A rose for emily literary analysis in a rose for emily , william faulkner uses setting, character development, and stylistic devices to express the mystery of emily and the somewhat gossip obsessed attitude the townspeople have towards emily. Faulkner uses the setting to convey the mystery surrounding emily and her actions. For example, faulkner writes knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. This quote shows the mystery of her house and how nobody knows what is in it or what goes on inside of it. Also the townspeople give off a very southern racist attitude when he writes: the construction company came with niggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named homer barron, a yankee a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers, and the niggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. The setting affects how we look at the character because we are looking through the eyes of the townspeople.

The southerners believed that she needed to act a certain way so that put a lot of pressure on miss emily to act rich like her family was even though she is poor. For example, she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last grierson. Pg.651 another writing tool faulkner uses is the change in miss emily’s character. At first miss emily is a slender figure in white in the background but then years later she is described as: a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Phoenix, az william faulkner once said, given a choice between grief and nothing, i 039 d choose grief brainyquote. He further explains why he’d do this in a rose for emily although the story is not about him, he details the loneliness and selfishness of a poor woman, miss emily. Miss emily is unable to grip the idea of death and suffers great deals of denial.

After the death of her father, the townspeople expected her to be in a state of grief but alas she is not. William faulkner’s idea of grieving is clear in this story because he shows his audience that it is better to accept death than to ignore it through the accounts of miss emily’s journey. William faulkner’s story takes place in the south, during a time period of racial discrimination and major political change.

By using reader response criticism, a reader can analyze a rose for emily through the aspects of the secret held within the story, race found through anthropology, and gender found through anthropology. To begin with, one can analyze a rose for emily by examining the underlying hidden message found within the story. The hidden message that william faulkner tried to convey in his story was the themes of death and change. Death looms through the story from the beginning right on through to the end as the narrator begins describing the beginning of miss emily’s funeral. Miss emily herself chooses not to accept the fate of death when her extremely controlling father passes away. Miss emily met them at the door, dressed` as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. This quote from a rose for emily clearly shows how miss emily tried to defy death by holding on to her father’s corpse and treating it as if he were still living and how fearful she was of change.

Miss emily continually tried to prevent any sort of change through death or other means from occurring in her town. She was so frightened of change that she wouldn’t allow the city to put numbers on her house for mail. Miss emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. Through this quote one can see the struggle that miss emily had to maintain her traditions and her attempts to force the town to remain at a standstill. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust faulkner. This is miss emily’s most severe attempt to preserve her life and the time period in which she lived. The next step to analyzing a rose for emily is to examine race found through anthropology.

Int 2 English Critical Essay Marking

William faulkner’s attempts to convey this racism is made clear in a rose for emily. They were admitted by the old negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow faulkner. Faulkner truly conveys the experience of the african american in the time period that this story was written because he is able to show how stripped of their identities they were.