The Narrative Dynamics in“A Rose for Emily”:Temporal and Other Elements

School of Foreign Languages,Yunnan University,Kunming,China Email:976354856@qq.com

[Abstract]A good narrative is always unremittingly dynamic,when it allows different readers to approach it with senses somewhat compromised or not compromised.“A Rose for Emily”serves as an excellent example for this purpose.Its temporal and other elements as embodied by objects and characters are quintessential to the deciphering of its theme:How Emily,as a temporally and geographically symbolized character,chooses to be a life martyr-fighter for the historically doomed cause on behalf of the old genteel South even when the Civil War is ended long before.

[Keywords]narrative dynamics;Jefferson;the Griersons;madness;Emily

Introduction

a literary narrative is the art of letting meanings happen in all ways possible in text,whether it is by means of temporal or spatial remodeling,or rather,both,with the former more favored because of its richer flexibility,though.Thus,a good narrative is one that is always dynamic and ready to stretch for yet another one more interpretative inch out of the secretly folded times and spaces an author tucks in before a critic can make a start for his search.“Rhetorical or reader-oriented motivations”(Skinner,1985),is the language used by critics like Perry and others who believe that when a narrative is immanently invested with dynamics,the reading process of it is basically controlled by an internal rhetoric.“A Rose for Emily”by William Faulkner is a best example of this.Regardless of its expansive coverage in criticism ever since it came out in 1930,it is still blessedly surrounded with a density of ambiguities,of which,whether Emily is really mad,stands out best.The other comparably equivocal question is“Are Emily and her father really in a problem relationship? When answers to these two questions are produced,we may gladly come to realize that the theme of the short story itself shall be necessarily reworded:It’s not romance or love as the novella has long been universally believed to be about,but the inter-generation alliance between a pair of soldierly father and daughter,and the crusading confrontation of a somewhat degenderized woman against her community.

Jefferson and Its Nonconformist Family

In more than one works of Faulkner,“Jefferson”is used as a distinctive proper name that indicates a locale where bazaar lives happen.Here in“A Rose for Emily”,Jefferson is again made synonymous of some hugely compelling anecdotes perplexing to the under-informed or the ignorant of Jeffersonian locals.A community finds itself legitimate only if it runs on a set of commonly convinced and practiced values.In this regard,Jefferson is fairly typical as a community.Its residents are supposed to carry on the institutions and rituals in its public life as indicated by“The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid,as is our custom”(p.1432).At the same time,the community is also inclined to eliminate what or whoever that poses a public hazard.The way the town collectively interferes into Emily’s decision to keep her father’s body shows how easily a community can get itself justified when the prospective public good is alluded to.After all,retaining a corpse may entail considerable risks of public disgust and hygiene.However,Emily is uncooperative at the best.She doesn’t break down until“they were about to resort to law and force”(p.1432).Why does she act like this?Is she really out of her mind?Why are“we”(mainly the townswomen)so understanding of her as to put“ourselves”in her shoes?

“We did not say she was crazy then.We believed she had to do that.We remembered all the young men her father had driven away,and we knew that with nothing left,she would have to cling to that which had robbed her,as people will”(p.1432).Viewed alone,“we”seem quite kind and tolerant.“We”allow Emily a second chance to resume her sense.That is why there is the statement that“We did not say she was crazy then”by logic.But this also implies that there is indeed a point of time when the townswomen do start to say“she is mad”later.However,throughout the text,there is nowhere any of the townsfolk ever puts that in words,in this sense,Jefferson does appear to be a place civilly governed with courteous and friendly codes.However,when a member goes too far and leaves defied its norms of propriety,it is sure to get the nonconformists excluded.So,despite of the absence of a statement on Emily’s“madness”,Emily’s peculiar state of mind is once and again insinuated.The boldest implication comes as follows:

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her.People in our town,remembering how old lady Wyatt,her great-aunt,had gone completely crazy at last,believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were.None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such(p.1432).(my italicization)

On the surface,the italicized sentence is about how the sector of the town that can be best denoted by“we”pity Emily,showing a neighborly goodwill to an ill-lucked member as all institutionalized communities are expected to.However,it is also a punitive declaration to say that“as a Grierson,Emily is repeating the predestined madness after her great-aunt”as she is just another example who thinks too much of herself.Instead to get readers informed with how strategic Emily is in the intelligence combat between her and the invasive lime sprinklers as narrated in the text that literally precedes it,the narrator seems to be more enthusiastic on telling readers about how Emily is pity-worthy.This is the way the narrative after the emphasized sentence is directed.The narrator doesn’t see anything wrong in the band’s break-in.“They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there,and in all the outbuildings”(p.1432).It is not insensible to say that were not it for their knowledge about Emily’s presence indoors,the intruders would well bring themselves into the interiors of the main building.Taking side with the invaders at this point,the narrator seems to be somewhat awestruck as he,on behalf of the band at this point,comes to realize the ever-presence of Emily’s defeating surveillance all of a sudden,“as they recrossed the lawn,a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it,the light behind her,and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol.They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street”(p.1432).

