短篇小说A Rose For Emily A story for an hour 分析

A Rose for Emily

Title

Faulkner described the title as \allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who has had a tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute ... to a woman you would hand a rose.\

The much-anthologized story is among the most widely read and highly praised of Faulkner’s work. Beyond its lurid appeal and somewhat Gothic atmosphere, Faulkner’s “ghost story,” as he once called it, gestures to broader ideas, including the tensions between North and South, complexities of a changing world order, disappearing realms of gentility and aristocracy, and rigid social constraints placed on women. Ultimately, it is the story’s chilling portrait of aberrant psychology and necrophilia that draws readers into the dank, dusty world of Emily Grierson.

Structure and Story Overview

.......Faulkner divides the story into five short sections. The first section reports the funeral and burial of Emily and provides background on her house, her servant, and her tax status. The second section focuses on a foul smell coming from her house, the use of lime by city officials to neutralize it, the insanity that runs in Emily's family, her father's refusal to allow young men to call on her, and the death and burial of her father. The third section introduces a Northerner, Homer Barron, who comes to town with a construction crew and takes Emily for buggy rides. It also reports that Emily buys arsenic at the local drugstore. The fourth section tells of the townspeople's belief that Emily is setting a bad example by regularly keeping company with Homer Barron. It also tells of the disappearance of Barron, the years when Emily teaches china painting, and the death of Emily. The fifth section reports the happenings at Emily's funeral and a grotesque discovery in an upper room of the house.

Point of View

.......The townspeople tell the story in first-person point of view. Here is an example of the narrator's first-person commentary:

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

Type of Work

.......\lonely Mississippi woman who succumbs to mental illness while living reclusively according to the outmoded traditions of Old South aristocrats.

.......Gothic horror is a genre of fiction presenting dark, mysterious, terrifying events that take place in a gloomy or ghostly setting. The genre derives its name from the Gothic architectural style in Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Gothic structures such as cathedrals and castles featured cavernous interiors with deep shadows, gargoyles looming on exterior ledges, and soaring spires suggestive of a supernatural presence. When a Gothic horror story takes place in the American South and centers in part on Southern cultural traditions and character types, as well as on a realistic rather than romantic account of events, scholars often characterize the story as Southern Gothic.

.......Tragedy is a fictional genre about the downfall or ruination of the main character. In this genre, the sympathies of the narrator, reader, or—in the case of a play—the audience often lie with the main character even when he or she has committed an unspeakable crime or sin. Such is the case in \

Emily Grierson

Emily is the classic outsider, controlling and limiting the town’s access to her true identity by remaining hidden. The house that shields Emily from the world suggests the mind of the woman who inhabits it: shuttered, dusty, and dark. The object of the town’s intense scrutiny, Emily is a muted and mysterious figure. On one level, she exhibits the qualities of the stereotypical southern “eccentric”: unbalanced, excessively tragic, and subject to bizarre behavior. Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, such as when she refuses to pay her taxes or state her purpose for buying the poison. Emily also skirts the law when she refuses to have numbers attached to her house when federal mail service is instituted. Her dismissal of the law eventually takes on more sinister consequences, as she takes the life of the man whom she refuses to allow to abandon her.

The narrator portrays Emily as a monument, but at the same time she is pitied and often irritating, demanding to live life on her own terms. The subject of gossip and speculation, the townspeople cluck their tongues at the fact that she accepts Homer’s attentions with no firm wedding plans. After she purchases the poison, the townspeople conclude that she will kill herself. Emily’s instabilities, however, lead her in a different direction, and the final scene of the story suggests that she is a necrophiliac. Necrophilia typically means a sexual attraction to dead bodies. In a broader sense, the term also describes a powerful desire to control another, usually in the context of a romantic or deeply personal relationship. Necrophiliacs tend to be so controlling in their relationships that they ultimately resort to bonding with unresponsive entities with no resistance or will—in other words, with dead bodies. Mr. Grierson controlled Emily, and after his death, Emily temporarily controls him by refusing to give up his dead body. She ultimately transfers this control to Homer, the object of her affection. Unable to find a traditional way to express her desire to

possess Homer, Emily takes his life to achieve total power over him. Homer Barron

Homer, much like Emily, is an outsider, a stranger in town who becomes the subject of gossip. Unlike Emily, however, Homer swoops into town brimming with charm, and he initially becomes the center of attention and the object of affection. Some townspeople distrust him because he is both a Northerner and day laborer, and his Sunday outings with Emily are in many ways scandalous, because the townspeople regard Emily—despite her eccentricities—as being from a higher social class. Homer’s failure to properly court and marry Emily prompts speculation and suspicion. He carouses with younger men at the Elks Club, and the narrator portrays him as either a homosexual or simply an eternal bachelor, dedicated to his single status and uninterested in marriage. Homer says only that he is “not a marrying man.”

