The text under consideration is “The Rose for Emily” by an outstanding American writer, William Faulkner. This literary work is a marvelous and impressive example of Faulkner’s literary talent, as on the basis of several pages he manages to transfer immense feelings and the terrible tragedy that is usually characteristic for longer literary genres, for instance, novels. We believe that the author manages to disclose his message of the story mainly due to resorting to symbolism. Symbols are the devices that make this story so outstanding, beautiful, and terribly sad at the same time. That is why symbols of the text deserve detailed analysis.
In the first place, the family house where Emily and her deceased father lived is one of the central symbolic images of the story. Usually, people can always find refuge in their houses, they know that the family hearth is always ready to warm us, the family house is the symbol of childhood and the unity of the family. The house in “A Rose for Emily” makes an absolutely opposite impression on the reader. It is a dark and oppressive symbol: “It was 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 …” (Faulkner and Cowley 392). The house is presented to the reader as a monster, as a black hole, extracting Emily’s life and energy. The house imprisons Emily forever and it symbolizes her loneliness and isolation from society, what is more, it also imprisons her beloved person, like a monster from horror movies, that lets a person in and never lets him out. It is known that people managed to come into the house only after Emily’s death, as if her death opened the door of the house and many people came in order to see the house inside, not to say farewell words to the late mistress of the house (Faulkner and Cowley 392).
In the second place, hair and grey hair, in particular, is a speaking symbol of the story. It symbolizes the process of aging and movement to the logical death of the protagonist. Hair was the only sign that gave the town dwellers the opportunity to follow the changes in Emily’s appearance and her destiny: “her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl” (Faulkner and Cowley 396). Besides, there is one more symbolic thing connected with grey hair, it is the grey lock that was found on the pillow near Homer’s decomposed corpse. Here the loch stands for the irrefutable evidence of Emily’s presence in the room, it is soothing like a signature under the confession of a terrible murder in the name of love.
In the third place, it is impossible to omit the most terrifying symbol of the short story, death. This symbol opens the story because we meet the protagonist when she is dead already which is unusual in itself. The breathing of death may be read between lines because many other minor details contribute to the creation of the symbolic atmosphere of death: lime that is used to struggle against the smell of putrefaction, because the terrible smell is covering the whole town gradually, the poison for rats that may well kill a person and in fact really kills Barron. Besides, the story has a number of deceased characters: Emily, her father, her fiancé. All these elements together create an oppressive and gloomy atmosphere in the story.
In conclusion, let us say that by means of the usage of symbols in the narrative William Faulkner manages to attract the reader and make his flesh creep. Every symbol is necessary for the composition of the story because all of them are aimed at the creation of a horrifying atmosphere of the story and they are the basis for the characterization of the protagonist.
References
Faulkner, William and Malcolm Cowley. The Portable Faulkner. NY: Penguin Classics, 2003.