Despite the ill-directed narrative,an implied reader is supposed to see Emily as what she is:living largely as a recluse though,she can read others’minds with shocking accuracy,which explains her vigilantly witnessing every move taken by the sprinklers till their retreat and disappearance into the street.So Emily is the last one the ignorant townsfolk are in a position to feel sorry for,not to say when it is in respect to her overwhelming maneuver demonstrated with“After a week or two the smell went away”(p.1432).Many critics ever discussed the solutions for the rapid die-away of the smell,which may otherwise withstand for quite a few weeks without a best measure.So,the reason the narrator shall pretend to be a townsfolk by uttering the sentence as italicized is to get an implied reader distinguished from the rest.However,just as boisterous are the multitudes,so credulous are the majority of readers.Many turned out to be deluged with the ill-intended guesses about Emily and the rest of Griersons.This is immediately testified by what comes after the italicization,“People in our town,remembering how old lady Wyatt...None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such”(p.1432).Check this against the earlier excerpt that’s started with“We remembered all the young men her father had driven away”(p.1432),a good reader would find“we”are not telling the truth.These two statements cannot hold water at a time,either it is that of“the Griersons held them too high...”or that of“the father had driven all the young men away”that makes a true-valued statement.

A post-text that is located quite distant from this also speaks a lot about Jefferson’s institutional tendency to estrange a nonconformist,“Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing,including a nightshirt,and we said,‘They are married.’We were really glad.We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been”(p.1434).Regardless of the fact that the townswomen are all the way watchful of Emily for everything she does during her outings on Sunday afternoons with Homer Barron,the gossipers are nothing but self-indulgent in their imaginations about how things get on between them.The nightshirt serves as an excellent material item to get the self-indulgence in their speculations somewhat tempered.But,that does not by any means lend a chance for the women to assuredly claim that“They are married”.As far as they see,once Emily gets married,something most typical of the Griersons shall be impaired and they have a reason to be really glad.So,what is the most Grierson trait as minded by the gossipers?Why shall the townswomen feel so happy with the quality blemished?

To answer these two questions,we have to look into Emily’s great-aunt’s marital status.We are told by the women that Wyatt goes completely mad in the end.Seen from the message that she has no inheritor for her estate as in“her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt”(p.1433),we can infer that she dies a spinster who most probably lives under the roof of Emily and her father’s,otherwise Emily’s father wouldn’t be the winning nephew in the inheritance of the property she is entitled to.Wyatt,Emily’s father and Emily herself must be bound as closely as to impress Jefferson as the last of 3-generationed Griersons.That’s why the townswomen shall feel rather shocked when it dawns on them that after all Emily has some blood-kin outside Jefferson,“so she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments”(p.1434).Unhappy though are the Griersons from Alabama with the Griersons in Jefferson,they are all seen as genuine representatives of the family in that the Grierson women are all too conceited for their used-to-be advantageous social hierarchy,“they all held themselves a little too high for what they really were.None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such”(p.1432).At the seemingly unmistakable news about the purchases of toilet set and nightshirt for Homer that seems to come of the two cousins,“we(the townswomen)were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been”(p.1434).The sentence is evidently informative of the reason,at least,in part,why the Griersons are perpetually unwelcome in Jefferson:once socially privileged,its women folks persist not to marry minors in“the gross,teeming world”.With the abolition of aristocratic genteel culture in the old South since the end of the Civil War,women with a mind like this are condemned to a life spinsterhood.Deleterious to the communal congruence,such a marital outlook is sure to be gotten rid of.Naturally,any progress made in this respect shall give the meddlesome women a reason to feel relieved and encouraged,as they reckon they somewhat get Emily succumbed to the commonly practiced codes—a woman marries.Pretending not to get much involved,they wouldn’t spare any effort to get Emily married,when it is necessary,“(By that time it was a cabal,and we were all Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.)”(p.1434).

