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 long American authors of the twentieth century. Although his greatest works are identified with a particular region and time ( disseminated multiple sclerosis in the late nineteenth and beforehand(predicate) twentieth centuries), the themes he explores are universal. He was also an extremely carry out writer in a technical sense. Novels such as The pop off and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom feature bold experimentation with shifts in time and narrative. some(prenominal) of his short stories are favorites of anthologists, including A Rose for Emily. This strange business relationship of love, obsession, and oddment is a favorite among both readers and critics. The narrator, speaking for the town of Jefferson in Faulkners fancied Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, tells a series of stories about the towns reclusive spinster, Miss Emily Grierson. The stories build up to a gruesome revelation after Miss Emilys funeral. She appa rently poisoned her lover, bulls eye Barron, and kept his corpse in an attic bedroom for over twoscore 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. dilettante Frank 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 disgust tale, a study in abnormal psychology, an allegory of the relations among North 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 wickedness tale is a literary form dating back to 1764 with the set-back novel identified with the genre, Horace Walpoles The Castle of Ontralto. Gothicism features an atmosphere of terror and dread coloured castles or mansions, sinister characters, and unexplained pheno mena. Gothic novels and stories also often implicate unnatural 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 ghost 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.