As the foreman of a company that has arrived in town to pave the sidewalks, Homer is an emblem of the North and the changes that grip the once insular and genteel world of the South. With his machinery, Homer represents modernity and industrialization, the force of progress that is upending traditional values and provoking resistance and alarm among traditionalists. Homer brings innovation to the rapidly changing world of this Southern town, whose new leaders are themselves pursuing more “modern” ideas. The change that Homer brings to Emily’s life, as her first real lover, is equally as profound and seals his grim fate as the victim of her plan to keep him permanently by her side.

Themes

Tradition versus Change

Through the mysterious figure of Emily Grierson, Faulkner conveys the struggle that comes from trying to maintain tradition in the face of widespread, radical change. Jefferson is at a crossroads, embracing a modern, more commercial future while still perched on the edge of the past, from the faded glory of the Grierson home to the town cemetery where anonymous Civil War soldiers have been laid to rest. Emily herself is a tradition, steadfastly staying the same over the years despite many changes in her community. She is in many ways a mixed blessing. As a living monument to the past, she represents the traditions that people wish to respect and honor; however, she is also a burden and entirely cut off from the outside world, nursing eccentricities that others cannot understand.

Emily lives in a timeless vacuum and world of her own making. Refusing to have metallic numbers affixed to the side of her house when the town receives modern mail service, she is out of touch with the reality that constantly threatens to break through her carefully sealed perimeters. Garages and cotton gins have replaced the grand antebellum homes. The aldermen try to break with the unofficial agreement about taxes once forged between Colonel Sartoris and Emily. This new and younger generation of leaders brings in Homer’s company to pave the sidewalks. Although Jefferson still highly regards traditional notions of honor and reputation, the narrator

is critical of the old men in their Confederate uniforms who gather for Emily’s funeral. For them as for her, time is relative. The past is not a faint glimmer but an ever-present, idealized realm. Emily’s macabre bridal chamber is an extreme attempt to stop time and prevent change, although doing so comes at the expense of human life.

The Power of Death

Death hangs over “A Rose for Emily,” from the narrator’s mention of Emily’s death at the beginning of the story through the description of Emily’s death-haunted life to the foundering of tradition in the face of modern changes. In every case, death prevails over every attempt to master it. Emily, a fixture in the community, gives in to death slowly. The narrator compares her to a drowned woman, a bloated and pale figure left too long in the water. In the same description, he refers to her small, spare skeleton—she is practically dead on her feet. Emily stands as an emblem of the Old South, a grand lady whose respectability and charm rapidly decline through the years, much like the outdated sensibilities the Griersons represent. The death of the old social order will prevail, despite many townspeople’s attempts to stay true to the old ways.

Emily attempts to exert power over death by denying the fact of death itself. Her bizarre relationship to the dead bodies of the men she has loved—her necrophilia—is revealed first when her father dies. Unable to admit that he has died, Emily clings to the controlling paternal figure whose denial and control became the only—yet extreme—form of love she knew. She gives up his body only reluctantly. When Homer dies, Emily refuses to acknowledge it once again—although this time, she herself was responsible for bringing about the death. In killing Homer, she was able to keep him near her. However, Homer’s lifelessness rendered him permanently distant. Emily and Homer’s grotesque marriage reveals Emily’s disturbing attempt to fuse life and death. However, death ultimately triumphs.

Motifs

Watching

Emily is the subject of the intense, controlling gaze of the narrator and residents of Jefferson. In lieu of an actual connection to Emily, the townspeople create subjective and often distorted interpretations of the woman they know little about. They attend her funeral under the guise of respect and honor, but they really want to satisfy their lurid curiosity about the town’s most notable eccentric. One of the ironic dimensions of the story is that for all the gossip and theorizing, no one guesses the perverse extent of Emily’s true nature.

For most of the story, Emily is seen only from a distance, by people who watch her through the windows or who glimpse her in her doorway. The narrator refers to her as an object—an “idol.” This pattern changes briefly during her courtship with Homer Barron, when she leaves her house and is frequently out in the world. However, others spy on her just as avidly, and she is still relegated to the role of object, a

distant figure who takes on character according to the whims of those who watch her. In this sense, the act of watching is powerful because it replaces an actual human presence with a made-up narrative that changes depending on who is doing the watching. No one knows the Emily that exists beyond what they can see, and her true self is visible to them only after she dies and her secrets are revealed. Dust

A pall of dust hangs over the story, underscoring the decay and decline that figure so prominently. The dust throughout Emily’s house is a fitting accompaniment to the faded lives within. When the aldermen arrive to try and secure Emily’s annual tax payment, the house smells of “dust and disuse.” As they seat themselves, the movement stirs dust all around them, and it slowly rises, roiling about their thighs and catching the slim beam of sunlight entering the room. The house is a place of stasis, where regrets and memories have remained undisturbed. In a way, the dust is a protective presence; the aldermen cannot penetrate Emily’s murky relationship with reality. The layers of dust also suggest the cloud of obscurity that hides Emily’s true nature and the secrets her house contains. In the final scene, the dust is an oppressive presence that seems to emanate from Homer’s dead body. The dust, which is everywhere, seems even more horrible here.