Seen from the not-to-marry attitude uniformly taken by the Grierson women down through three generations,it can be suggested that the slanderous attack on them for their standoffishness in marriage starts early;Emily is a mere successor to Wyatt who is the first to abandon the identity of a marrying woman in contempt of the marital code in Jefferson.In this sense,anything narrated from the point of view of the townspeople,especially,the women and the elders,is far from being reliable.If Emily is practically mad,how can she be so shrewd once and again in counteracting the community’s interference?Neither is Wyatt nor Emily mad.They are just slandered because they cannot be succumbed.The townswomen seem to find the Grierson women suspicious for their marital outlooks all the time,“so when she got to be thirty and was still single,we were not pleased exactly,but vindicated(my italicization)”; the female gossipers are somehow caught up with a penalizing hostility toward Emily:They try to impose their own values on her,wishing Emily to conform to their marital outlooks;while they happily gloat over Emily’s failure to seize a viable chance for marriage,“even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized”(p.1432).Regardless of their pretended goodwill,the women in Jefferson are morally corrupt in effect,otherwise,they won’t utter anything like“so the next day we all said,‘She will kill herself’;and we said it would be the best thing”(p.1433).Therefore,when it comes to the relationship between Emily and her father,especially with the most imposing description on it comes in the immediate post-text after what’s about Wyatt’s madness,a good reader shall be air-tightly cautious in case he shall be prejudiced against the Griersons.This is exactly what’s expected by the ignorant and hostile townswomen who are all the way down in the text found defaming and alienating the nonconformist Griersons on behalf of their community.

Like Father,Like Daughter:A Special Bond between Generations

To understand Emily right,it is necessary for us to zoom in a bit closer on her father.There are many places where the father is narrated either in the form of peripheral reference or in that of symbolic presentation,despite he is not given a single chance to appear in person.“Then we knew that this was to be expected too(my italicization); as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die”(p.1434),such a peripherally relevant message about the father also tells a lot about Emily.At this point,the narrator seems to be fully sure of Emily’s having poisoned Homer Barron as this comes in the very paragraph of modest length that is suggestive of Homer’s forever disappearance and Emily’s long abandonment of the streets.The father is virulent and furious;so is the daughter.

In the narratives about how unfailingly she holds her head high during her“courtship”with Homer,Emily shows a lot of unbecoming toughness and virulence,“She carried her head high enough－even when we believed that she was fallen”(p.1433).Besides,when she buys arsenic form the druggist,that quality is also given a highlight,like“The druggist looked down at her.She looked back at him,erect,her face like a strained flag”and“Miss Emily just stared at him,her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye,until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up”(p.1433).

Seen from the way she holds her head high and her virulence in intending to get a most venomous poison,she cannot be possibly in love with Homer,a northern day-laborer who is cheekily loud in every sense.“Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square,Homer Barron would be in the center of the group”(p.1432).And his visual taste for noisy color is also in nice accordance to his boisterousness in auditory sense,“the yellow-wheeled buggy and yellow gloves”cannot be deemed proper in the eyes of Emily as an old-fashioned southern belle,not to mention his failure to render privacy private,“Homer himself had remarked—he liked men,and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elk’s Club—that he was not a marrying man”(p.1433).Homer’s grossness is set in vivid contrast with the traits oftener associated with the old-timed southern aristocrats Emily embodies,“Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear,inescapable,impervious,tranquil,and perverse”(p.1435).

It is hard to imagine how a lady who is always as old-fashioned and haughty as Emily can go dating with Homer Barron.Is Emily really fallen(deflowered)as gossiped by the townswomen?If Emily’s outings with Homer are otherwise intended than love,what is it? Homer is not a marrying man,which is known and accepted by everybody in the town while none feels like buying into Emily’s resolution that comes as part of her family heritage—She cannot afford to marry anybody as the daughter of a militant father who always tries to produce a soldier-like successor who fights on behalf of the old South after him.Just as what’s suggested by the implied narrator that Emily’s life as a woman is thwarted for times by her willful father,Emily is not just turned into one who disowns her will to marry,rather,she is even degenderized or symbolically reconfigured in gender.“When we next saw Miss Emily,she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray.During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepperand-salt iron-gray,when it ceased turning.Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous irongray,like the hair of an active man”(p.1434).As a shrewd and virulent strategist,Emily is so neat with her last,also the most decisive victory made with the“long strand of iron-gray hair”on the indented pillow as discovered by the invasive townspeople,that Lionel Trilling ever extolled that:“A Rose for Emily,”the story of a woman who has killed her lover and has lain for years beside his decaying corpse,is essentially trivial in its horror because it has no implications,because it is pure event without implication...(Skinner,1985).Emily entertains the expected intruders with a perfect stroke—except the implied narrator and reader,none would get a clue to realize that what she intends between her and the coarse northerner is nothing but a determined annihilation in memory of the prewar South.Although,the implied narrator does for one time touch upon the reason why Emily shall get associated with Homer,“ It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness”(p.1433),few critics have ever paid due attention to the peculiarity of Emily in relation to the father.

