A Rose For Emily Setting Essay

Every story has a setting. Whether it is in this world or one that is completely imaginary, the setting of any story is necessary in order to understand the characters. The characters in the following three short stories are shaped by their setting and would not be the same if the setting was different. Over the course of each story it is easy to see how vital the setting is in order for the reader to fully understand the characters and their lives. Therefore, while the reader reads these stories they must analyze how the setting affects the characters, the obstacles that the setting creates, and what it tells us about the characters.

     In the short story A Rose for Emily, by William Faulkner there is a very interesting character. Her Name is Emily Grierson and she is a rich southern gentile. All her life it seems that she was raised at a standard that was above the rest. By living such a secluded and controlled life it set her up for the happenings in her future.

Tradition controls the actions of both the town and Emily herself.  “A Rose for Emily” captures the importance tradition holds for her Southern community.  The Civil War was an issue of lifestyle.  Southerners hung to the lifestyle they had, with the slaves. Tradition was the reason Emily didn’t pay her taxes. Her father was aristocracy and paid no taxes , therefore , Emily refused. When the slavery era passed, the South fell, the lifestyle was torn apart and the economy changed.  Old-time families, like Emilie’s, lost their position with their

Miss Emily's relationship with her father is a key factor in the development of her isolation. As she is growing up, he will not let anybody around his daughter,

Critic James H. Picker once wrote, “To classify, to regard fiction as an object can be taken apart and then put back together, is only one way to approach and participate in the work of literature; but it is not the only way. Once students grasp this truth, literature becomes dynamic, alive and ‘available”. In the short story, “A Rose for Emily”, writer William Faulkner uses plot, character and setting to demonstrate Emily’s refusal to transition into the “New South”.

In light of Homers feelings toward marriage Emily had been seen in town at the jewelers purchasing a men’s toilet set in silver with the letters H.B. on each

Meyer, Michael. "A Rose for Emily." The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Ninth ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. 84-90. Print.

7) What is the significance of Miss Emily’s actions after the death of her father?

This reality sends panic and fear through her because now she has nowhere to turn and no one to tell her what to do, no one to command her life. Not only is she stricken with the loss of her father but now she is cut off to the outside world, because her only link has passed on. Emily immediately goes into a state of denial; to her, her father could not be dead, he was all that she had and she would not let him go.

William Faulkner is a well-known author, whose writing belongs in the Realism era in the American Literary Canon. His writing was influence by his Southern upbringing, often setting his stories in the fictional Southern town, Yoknapatawpha County. “A Rose for Emily” was one of Faulkner’s first published pieces and displays many of the now signature characteristics of Faulkner’s writing. The short story provides commentary through the use of many symbols. In William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily”, the author uses the townspeople as a representation of societal expectations and judgments, Emily and her house as symbols for the past, and Homer’s corpse as a physical representation of the fear of loneliness.

In "A Rose for Emily", a woman (for whom the story is named) confines herself in her somewhat large house in a small town during the early half of the twentieth century. For the most part, in order to understand the entirety of the story, it is vital to understand the setting and how each character develops it, and,or, interacts with it.

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris” (Faulkner I). Emily abandoned with no wealth but a house from her father's will. Her father was the man in her life that took control and isolated Emily by enabling her to have a husband and a proper life. Emily creates her own illusions, a reality that permanently detaches herself from the real world. Therefore, as the years passed the town developed a new society, but Emily has gone old unable to accept the changes in her surrounding by refusing to have a mailbox build on her property. She lives in the past that enables her to adapt. This gothic short story, A Rose for Emily (1930),

“A Rose for Emily” is quite a messed up story, but has my interest. A theme in the story would be forgiveness and some compassion towards a murder A.K.A Emily Grierson. The local townspeople are very curious about Emily. Because she is quite the mysterious lady in town who keeps to herself, and you only hear about her from rumors. Townspeople are all intrigued in every little thing she does.

William Faulkner is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Although he was born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897 he moved to Oxford, Mississippi before his fifth birthday. Faulkner belonged to a once-wealthy family of former plantation owners (eNotes.com, Inc., 2012). He spent his boyhood hunting and fishing in and around Lafayette County (eNotes.com, Inc., 2012). William Faulkner based most of his stories and characters closely to his life and the ones that had the greatest influence in his life. The South’s historical legacy is what Faulkner often wrote his novels based on and that it what helped him gain recognition. Faulkner moved around to

William Faulkner was an American novelist and short storyist who wrote numerous stories and novels throughout the 1920s-1960s. Faulkner was unlike the other authors of his era such as Charles Dickens, as his works commonly provoked a psychological response of the reader. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, for his major literary works The Sound and the Fury, various screenplays such as Stream of Consciousness and as I Lay Dying. He also is known for his works following the life of the impoverished white population of the south, in which he maintained the gravity of emotion as he highlighted the unglamorous, raw lives of the poor in Oxford, Mississippi. These observations also contributed to the intensity and common setting in the same fictional county of his later novels Sanctuary, A Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!. Not only did Faulkner compose novels which taxed one’s psyche, but he also wrote technically challenging novels such as The Wild Palms, which can be credited to fathering the modern styles of writing. Of his short stories, he continued using his observations of southern culture in the 1930s, as well as used intrinsic language to compose various works, such as The Unvarnished, yet both, his style and common themes meld together in his 1930 short story A Rose for Emily.