A large black letter 'H' with a purple hat positioned on top.
Illustration of the letter 'E' with cartoon characters of two eggs in a carton and a cracked egg with a yolk above.
A simple illustration of a table lamp with a yellow shade and a colored base.
A wooden log positioned horizontally next to a vertical stick, forming an L shape.
An elderly woman wearing glasses, dressed in a blue outfit with a green shawl, holding a cane and framed by a black rectangle.

2015: My Initiation Into Critical Analysis Through Faulkner’s ‘A Rose For Emily’

Spoiler alert: don’t read this if you haven’t read the story and wish to read it!

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As I reflect on my writing— currently in 2025, almost a decade later— I notice the gaps in my argument and an average depth in my analysis. However, the timing of this observation is personally relevant indeed. Usually when you take on something new, it often starts with being average. This is true even after a decade, because there are so many new things I am about to try and am currently practicing, I need to remember that age or growing up does not beat practice. Yes, I have become better at the things I started learning and practicing a decade ago. But the things I will begin now, will take time to build and eventually become better over the years as I continue practicing them.

It is necessary that I fight this illusion or rather the social expectation of “knowing what I am doing” just because I have grown and matured to a certain age. The age where I see people around me experiencing a kind of low in their curiosity or spontaneity to explore new things and fall into the monotony of life. That part of the demography which shies away from asking questions and following their train of thought too long. Not because they don’t want to, but because it might take them into a rabbit hole, or perhaps a path that requires them to start practicing a discipline again— and that requires making time to hone a new skillset. And to be in a position where you can put aside what you’ve worked towards for a decade or two and decide to carve another path, a lot of things in your life must have gone right— with your personal, social, professional, financial, physical and mental health factors combined.

Coming across this old college assignment, I am reminded that we never start at our best. We just start with something and with dedicated practice over time we keep getting better at it.

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There’s a lot of difference in the way the audience reads a text and the way critics read one. Reading “A Rose For Emily” by William Faulkner as someone from amongst the audience, was an experience filled with mixed emotions.

The way the story starts with the death of the protagonist and the reaction of the people to it, induces curiosity in the reader to figure out what happened. The way the town is a character itself in the story, made me like the concept and continue reading. As a reader, I felt pity for Miss Emily when the town felt pity. I felt confused when Miss Emily’s taxes were remitted because the author reveals to the reader that Colonel Sartoris had “invented” a tale in order to remit her taxes. I felt suspicious when Miss Emily just shuts herself from the rest of the town. I felt sad when Miss Emily’s father dies— and later when Homer Barron disappears from the scenario. And I felt shock when the story revealed that Homer Barron’s corpse is found in Miss Emily’s house after her death.

I felt all emotions that a reader is supposed to feel when they read a story just for the story. To each their own. Every reader has their own perspective and things they pay attention to at first.

The same story turns to something else when you look at it as a critic. The story that arouses so many emotions gets a new meaning. You look beyond the emotion of the reader, beyond what the author has written, thus avoiding both affective and intentional fallacy respectively. The town as a character, does not just remain a character, but becomes a medium through which you get an insight into the history and society of early 1900s America. The place and time becomes important. Also, the biography of the author becomes somewhat significant. Besides, factors like the form of the story, the sequence in which it has been written and the things that can be interpreted from the text itself become of great consequence.

While attempting a critical analysis of this story, the first question that I got stuck on was whether you read the story and then apply the theory of literary criticism? Or do you first decide the school of thought and then read the story in that framework? So I proceeded with reading the story first, then identifying the themes in the story. I then looked up the biography of the author and the social and cultural context of his time. Next, I looked up the different schools of thought of Literary Criticism, all of it mostly on the internet.

I was in two minds— whether to apply Historical/Biographical criticism or New Historicism. I further tried to read the text thoroughly and even tried approaching it by the way of Formalists, but realised that it was the sequence of narration alone that was so significant and more was to be found in the other two approaches comparatively. By the third or fourth reading of the text, I was able to pin my method down to New Historicism.

