Lawyers’ litigation forecasts play an integral role in the justice system

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, September 2023, Vol. 13, No. 9, 650-655

doi: 10.17265/2159-5836/2023.09.004

A Narratological Study of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for

Emily”

HUANG Li-hua

Guangzhou College of Technology and Business, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510800, China



William Faulkner (1897-1962) is usually regarded as one of the most important American novelists of the 20th

century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. “A Rose for Emily” is one of Faulkner’s famous

short stories which applies the conventions of Gothic fiction, and it has drawn the the attention of a large number

of scholars and inspired their enthusiasm of interpretation owing to its use of many experimental techniques. This

article attempts to analyze the narrative techniques of “A Rose for Emily” in terms of tense, mood and voice,

three concepts introduced by Gerald Genette, a distinguished French critic of structuralist narratology in his

Narrative Discourse (1980).

Keywords: William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”, narrative techniques, Gerald Genette, narratology

Introduction

Published in Forum on April 30, 1930, “A Rose for Emily” is one of the earliest and most famous short

stories by William Faulkner (1897-1962), an American writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

The story is mainly about the tragic life of Emily Grierson, a declining aristocratic lady in a small town called

Jefferson in the South after the American Civil War. When she was young, Emily’s father, in order to maintain

the so-called family status and dignity, drove away all the men who came to her door to woo Emily, depriving her

of the right to pursue happiness. After her father’s death, Emily fell in love with a foreman named Homer Baron

who came to town to pave the sidewalks. However, their marriage was opposed and hindered by the townspeople

and Emily’s relatives, and Homer had no intention of marrying her, as he once said that he liked men. In

desperation, Emily poisoned him with arsenic and shared a bed with his corpse for 40 years. It was only when she

died at the age of seventy-four that the townspeople discovered the secret after attending her funeral.

In the presentation speech when awarding Faulkner the Nobel Prize in 1950, Gustaf Hellström, Member of

the Swedish Academy, described William Faulkner as “the great experimentalist among twentieth-century

novelists” (quoted in Kinney, 1978, p. xi). Faulkner has applied many experimental techniques in the “A Rose

for Emily” as is mainly reflected in the use of embedded structures, alternating inversion of text time,

interspersing and jumping, the first person plural narrator and the use of multiple voices and perspectives, all of

which fit in well with Gerald Genette’s narrative theory.

HUANG Li-hua, M.A., Associated Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Guangzhou College of Technology and Business.

DAVID PUBLISHING

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In Figures III, Gerald Genette, a French structuralist narratologist, divides narrative works into three levels:

histoire (story), the content of the story told; recit, the text (narrative) read by the reader; and narration, the act or

process of producing the discourse (Genette, 1972, pp. 71-76). The content of the story is relatively fixed, but

there are many ways to tell the story. So the theory of narratology is generally used to study literary works,

mainly from the aspect of narrative discourse. In his Narrative Discourse, Genette explores the narrative

discourse of the novel from three aspects: tense, mood and voice, with tense concerning the relationship between

story time and text (narrative) time, mood about narrative distance and perspective, and voice about the

relationship between narrator and story (Genette, 1980, pp. 31-32).

A Narratological Study of “A Rose of Emily”

Tense (Temporal Order)

According to Genette, the relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of narrative can be

studied according to three essential determinations: order, duration and frequency (Genette, 1980, p. 35), among

which we will mainly focus on order, that is , the “temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the

pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative” (Genette, 1980, p. 35), as is the most conspicuous

feature in “A Rose for Emily”. Genette uses “the general term anachrony to designate all forms of discordance

between the two temporal orders of story and narrative,” which is mainly divided into two types: analepsis

(flashback) and prolepsis (flash-forward) (Genette, 1980, p. 40). Obviously, Faulkner has used the narrative

technique of anachrony in “A Rose for Emily”. Just as Wang says, “A characteristic of Faulkner’s novels is to

break the linear narrative order, to disrupt the chronological order, to break the story into many fragments, and to

have various characters tell the story from different perspectives” (Wang, 2001, p. 35). We’ll follow Genette’s

method of presentation in his Narrative Discourse by using different ways to number the events in the temporal

order in both the story and narrative level. Hence, capital letters A, B, C, D… will be used to number the events in

“A Rose for Emily” in the order in which they are narrated in the text; Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, 4… will be used to

describe the chronological order of the events when they happened in the story, and the chapters of the short story

are numbered by Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, and V. Then we get the following table:

Table 1

Narrative Order and Story Order in “A Rose for Emily”

A23 When Emily died, the whole town went to her funeral.

