William Faulkners A Rose for Emily is a Gothic Horror Tale :: A Rose For Emily, William Faulkner

William Faulkner is widely considered to be one of the great American authors of the twentieth century. Although his greatest works atomic number 18 identified with a particular region and time (Mississippi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the themes he explores are universal. He was also an extremely accomplished writer in a technical sense. Novels such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom feature bold experimentation with shifts in time and narrative. Several of his short stories are favorites of anthologists, including A Rose for Emily. This strange theme of love, obsession, and death is a favorite among both readers and critics. The narrator, speaking for the townsfolk of Jefferson in Faulkners fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, tells a series of stories about the towns reclusive spinster, Miss Emily Grierson. The stories build up to a gruesome revelation after Miss Emilys funeral. She ostensibly poisoned her lover, Homer Barron, and kept his corpse in an attic bedroom for over forty years. It is a common critical cliche to say that a story exists on many levels. In the case of A Rose for Emily, this is the truth. Critic Frank A. Littler, in an essay published in Notes on Mississippi Writers regarding the chronology of the story, writes that A Rose for Emily has been read variously as . . .a Gothic horror tale, a study in abnormal psychology, an allegory of the relations between North and South, a meditation on the nature of time, and a tragedy with Emily as a sort of tragic heroine. These various interpretations serve as a good startle point for discussion of the story. The Gothic horror tale is a literary form dating back to 1764 with the first novel identified with the genre, Horace Walpoles The Castle of Ontralto. Gothicism features an airwave of terror and dread gloomy castles or mansions, sinister characters, and unexplained phenomena. Gothic novels and stories also often include unnatural combinations of sex and death. In a remonstrate to students documented by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner in Faulkner in the University Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957-1958, Faulkner himself claimed that A Rose for Emily is a ghost story. In fact, Faulkner is considered by many to be the progenitor of a sub-genre, the Southern gothic. The Southern gothic style combines the elements of classic Gothicism with particular Southern archetypes (the reclusive spinster, for example) and puts them in a Southern milieu.