I have tried to answer questions that New Historicists popularly tend to ask. For instance,

  • What language/characters/events present in the work reflect the current events of the author’s day?
  • Are there words in the text that have changed their meaning from the time of the writing?
  • How are events’ interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?
  • Does the work’s interpretation support or condemn the event?
  • How does the work consider traditionally marginalised populations?

In my opinion, going about the methodology is easier, but choosing the method is a more difficult task. The reason I selected this approach is because with every reading I realised that the story was communicating the social and cultural context of Faulkner’s time through it’s characters, events and language— the town, Homer Barron, Miss Emily’s affair, the words such as “Negro”, “niggers”— way more than any of the facts of Faulkner’s life itself. Though Faulkner had drawn from his life certainly, to some extent, yet they were not a portrayal of any part of his life. And hence, New Historicism seemed the most appropriate school of thought to me.

In this story, there are some things that you may understand better from the biographical and historical context of the author. The fact that the story was published in 1930 and has a setting in Southern America is an indication to the time period of William Faulkner’s life (1987-1962), and suggests that he must have written it sometime before 1930, likely in the 1920s. Facts like how Faulkner’s great-grandfather was a Colonel and most of his works were dedicated to him explain Colonel Sartoris in Faulkner’s various works. His interest in art in his real life is probably why he depicts Miss Emily as giving china-painting lessons.

Further facts like him having a “mammy”, who was a black woman named Caroline Barr and raised him from birth until the day he left home, explain the coloured characters in his stories. This also tells us that he observed the colours of the society well and was one of those who talked about the race and class distinctions that were prevalent. This fact, rather than being biographical in nature, gives us an insight into the social context of that time. The use of the word ‘Negro’, used to address the old-servant, also signifies the dominance of racism in America. If you read further, you come to know that the use of that word diminished only after the 1970s and now it is considered to be discriminatory, even punishable by law in some places. The practice of racism, and how the black people were demeaned in that time, is further established when you come across the following lines in the story,

The construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee—a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks.

The same lines also portray the difference that was prevalent between Northerners and Southerners, especially when Miss Emily gets involved with Homer Barron and that too without any talk of marriage. The rationale behind this frowning upon her being the violation of the Southern tradition, which women of certain class were expected to uphold. Another part of the story, that is most probably the product of Faulkner’s time, is where they pity Miss Emily because she stays single even when she turned thirty. And when her father dies, she is only left with a house. This is a depiction of how women were typically viewed in Southern parts of America at that time, until the 1960s and 1970s. The Southern American women were always seen as a wife or a mother or a daughter. They did not have an identity of their own and were identified in relation to the man in their lives. Apart from this, the fact that Homer Barron’s disappearance goes legally unquestioned and the ability of Miss Emily to keep his ‘death’ a secret for so long are also indicators of deeper meanings and the way the society and politics worked at that time.

Coming to the narration and presentation of the work, it can be observed that everything we know of Miss Emily is from the point of view of a townsman and the impression that the townspeople have of her. Such a narration succeeds in giving a one sided picture of Miss Emily as far as the story is concerned, but gives a holistic picture where the social and cultural text is concerned, by the very same fact that the narrator takes the view of the majority, that is of the town. The narrator does not seem to condemn or support the character or what happened, instead he seems to shed light on the interpretation and how the people of the town make sense of Miss Emily. Moving on, the description of the house and the interior is the result of the ubiquitous lifestyle. Furthermore, the portrayal of the rise of the new generation is a pronounced fact of the time and depicts the change in ideology that was, maybe, gradually taking place.

According to New Historicism, “every work is a product of the historic moment that created it.” Moreover, New Historicists believe “that we interpret events as products of our time and culture.” ‘A Rose For Emily’ is a kind of story that, I feel, summarizes the time and events of the period when Faulkner lived. The text helps us to situate the history of that time and can be seen as a product of the thoughts and ideas that were then dominant.

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Bibliography

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