Welcome to the weekend!
Today’s short story is William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” a florid and ghoulish tale of hierarchy, envy, and obsession set in the Deep South — Mississippi, to be precise. Published in 1930, “Emily” feels ancient in some ways, with Confederate uniforms brushed and worn for special occasions and “Negroes” afforded capitalization in singular form but never granted Christian names or autonomy.
It is not Faulkner who elocutes from the page, not directly. Instead, a narrator acts as the city’s memory, a gabbling chronicler of prevailing sentiment and contempt. There are the stirrings of Stephen King’s Derry, Maine, in the place, but the evil is very human. And it is that assured humanity that makes “Emily” so modern, so true.
The narrator casts back and speaks of the ’70s and its people and structures, a time within living memory for the narrator and us, but a full one hundred years separate our respective conceptions of the decade. However, the purpose applies equally well, an instructive separation between the way things were done “back then” and the way things are improved “now,” though partially foiled by what was done “then.” We are arrogant creatures, perhaps because we’ve outlived most of mankind. But even a city’s fixtures die, the young men gray, and the children leave — those who will bury us and shake their heads at our foolishness. For good and ill, what we accomplish will follow them as surely as the actions of our forebears buttress and vex us.
“A Rose for Emily” is a love letter to — and a denouncement of — an insular and atrophying society. And it’s creepy as nuts.
Faulkner begins:
WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant — a combined gardener and cook — had seen in at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor — he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.
(You can read the rest here.)
Please share any thoughts in the comments section, and may your weekend be exceptionally lovely. Also, if you’re harboring a long-deceased spouse in your attic, it’s best to come clean on that front.