Symbols

Emily’s House

Emily’s house, like Emily herself, is a monument, the only remaining emblem of a dying world of Southern aristocracy. The outside of the large, square frame house is lavishly decorated. The cupolas, spires, and scrolled balconies are the hallmarks of a decadent style of architecture that became popular in the 1870s. By the time the story takes place, much has changed. The street and neighborhood, at one time affluent, pristine, and privileged, have lost their standing as the realm of the elite. The house is in some ways an extension of Emily: it bares its “stubborn and coquettish decay” to the town’s residents. It is a testament to the endurance and preservation of tradition but now seems out of place among the cotton wagons, gasoline pumps, and other industrial trappings that surround it—just as the South’s old values are out of place in a changing society.

Emily’s house also represents alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the living past, and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she preserves the man she would not allow to leave her. As when the group of men sprinkled lime along the foundation to counteract the stench of rotting flesh, the townspeople skulk along the edges of Emily’s life and property. The house, like its owner, is an object of fascination for them. They project their own lurid fantasies and interpretations onto the crumbling edifice and mysterious figure inside. Emily’s death is a chance for them to gain access to this forbidden realm and confirm their wildest notions and most sensationalistic suppositions about what had occurred on the inside.

The Strand of Hair

The strand of hair is a reminder of love lost and the often perverse things people do in their pursuit of happiness. The strand of hair also reveals the inner life of a woman who, despite her eccentricities, was committed to living life on her own terms and not submitting her behavior, no matter how shocking, to the approval of others. Emily subscribes to her own moral code and occupies a world of her own invention, where even murder is permissible. The narrator foreshadows the discovery of the long strand of hair on the pillow when he describes the physical transformation that Emily undergoes as she ages. Her hair grows more and more grizzled until it becomes a “vigorous iron-gray.” The strand of hair ultimately stands as the last vestige of a life left to languish and decay, much like the body of Emily’s former lover.

Faulkner and the Southern Gothic→

Southern Gothic is a literary tradition that came into its own in the early twentieth century. It is rooted in the Gothic style, which had been popular in European literature for many centuries. Gothic writers concocted wild, frightening scenarios in which mysterious secrets, supernatural occurrences, and characters’ extreme duress conspired to create a breathless reading experience. Gothic style focused on the morbid and grotesque, and the genre often featured certain set pieces and characters: drafty castles laced with cobwebs, secret passages, and frightened, wide-eyed heroines whose innocence does not go untouched. Although they borrow the essential ingredients of the Gothic, writers of Southern Gothic fiction were not interested in integrating elements of the sensational solely for the sake of creating suspense or titillation. Writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, Erskine Caldwell, and Carson McCullers were drawn to the elements of Gothicism for what they revealed about human psychology and the dark, underlying motives that were pushed to the fringes of society.

Southern Gothic writers were interested in exploring the extreme, antisocial behaviors that were often a reaction against a confining code of social conduct. Southern Gothic often hinged on the belief that daily life and the refined surface of the social order were fragile and illusory, disguising disturbing realities or twisted psyches. Faulkner, with his dense and multilayered prose, traditionally stands outside this group of practitioners. However, “A Rose for Emily” reveals the influence that Southern Gothic had on his writing: this particular story has a moody and forbidding atmosphere; a crumbling old mansion; and decay, putrefaction, and grotesquerie. Faulkner’s work uses the sensational elements to highlight an individual’s struggle against an oppressive society that is undergoing rapid change. Another aspect of the Southern Gothic style is appropriation and transformation. Faulkner has appropriated the image of the damsel in distress and transformed it into Emily, a psychologically damaged spinster. Her mental instability and necrophilia have made

her an emblematic Southern Gothic heroine.

Time and Temporal Shifts→

In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner does not rely on a conventional linear approach to present his characters’ inner lives and motivations. Instead, he fractures, shifts, and manipulates time, stretching the story out over several decades. We learn about Emily’s life through a series of flashbacks. The story begins with a description of Emily’s funeral and then moves into the near-distant past. At the end of the story, we see that the funeral is a flashback as well, preceding the unsealing of the upstairs bedroom door. We see Emily as a young girl, attracting suitors whom her father chases off with a whip, and as an old woman, when she dies at seventy-four. As Emily’s grip on reality grows more tenuous over the years, the South itself experiences a great deal of change. By moving forward and backward in time, Faulkner portrays the past and the present as coexisting and is able to examine how they influence each other. He creates a complex, layered, and multidimensional world.

Faulkner presents two visions of time in the story. One is based in the mathematical precision and objectivity of reality, in which time moves forward relentlessly, and what’s done is done; only the present exists. The other vision is more subjective. Time moves forward, but events don’t stay in distant memory; rather, memory can exist unhindered, alive and active no matter how much time passes or how much things change. Even if a person is physically bound to the present, the past can play a vibrant, dynamic role. Emily stays firmly planted in a subjective realm of time, where life moves on with her in it—but she stays committed, regardless, to the past.

