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 20th century. Although his greatest works are identified with a finical region and time (Mississippi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the themes he explores are universal. He was also an extremely accomplished generator in a technical sense. Novels such as The Sound and the vehemence and Absalom, Absalom feature bold experimentation with shifts in time and narrative. Several of his on the spur of the moment stories are favorites of anthologists, including A Rose for Emily. This strange story of love, obsession, and death is a favorite among both readers and critics. The narrator, speaking for the town of Jefferson in Faulkners fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, tells a series of stories about the towns sequestered spinster, Miss Emily Grierson. The stories build up to a gruesome revelation after Miss Emilys funeral. She apparently poisoned her lover, Homer Barron , and unplowed 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 blustering 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 history, a study in abnormal psychology, an allegory of the relations between trades union 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 starting point for discussion of the story. The Gothic horror tale is a literary form dating back to 1764 with the first fable identified with the genre, Horace Walpoles The Castle of Ontralto. Gothicism features an atmosphere of terror and dread gloomy castles or mansions, sinister characters, and unexplained phenomena. Gothic novels and stories also often i nclude touched combinations of sex and death. In a lecture 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 phantasma story. In fact, Faulkner is considered by many to be the progenitor of a sub-genre, the gray 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.