B13 Emily was exempt from the tax by Colonel Sartoris.

C18 Ten years after Colonel Sartoris’s death, a new government demanded that Emily pay taxes and send a delegation

to her house, but in vain.

D11 After the neighbors complained about the smell issuing from Emily’s house to the 80-year-old mayor, Judge

Stevens, four men sneaked into Emily’s yard to sprinkle lime, and the smell disappeared a week or two later.

E1 When Emily was young, her father shut out all the young men who intended to propose.

F2 When Emily’s father died, she insisted that he wasn’t dead, refused to let the body be disposed of, and three days

later broke down so that her father could be buried

III

G3 After being ill for a long time, Emily reappeared in the public with short hair and looked like a little girl.

H4 Northerner Homer Barron led the team to pave the sidewalks in the town, the two got acquainted with each other,

and drove together every Sunday afternoon.

I8 Emily went to the drugstore to buy arsenic. She was in her early thirties, still slim, thinner than ever.

J5 Concerning the gossip of Emily’s marrying Homer, the men did not want to interfere, and the women forced the

Baptist minister to visit Emily at her house.

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K6 The minister’s wife wrote to Emily’s relatives in Alabama.

L7 Two cousins arrived; Emily was busy preparing for the wedding; Homer left.

M9 A week later the two cousins left.

N10 Three days later Homer returned, but soon disappeared, and the front door of Emily’s house closed.

O12 After six months off the streets, the next time people saw Emily, she had put on weight and her hair had gone grey.

Q14 The front door of Emily’s house remained closed, except when she was about forty, and for six or seven years it

was open to teach porcelain painting lessons to the daughters and granddaughters of Sartoris’s contemporaries.

R15 A new generation took the reign, the students of the painting class grew up, left, and the front door of Emily’s

house closed forever.

S16 Emily refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a free mailbox to it.

T17 The government sent her a tax notice every December, but they were always returned a week later by the post

office as unclaimed.

U19 Emily closed off the upstairs floor and occasionally appeared in the downstairs window.

V21 Emily died in a room downstairs with only an old servant looking after her.

W20 The black servant greeted the first of ladies at the front door, then went out the back door and disappeared.

X22 Emily’s cousins arrived and held Emily’s funeral the next day.

Y24 People forced open a room upstairs that no one had seen for 40 years.

Z25 The remains of Homer, in an embrace position, were seen on the bed of the room arranged as a wedding house,

with an indentation and a lock of iron-gray hair on the pillow next to it.

As can be seen from the table above, the first chapter of “A Rose for Emily” begins with Emily’s funeral, the

fifth chapter returns to her funeral, and then people break into the door to uncover the mystery. This is Faulkner’s

preferred “circularity”(Blotner, 1991, p. 160), just like Genet’s embedded frame theory. Faulkner freely used

flashbacks, flashforward, interspersed narratives, interveined and leaping narrative in the novel, making the text

time staggered and inverted. The story seems to be broken into pieces of fragments, making the reader’s reading

experience fresh and exciting just like playing a large jigsaw puzzle.

Voice (Narrative Voice)

The narrative features of “A Rose for Emily” are also reflected in the use of first person plural narrator and

multiple voices and perspectives. Genette argues that the difference between mood and voice is who is the

character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective (who sees)? and who is the narrator (who speaks)?

