Dead Men in The Attic: A Feminist View of Faulkner’s Short Story “A Rose for Emily”
By Elizabeth Roller
William Faulkner is a name that is inseparable from the Southern literary tradition. His novels As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Sound and the Fury are considered paramount in the category of southern gothic fiction. The themes and characters he weaves are second to none. However, he is not without his detractors. Faulkner is a product of a misogynistic time and his female characters show this, though critics disagree to what extent. Kevin Railey states in his essay on paternalism in Faulkner that “rarely, if ever, does one find women in Faulkner who are not essentially projections of male fear and/or desire” (98), while Diane Brown Jones essay in A William Faulkner Encyclopedia says “Faulkner’s creation of women characters is central to his art; indeed, of all the characters in his Yoknapatawpha landscape, his women characters are the ones who most endure” (439). Few writers besides Faulkner have had such polarizing views of women themselves, as “Faulkner, himself, made statements that pointed to his misogyny, yet at other times, he stated that he thought women were wonderful and more interesting to write about than men” (Jones 439). Clearly, there is something to be examined here.
Faulkner’s first published short story, “A Rose for Emily”, is a perfect encapsulation of his tumultuous relationship with writing female characters. Faulkner describes it as the story of a “young girl with a young girl’s normal aspirations to find love and then a husband and a family, who was brow-beaten and kept down by her father” (In The University 185). He displays the typical misogyny of the time with this statement, implying that all girls’ ultimate life goal is to marry. Yet self-proclaimed radical feminist Minrose C. Gwin views it differently. She claims that Faulkner might have written Emily as the everywoman of the time:
And although I didn’t know it when I first met Emily Grierson, I know now that most women live out their lives with several male corpses in their attics. We are all, in some sense, I believe, “madwomen in the attic,” in that the closed back rooms of our houses and our psyches are often those very places where it is possible to exert power over men in ways that are unthinkable in the real world. I think that Faulkner knew this when he wrote “A Rose for Emily.” I think he liked her too. (qtd. in Carvill 220)
The main focus of “A Rose for Emily”, if not the main character, is a woman named Emily, who in her old age has become somewhat of a town oddity. The townspeople both respect her and pity her, in contrast. This mix of emotions is what carries over into Emily’s characterization. Emily is a symbolic figure for both the feelings towards women of Faulkner and his time period. In the time at which Faulkner wrote, the new woman was having her advent. Short hair was in vogue, and dresses that showed the knees were not too uncommon. Girls were even invading the boys’ clubs that were universities. Unlike Faulkner’s character Temple Drake, the flapper protagonist of Sanctuary, Miss Emily is a genteel southern lady, the last gasping breath of a dying tradition. The events of “Rose” show the decay that “traditional womanhood” had on a woman and what the implications of being a southern belle truly meant. Faulkner’s sympathetic portrayal of Emily shows that he realized the flaws in this system, but he was also concerned with women breaking away from these roles.
Emily lives in a fictional town called Jefferson, a sleepy southern town once run by another one of Faulkner’s most famous creations, General Satoris. Her father was a Grierson and an influential member of the town. Her mother is not present, and her father rules her life. It is strange that not one mention of her mother and her character is included. Cleanth Brooks suggests that “Faulkner wanted to isolate Miss Emily Grierson almost completely and to throw her back on her own resources. The early loss of a girl’s mother is an obvious way of heightening her loneliness and stressing her father’s power over her” (69-70). Faulkner describes her in her youth as “a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip” (“A Rose” 118). White has been associated with youthfulness, virginity and purity, all qualities valued in southern women. Emily is in the background, due to being overshadowed by her father in both social standing and personality. The horsewhip he holds can be viewed as a weapon to keep the suitors away; however, it can also be viewed as a tool to train and discipline Emily into a perfect southern belle. He keeps all potential lovers away from his daughter. The townspeople are not too surprised, because “the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 118). Still, like all proper ladies, though, she has a man to protect her. Emily has depended on her father for her whole life, and when he dies, she refuses to believe it. When the ladies of the town come to visit her, she is “dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 118). She has been raised to only know her father running her life. In her essay “A Rose for ‘A Rose for Emily’”, Judith Fetterley says that “not only is ‘A Rose for Emily’ a supreme analysis of what men do to women by making them ladies; it is also an exposure of how this act in turn defines and recoils upon men” (56). Emily has been turned into the perfect, unattainable southern woman by her father. This oppression turns around on another male. “When the would-be ‘suitors’ finally get into her father's house, they discover the consequences of his oppression of her, for the violence contained in the rotted corpse of Homer Barron is the mirror image of the violence” (56), says Fetterley.