Definitely,the father is the eventual sources responsible for the shaping of Emily’s character.Contrary to what’s gossiped by the ignorant townswomen that the father is all bullying and despotic,Emily finds a protective and loving ally out of him.Otherwise,there wouldn’t have been the narrative“with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier”(p.1435).It can’t be anybody except Emily’s own idea to get her father’s crayon portrait moved over from its original place,“On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father”(p.1430).Jealously bitter and hostile as the townswomen are toward the Griersons,Emily never shows any tendency to socialize in the town.That’s the reason why for the most of her lifetime,her front door is shut.Trying to get the Griersons estranged,the townspeople are also avoided in return.There is an embarrassing social gap between them.The townspeople don’t know much about the father and the daughter so they have to resort to imagination,“we had long thought of them as a tableau,Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background,her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground,his back to her and clutching a horsewhip,the two of them framed by the back-flung front door”(p.1432).Here,just like what’s implied by“the tarnished gilt easel”,“the faded ink”,and“the ebony cane with a tarnished head”and“the stubborn and coquettish decay of the Grierson house”,the“backflung front door”is another sign that is intended to tell how the father as well as the daughter are hind-sighted nostalgics,they look at the world not in its prospect,but in its retrospect,instead.

As Emily is not predisposed to marry as aforesaid,the horsewhip clutched by her father won’t suffer anything of the father-and-daughter relationship.What’s more likely is that the father acts on the daughter’s will as Emily’s resolution not to marry is just sporadically known to the town and there are indeed some young men who do attempt to woo her.So“We remembered all the young men her father had driven away”seems to say something problematic about the relationship between the father and the daughter,but in effect,it may also be read as a sign indicative of how the father helps his daughter turn down the innocent suitors as she wills.

Seen from Colonel Sartoris’s arbitrary remission of Emily’s taxes upon her father’s death,we have a reason to infer that the old mayor is trying to help Emily resume some fatherly love when she is bereaved of her blood-father as the only child of a former comrade in battle.Presumably,both the colonel and Emily’s father are actual fighters of the battle of Jefferson,which probably helps the old mayor rationalize the dispensation as he also“fatheredthe edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron”(p.1430)in a similar way.(my italicization)Therefore,the symbolic meanings subtracted from the“spraddled silhouette”and the“horsewhip”are supposed to be about something of the father’s identity:A sort of equestrian military leader who ever fights for the Confederacy.

Temporally and geographically,he is identified with and devoted to the Old South.This explains why the Griersons’house is built as it is,“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”(p.1429).By 1870s,over was the Civil War(1861-1865)and the South was sure to be sweepingly influenced by the North.So,as the building point of the Grierson’s house,“1870s”is heavily loaded:as one of two possible investor-builders of the house beside his aunt Wyatt,Emily’s father demonstrates a good measure of a diehard southerner’s stubbornness in his fashioning the house as what a typical prewar aristocratic southern building is.No wonder that the townspeople are once and again so minded about the building or its component as manifested by“Just as if a man —any man—could keep a kitchen properly”(p.1431)and“When her father died,it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way,people were glad”(p.1432).By the time it is uninhibitedly visited by the town at Emily’s death at 74,it is overtly ridiculed because its pretentious exterior suggestive of leisureliness and nobility still makes an abominable eyesore for the modern and mediocre-minded mourners,real misfitting in its industrialized surroundings rife with machines.Beneath the mocking admiration tinged with proletarian jealousies lie the townspeople’s collective hostilities toward the Griersons:The house stands as the best target of criticisms and hate of the new Jefferson.In this sense,the house is no longer an architecture,rather,it helps identify the dweller,the builder as well,working as a subsidiary means for characterization when temporal and geographical elements associated with it are deservedly interpreted.

