Who Arose for Emily?

Author(s): Timothy O'Brien

Source: The Faulkner Journal , Spring 2015, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 101-109
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44211471

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 / Faulknei^' Timothy O'Brien
/ Journal

Who Arose for Emily?

ily,5 * M. Thomas Inge recommends a number of paper topics, perhaps the

most obvious of which involves the storys title: "Faulkner and his critics
In most ily,5 suggestsuggesthis vari* M.ous1970meaniobvingsousforvaritheoustitlThomas Merridilfferent
e. How many of meanimeaningsngsIngemigwhiht ch Literary recommends involves for Casebook the title. the a on storys number How Wil iam many title: of Faulkners paper different "Faulkner topics, meanings "A and Rose perhaps his for critics might Em- the
it have?" (126). The prompt addresses a basic interpretive problem: a rose never
appears in the story, the closest references to one being the "curtains of faded
rose color" and "the rose-shaded lights" in the macabre bedroom scene at the
end ("Rose" 129). This apparent disconnect between title and text troubles plenty
of readers, inspiring questions of Faulkner and an array of ingenious interpreta-
tions.

Faulkner regarded the title as referring to the story itself, a fond gesture to-
ward Emily, a tribute of sorts to "a woman you would hand a rose" ( Nagano
70-71). Within the story, that sort of gesture emerges from the description of the
"mass of bought flowers" at Emilys funeral (129). As for the story s critics, they
focus on the cultural symbolism of the rose itself. It can represent Emily as a
treasured memory (Going 54). It can refer to Homer Barron as Emilys romantic
rose, a keepsake rose; or as a memento that love once flourished in her life ( Weaks
11-12; Kurtz 40). It can amount to the narrators story itself and its timelessness;
and it can ironically refer to the odorous corpse (Brown 319-20; Hagopian, item
68). The number of literary allusions identified in these interpretations and oth-
ers seems exhaustive, ranging, for example, from Der Rosenkavalier (Going 54)
and Blake's "The Sick Rose" (Mellard 37-39) to the "usual suspects": Romeo and
Juliet's "That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet"; "O
my luve is like a red, red rose, / That's newly sprung in June" from Burns s poem;
and Stein's "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" (qtd. in Inge). The suggested allusions
include even the ancient Roman custom of suspending a rose in a room to indi-
cate that sub rosa events, likely sexual ones, were occurring there (Scherting 404).
In all of these variations, the rose represents the puzzling love between Homer
and Emily and, through Oedipal implications, as a number of commentators
and Faulkner himself have insisted, between Emily and her father (FU 184-85). 1
As impressive as they are, these readings of the title's cultural implications
actually have closed off a simple but as yet unacknowledged observation that
!For examples, see Dennis Allen (59), Mary Arensberg and Sara E. Schyfter (133), Suzanne Hunter
Brown (31 1-27), Norman Holland (18), Irving Malin (37-38), and Jack Scherting (404). Diane Brown Jones's
overview of the commentary on the title is also valuable (122-23).

101

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1 02 Timothy O'Brien Who Arose for Emily ?

