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WE ENTER INTO WILLIAM FAULKNER'S "A ROSE FOR EMILY" VIA THE indeterminacy surrounding a persistent rumor. Agitated about a possible scandal, the suspicious Jefferson townsfolk fixate on Emily's romance with Homer Barron: "'Do you suppose it's really so?' they said to one another" (125). Their compulsive, perhaps prurient interest ironically reflects both presumption and doubt: "Of course it is. What else could......" (125). What else could indeed; an untold surplus of "what else" saturates this sordid tale. The town's uncertain "whispering" (125) may be read as a multivalent signal toward the story's manifold unresolved issues, including its overall rhetorical import. Indeterminacy operates throughout by way of a metanarrative that foregrounds this complication. My reading seeks to show in part why Faulkner trades in undecidability, dubious meaning and failed closures.
Faulkner plays with the incalculable and the unimaginable as a rhetorical challenge to readers in this work and others. His odd characters confirm a "human condition in which the uncanny other, as a densely signifying representational figure, always bears the signatures of the narrative's affective ambivalence and epistemological uncertainty" (Zeitlin 624). Emily may be Faulkner's most uncanny and enigmatic figure, her mystery magnified by the story's lack of details about her private world. We trace her struggles with personal grief, a restricted social life, socio-economic decline, and romantic misfortune, a long history of trauma and repression. Faulkner selectively conceals and reveals Emily with narrative mystifications that range from presumption to denial, thereby deconstructing received modes of interpretation through the sheer effect of negative capability. The tale's impenetrable plot, unique figurations and double-voiced metanarrative "we" (122) subvert any definitive closure on Emily's improbable life.
Emily's eccentric behavior is one of Faulkner's gestures toward the unfathomable. Her intransigence runs from chasing offcity officials-"I have no taxes in Jefferson" (121)-to refusing "to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it" (128). The "we" that ironically purports to "know" her only succeeds in making her more remote. She appears visible enough to the townspeople bent on scrutinizing her every move, yet she remains well beyond their comprehension.
This irony is made more evident by Emily's ill-fated dalliance with Homer Barron, harbinger of the tale's deepest conundrum. Homer sweeps into town on a public...