With Emily’s father fleshed up as a character with some corporeality(Zhang,2018),It would be easier for us to see why there is the narrative“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”(p.1430).In the implied author’s eyes,Emily is the virtual successor of the father for his military cause.Although that is already historically lost to the Northerners when she is just around 2 or 3 years old,she inventively finds a way to get it privately prolonged at lower levels of community and individual even if she has to sacrifice everything for it:gender parameters,everyday normalcy,and communal integration.This perfectly echoes the idea of social time theorized by Georges Gurvitch:Different choices on the temporal spectrum of a society are usually made by different role-takers and thus are often characteristic of contrariness,uncertainties and discontinuities.The different choices rival with,substitute and terminate each other among themselves as their choice-making subjects usually do.Because of the attitudinal differences in different social roles,a community is more often than not disintegrated into numerous parts(Gurvitch,2010).Chronological choices are found at the core of the ideologies of any given organizations.Temporally hind-sighted as the Griersons are,the family have long been singled out for collective discrimination or elimination even,by the foresighted Jefferson community as a result of the family’s deviance in their choices of social time.Therefore,ended though is the Civil War between the North and the South in the grand narrative,that does not spell a full period to the local-leveled narratives about it.It can be furthered in new forms as long as the diverse communities and individuals involved find imperative to fight for the temporal systems they respectively make choices of.As the last of the nonconformist Griersons,Emily has to seek comradely condolence from any possible source,even from a portrait of her late father.The father is not a bullying patriarch,nor the daughter a victim of male chauvinism.Rather,she is turned into a heroic figure,idolized and martyred as the rivalries between the old and new time and that between the old and new Jefferson are drastically incommensurate with Emily alone as the sole and last representative of the temporal and spatial orders of the old South.

To deal with a massive opponent as represented by the whole town of Jefferson after the old mayor’s time,Emily has to be characterized as one that lives like a strategic hunter who knows how to use a subterfuge,an artistic means about retreating and hiding,that is well appreciated by Frederick R.Karl in his 1989 biography of Faulkner.This hiding technique also finds an ideal expression in that the narrator can manipulate so many different points of view in his narration that a reader has to be cautious of the on-going of at least two narratives at all times:one is the evident process on the surface;the other is the covert process that is only sensible to the implied readers(Shen,2018).On the surface,“A Rose for Emily”is about how a slim southern lady murders her lover and weirdly sleeps by the ever-decaying body for decades;beneath the cover,it is about how a last fighter on behalf of the old South launches a lifelong crusade for her temporally and geographically delineated identity.

a single-handed fight is hard like a crusade,and it is by no means practicable for Emily to go against the whole community alone,she has to find some colleagues,in symbolic sense or by means of discourse at least.The implied author certainly is one that has to be eventually identical with Faulkner himself who was discovered to be much caught in his nostalgia for the old South:“Faulkner,in all his works,shows an ambivalence toward the South.And in none of his works,it seems to me,is the paradox so neatly compressed as in Emily.The whole texture of the story is wrought of this ambivalence of love and hate,respect and contempt”(Sullivan,1971).Maybe,because of the bifocal nature underlying the paradoxicality,such a mechanism of dual narratives also reminds us of the comment of Blair Labatt’s on Faulkner for his“potent control of his fictional world by highlighting the balance of his stance toward characters”(Hagood,2006).Thus,it doesn’t risk much to say that Emily is aided by the implied author in morale as she is adorably characterized to be so tactful in her one-to-many fight that she can come up with a most decisive blow climaxing at her death.As a counterpart epitome embodying the triumphant North for its industrialism and cultural mediocrity,especially the heretic orientation in sex,Homer makes a perfect target for Emily in her anti-alienation.Ironically,the young northerner with a strong build shall be brought down by Emily,a slender female southerner,who ends the game so inconsequentially that nothing is verified until she is decently put underground.The shock works and she wins.Single-handed though,Emily triumphs in the ultimate sense.This,is a sure demonstration of the Faulknerian efforts in balancing his characters.

Conclusion

A narrative is dynamic when meanings are once and again extricated by readers from possible interpretive angles.This is,on one hand,predetermined by the author with his employment of a certain narrative mechanism;on the other,it is also a yield that comes of the discerning readers’internal rhetoric.Wadlington suggested that“The writing/reading ideal Faulkner describes would seem to fill the needs of his characters,if only they could read his books as well as inhabit them(Weinstein,2005).Through a close reading in the manner that allowed me to be as if one who inhabited the fictive Jefferson,I tried to put the Griersons under the communal perspectives and saw their needs,revealing how the townspeople,especially the women and elders of them,are least reliable in their narration.Upon a host of contextually based analyses,my conclusion is drawn:Emily does not suffer from insanity and her father makes a protective and loving alliance for her in her heroic fight for the Old South.