A Rose for Emily

A town that talks as 'we'

The story has no single narrator. The town speaks, as 'we'. It watches Miss Emily through windows and behind blinds for most of her life, and gossips about her the whole time.

The town's feelings keep changing. People pity her when her father dies and leaves her only the house. They disapprove when she drives out on Sunday afternoons with Homer Barron, a Northern day laborer. They whisper 'Poor Emily' behind their blinds, and they are glad when they think she will marry him.

The story is told out of order. It opens with her funeral, goes back to the tax visit, then back thirty years further to the smell. Only then does it tell of her father's death and of Homer Barron. A reader who puts the pieces in order can work out the ending before the town does.

Miss Emily and her father

The town remembers Miss Emily and her father as a picture. She stands in white in the doorway. Her father stands in front of her with his back to her, holding a horsewhip. He drove away every young man who came for her.

When he dies she tells the ladies who call that he is not dead. She keeps his body in the house for three days, until the ministers and doctors are about to use the law. The town decides she had to cling to the thing that had robbed her.

Faulkner described her in 1957 as a young girl who wanted what young girls want, love and a husband and a family. Her father, a selfish man who wanted a housekeeper, kept her down. You can mash a natural instinct down, he said, but it comes up somewhere else, likely in a tragic form.

What Faulkner said about it

Asked in 1957 where the story came from, Faulkner said it started with a picture of a strand of hair on a pillow in an abandoned house. It was a ghost story, he said.

Asked what the title meant, he said the poor woman had had no life at all. Her father had kept her more or less locked up, and when she found a lover he was about to leave her. The title was just that, a rose for Emily.

Students often asked whether Emily stands for the South and Homer for the North. Faulkner said he had not set out to write a symbol of anything. He was writing about people, and if the reading was there, it was only incidental. He said Miss Emily knew she was doing wrong, and that her wrecked life was her punishment.

He also insisted the story was all fiction. A writer who puts anything familiar into a story gets letters about it, he joked, and gets sued if people think he made money.

Tobe, and the town's racial language

Tobe, Miss Emily's Black servant, is the only person who sees her daily life. The town never learns anything from him. His voice grows harsh and rusty, the story says, as if from disuse.

The story names him only once, when Miss Emily calls him to show the aldermen out. Otherwise the town calls him by the racial label of its time, thirteen times in all. When the ladies arrive after her death, he lets them in, walks straight through the house and out the back, and is never seen again.

The n-word appears four times. The mayor, Judge Stevens, uses it once. The town uses it three times for the Black men on the paving crew that Homer Barron shouts at. The first page also mentions Colonel Sartoris's order that no Black woman appear on the streets without an apron.

In print, and in Paris

The Forum printed the story over pages 233 to 238 of its April 1930 issue, with drawings by Weldon Bailey. The same issue printed Faulkner's joke autobiography. He called himself born male and single at an early age in Mississippi, claimed two plane crashes in the war, and signed off owning and operating his own typewriter.

Most of that note is invented. He trained as a pilot in Canada in 1918, but the war ended before he saw service. He also placed his meeting with Sherwood Anderson in Europe. They actually met in New Orleans.

In 1931 Faulkner included it in These 13, his first collection of stories, published in New York by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. It reached Paris eight years later. Éditions Gallimard published These 13 as Treize histoires in 1939, translated by René-Noël Raimbault and Charles-P. Vorce with Maurice-Edgar Coindreau.

Gallimard later gave the story its own small book, Une rose pour Emily et autres nouvelles, in its two-euro Folio series in 2002.