The Narrator→

The unnamed narrator of “A Rose for Emily” serves as the town’s collective voice. Critics have debated whether it is a man or woman; a former lover of Emily Grierson’s; the boy who remembers the sight of Mr. Grierson in the doorway, holding the whip; or the town gossip, spearheading the effort to break down the door at the end. It is possible, too, that the narrator is Emily’s former servant, Tobe—he would have known her intimately, perhaps including her secret. A few aspects of the story support this theory, such as the fact that the narrator often refers to Emily as “Miss Emily” and provides only one descriptive detail about the Colonel Sartoris, the mayor: the fact that he enforced a law requiring that black women wear aprons in public. In any case, the narrator hides behind the collective pronoun we. By using we, the narrator can attribute what might be his or her own thoughts and opinions to all of the townspeople, turning private ideas into commonly held beliefs.

The narrator deepens the mystery of who he is and how much he knows at the end of the story, when the townspeople discover Homer’s body. The narrator confesses “Already we knew” that an upstairs bedroom had been sealed up. However, we never

find out how the narrator knows about the room. More important, at this point, for the first time in the story, the narrator uses the pronoun “they” instead of “we” to refer to the townspeople. First, he says, “Already we knew that there was one room. . . .” Then he changes to, “They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.” This is a significant shift. Until now, the narrator has willingly grouped himself with the rest of the townspeople, accepting the community’s actions, thoughts, and speculations as his own. Here, however, the narrator distances himself from the action, as though the breaking down of the door is something he can’t bring himself to endorse. The shift is quick and subtle, and he returns to “we” in the passages that follow, but it gives us an important clue about the narrator’s identity. Whoever he was, the narrator cared for Emily, despite her eccentricities and horrible, desperate act. In a town that treated her as an oddity and, finally, a horror, a kind, sympathetic gesture—even one as slight as symbolically looking away when the private door is forced open—stands out.

Important Quotations Explained

1. Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . . .

This quotation appears near the beginning of the story, in section I, when the narrator describes Emily’s funeral and history in the town. The complex figure of Emily Grierson casts a long shadow in the town of Jefferson. The members of the community assume a proprietary relationship to her, extolling the image of a grand lady whose family history and reputation warranted great respect. At the same time, the townspeople criticize her unconventional life and relationship with Homer Barron. Emily is an object of fascination. Many people feel compelled to protect her, whereas others feel free to monitor her every move, hovering at the edges of her life. Emily is the last representative of a once great Jefferson family, and the townspeople feel that they have inherited this daughter of a faded empire of wealth and prestige, for better or worse.

The order of Faulkner’s words in this quotation is significant. Although Emily once represented a great southern tradition centering on the landed gentry with their vast holdings and considerable resources, Emily’s legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order. The town leaders conveniently overlook the fact that in her straightened circumstances and solitary life, Emily can no longer meet her tax obligations with the town. Emily emerges as not only a financial burden to the town but a figure of outrage because she unsettles the community’s strict social codes.

2. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

These lines end the story. Emily’s secret, finally revealed, solidifies her reputation in the town as an eccentric. Her precarious mental state has led her to perform a grotesque act that surpasses the townspeople’s wildest imaginings. Emily, although she deliberately sets up a solitary existence for herself, is unable to give up the men

who have shaped her life, even after they have died. She hides her dead father for three days, then permanently hides Homer’s body in the upstairs bedroom. In entombing her lover, Emily keeps her fantasy of marital bliss permanently intact.

Emily’s excessive need for privacy is challenged by the townspeople’s extreme curiosity about the facts surrounding her life. Unsatisfied with glimpses caught through doorways and windows, the townspeople essentially break into the Grierson home after Emily’s death. Convincing themselves that they are behaving respectfully by waiting until a normal period of mourning has expired, they satisfy their lurid curiosity by unsealing the second-floor bedroom. There is no real moral justification for their act, and in light of their blatant violation of Emily’s home and privacy, Emily’s eccentric, grotesque behavior takes on a layer of almost sympathetic pathos. She has done a horrible, nightmarish thing, yet the confirmation of the townspeople’s worst beliefs seems sad, rather than satisfying or a cause for celebration.

THE STORY OF AN HOUR Kate Chopin

Plot Overview

Louise Mallard has heart trouble, so she must be informed carefully about her husband’s death. Her sister, Josephine, tells her the news. Louise’s husband’s friend, Richards, learned about a railroad disaster when he was in the newspaper office and saw Louise’s husband, Brently, on the list of those killed. Louise begins sobbing when Josephine tells her of Brently’s death and goes upstairs to be alone in her room.

