Who_Made_the_“Monument”_Fall_Down_

"A rose for Emily" is one of Faulkner's most shocking yet thought-provoking short-fictions, which depicts the tragic life of Miss Emily Grierson. Her tragedy can be attributed to several reasons, including her domineering father and her conflict with the surrounding people. However, the most fundamental and devastating element that causes her tragedy is her clinging to the past. Emily's father, with his tyrant-like image, exerts a tenacious influence on her life. Even when she died, his father's ubiquitous presence is felt. "Above her dead body sits the crayon face of her father, musing profoundly." And it is right this man, who, from the very beginning, corrupts Emily's sense of reality and deprives her of the possibility of a happy, blessed marriage life. "We had long thought of them as a tableau…the two of them framed by the back-flung front door". (P130) In this father-daughter relationship description, Miss Emily is but a pathetic figure over-protected, restrained and suppressed by her father while with a horsewhip in hand, her father appears as a rather formidable and rigid figure. Actually, brandishing the self-conscious high social status as a weapon, her father repels the town's young men from advancing, thus mercilessly forcing young Emily into a confined maiden life of no choice. Later, as we can perceive acutely, as Emily is totally sealed from reality in her restricted world framed out of his father's mind, the distinction between reality and illusion, present and past begin to blur, eventually bringing her to retreat into a reality of pure inner world. Emily’s conflict with surrounding people also plays an essential role in her tragedy. Born of noble descent, she remains not only "a tradition, duty, and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town"(P129), but also “a communal property” and the centre of public speculation. The town's people, although repeatedly vanquished by the arrogant Griersons, insist on keeping a watchful eye on Emily's every move. It is not so much that the town's people are purposefully unsympathetic and particularly vicious. But Emily, with her privileged social status, her overbearing pride, and her indomitable will, makes her such a maverick in people's eyes that they feel obliged to dispel her illusory sense of superiority, confront her with the harsh reality and justify her self-claimed sense of superiority. They are alternately curious, jealous, spiteful, pitying and disapproving as they take the initiative to help bury her dead father, to volunteer to help “deodorizing the stench” supposedly came from her kitchen, and to impose the-never-to-be-collected tax on her. And when she begins her affair with Homer Barron, they successively say. "She will marry him." "She will persuade him yet"."Poor Emily". "They are married". Eventually, when they hear her buying arsenic, they all say, "she will kill herself and it would be the best thing" .This nonchalant but actually cold-blooded observation betrays the town people's inveterate belief that a lady, if abandoned, has no alternative but to commit suicide if she were to preserve the dignity of herself. People's enmity toward Emily, making her isolated and lonely, expedites her tragedy. However, the most fundamental and devastating element that causes her tragedy is her clinging to the past. Miss Emily refused to release her father’s body for burial, and kept his portrait in a prominent place in her living room: it was her connection to the old tradition, and her spiritual support. She did not accept the passing of time: To her, time, is more like a motionless landscape in one's heart rather than a mechanical reality of the world. She even refused to corporate with the new generation, answering the tax notice on “paper of an archaic shape in a then flowing calligraphy in faded ink.”(P127)Her clinging to the past developed into such obsession and homicidal mania that she killed Homer Barron when she knew he would not marry her. Her aristocratic arrogance forbade her to accept the refusal of an inferior Yankee, so she killed him and kept the body, which supported her to pass the isolated and lonely life until her death. Emily is never able to win an upper hand in her battle against her past. In fact, however hard she struggles, she is neither able to deny its influence on her, nor to break away with it. She remains a prisoner of her past, as we can see from the evidence that "….up to the day of her death at seventy four", her hair "was still the vigorous iron-grey, like the hair of an active man". She isolated herself from the actual society, so what she could do was only to miss the past desperately until at last she died with deep agony. “The past “entitled Emily the” monument” in people’s heart. Unfortunately, she can only experience the falling down of the monument as she sticks to it lifelong.