Emily's Rose of Love: Thematic Implications of Point of View in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

CRITICISM EMILY'S ROSE OF LOVE: THEMATIC IMPLICATIONS OF POINT OF VIEW IN FAULKNER'S "A ROSE FOR EMILY" Helen E. Nebeker* The thesis of this paper, simply stated, is that forty years of critical study of Faulkner's short story, "A Rose for Emily," has failed to come to grips with the problem of its narrative focus or point of view. Furthermore, I will contend that this failure to fully explore the significance of the narrative voice has obscured several essential points of the story, chief of which is the underlying horror of Faulkner's real theme, a theme which he has kept successfully hidden through the years within his deliberate structural ambiguity and behind his anonymous narrator. As most readers are no doubt aware, the general view of critics regarding the anonymous, ubiquitous narrator is that he is a ldnd of innocuous, naive, passive citizen of Jefferson, who relates for the reader the story of Miss Emily's life and death. Or, in the words of one critic surnming up the prevailing view, he is "... a townsman, gifted in the art of storytale-telling, shifting his identity imaginatively as he moves through the story." Or, as another group of critics states, the narrator simply records "... the progress or advance in the . . . knowledge of Emily's townsmen ... a growth from bemused tolerance, to suspicion, to knowledge, to horror . . " at Emily's crime. From these more or less similar views of the narrator, the critics proceed to develop their interpretations of Miss Emily as the proud, unbending monument of the Old South who somehow triumphs over time and change, thereby evoking admiration conjoined with pity.1 On the surface, such explanation of both narrator and theme may suffice. But if one looks sharply and critically at the point of view chosen by Faulkner, remembering that the basic structural resource of a writer is point of view which becomes, in the words of Mark Schorer, a mode of thematic definition, and if one acknowledges the mastery of Faulkner in merging person, time, place, and events, the importance of his chosen point of view should not be "I want to thank my colleague, Professor George Herman, with whom I first discussed these ideas, for the suggestions and encouragement he gave me in writing this article. 1FOr a few useful and interesting references to these interpretations, see: Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren, The Scope of Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, I960), pp. 302-306. Donald Heiney, Recent American Literature (Great Neck, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 1958), pp. 224-225. Ray B. West, Jr., Reading the Short Story, (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968), pp. 82-85. Explicators: VI (May, 1948), item 45; VII (Oct., 1948), item 8; XLX (Jan., 1961), item 26; XX (May, 1962), item 78; XXII (April, 1964), item 68. 4 RMMLA BulletinMarch 1970 so lightly dismissed. However in just such dismissal, readers and critics alike have permitted themselves to be fooled by a master story-teller who lays out point by point the details of a horror far more monstrous Ulan that of a poor demented woman who kills her lover. For the truth of the Miss Emily episode lies, not in the character and motivation of Miss Emily, but in the identity of the narrator. And to arrive at that identity, the reader must untangle the deliberate ambiguity of the various pronoun references which control the point of view. Once this is done, the implicit horror of the story is clearly revealed, and from that horror, a new, more subtle theme emerges, revealing starkly and undeniably the significance of the "rose" of the title. The reader of "A Rose for Emily" realizes immediately the vagueness of the pronoun focus within this story. Within all five sections we note a continual shifting of person, from our to they to we (all italics added) . And this shift is further complicated by implied shifts of referents for the various pronouns. That is, our does not always have the same referent, nor do they and we! For example, in Section I, this shifting ranges from the our of the opening sentence (our whole town), which we easily...