Louise sits down and looks out an open window. She sees trees, smells approaching rain, and hears a peddler yelling out what he’s selling. She hears someone singing as well as the sounds of sparrows, and there are fluffy white clouds in the sky. She is young, with lines around her eyes. Still crying, she gazes into the distance. She feels apprehensive and tries to suppress the building emotions within her, but can’t. She begins repeating the word Free! to herself over and over again. Her heart beats quickly, and she feels very warm.

Louise knows she’ll cry again when she sees Brently’s corpse. His hands were tender, and he always looked at her lovingly. But then she imagines the years ahead, which belong only to her now, and spreads her arms out joyfully with anticipation. She will be free, on her own without anyone to oppress her. She thinks that all women and men oppress one another even if they do it out of kindness. Louise knows that she often felt love for Brently but tells herself that none of that matters anymore. She feels ecstatic with her newfound sense of independence.

Josephine comes to her door, begging Louise to come out, warning her that she’ll get sick if she doesn’t. Louise tells her to go away. She fantasizes about all the days and years ahead and hopes that she lives a long life. Then she opens the door, and she and Josephine start walking down the stairs, where Richards is waiting.

The front door unexpectedly opens, and Brently comes in. He hadn’t been in the train accident or even aware that one had happened. Josephine screams, and Richards tries unsuccessfully to block Louise from seeing him. Doctors arrive and pronounce that Louise died of a heart attack brought on by happiness.

Louise Mallard

An intelligent, independent woman, Louise Mallard understands the “right” way for women to behave, but her internal thoughts and feelings are anything but correct. When her sister announces that Brently has died, Louise cries dramatically rather than feeling numb, as she knows many other women would. Her violent reaction immediately shows that she is an emotional, demonstrative woman. She knows that she should grieve for Brently and fear for her own future, but instead she feels elation at her newfound independence. Louise is not cruel and knows that she’ll cry over Brently’s dead body when the time comes. But when she is out of others’ sight, her private thoughts are of her own life and the opportunities that await her, which she feels have just brightened considerably.

Louise suffers from a heart problem, which indicates the extent to which she feels that marriage has oppressed her. The vague label Chopin gives to Louise’s problem—“heart trouble”—suggests that this trouble is both physical and emotional, a problem both within her body and with her relationship to Brently. In the hour during which Louise believes Brently is dead, her heart beats strongly—indeed, Louise feels her new independence physically. Alone in her room, her heart races, and her whole body feels warm. She spreads her arms open, symbolically welcoming her new life. “Body and soul free!” she repeats to herself, a statement that shows how total her new independence really is for her. Only when Brently walks in does her “heart trouble” reappear, and this trouble is so acute that it kills her. The irony of the ending is that Louise doesn’t die of joy as the doctors claim but actually from the loss of joy. Brently’s death gave her a glimpse of a new life, and when that new life is swiftly taken away, the shock and disappointment kill her.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols→ Themes

The Forbidden Joy of Independence

In “The Story of an Hour,” independence is a forbidden pleasure that can be imagined only privately. When Louise hears from Josephine and Richards of Brently’s

death, she reacts with obvious grief, and although her reaction is perhaps more violent than other women’s, it is an appropriate one. Alone, however, Louise begins to realize that she is now an independent woman, a realization that enlivens and excites her. Even though these are her private thoughts, she at first tries to squelch the joy she feels, to “beat it back with her will.” Such resistance reveals how forbidden this pleasure really is. When she finally does acknowledge the joy, she feels possessed by it and must abandon herself to it as the word free escapes her lips. Louise’s life offers no refuge for this kind of joy, and the rest of society will never accept it or understand it. Extreme circumstances have given Louise a taste of this forbidden fruit, and her thoughts are, in turn, extreme. She sees her life as being absolutely hers and her new independence as the core of her being. Overwhelmed, Louise even turns to prayer, hoping for a long life in which to enjoy this feeling. When Brently returns, he unwittingly yanks Louise’s independence away from her, putting it once again out of her reach. The forbidden joy disappears as quickly as it came, but the taste of it is enough to kill her.

The Inherent Oppressiveness of Marriage

Chopin suggests that all marriages, even the kindest ones, are inherently oppressive. Louise, who readily admits that her husband was kind and loving, nonetheless feels joy when she believes that he has died. Her reaction doesn’t suggest any malice, and Louise knows that she’ll cry at Brently’s funeral. However, despite the love between husband and wife, Louise views Brently’s death as a release from oppression. She never names a specific way in which Brently oppressed her, hinting instead that marriage in general stifles both women and men. She even seems to suggest that she oppressed Brently just as much as he oppressed her. Louise’s epiphany in which these thoughts parade through her mind reveals the inherent oppressiveness of all marriages, which by their nature rob people of their independence.

Motifs

Weeping

Louise’s weeping about Brently’s death highlight the dichotomy between sorrow and happiness. Louise cries or thinks about crying for about three-quarters of “The Story of an Hour,” stopping only when she thinks of her new freedom. Crying is part of her life with Brently, but it will presumably be absent from her life as an independent woman. At the beginning of the story, Louise sobs dramatically when she learns that Brently is dead, enduring a “storm of grief.” She continues weeping when she is alone in her room, although the crying now is unconscious, more a physical reflex than anything spurred by emotion. She imagines herself crying over Brently’s dead body. Once the funeral is over in her fantasies, however, there is no further mention of crying because she’s consumed with happiness.

