E300 WEEK 6 – FICTION. 03/02. Wed. Chapter 9. Critical Contexts: William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (389-91). William Faulkner. "A Rose for Emily" (391-97). Critical Contexts on the Faulkner Story (398-425).
BRIEF PLAN FOR FAULKNER
I'll begin with Faulkner's own responses to offer the most straightforward, balanced view of "A Rose for Emily." There's something of Miss Havisham in Emily, and I think that's how Faulkner describes his interest in her: she is a woman whose natural feelings and aspirations have been thwarted and who has nowhere to turn but to a destructive act.
Then we can move on to group work and the question will be just to ask which piece of criticism students found most worthwhile and why so – on the whole, what if anything did the criticism, taken together, add to our understanding of the story itself and what does it suggest about the value of criticism more generally?
I found some of the critical studies to be rather limited, but the one I found most worthwhile was the last – the chap who describes Faulkner's tale as being sort of a detective story but with a few distinctions. That makes sense to me – it's a detective story with a hard-to-pin narrator as the detective. The last-mentioned point is probably what keeps the tale itself from being pedestrian.
I don't see the point in bashing people for reading "the South" into Faulkner's work – it's all over the place, and he's obviously fascinated with the South, and Mississippi in particular because that's where he came from and mostly where he lived his life. Novels such as Absalom, Absalom and others go deeply into the "myth of the Old South" and hardly leave it intact, but the fact remains that Faulkner's books are basically of and about the South. I suppose you could say that like other modernists such as Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and Pound, there's a rather standoffish but still intense relationship between the author and the location where he began his life. Joyce and Yeats were both internationalists, but their work is often about Ireland and its struggles. Eliot and Pound are Americans, but somehow we end up putting them in British Lit. anthologies.
Faulkner's work about the South is both passionate and analytic – only a great author could pull that off so well. I don't know a lot about Faulkner criticism since I'm a classicist and C19 reader, but my sense is that the method he follows as an author would yield good results to a deconstructive approach, expertly handled: that's because of the way in which he remains close to the South and its myths, using them doggedly as the tools for his own sometimes destructive readings of the South's ways and sensibilities. The gesture isn't one of simple rejection but rather one of simultaneous homage and bringing-down.
Anyhow, the Southern motif here probably isn't that important since the story is so short and so focused on Emily herself. But still, she's an antebellum figure who never really accepts the passage of the Old South since in it lay her dignity. The town of Jefferson changes, modernizes, but she never does. The place manages to be both distant from her and yet oppressive in the way that a small town can be: everybody insists on knowing everybody else's business; it's a means of social control: gossip is part of that, and we notice that the narrative voice is, as a few critics in our survey point out, gossip-like in its contradictoriness and occasional cruelty.
The feminist piece I found a limited because Faulkner said much the same himself, but without recourse to such polysyllabic diction. Of course Emily's inner life was badly crushed by her overbearing, selfish father. No doubt about it.
I also didn't get much from the criticisms leveled against Brooks and Warren – okay, I get it, they oversimplify somewhat. But I thought the point they made was valid, if limited in scope, and didn't need tearing down.
