John Doe

Professor Martin

English 1301-S40

21 September 2004

Denying Time

As a first time reader of any work by William Faulkner, one may be initially unsure of what is so special and unique about his writing. He is a writer that speaks out of a need to communicate common, underlying human thoughts and emotions. In his short story- “A Rose for Emily,” he ingeniously incorporates the use of fractured time to differentiate views held by the different generations of people in the town of Jefferson.  Faulkner uses the natural human need to deny the passage of time to help the reader understand the justification and complicit attitude of the town and its people towards Emily. Through the view of the narrator, Emily goes from being a young desirable, inaccessible southern belle to an old, perverse recluse that gets away with much more than she should. 
In this story there are two distinct generations seen. The older generation that is under the mayoralty of Colonel Sartoris, gave Emily the right to be exempt from paying taxes in Jefferson in exchange for giving china painting lessons to the kids in the town. As the years passed, Mr. Grierson died and left his daughter with no known inheritance save the house that she has holed herself up in. "Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized"(Faulkner).  The younger generation, with its modern ideas opposing their parents’, attempts to impose taxes upon Miss Emily. They see her as a parasite, of sorts, to society and lack their parents’ lasting respect. By now all the children have stopped going to her to take china painting lessons and the new town officials decide to see her as a normal person, unlike their father’s views. At the refusal to pay taxes or comply with the town's wishes, the officials are stumped as to what to do. They feel awkward and unsure of how to treat Emily and end up labeling her insane, creating a puzzling tableau for the people. 
The town had long thought of the Grierson's as somewhat of an enigma with the picture of "Miss Emily- a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back flung front door..." (Faulkner). The new generation is capable of being complicit to Emily's nature simply because they are lazy. They do not want to mar the fairytale Emily that their fathers had created by forcing her to do such a human thing as pay taxes. So you see how the passage of time has effect on how the younger generation is acting. In this corrupt shroud, the town's aldermen have conspired to cover up Emily's crime (though they haven't actually seen evidence that she murdered anyone) simply to get attention away from her. Emily's purchase of arsenic and the recent disappearance of Homer Barron are plain as day secondary evidence that she did kill him. Faulkner seems to idolize Emily's character, as do the town’s people. The aldermen resort to sprinkling lime around her house to take away the smell of death. "As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol"(Faulkner). The men slink around the yard and look up to Emily as being some sort of god or being worthy of reverence and fear. Who in the town would dare to question her about something like the smell of her house? No one will. Even in the way that Faulkner describes her death, she is idolized. Her house and surroundings seem to build up her high and mighty character. The room and the corpse are described as if they are the accouterments of an ancient tomb.
Further discussion of how Faulkner used the nature of time and how humans view it, brings us to the old men at the funeral conversing about Emily and the alibi she had. An argued meaning to this story was that it is birthed from Faulkner's meditation of the nature of time. “A Rose for Emily” covers approximately three quarters of a century. The focus points are not specific dates such as when each of the Grierson's died or when exactly the new generation overpowered the older one, but more on time as a force of physics. How does time constitute for Emily and the people's bizarre actions or lack thereof. Faulkner sheds light on this thought in the description of the very old men at Emily's funeral: "...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 bottleneck of the most recent decades" (Faulkner). In this beautiful telling of the nature of time, Faulkner helps the reader begin to understand the actions of the people. While the passage of time does not rightly justify crime or sin, it can make it easier to ignore. Emily simply devised her own way of denying the passage of time. Her way was just more extreme than most. Now days, people may resort to surgery or cheap camera tricks to slow time in aging. Emily wanted eternal companionship.  To her repressed and demented mind, murdering her fiancé was the only way she believed she could attain this. 
To normal human reasoning Emily's acts are seen as repulsive and utterly wrong, but in Faulkner's world of the nature of time, it is possible to pity "Poor Emily" (Faulkner). Through close analysis one can tell that Faulkner is writing from his heart. Maybe he needed to justify to himself something he did because of the effects time played on him. This is something that anyone can relate to. Faulkner truly is a great writer who masters the explaining of the complexities of connections between the past and present. No one is perfect and without sin, and a natural response to error is looking for an excuse or scapegoat to somehow cleanse us of our filth. No one likes being dirty.  Works of art inspired from human necessity have a genuine quality to them as opposed to a contrived product that is manufactured for lesser ends.