Don’t you see?” he cried. “Don't you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?” - William Faulkner
Why is Southern gothic such an enduring literary genre? “Here’s my idea,” writes author M.O. Walsh. “The Southern Gothic is like a bicycle.” Its handlebars are authenticity: its writers document places and people they know. Its basket “is full of vivid characters” who are often flawed or physically disfigured people. “In the hands of a southern writer, they are written with empathy and truth,” Walsh writes.
English 104 Students:
1) Read and take notes on William Faulkner (provided below).
2) Read Themes and Meanings - taking careful notes on "aha" moments that add to your understanding of Faulkner's, "A Rose for Emily".
3) Write a discussion post stating what you've learned from your reading today and how it has enhanced your understanding of "A Rose for Emily." Your post must contain references to the text as a representation of the Southern Gothic genre, insight into an important theme, and analysis of at least one character. Postings should be 3-4 well-written paragraphs. Be clear, concise, and focus on how your understanding of the text has deepened.
William Faulkner
William Faulkner is widely considered the most important and influential writer working in the vein of the Southern Gothic.
Faulkner’s dense and complex fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. In fact, his oft-quoted line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” which has come to serve as a clichéd definition of Faulkner’s works, is also a definition of the Gothic. The clash between Old South and New South takes on a Gothic hue in which the suppressed sins of slavery, patriarchy, and class strife bubble to the surface in uncanny ways. And all this takes place in a landscape of swamps, deep woods, and decaying plantations. Add to this the complex, modernist, labyrinthine language of Faulkner’s works, which create in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation, an impression that, as Fred Botting says, “there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language.”
Much of Faulkner’s work, novels as well as short stories, belongs in the Southern Gothic category. The often anthologized “A Rose for Emily” (1930) is perhaps the clearest example of Faulkner’s southern Gothicism. The story, narrated from a plural point of view by inhabitants of the small town, tells of the spinster Emily Grierson, who after her father’s death scandalizes the community when she takes up with the northern carpetbagger Homer Barron. When Homer disappears shortly after Emily has purchased arsenic, rumors abound in town. Decades later, after living a reclusive life, Emily dies. When the townspeople break open the door to an upstairs room, they discover a man’s “fleshless” corpse on the bed, the remains of him “rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt.” Next to the corpse is a pillow, with “the indentation of a head” and “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” The story’s themes of necrophilia, sin, and secrecy mark it as obviously Gothic, yet Richard Gray argues that it also “offers an unerring insight into repression and the revenge of the repressed.” Emily’s actions should be seen as “a perverse reaction to the pressures of a stiflingly patriarchal society,” the way she has been “reduced, by the gaze of her neighbors and the narrative, to object status, a figure to patronize and pity … The extremity of her actions is,” he argues, “ultimately, a measure of the extremity of her condition, the degree of her imprisonment.”
Citation:
Bjerre, Thomas. "Southern Gothic Literature."Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Oxford University Press, 2017.Oxford Research Libraries, accessed online April 14, 2020
Themes and Meanings: Click link below to access: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16s7H2o_hR-HQNFsBINUFUCexOSdrH2iXlIE585Dnrqs/edit?usp=sharing
“For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and flesh-less grin.” “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head.” with it “we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.” A Rose For Emily is a Southern Gothic Fiction Book that touches over the themes of death and life by showing us good examples of either state of being. With the book about a fallen monument, Miss Emily takes the lead role, the story starts off by talking about her dead Mother and Father, and transitioning into the taxes that she owes, you start to get a clearer picture of the situation.
Death is an important theme in …
When I first read “A Rose For Emily” I seemed to overlook quite a bit. With the death of her father foreshadowing the ending and the smell of Emily’s house after Homer goes missing, I never seemed to connect the dots. A recurring theme in the story was death. It was said apparently 5 different times and I only picked up on 3 deaths.
The deaths show the end of different generations or even security such as her father dying and that being the death of the “old south”. Another thing I newly found was how the town treated Emily like “idol” or a show really. It never seemed to be like she was an actual person, the way t…
William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" is a Southern Gothic text. This short story shows how Emily lived in a time where people were moving on and she had lost all sense of time. Emily was idolized and unapproachable due to her past and her up bringing. Emily was part of the decline of the Old South and it is made a big in the short story. She even refuses to pay taxes because of "an old deal" someone had supposedly made with her father.
William Faulkner use Emily in his short story to show how the past was dying away and modern ways of life were starting to appear. It's talks about how Emily was born…
In the Southern Gothic story, “A Rose For Emily”, we are given an insight into the societal conflicts that occurred just after the civil war. One of the plot devices that Faulkner uses is unreliable narrators that create tension and uncertainty. This is especially common in many other gothic stories. The plot structure is interesting because of the fact that Faulkner uses what seems like a series of disconnected plot points that all tied up in the final act. This structure confuses the reader until the final reveal is made and everything falls into place.
Many of the themes in the short story are applicable today. The narrator was representative of society’s love of gossip. The narrator is essentially just…
Isolation is a common characteristic of Southern Gothic literature. “At her funeral, the narrator notes that Emily has been ‘‘a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.’’ Although the community all felt to be part of her life she spent the majority of her time alone. When she was young isolation was forced upon her by her father. Being from an aristocratic family, she was only ever an icon of Old South values.
Another big concept is the old vs new and Emily’s morphed concept of time. Time for her was never linear as it was for the rest of the town. She clung to the past long after it was gone... She…