Content area
Full Text
Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century. . . . Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour"
One of the strongest, strangest, and most memorable characters in Faulkner's short fiction is the homicidal dowager, Emily Grierson, in "A Rose for Emily." Generations of Faulkner devotees are familiar with the tale of the reclusive spinster who, by means of murder and necrophilia, wages a battle to the death with time and change in the town of Jefferson. Scholars and critics have long agreed that the story unfolds through episodes that reflect the thematic contrast between past and present. Ray B. West, Jr., for example, claims that Emily is the "common property of the town, but in a special way-as an ideal of past values" (197). From an historical perspective, the story can be read as a chronicle of the waning of the Victorian age and the ascendancy of the twentieth century. The description of Emily's "big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the [eighteen-] seventies" (CS 119) conjures up an image of the sort of ornate old gingerbread mansion that today, after tasteful refurbishment, would sport a bed-and-breakfast sign on its front lawn. As Faulkner's story opens, however, the Grierson family home struggles to hold its own against the encroachments of the new century-"garages" and "gasoline pumps" (CS 119).
Some ingenious theories have been propounded regarding the provenance of Emily Grierson. Joseph Blotner, in his biography, notes that Faulkner's character was based on a cousin, Mary Louise Neilson, who had married a "Captain Jack Barren, a Yankee who had come into Oxford with the W. G. Lassiter Paving Company when the streets had been paved" (631-32). Clearly, though, Faulkner's imagination built mightily on these few details of family history. An early speculation on a source for Emily Grierson was advanced by James Stronks, who saw a parallel to the title character of the poem "To Helen" by Edgar Allan Poe. However, Stronks merely points out some of the similarities between Poe's description of his heroine (e.g., "Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche/ How statue-like I see thee stand . . .") and Faulkner's description of Emily framed in a lighted window of...