A Rose for Emily

             "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years." This is the first sentence in William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, in it he sets up the main cross-cultural relationship that is portrayed in this short story. Below I am going to discuss this cross-cultural relationship that Faulkner illustrates in this story and show how he illustrated it. The main cross-cultural relationship depicted is the old south vs. the new south.
             As pointed out above, Faulkner sets up this cross-cultural relationship in the first sentence of A Rose for Emily. In the first sentence, as with the entire short story, the old South is personified in the character of Emily Grierson and the new South in the men and women of the town of Jefferson. Emily is the last person alive from the era of the old South, and since she was isolated from early childhood, she has retained all of the ideals from that period. She was born into a wealthy plantation owning family shortly after the Civil War, where her father maintained that she was only to be wed to another person of their stature. The problem was though, that by the time she was of age there were no other plantation owning families around, and in fact their own plantation had dwindled and her family was in financial difficulty as well. She was a true southern bell. What Faulkner does here to illustrate this cross-cultural relationship is he juxtaposes Emily's character to the growing town of Jefferson. Jefferson is a town that has moved on from the days of slavery, and in fact has moved onto the former sight of the Grierson's plantation. During the period of this story, sometime near the turn of the nineteenth century, ...

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A Rose for Emily. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 02:58, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/35581.html