“A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
William Faulkner first published this short story in the April 30, 1930 edition of The Forum. Taking place in the town of Jefferson in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, it details the odd life of Miss Emily Grierson, a woman born of “southern nobility” whose family suffers a sharp decline after the Civil War.
A Rose for Emily
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…
Citation & Use Note
- Image of William Faulkner, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954, from Picryl Public Domain Media; it is in the Public Domain.
