A Rose for Emily - Symbolism - IIA2

1. Vanessa Fung
Génesis Dopico

2. The title: Faulkner choiced
Tobe: in some stories “negro” is sometime the title as an allegorical title,
represents death. In the story “A rose for the mean was, here was a
Emily” the color black is symbolic for woman who has had a
death, as well as depression and gloom. tragedy and nothing could be
Death is very prevalent in this story; the done about it so that this
death of Emily’s father, the death or story has the name “A rose
Homer and herself in the end. for Emily”.
Homer Barron: homer represents
a Yankee attitude toward the Miss Emily Griersons: Emily represents
Griersons and also toward the the Old South. Her stubbornness and
entire South. The South is known unrelenting attitude are very strong
for being traditional and the characteristics of the Southern heritage.
North is known for being very Emily is considered a monument of the
adaptable to changes. Homer Southern manners and an ideal of past
was from the North and also values. The Old South generations were
represented “the next deteriorating very rapidly by changing
generations with his modern traditions. When Miss Emily died, her
ideas”. and her house become symbols of the
dying.

3. Emily’s House
Emily’s house, like Emily herself, is a monument, the only remaining emblem of a dying
world of Southern aristocracy. The outside of the large , square frame house is lavishly
decorated. The cupolas, spires and scrolled balconies are the hallmarks of a decadent
style of architecture that became popular in the 1870s. By the time the story takes place,
much has changed. The street and the neighborhood, at one time affluent, pristine and
privileged, have lost their standing as the realm of the elite. The house is in some ways an
extension of Emily: it bares its “stubborn and coquettish decay” to the town’s residents. It
is a testament to the endurance and preservation of tradition but now seems out of place
among the cotton wagons, gasoline pumps and other industrial trapping that surround it-
just as the South’s old values are out of place in a changing society.
Emily’s house also represents alienation, mental illness and death. It is a shrine to the
living past and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she
preserves the man she would not allow to leave her. As when the group of men
sprinkled lime along the foundation to counteract the stench of rotting flesh, the
townspeople skull along the edges of Emily’s life and property. The house, like its
owner, is an object of fascination for them. They project their own lurid fantasies and
interpretations onto the crumbling edifice and mysterious figure inside. Emily’s death is
a chance for them to gain access to this forbidden realm and confirm their wildest
notions and most sensationalistic suppositions about what had occurred on the inside.

4. The strand of hair:
The strand of hair is a reminder of love Taxes: it is a symbol of the death of her
lost and the often perverse things people father. It is also a symbol of the
do in their pursuit of happiness. The financial decline the pound man must
strand of hair also reveals the inner life have experienced. Taxes could be also
of a woman who, despite her a symbol of the continued control over
eccentricities, was committed to living Emily from the grave.
life on her own terms and not submitting
her behavior, no matter how shocking to The lime: it is a symbol of the fruitless
the approval of others. Emily subscribes attempt to hide something
to her own moral code and occupies a embarrassing or creepy. It is also a
world of her own invention, where even symbol of the way of the town in that
murder is permissible. The narrator generation.
foreshadows the discovery of the long The arsenic: it is a symbol of getting rid of
strand of hair on the pillow when he something that smell. Remember when the
describes the physical transformation druggist wrote in Emily’s packet of arsenic
that Emily undergoes as she ages. Her “for rat”; probably Homer was not a nice
hair grows more and more grizzled until guy and if he’s planning to break the
it becomes a “vigorous iron-gray”. The promise to marry her, she, in the South
strand of hair ultimately stands as the tradition, would must probably considered
last vestige of a life left to languish and him a rat so that she killed him.
decay, much like the body of Emily’s
former lover.