Symbols

Heart Trouble

The heart trouble that afflicts Louise is both a physical and symbolic malady that represents her ambivalence toward her marriage and unhappiness with her lack of freedom. The fact that Louise has heart trouble is the first thing we learn about her, and this heart trouble is what seems to make the announcement of Brently’s death so threatening. A person with a weak heart, after all, would not deal well with such news. When Louise reflects on her new independence, her heart races, pumping blood through her veins. When she dies at the end of the story, the diagnosis of “heart disease” seems appropriate because the shock of seeing Brently was surely enough to kill her. But the doctors’ conclusion that she’d died of overwhelming joy is ironic because it had been the loss of joy that had actually killed her. Indeed, Louise seems to have died of a broken heart, caused by the sudden loss of her much-loved independence.

The Open Window

The open window from which Louise gazes for much of the story represents the freedom and opportunities that await her after her husband has died. From the window, Louise sees blue sky, fluffy clouds, and treetops. She hears people and birds singing and smells a coming rainstorm. Everything that she experiences through her senses suggests joy and spring—new life. And when she ponders the sky, she feels the first hints of elation. Once she fully indulges in this excitement, she feels that the open window is providing her with life itself. The open window provides a clear, bright view into the distance and Louise’s own bright future, which is now unobstructed by the demands of another person. It’s therefore no coincidence that when Louise turns from the window and the view, she quickly loses her freedom as well.

Structure and Style

In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin employs specific structural and stylistic techniques to heighten the drama of the hour. The structure Chopin has chosen for “The Story of an Hour” fits the subject matter perfectly. The story is short, made up of a series of short paragraphs, many of which consist of just two or three sentences. Likewise, the story covers only one hour in Louise Mallard’s life—from the moment she learns of her husband’s death to the moment he unexpectedly returns alive. The short, dense structure mirrors the intense hour Louise spends contemplating her new independence. Just as Louise is completely immersed in her wild thoughts of the moment, we are immersed along with her in this brief period of time. This story can be read quickly, but the impact it makes is powerful. Chopin surprises us first with Louise’s elated reaction when she first murmurs “free” to herself. She shocks us again at the conclusion when she dies upon Brently’s return. The “heart disease”

mentioned at the end of the story echoes the “heart trouble” discussed at the beginning, intensifying the twist ending and bringing the story to a satisfying close.

Because such a short story leaves no room for background information, flashbacks, or excessive speculation, Chopin succeeds in making every sentence important by employing an almost poetic writing style. She uses repetition to highlight important points, such as when she repeats the word open throughout the story to emphasize the freedom of Louise’s new life. She has Louise repeat the word free over and over again as well, which is one of the few words Louise actually speaks aloud in the story and indicates how much she cherishes her newfound freedom. Besides repeating words, Chopin also repeats phrases and sentence structures to highlight important points. For example, Chopin writes, “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday that she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.” The identical phrasing of the second half of each sentence reveals how drastically Louise’s life has changed—she once shuddered at the thought of a long life, but now she prays for it. Finally, Chopin makes the prose of the story beautiful by using alliteration and internal rhymes. For example, Josephine “revealed in half concealing” when she tells Louise the news, and Brently reappears “composedly carrying” his belongings. All of Chopin’s stylistic and structural techniques combine to make this very short story powerful.

Important Quotations Explained

1. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

This quotation appears after Louise has gone alone to her room to deal with the news of Brently’s death. After an initial fit of tears, Louise looks out her window at the wide-open spaces below. This quotation is our first hint that Louise’s reaction to Brently’s death will be surprising and that Louise is very different from other women. Whereas most women would gaze reflectively at the sky and clouds, Louise’s gaze suggests something different, something shrewder or more active. What she sees as she gazes out the window is different from what other women would likely see after their husbands have died. Not long after this passage, Louise acknowledges the joyous feeling of independence that Brently’s death has given her. Here, at the window, the first breaths of these feelings are stirring, and her “intelligent thought” will quickly engage once again as she processes these feelings and allows herself to analyze what they mean.

2. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

This quotation appears close to the end of the story, just before Louise leaves her bedroom to go back downstairs, and illuminates the extent of Louise’s elation. Before Brently’s death, Louise viewed her life with trepidation, envisioning years of dull, unchanging dependence and oppression. The “shudder” she felt was one of dread.

Now, however, she is free and independent, and her life is suddenly worth living. Whereas she once hoped life would be short, she now prays for a long, happy life. This passage, besides showing us how fully Louise feels her independence, also highlights the unexpectedness of Louise’s reaction. Rather than dread a life lived alone, this solitude is, for Louise, reason enough to anticipate the future eagerly. When Brently returns, she dies, unable to face the return of the life that she’d dreaded so much.