finally, after well over 100 published articles on the story, needs to be aired: that
the title puns on the use of "rose" as a verb, that "a rose" echoes "arose" from the
narrative itself. I do not think any commentators would put it past Faulkner to
employ such a pun. In a June 1957 interview, to illustrate this point, he distin-
guished between the short story and the novel in terms of the care required in
wording, remarking that "almost every word has got to be almost exactly right"
(FU 207). Given the variety of sexual activity in Faulkners writings, I would be
just as surprised if critics insisted that he would close off the puns bawdy sugges-
tion. As Richard Armour has remarked in regard to the honeysuckle-sex con-
nection in Faulkner, "the reader can expect something about sex even without
any mention of honeysuckle. But this has not lessened Faulkners popularity"
(74).2 More importantly, though, the pun on "a rose" and "arose" highlights a
fundamental binary in the narrative. Amid all the insistence by scholars on the
oppositions between past and present, stasis and progress, South and North and,
perhaps most importantly, inside and outside - of houses and even bodies - the
opposition between up and down, elevation and fall has attracted little sustained
attention.3 The notion that the title involves a pun grows out of this opposition
within the narrative and isolates its central paradox, one which other commenta-
tors have described in various ways: the horrible, perverse groundedness virtu-
ally built into gestures of elevation and superiority - the link, in other words,
"between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons" (122).
"Rose" or a variant of it - "rising," "rise," "rose color," and "rose-shaded" -
appears just six times in the narrative, the first occurring in the description of
Emilys encounter with the Jefferson townsmen who try to persuade her to pay
her taxes. In this episode "rose" is a verb: as the town leaders sat down "a faint
dust rose sluggishly about their thighs" (120); and "[t]hey rose when she entered"
(121)4. The scene documents the up and down binary: she stands and does not
ask them to sit, the narrator points out; moreover the dust rises from the chairs as
a result of their sitting down. Even the curious gold chain she wears "descend [s]
to her waist and vanish [es] into her belt" (121). Her body looks like one "long
submerged in motionless water" (121); and the crayon portrait of her father
stands on a "gilt easel before the fireplace" and the "stairway [mounts]" from the
hall into shadows above, as the townsmen sit waiting for Emily (120).
Even before this episode, however, the narrative captures this up/down
dynamic in its reference to Emily as "a fallen monument" (119). In the story s
2Ilse Dusoir Lind and James B. Carothers both examine the biological determinism of the sex drive in
Faulkner's women, which leads to a conflict between internal needs and social expectations
3Holland (7,18), Ruth Sullivan (162-63), and Floyd C. Watkins (46-47), for example, deal with the
binary of inside/outside as expressed in terms of incorporation, invasive sight, and disregard for the borders
of Emilys house. John F. Birk remarks that "portions" of the Grierson mansion "nearer the earth are the
more susceptible to change," as opposed to the upper reaches of the attic, the site of what he calls the "tryst
beyond time" (209). Dennis Allen discusses the leveling element of death and the democratic in the story,
as opposed to the aristocratic. William V. Davis lists a few examples of the difference between the high and
low in the portrayal of Emily, as in the description of her as "submerged" and lying "beneath" the mound of
flowers (36-37).
4Unless otherwise indicated, all textual emphases within Faulkner quotes are from the author.

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 The Faulkner Journal Spring 2015 103

second paragraph, the Grierson mansion represents a similar contrast: it is

marked by its vertical gestures - "cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies,"
as it " lifl[s ] its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and
the gasoline pumps" that represent a newer, less aspirational, less tiered cul-
ture (119). "Decay" emphasizes this binary in that it derives from the Latin
de-cadere> to fall. The contrast between Emilys home and its neighborhood is
actually contained within the architecture of the house: it expresses "the heav-
ily lightsome style of the seventies" (119). After her death, Emily is reunited
with the other members of her Southern class who "lay in the cedar-bemused
cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate
soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson" (119). The contrast on this first page
of the story, then, involves an aristocratic expression of superiority through
descriptions of actual, elevated structures as well as through words indicating
height, and at the same time, an inevitable fall, a succumbing to decay, ordi-
nariness, and the gravity of human mortality and desire. This contrast implies
a social stratification and the precariousness of that structure, something com-
mentators have observed; and it also evokes the inevitable ride on Fortunes
wheel from top to bottom expressed in medieval de casibus tragedy, the des-
tined fall from on high of the powerful.
Once recognized in these first few pages, this contrast - and involve-
ment - between elevation and fall is difficult to ignore. I conservatively count
over 60 occurrences of diction capturing either the "up/down-down/up" impli-
cation or the suggestion of either elevation or fall. For example, in the account
of the aldermen's efforts to eliminate the odor emanating from Emilys man-
sion, the young member of the group is described as one "of the rising genera-
tion" (122); he is ascending politically and socially. However, the dynamic of
de-odoring the mansion also depends on Emily sitting "upright" like an idol in
a window as the men, including the member of the "rising generation," "slunk
about the house like burglers, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at
the cellar openings" and down into the cellar as they sprinkled lime (123, 122).
Accompanying this literal, spatial description, the narrators account of the
towns feeling about Emily during this episode also participates in the up/down
binary: the people thought the Griersons "held themselves a little too high for
what they really were (123); they felt vindicated when she was still unmar-
ried at thirty because she would certainly not have "turned down all" possible
suitors - if there were any (123). The episode partially repeats the inextricably
connected event of two years earlier in which Emily refuses to admit the death
of her father: after three days of denying that her father had died, she finally
"broke down? allowing the townspeople to U[bury' her father quickly" (124).
The social dynamic played out in terms of up/down - the townsfolk slinking
about her house in order to restore it to conventional expectations - mirrors
the very shape of Emily s life, even apart from how others try to position her,
as a paradoxical falling, a giving into the subversion of the world as a result of

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104 Timothy O'Brien Who Arose for Emily?

