A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner (1930)
Length:9 Pages
Genre: Southern Gothic
Non Spoiler Summary
Emily attempts to utilize her strength to keep her home, as it was when her father died.
My Thoughts on Writers Craft
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is mentioned in Stephen King's the Stand.It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was but after a while it had gone away.
Stephen King probably utilized this story in order to shape the relationship between Frannie Goldsmith and Harold. Both stories deal with an alone girl, and a savant gardener and cook. Both Frannie and Emily bury their fathers in the garden. And then attempt to hold onto a time that is flickering by in an unstoppable fluency. Stephen King utilized the story but made it his own, this is what good authors do. What is haunting about this story is the need for humans to cling to the past, no matter what or whom it may harm.
Quote from the Story
uniforms--on the porch and the
lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs,
believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps,
confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom
all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which
no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow
bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years
Tidbits
- Mentioned in the stand by Stephen King.
- Ole Miss changed their mascot from the Rebels to the Bear, The Bear is a William Faulkner short story.
- He attended the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, and was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon social fraternity
Where To Find this Story
Read It Online.