After her father dies, Emily is alone, although now she is allowed to have a suitor. She chooses “a Northerner, a day laborer” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 118), who has been hired. His name is Homer Barren, which, in foreshadowing, “signifies…‘barren home’” (Polk 124). The citizens of Jefferson at first think she would have no interest in him because he is from the North and much less in status than she, but they are pleased she has taken an interest in a man. Soon, the two grow close and the citizens say that “she will marry him…she will persuade him yet” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 119). Things are not perfect in paradise, however. Homer, despite “laughing in the square” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 118), is still a man like her father. They rode through town on Sundays, “Miss Emily with her head held high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 119). Yet again, the image of a horsewhip, of control, is present. The text even states that this strange affection for a man similar to her father is normal, saying “she would have to cling to that which robbed her” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 118). Even worse than her father, though, Homer will not take care of her “properly” and marry her. The reason was that “Homer himself had remarked --- he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elk’s Club --- that he was not a marrying man” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 119). This could be interpreted in a variety of ways, from taking it at face value that Homer is just not the kind to settle down or that he literally “likes men” and is a homosexual. At any rate, he will not conform to the standards of the times. This was disturbing to Miss Emily. When asked, Faulkner himself says that “she has been trained that you do not take a lover” (Faulkner, In the University 58). His not marrying her shattered everything her father had taught her. She cannot comprehend why he wouldn’t marry her. It is implied that she is delusional about their status, as she begins to buy “a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece…a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 120). When she learns she cannot have him the traditional way, she decides to deviate for once in her life and have him by killing him.
The townspeople view Emily as a “fallen monument” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 115) to both her family and the old south. Yet, conversely, they view her and her house as “an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 116). She is something that they, as the younger generation, have an obligation to take care of, like a statue. They don’t understand her completely, yet tradition binds them to her. They revel in a sort of voyeuristic relationship with her, and her business is the towns business. She is judged when she is single, and she is judged when she sees someone. All the time, they say “poor Emily” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 119), without ever fully understanding the situation. When her father dies, they could “at least now pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 118). She falls, and they secretly enjoy it. Diane Roberts offers that “her house, once the grandest in town, develops a terrible smell” as a kind of “advertisement that she has fallen” (Roberts 159). The town is divided on the problem of Miss Emily. The elders want to allow her the luxury of going on as she always has, not paying taxes and simply fluttering around alone in her house. One town official is aghast when a younger chancellor suggests they tell Miss Emily that people have complained about the smell, asking him if he “will accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 117). The up-and-coming generation does not see it this way. They send her tax notices and attempt to get her to put up street numbers on her house, to her dismay and indignation. But “Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care” (Faulkner, “A Rose” 116) that they cannot ignore. The problem of Miss Emily is the problem of all women of Faulkner’s time. Especially in the South of Faulkner’s writings, women are in a constant state of flux. They are expected to be Southern belles, but also own up to the rising movement of feminism and the ways of the “new woman”. It’s an impossible situation to win, when someone is pulled in two different directions. Miss Emily’s actions are only the results of desperation.
One interesting facet of Faulkner’s writing is the paradox between the sympathy he shows females and the thin veil of animosity towards them running through his work. In Robbing the Mother, Deborah Clark suggests that an underlying theme in Faulkner’s misogyny is that women succeed in “reminding men of their origins and their dependence on women's bodies for their very existences” (5). Men cannot deny the existence of a female sexuality, because without it, they would not be here. Also, as owners of wombs, women are the only true source of “creativity”, and this comes with a price: feminine filth, or menstruation. This means that “the bloody functioning of female sexual organs reveals the reality behind the ideal, that the physical, not the linguistic, provides the engendering power, a power which grows out of female sexuality” (Clark 5). This power is present in Faulkner’s female characters, because “not even age and menopause necessarily render women less threatening; the only safe woman is a dead woman” (Clark 5). As a white, middle class man, Faulkner was a member of the Southern patriarchy, but he was a writer who admired creativity. It is possible that he could have been resentful of women because he saw them as both equals and inferior, and that he could not escape the fact that he owed his life to a woman. The citizens of Jefferson, too, try to deny Miss Emily’s sexuality. Yet, they cannot, because she “harbors a covert sexuality that destabilizes not only the integrity of the spinster but the whole edifice of southern history and class” (Roberts 158). She plays into the image of a southern lady, while in actuality she is a cruel parody of one. The house that had been her father’s “signifies how she has pretended to conform to the Old South code of chastity, all the while reveling in her deviancy” (Roberts 159). It was the one way she has ever gone against the myth of womanhood her entire life.
Miss Emily is a perpetrator of a horrible crime. She kills an innocent man for simply rejecting her and keeps his body for years and years for her own twisted pleasure. In the end, she seems totally unrepentant for it. But, while not an excuse, she does have a reason for it; it was all she knew to do. Her father, whom she believes loved her, keeps her in his house with her most of her life, and she is just returning the favor when she keeps Homer with her. She is told she must have a man, but she must be chaste and asexual. What’s a girl to do? Like the women of Faulkner’s time, she is caught in two opposite tidal waves, one calling for a new kind of woman and the other screaming about values, morals, and old codes. So, she does what she is told and “gets herself a man”, and when the traditional way doesn’t work, she uses her own method. In that, she finds the ability to have power over men for the first time ever. Miss Emily does literally to a man what men have been doing to women metaphorically for years before her time.