trying to remain elevated, superior, and impervious to ordinary needs: the epi-
sode of the smell "was another link between the gross, teeming world and the
high and mighty Griersons" (122).
The narrator spells out a good deal of this dynamic just as he or she de-
scribes the budding relationship between Homer Barron and Emily: "She car-
ried her head high enough - even when we believed that she was fallen" (125).
It was as if the pride of being a Grierson "wanted that touch of earthiness to
reaffirm her imperviousness" (125). Obviously another aspect of the up/down
pattern, the earthiness mentioned here equates to Homer Barron and his com-
monness. In fact, that is the central irony of Emily s relationship with Homer
Barron, a laborer whose job it is to level the vertical, aristocratic world. He
paves streets, a purely horizontal operation, but Emily s desire to remain aloof
from the town, superior to it by fulfilling what becomes a need for romantic
love, attracts her to the very thing that brings her down. When she and Homer
ride through Jefferson in the buggy, Emily holds "her head high" (126). That ar-
rogance, as associated with the up/down binary, emerges also in her "standoff"
with the druggist about the arsenic. She insists on the poison the druggist does
not want to sell her: he "looked down at her," but "She looked back at him, erect ,
her face like a strained flag ," in response to which the druggist relents (126).
The encounter unfolds as a contest of elevation, essentially, and despite her
short stature, Emily wins: she is "erect" and has the elevation, at least emotion-
ally, of a flag straining in the wind.
In terms of these episodes it becomes easy to appreciate the pervasive-
ness of this binary. As ordinary as it is, the image of earth-bound dust rising
is perhaps the core action of the story. The "realistic" detail - because seem-
ingly unnecessary - of the black workers "singing in time to the rise and fall of
picks" (124) further expresses the sad inevitability of the binary. That descrip-
tion follows another one combining various suggestions of elevation and fall:
in it Emily, hair now closely cut, resembles "those angels in colored church
windows - sort of tragic and serene" (124). 5 Even the narrators mentioning
that "Emilys people were Episcopal" is involved as well, as "episcopal" comes
from the Greek epiy or "over," and skopos , or "seerer" (126). That detail, more-
over, counters something potentially scandalous: the Baptist minister sent by
the townspeople to dissuade Emily from consorting with Homer "refused to go
back" and talk with Emily again; he would not "divulge what happened dur-
ing that interview" (126). The word "divulge" and its association with "vulgar"
emphasizes the peculiar connection between elevation - the "over-seeing" of
"Episcopal" - and the lowly (126). Emilys painting pupils "grew up and fell
away" as "the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the
town" (128). The less obvious suggestions of uprightness in "backbone" and
upward growth in "generation" underscore the binary in the description of the

5Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren refer to this detail as suggesting "a kind of calm and dignity
which is supermundane, unearthly, or over- earthly"' (27).

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 The Faulkner Journal Spring 201 5 105

students. Emily does not get sick and die; she "[f] ell ill" (128) after living for
years in the downstairs of her house, the top floor having been shut up. She
dies downstairs in a "heavy walnut bed," but her head is "propped on a pillow"
(129). At the funeral, the people come "to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of
bought flowers" (129). She is in a "bier," as well, the very word itself repeating
the sense of her as a burden (129). Countering these suggestions of oppressive
weight and fall, however, is the appearance once again of the "crayon face of her
father musing profoundly above the bier" (129). As often occurs with this pat-
tern, the "above" has built into it the "below," as "profoundly," from profundis
means deep. Even the word "musing" involves a rather sick joke joining ratio-
cination on the one hand with the bodily decay on the other, as "muse" comes
from the Latin word for snout, or nose, recalling the stink from Homer Barrons
corpse and anticipating what will be found in the upstairs room.
Perhaps Emilys watch, described in the storys first section, is the richest
of these paradoxical images. Apparently substantial enough to be heard from
beneath her belt, the watch is attached to a thin gold chain strung around her
neck, it seems (121). The chain connects the upper with the nether region of
her body, mind (by suggestion) with sexuality, and thereby almost parallels an-
other of Faulkner s comments about the story: that it treats "the conflict of con-
science with glands" (FU 58). This vertical line joins the teeming, urgent, time-
bound and crass sexuality below to the haughtiness and imagination above,
with all the aureole-like suggestiveness of the golden chain. The ulteriority of
the persistently ticking watch, the biological clock, as it were, opposed to the
gold - the sexual opposed to the imaginative and mental - parallels the ulte-
riority of "arose" as opposed to "a rose," "arose" operating as the unacknowl-
edged element in the binary of romance, love pitching "his mansion in / The
place of excrement," according to Yeatss Crazy Jane, certainly Emilys match
at being "proud and stiff / When on love intent" (254-55). Thus the dust ris-
ing ("rose") when the townsmen sit and their rising ("They rose") when Emily
enters develop a perverse joke of sorts that captures Emily s ineluctable though
unacknowledged connection with sex, corruptible flesh, and, ultimately, dust
(120-21). As the dust rises curiously about their thighs, the men rise almost as
if in response to that particular feature of Emily s presence, that vertical line
from close to her head to beneath her belt.
No doubt the nonchronological structure of this narrative promotes re-
cursive reading, and so every accumulating detail suggesting the connection
between the low and the high, between superiority and abject submission to
biological needs, invests such early-occurring details as the watch and watch-
chain and the verb "rose," not to mention the title itself, with added meaning.
So too does that process of investing these earlier details with meaning circle
back around to the advancing narrative so that later details become trans-
formed by the earlier ones. That is certainly the case with the episode in the up-
stairs room that ends the story. It too relies heavily on the up/down binary: the