Gothic Overtones

.......The first hint of the story's spooky patina is Emily's house. It is a decaying mansion that no outsider had entered in the decade before her death. Years before, when representatives of the Board of Aldermen gained entry to the house, Emily's servant \from which a staircase mounted into still more shadow,\smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.\

.......The focus then shifts from the house to Emily's appearance, which is no more inviting than the house: \pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal. . . .\

.......The narrator next hints of sinister goings-on when he mentions the smell that developed \the body in the house?

.......The state of Emily's mind then comes into question when the narrator reports that her great-aunt had gone insane and when he informs the reader that Emily had refused for three days to release her father's body for burial.\arsenic at the pharmacy and finally that the body of Homer Barron had lain decaying for years on a bed in an upstairs room. Next to it, a pillow with a head indentation indicates that Emily had slept with the body. In other words, Emily had been a necrophile, a person fixated on death and/or sexual relations with a dead person. Her mental illness may have been rooted partly in the same debility that afflicted her great-aunt and partly in the heavy-handed influence of her father that turned her into a lonely recluse.

Climax

.......The climax of a short story or another literary work can be defined as (1) the turning point at which the conflict begins to resolve itself for better or worse, or as (2) the final and most exciting event in a series of events. The climax of \first definition, when Emily buys poison to kill Homer Barron. In the year before making the purchase, she had emerged from her seclusion to date Barron. His low social status indicated that she may have been ready to break free of Old South constraints. When Homer decided to leave her, she could have chosen to remain in the modern world and perhaps begin a new relationship and even seek psychological counseling. But, no, she decided to poison Barron and return to seclusion. After this turning point, she remained in her home and descended

further into madness. According to the second definition, the climax occurs when the townspeople break into the upstairs room and discover Barron's rotting corpse and the pillow beside it with a gray hair from Emily's head.

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Themes

Psychological Bondage .......When Emily was a child, her father apparently indoctrinated her with the proud ways of the Old South. When she was old enough to socialize with young men and consider marriage, he banished all her would-be beaus. Her upbringing thus isolated her from the New South residents of the town; she had become totally dependent on, and totally attached to, her father. It is no wonder, then, that when her father died she refused to give up his body for burial. It took townspeople three days to persuade her to surrender the corpse. Afterward, he reached from beyond the grave to continue to oppress her, as the following passage indicates: Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

.......Emily had become, in effect, a hapless slave to the will of her father. Her one attempt to free herself of psychological bondage to him occurred when she dated a newcomer to town, a Northerner of low social standing whom she knew her father would not like. But the Northerner, Homer Barron, informed her that he was not the marrying kind. So she lapsed back into the seclusion of her house and into the comfortable past of the Old South. Time had stopped for her, and she decided that it would also stop for Barron. Living in the Past

.......When Mr. Grierson reared Emily, he instilled in her his Old South values, manners, and customs. He also drove off all her New South suitors, presumably because they could not measure up to his Old South standards. Townspeople generally regarded Emily as haughty, a true daughter of Southern aristocracy. Paradoxically, however, many people—in particular the older residents—later began to admire and respect her for daring to live according to bygone dictums. She was, as the first paragraph says, something of a \

.......After her father died and left her his house, Emily had no husband and no income, so she clung to the past for support. She even denied that her father had died, a sign that her sanity was beginning to deteriorate. It took her three days to give up her father's body for burial. .......Over the years, she remained in the past most of the time, living shut up in her house. Her only connection with the outside world was her servant, who did the marketing. However, in her struggle to cope and to escape her loneliness, she emerged from her seclusion twice: once to keep company with Homer Barron and a second time for seven years to teach china

painting to young people.

.......\the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good.\

.......So Emily once again became a hidden relic of the Old South. To manifest her repudiation of modern ways, she spurned the tax bills of the new generation of government leaders and prevented postal officials from installing a mailbox and an address number above her door. Moreover, she defiantly allowed her house to stand as it was before her father died, making no repairs or other improvements.

.......Whether Emily enthusiastically embraced Old South traditions in her youth or passively accepted their imposition on her by her father is open to question. In either case, there can be no gainsaying that Emily became a living symbol of the Old South. Consider, for example, the following: ?

Emily relied on a black man to cook and garden for her and to perform other chores. He was, in effect, her slave, never leaving the house except to go to the market. After Emily died, he became emancipated. “He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again,” the narrator says. ?

Emily lived in what was once an elegant house, “decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies,” the narrator says, and “set on what had once been our most select street.” It was, in short, a house fit for an Old South belle. But Emily made no attempt to improve or modernize it. To do so would be to remove it from the past, where she lived. ?

In her stand against paying taxes, Emily received the support of Colonel Sartoris, the mayor, whose military title suggests Old South sympathies, as does his “edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron.”

