A rose for emily by William Faulkner Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

A rose for emily by William Faulkner - Essay ExampleA uprise for Emily embodies the subtle coefficient of correlation between Southern Gothic and Faulkners interest in the moral inferences of hi paper.William Faulkners story, A Rose for Emily, is a famous example of southern gothic literature because of its rich gothic elements such as sense of horror, gloomy setting, signs of understated violence, uncertainty of point of view, the unidentified narrator, and necrophilia. Faulkners story is fraught with sable imageries and actions such as Emilys effort to prevent her fathers corpse from burial, her necrophilia (attraction to Barrons corpse), the decaying mansion, the strange vanishing of a servant and the slaughter of Barron. These gothic elements inevitably facilitate the development of the theme of the story the gradual decay and death of the aristocratic old society and the emergence of the new class. In fact, Faulkners protagonist, Emily herself symbolizes the dying aristocrac y in the first half of the 20th century. She wants to cling to her aristocratic superiority as well as seclusion. Though she falls in love with Baron, a layman, she fails to cope with the class-gap between her and her lover. Faulkner has kept the idea of Barons murder secret and left it to the readers assumption. In fact, this technique of keeping the motif open to interpretation necessarily allows the readers to investigate deep into Emilys motif behind the murder in relation to her aristocratic social status. Indeed, there is a number of possible motifs behinds Barons murder Barons homosexuality, his non-marriageable nature, Emilys mental sickness, etc. But whatever the reasons are, they are all tie in to a central reason that is the status-gap between Emily and Baron. Faulkner uses mainly three literary techniques -point of view, unidentified narrator, characterization- to