Paradox In A Rose For Emily

Author Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart”, aptly describing the bittersweet nature of memories. Similarly, the South’s antebellum past is simultaneously glorified and rejected at the turn of the nineteenth century, resulting in an ambiguous social atmosphere riddled with hypocrisy and infeasible expectations. This paradox is exemplified in “A Rose for Emily” as the story focuses on a Southern town’s obsession with past traditions and ideals in a rapidly changing society and its effects on the decaying Southern nobility. Even as social values shift around her, the protagonist, Emily, seems stuck in time as she is held back by the antiquated standards ascribed to members of the upper-class. …show more content…
To the townspeople, the Griersons often “held themselves a little too high”, and as a result, Emily seemed unapproachable and isolated from society. The townspeople see her relationship with her father as like a “tableau”, with her father “spraddled…in the foreground…clutching a horsewhip.” In this image, Emily’s father takes a position of threatening dominance as he stands in front of her with a “horsewhip”, seemingly warning others to stay away from his family. Furthermore, by comparing the Grierson image to a “tableau” with Emily in the background, the townspeople strip her of personal attributes, and instead, construct her image based on her status as a member of the Grierson family. Only after her father’s death and the loss of her ancestral prestige does Emily finally seem “humanized” as she is now on equal economic footing with the community. However, her father never truly relinquishes control over Emily even after his …show more content…
Emily denies her father’s death and keeps his body for three days, “[clinging] to that which had robbed her.” Having spent her life thus far completely under her father’s control with little interaction with the outside world, Emily is unable to cope with his death and consequentially, the loss of external, patriarchal control in her life. She is poorly unprepared for life outside her identity as a daughter of the Grierson family, and desperately “clings” onto her father even after his death, fully aware that he “robbed” her of a normal life with love and friendship. Her irrational reaction stems largely from fear of the future and the responsibilities it holds as her upbringing left her ill-equipped with the skills required for independent living. Without these skills to rely on, Emily resorts to holding onto the past as she sees her family name as the only thing that can uphold her current lifestyle and social status. This penchant for holding onto the flawed past is paralleled by the townspeople as they expect Emily to uphold aristocratic ideals of the past even as society gradually modernizes. The townspeople attempt to hold onto history by exalting Emily as a nostalgic relic of a greater past. To older members of society who attend Emily’s funeral, history is seen as “a huge meadow which no winter never quite touches” rather