Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“A Rose for Emily” 167
that resulted in the paving of small town sidewalks and streets, which
in turn brought the Yankee suitor to Jefferson. And thereby hangs
Faulkner’s tale. Into both settings of change the author introduces a
hero who, fortifying himself in an anachronistic, essentially horrible,
and yet majestic stronghold, ignores or defies the insistent encroachments
of time and progress. It is the different and yet similar ways in
which Poquelin and Miss Emily oppose these encroachments that
their creators show their kinship and, after all, their basic difference.
Each curtain goes up on an isolated fortress from bygone days.
Jean-ah’s is seen as “an old colonial plantation-house” in New
Orleans “half in ruin,” “aloof from civilization,” standing at considerable
remove from the smaller, newer houses on the bank of the
Mississippi. It is “grim, solid, and spiritless,” “its massive build” a
reminder of an earlier, more hazardous period of American history.
With its “dark” and “weather-beaten” roof and sides, it stands above
a marsh in whose center grow two dead cypresses, “clotted with
roosting vultures.” The Grierson home of Faulkner’s story is similarly
detached, superseded, and forbidding. It is a “big, squarish frame
house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires
and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies.”
It too stands alone on the street as a human dwelling, “lifting
its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the
gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.”
In the first of these half-ruined homes lives a half-ruined old
creole grandee, “once an opulent indigo planter, . . . now a hermit, alike
shunned by and shunning all who had ever known him,” the last of
a prominent Louisiana line. His only relative, a much younger halfbrother
named Jacques, has not been seen for seven years, two years
after Poquelin and he left for the Guinea coast on a slave-capturing
expedition and Jean Marie returned alone. (“He must have arrived
at his house by night. No one saw him come. No one saw ‘his little
brother’; rumor whispered that he, too, had returned, but he had never
been seen again.”) This livelihood Poquelin had descended to after
his indigo fields had had to be abandoned, and, after that, smuggling.
From the first, there is suspicion of foul play, and with the passing of
time “the name of Jean Marie Poquelin became a symbol of witchery,
devilish crime, and hideous nursery fictions.” His society is avoided,
and boys playing in the neighborhood jibe at the old man, who retaliates
imperiously with violent but unheeded (and outdated) “French