A_Rose_For_Emily

A Rose For Emily In the short story “A Rose for Emily” Emily, an old spinster, has difficulty acknowledging that death and change are inevitable. Emily’s reluctance to let go of the past is a representation of the “dying south”. The author, William Faulkner, is able to reveal the story’s theme through various forms a symbolism. Faulkner begins the story with the narrator describing the funeral of the aristocratic Miss Emily. Faulkner mentions: ”our whole town went to the funeral with a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument” ( p.28). By characterizing Emily as a “fallen monument” Faulkner deliberately makes Emily a symbol of the south’s transition from grandiosity into a modernized less refined society. . The choice of the word monument reveals that Emily was the last of her kind and that with her death, the past that she represented will only be a memory of a dying institution. “ …The ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men…confusing time with its mathematical progression… to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided to them now by the narrow bottleneck emily, faulkner, time, past, miss, emily’s, old, decay, watch, house, south, rose, new, go, era, story, seen, portrait, monument, death, years, water, wagons, voice, various, trying, ticking, through, theme, symbolizes, symbolism, symbol, submerged, stubborn, story’s