the literary piece

Answer:

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, The United States on September 25, 1897, he died on July 06, 1962. The genre is Literature & Fiction, Poetry, Southern Gothic.

The people who influence his novel are Mark Twain, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche,T.S Eliot.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was a Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, his reputation is based mostly on his novels, novellas, and short stories. He was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter.

The majority of his works are based in his native state of Mississippi. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." Faulkner has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature. Faulkner was influenced by the european modernism, and employed the Stream of consciousness
in several of his novels.

2.      Write the synopsis or summary of the literary text

Answer:

The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily Grierson’s 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, Emily’s house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax responsibilities to the town after her father’s 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 Emily’s 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.

The day after Mr. Grierson’s death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her father’s body over for burial.

In section III, the narrator describes a long illness that Emily suffers after this incident. The summer after her father’s death, the town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks, and a construction company, under the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is awarded the job. Homer soon becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station.

As the affair continues and Emily’s reputation is further compromised, she goes to the drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She offers no explanation, and the package arrives at her house labeled “For rats.”

In section IV, the narrator describes the fear that some of the townspeople have that Emily will use the poison to kill herself. Her potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly unlikely, despite their continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town insist that the Baptist minister talk with Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what happened and swears that he’ll never go back. So the minister’s wife writes to Emily’s two cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an extended stay. Because Emily orders a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homer’s initials, talk of the couple’s marriage resumes. Homer, absent from town, is believed to be preparing for Emily’s move to the North or avoiding Emily’s intrusive relatives

After the cousins’ departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite the occasional lesson she gives in china painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In what becomes an annual ritual, Emily refuses to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes up the top floor of the house. Except for the occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the servant is seen going in and out of the house.

In section V, the narrator describes what happens after Emily dies. Emily’s body is laid out in the parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed, the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by the townspeople. The room is frozen in time, with the items for an upcoming wedding and a man’s suit laid out. Homer Barron’s body is stretched on the bed as well, in an advanced state of decay. The onlookers then notice the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer’s body and a long strand of Emily’s gray hair on the pillow

3.      Jot down three questions that come to mind while reading the text, then choose one explore it more fully

Answer:

1.      Why is Miss Emily Grierson described as “a fallen monument”?

2.      Where does the story take place?

3.      Who is the protagonist of the story?

I will explain the first question about the meaning of “The World is Too Much With Us”. In my opinion The poet is referring.

4.      Explain the emotion that literary text work in you or which you felt while or after reading the peace.

Answer:

The emotion speaker is Ironic, Confessional, Gossipy, Angry, Hopeful

The irony of the story is closely tied to the rose in the title, and to Williams Faulkner's explanation of it: [The title] was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute…to a woman you would hand a rose.
It's ironic because in the story Miss Emily is continually handed thorns, not roses, and she herself produces many thorns in return. This is where the "confessional" part comes in. Since the narrator is a member of the town, and takes responsibility for all the townspeople's actions, the narrator is confessing the town's crimes against Emily.
Confession can be another word for gossip, especially when you are confessing the crimes of others. (Here one of the big crimes is gossip.) The chilling first line of Section IV is a good representative of the elements of tone we've been discussing so far: "So the next day we all said, 'She will kill herself'; and we said it would be the best thing." This is where the anger comes in. Because this makes us angry, we feel that the narrator too is angry, particularly in this whole section. This leads us back to confession and hopefulness.
The hopefulness of the town is the hardest for us to understand. It comes in part from the title again – if we can put ourselves in the same space as Faulkner and manage to give Emily a rose, to have compassion for her even though she is a murderer, to recognize her tragedy for what it is, this might allow us to build a more compassionate future for ourselves, a future where tragedies like Emily's don't occur. This also entails taking off our "rose-colored glasses" (as we discuss in "What's Up With the Title?") and facing the ugly truths of life, even confessing our shortcomings. Hopefully, we can manage to take those glasses off before death

5.      Copy a part of literary text (sentence, paragraph, dialogue) which struck you most something you find beautiful, enlightening and discuss why?

Answer:

-           […] only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps – an eyesore among eyesores. (1.2)

The narrator doesn't approve of Miss Emily or the surrounding area. As a townsperson, or people, the narrator is dissatisfied with this segment of America.

-          So [Miss Emily] vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. (2.1)

This moment gives us another big component of Emily's isolation. The smell was the beginning of the end. The interesting thing here is the word "vanquish." If Emily vanquished the lime-tossing guys, that means she conquered them

-          Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town […]. (1.3)

As is often the case in the story, Emily is described here as an object, a thing passed on from generation to generation. When we realize the town is complicit in her downfall, this objectification waxes sinister.

-          At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. (2.13)

This is a bare and brutal humanization. Emily was still an object to the townspeople, a symbol onto which they could pour their frustrations

6.      Identify the theme of literary piece and discuss it in the light of drama or poem

Answer:

The theme that  Willian Faulkner  was trying to present to his readers was through the mysterious figure of Emily Grierson, Faulkner conveys the struggle that comes from trying to maintain tradition in the face of widespread, radical change. Jefferson is at a crossroads, embracing a modern, more commercial future while still perched on the edge of the past, from the faded glory of the Grierson home to the town cemetery where anonymous Civil War soldiers have been laid to rest. Emily herself is a tradition, steadfastly staying the same over the years despite many changes in her community. She is in many ways a mixed blessing. As a living monument to the past, she represents the traditions that people wish to respect and honor; however, she is also a burden and entirely cut off from the outside world, nursing eccentricities that others cannot understand.

Emily lives in a timeless vacuum and world of her own making. Refusing to have metallic numbers affixed to the side of her house when the town receives modern mail service, she is out of touch with the reality that constantly threatens to break through her carefully sealed perimeters. Garages and cotton gins have replaced the grand antebellum homes. The aldermen try to break with the unofficial agreement about taxes once forged between Colonel Sartoris and Emily. This new and younger generation of leaders brings in Homer’s company to pave the sidewalks. Although Jefferson still highly regards traditional notions of honor and reputation, the narrator is critical of the old men in their Confederate uniforms who gather for Emily’s funeral. For them as for her, time is relative. The past is not a faint glimmer but an ever-present, idealized realm. Emily’s macabre bridal chamber is an extreme attempt to stop time and prevent change, although doing so comes at the expense of human life

7.      Write the critique of the works using an appropriate literary approach or theory

Answer:

There are some of the literary approaches to criticize this poem, and I will discuss it from psycological approach.

     In his writing, Faulkner was particularly interested in exploring the moral implications of  history. As the South emerged from the Civil War and Reconstruction and attempted to shed the stigma of slavery, its residents were frequently torn between a new and an older, more established world order. Religion and politics frequently fail to provide order and guidance and instead complicate and divide. Society, with its gossip, judgment, and harsh pronouncements, conspires to thwart the ambitions of individuals struggling to embrace their identities. Across Faulkner’s fictional landscapes, individual characters often stage epic struggles, prevented from realizing their potential or establishing their place in the world.