(Genette, 1980, p. 186). Susan S. Lanser differentiated between authorial voice, personal voice and communal

voice in her Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992). She used “the term authorial

voice to identify narrative situations that are heterodiegetic, public, and potentially self-referential” (Lanser, 1992,

p. 15), which is usually called the traditional “third-person” narration in which the narrator is not a participant in

the fictional world (Genette, 1980, pp. 244-245). The term personal voice is used to refer to “narrators who are

self consciously telling their own histories”, but not necessarily to designate all “homodiegetic” or “first-person”

narratives, that is, “all those in which the voice that speaks is a participant in the fictional world” (Lanser, 1992,

pp. 18-19), but only those “autodiegetic” by Genette in which the “I” who tells the story is also the story’s

protagonist (Genette, 1980, pp. 227-247). By communal voice Lanser means “a spectrum of practices that

articulate either a collective voice or a collective of voices that share narrative authority… a practice in which

narrative authority is invested in a definable community and textually inscribed either through multiple, mutually

authorizing voices or through the voice of a single individual who is manifestly authorized by a community”

(Lanser, 1992, p. 21).

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Lanser also distinguish three types of communal vice: “a singular form in which one narrator speaks for a

collective, a simultaneous form in which a plural ‘we’ narrates, and a sequential form in which individual

members of a group narrate in turn” (Lanser, 1992, p. 21). Just as Cheng Xilin claims, the narrator in “A Rose for

Emily” belongs to the simultaneous form of “communal voice”, and the narrator “we” “is actually only a resident

of the town, but it represents the observation and opinion of the residents of the southern town (Jefferson) in the

novel about the heroine Emily. The narrator is limited in what he sees and hears, and is unable to personally

observe many of the events that take place in Emily’s mysterious mansion” (Cheng, 2005, p. 68). Therefore, the

narrator’s perspective is limited, and the use of multiple perspectives is inevitable.

Kirchdorfer argues that “A Rose for Emily” uses “an unknown, omniscient narrator, fond of using the plural

we, a narrative strategy that establishes more distance between author and narrator than if the author had

employed the singular I” (Kirchdorfer, 2017, p. 147). Just as Sullivan notes, “Faulkner gives the narrator neither

face, sex, name, occupation, nor age” (Sullivan, 1971, p. 166). Moreover, this enigmatic narrator chooses an

unpredictable narrative person, switching back and forth between “our”, “they”, “people”, “we” and “they”, the

narrator “we” and the reflector “they” are used interchangeably. In the first chapter, “they mailed her a tax notice”

(Faulkner, 1942, p. 8); in the fourth chapter, “we sent her a tax notice” (Faulkner, 1942, p. 20), and “they” seem to

merge with “we”. Thus, the reader “realizes immediately the vagueness of the pronoun focus within this story.

Within all five sections we note a continual shifting of person, from our to they to we (all italics added). And this

shift is further complicated by implied shifts of referents for the various pronouns. That is, our does not always

have the same referent, nor do they and we!” (Nebeker, 1970, p. 4). As a result, the meaning of the text has

become ambiguous and confusing, causing certain difficulties for readers’ interpretation. According to

Richardson, “It is the very ambiguity and fluctuations of the precise identity of the ‘we’ that are among its most

interesting, dramatic, and appealing features…” (Richardson, 2006, p. 56).

Mood (Narrative Perspective)

In “A Rose for Emily”, not only does Faulkner use multiple person narration, he also uses multiple narrative

perspectives. For example, after the description of Emily’s house in the first chapter, the narrator uses the highly

subjective words “an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner, 1942, p. 7). When the second generation of mayors and

aldermen sent a delegation to visit Miss Emily, they described the interior of her house and her appearance from

the perspective of the members of the delegation, saying that “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in

motionless water…” (Faulkner,1942, p. 9). In both cases, the voice is obviously of an omniscient narrator, but

viewed through the perspective of the new generation, because the older generations who respected the old

Southern tradition and regarded Emily as a symbol of that tradition would never have used such expressions to

describe their monument and her house.