Emily was exploited by a Northerner, Homer Barron, just as Old South residents were exploited by Northern carpetbaggers in the postwar Reconstruction period

(1865-1877). Barron was foreman of a crew that “reconstructed” the Old South—that is, his workers installed new sidewalks. After his fling with Emily, he decided to leave her. Then Emily bought the arsenic, murdered him, and returned to the past. .......Allegorically, she represents not only die-hard adherents of Old South ways but also subscribers to any other outmoded way of life—or to an antiquated belief, tradition, custom, trend, social movement, and so on. To such people, modern culture—including social customs, scientific and technological advancements, fashions, and so on—are anathema. Death of the Old South .......Emily is a symbol of the Old South. When she dies, the lingering remnants of the Old South die with her—or at least, like the old men in their Confederate uniforms—are about to die. An exception here is the racism in the town, as indicated by the narrator's use of the highly offensive term \

Mystery .......Everyone likes a good mystery, such as Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, or Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. But some of the best mysteries present themselves in the house down the street in an ordinary city. Such is the case in \Emily.\Grierson house and wonder at the significance of this or that activity. What was the cause of the foul smell? Will Miss Emily marry Homer Barron? Why did she buy the arsenic? There was a time when they would try to get information from her black servant, Tobe. But he would have nothing to say, mainly because his voice \speculated that he probably didn't even talk with Emily. After she died, \the funeral,\house. After the funeral, people broke into an upstairs room that had been closed for forty years. There, they found out what happened to Homer Barron, but Miss Emily's motives murdering him, her reclusiveness, and the state of her mind when she died all remaned a mystery.

.......\secrets. And everybody occasionally acts in a way that not even he or she can explain.

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Unanswered Question

.......Was Mr. Grierson guilty of incest with his daughter? Evidence in the story hints at this possibility, although the evidence is far from foolproof. This evidence includes the following information provided by the narrator, who may not be entirely reliable:

.......First, Grierson drove away all of Emily's suitors because, the narrator says, he thought they were not good enough for his daughter. He could have had another reason: s desire to reserve Emily for himself.

.......Second, the narrator makes no mention of Grierson's wife. Either she was dead or he was divorced from her. In either case, he had no convenient outlet for his libido.

.......Third, Emily vainly attempts to keep the corpse of her father in her house. Later, she succeeds in keeping the corpse of Homer Barron. The last two paragraphs of the story indicate that she slept with the corpse:

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted

something from it, and leaving forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

One may fairly ask whether this passage indicates that Emily also wanted to sleep with the corpse of her father.

.......Fourth, insanity ran in the Grierson family. Old Lady Wyatt was insane, and it becomes obvious that Emily was insane. If her father suffered from the same family scourge, it could have predisposed his mind to the commission of an unnatural act.

.......Of course, it is also possible that Grierson realized his daughter suffered from a mental debility. This realization would explain why he kept suitors away. However, if he had such knowledge, it seems likely that he would have made provisions for her care after his death. But there is no evidence that he did so.

Conflicts

.......The main conflicts in the story are (1) Emily vs her father, (2) Emily vs the modern world, and Emily vs her emotional and psychological debilities.

Symbols

Barron: Homer Barron, a Northerner who traveled to Jefferson to install new sidewalks, dated Emily for about a year and then severed his relationship with her. He symbolizes post-Civil War carpetbaggers and, in a larger sense, any opportunists.

Episcopal Religion: With its elaborate rituals, the Griersons' Episcopalianism appears to represent the ornate trappings and elegant lifestyle of Old South aristocrats.

House: Described as stately but decaying, Emily's house represents what is left of the Old South.

Ink: See Stationery.

Mailbox, Metal House Number: These symbolize modernity and change. Emily refuses to allow postal officials to install the house numbers and the mailbox.

Sidewalks: The new sidewalks that Homer Barron and his crew construct appear to symbolize the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

Tobe: This name (a variant of Toby) of Emily's servant symbolizes (1) slavery and (2) a better future, as suggested by the two words (to and be) that make up his name.

Stationery: The note Emily sent the mayor was written on \flowing calligraphy in faded ink.\represent the outmoded traditions of the Old South.

Tarnished Metals: The tarnished gold head of Emily's cane and the tarnished silver toilet set in the room with Barron's corpse symbolize aging, deterioration, and death.

Whips: The narrator makes it a point to mention the whips Mr. Grierson and Homer Barron use to lash their horses while driving Emily in their buggies. The whips may represent the male-dominated society of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

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Study Questions and Essay Topics

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When her father was driving off her suitors, why didn't Emily run away and live elsewhere?

Describe the narrator's attitude toward women.

There was an unofficial caste system in the South in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Describe the people at the top, those at the bottom, and those in the middle.

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Write a psychological profile of Emily. Support your thesis with evidence from the story and research from books and Internet sources.

In an essay, compare and contrast William Faulkner's handling of horror involving a woman with Edgar Allan Poe's handling of the same subject. Among Poe short stories involving a woman are Berenice, The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, Morella, and The Oval Portrait.

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