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1 06 Timothy O'Brien Who Arose for Emily?

townspeople's ascent to the "region above stairs" depends upon Emily being, in
by now oxymoronic terms, "decently in the ground" (129). In the upstairs lay
the remains of Homer Barron, shut up, inaccessible, hidden. In keeping with
the up/down dynamic, the closed and locked upstairs room is forced open,
or "[broken] down" (129), unsettling the dust. Homer "lay in the bed," while
the townsfolk "just stood there, looking down" at him (130). His decayed flesh
lies "beneath" the rotten nightshirt; and everything in the room, including the
townspeople, lies beneath the dust; it is "upon" everything (130). The spatial
disposition in this final scene completes the social reversal: those who largely
resented Emily s elevation have now attained it, in a sense, though in doing so
they are forced to participate in and literally be touched by the very paradox
of Emily s life, the perverse fall built into elevation. The laborer, Homer, para-
doxically lies in a room at the top of the mansion, though beneath the rotten
wedding clothes and the dust. And the very last gesture of the story involves
elevation and fall, as one of the townsfolk "[lifts]" the "long strand" of Emilys
"iron-gray hair," with all the weightiness implied by that description, from the
indented pillow (130).
Here, as I mentioned earlier, we get the only use of "rose" to describe the
color of the curtains and the lampshades. Through the recursive process en-
couraged by the storys narration, then, the apparently neutral, or perhaps re-
spectful, act of rising seen in the story s opening section grows into a pun on
sexual desire, while the delicate, romantic hue of rose, the adjective, takes on
the implications of the sexually suggestive, even bawdy verb, arise. While al-
luding to the more decent and conventional meanings of romanticism, "rose"
also becomes complicit in the scene s visual language of necrophilia; of implied
incest in the identification of Homer and Emily s father, who has just been de-
scribed as looking down upon his daughter s bier; and of a ludicrous, macabre
cuckoldry. Even the tone of the story, then, wheels from one extreme to anoth-
er, from the height of the serious and pitiful down to the absurd and irreverent,
establishing the mixture of the two as its vision of a needy life.6
Emily rides this wheel of fortune to the depths of the grave, and before that
to the depths of the "perverse," to use one of the narrator s memorable descrip-
tions of her as "dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse" (128). In
keeping with the up/down binary, that perversity occurs in one of the houses
elevated rooms, as if to suggest that the very grandeur of her impervious, iso-
lated character, the suggested elevation of it, is the very thing that makes it ob-
scene. The arrested, horizontal figure of the "new man" - Homer Barron - lies
beneath all the accouterments of Emily s desperate attempt to fix him in her
elevated world of traditional courtship, marriage, and family. And beneath it
all, if you will forgive the pun, lurks Emily s desperately undeveloped and un-
fulfilled sexuality. In other words, the story, at its roots, is as perverse as Emily:
6See Charles A. Allen (59-60) and Nikolaus Happel (70-71) for discussions of the comic element in the
story. Minrose C. Gwin analyzes this scene as Emilys act of "subvert [ing] the culturally defined signifiers of
marital love" (26).

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 The Faulkner Journal Spring 201 5 107

Homer "arose," once perhaps became "aroused," in other words, for Emily; and
in gaining Homer s arousal and fixing him in that consummating position, she,
through that proxy, raises her father from the death she denied, from the grave
into which the townsfolk lowered him.

U.S. Naval Academy

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1 08 Timothy O'Brien Who Arose for Emily?

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