Both an omniscient narrative voice and perspective is used in the description of the smell incident, when

four men sneaked into Emily’s yard to sprinkle lime and in the third chapter, and when Emily went to the

drugstore to buy arsenic, where the narrator was not present, but there was a detailed description of Emily’s

appearance and her conversation with the drugstore owner. The law requires the buyer to explain the purpose

before the purchase, but neither did the owner dare to ask questions due to Emily’s aggressive eyes and arrogant

posture, nor did he dare to come out again, instead he sent a negro delivery boy to bring her the package. In view

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of the fact that no third person was present at that time, and the pharmacy’s owner’s conduct was in violation of

the law, he could not disclose the details to the third person, so the narrator here also adopts an omniscient

perspective. The omniscient narrator also reveals to us what he has seen, “When she opened the package at home

there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats” (Faulkner, 1942, p. 16).

However, there are also other cases where the narrative voice and perspective of the omniscient narrator is

totally replaced by the plural narrator “we”. After Emily’s funeral, people forced open a room upstairs that no one

had seen for 40 years. “The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A

thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal…”

(Faulkner, 1942, pp. 21-22). Then the eyes of the observers pass, in turn, over “the valence curtains of faded

rose color”, “the rose-shaded lights”, “the delicate array of crystal and the man’s toilet things backed with

tarnished silver”, “a collar and tie”, the carefully folded suit, “the two mute shoes and the discarded socks”, and

then the man lying in the bed. Then everybody in the room was shocked by the scene, “For a long while we just

stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin… Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the

indentation of a head” (Faulkner, 1942, p. 22).

The first thing we need to think about is, who are the “they” that broke down the door? Obviously, it can

not be the predecessors of the deceased Emily, nor can it be the peers of Emily who is already 70 or 80 years

old, and it is likely to be her next generation or even younger generation. As early as the fourth chapter, during

Emily’s cousin’s visit, the narrator informs us that Emily has gone to order men’s toiletries, and that it has been

more than 40 years since they were engraved with H. B., Homer’s initials. So it’s possible that the people who

broke into the room did not know what was inscribed on it, hence, “the man’s toilet things backed with

tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured” (Faulkner, 1942, p. 22). In addition,

Homer’s name does not appear in this scene, but is referred to as “The man”, “him”, etc. The narrator is no

longer omniscient, his voice and his perspective has been completely replaced by that of a “we” narrator.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the narrative techniques in “A Rose for Emily” mainly lie in the use of anachrony, the

employment of first person plural, we-narrator, and multiple voices and perspectives, etc. The use of anachrony,

or the inconsistency between text time and story time makes the text seem to be upside down, messy, broken,

and illogical; due to the rapid changes of pronouns and their references, and due to the overt and covert shift of

narrative perspectives, the identity of the mysterious first-person plural narrator is difficult to distinguish, all

these make readers’ interpretation of the text rather challenging but also inspires their wild imagination and

brings them a new reading experience. Although the narrator knew Emily’s secret very well, he chose to reveal

the suspense at the last moment, so he pretended not to know everything that happened in Emily’s room, and

never entered Emily’s consciousness from beginning to end. All that we know about Emily is through the gossips

of the people in the town of Jefferson. “‘We’ narration is especially effective in juxtaposition to other, traditional

modes of narrating. This results in a distinctive kind of multiperson narration that continuously defamiliarizes the

conventional nature of traditional narrative forms” (Richardson, 2006, p. 56).

William Faulkner applies the conventions of Gothic fiction in creating “A Rose for Emily” with its gloomy

and uncanny settings, eccentric and grotesque characters, sensational murder, mysterious disappearance as well

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as a sense of dreadful mystery. Owing to Faulkner’s experimental application of various narrative techniques, the

mysterious horror atmosphere and the shocking effect of the story has been successfully achieved. Such effective

horror not only provokes us to reflect on Emily, the tragic protagonist who impresses us as obstinate, eccentric,

isolated, asocial, twisted in personality, refusing modern changes, living in the past, but still deserves our

sympathy, as she is a victim of southern aristocratic traditions, alone, penniless, innocent, longing for love,

defying conventions, considered to be a living monument, dead while alive as a symbol of tradition. It also

arouses us to meditate on how haunted and paralyzed the South was after the Civil War by its conception of its

own glorified and genteel past.

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University Press.

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