An Analysis of The Setting of The Short Story "A Rose for Emily"

In William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily.” He sets the town in a fictional post-civil war, creepy town by the name of Jefferson in Mississippi, in a county by the name of “Yoknapatawapha.” A small town in the south of the United States. Faulkner’s use of this certain period of time is effective in giving us, the readers an understanding or background views to the morals and the opinions of the characters in the story. The town of Jefferson is a malformed legacy. The classified government of the Griersons and the period structure of the time where ruling of the mayor a, Colonel Sartoris, who made it illegal for a black woman to walk down the street without an apron on. It had changed into a place where even the street where Miss Emily lived, that had once been the most popular, had now been violated and destroyed, her house a horror among horrors. Its inhabitants are irreplaceable; we can see their settlement as any southern settlement during that period.

The circumstances that arise in the story develop in large, part because many southerners who lived during the slave owning period of time didn’t know what to do when that way of life ended. The setting in “A Rose for Emily”, Faulkner has developed a time and place about a fictional town where murder, death, decay, and concern take place. The setting of the story is a place and time, and offers more than a setting for the story. Faulkner uses this to give an understanding into the isolated realm of Miss Emily Grierson. The town is more than just the setting of the story. It takes on its own classification together with Emily. It is the main understanding behind Emily’s brashness and movements. It gives us an easier understanding into why Emily makes the choices she does as the story unwinds. Emily’s father controlled her whole life and essentially controlled the rest of the town through Colonel Sartoris. In the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Faulkner gives us details about setting and the atmosphere that gives the reader a background look into the values and beliefs of the characters in the story, helping to understand the inspirations, movements, and feedbacks of Miss Emily and the rest of the town, and changing the mood or tone in the story.

Because “A Rose for Emily” is set in post-civil war town it has a historical feel to it already. Miss Emily is an existing verification to the Civil War, having been born just beforehand or throughout the War Between the States. She relates to the years previously to the war and then the turn of the century, representing the principles of the Deep-rooted South and its struggle to adjustment during the periods following the war. The Grierson family had been a significant and rich family during the eighteenth-century years but, like many rich Southerners, their treasures vanished following the surrender. Emily, corresponding to others who had been a part of the pre-war Southern nobility, was reluctant to agree to her new and reduced societal standing. “A Rose for Emily”, in just a few paragraphs, covers three quarters of an era. The birth of Emily happens sometime around the Civil War. Her long coming death takes place sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, sometime nearby the day or time that Faulkner wrote the story. The Civil War had a huge effect on the South, with them being the Confederates. The Souths old fashioned estate economy, based upon slave labor, was devastated by unrestraint. Southern aristocrats start themselves by working the land together with resident farmers and prior slaves. Because Faulkner came from a family that on one occasion possessed a plantation.

The history of Faulkner’s family life and that of the South in over-all stimulated Faulkner’s imagination for the historical setting of the story and the town of Jefferson. The residents of Jefferson seem oddly captivated with Miss Emily as a historical object of an older time. They have put her in an extraordinary situation among the others and while they have not tried to have any direct contact with her, they are still interested even after her death in 1935. This could be accredited to the fact that as the times are changing, the townspeople need someone to reestablish or maintain the town’s southern pride and as she is the last living Grierson, she is really their only link to that past. In “A Rose for Emily”, we are offered by the countless ups and downs that a civilization is going through in a corresponding to reality through Faulkner’s literary work. Faulkner does a great trade in setting all of the pieces together to make the relations with the current reality of 1929 and the method that all the achievements of that time in history shakes up southern society. As the south was adjusting to the modifications that the northern society was imposing upon them, they had to deal with the clash of customs that would bring unavoidable consequences to their lives.

Faulkner transports the fight that comes from trying to uphold tradition in the face of a nationwide, drastic change. Jefferson is at an intersection, taking up an up-to-date, more marketable future while still hanging on the control of the past. The washed-out magnificence of the Griersons decaying family home to the town graveyard where unidentified Civil War armed forces have been laid to rest. Emily herself is a belief, consistently remaining the same over the ages, regardless of many modifications in her community. She is in many ways an assorted blessing. As a living monument to the past, she represents the customs that the townspeople wish to respect and honor; however, she is also a problem and completely cut off from the outside world, nursing bizarreness that others cannot understand. Emily’s house, like herself, is a shrine, the only remaining symbol of a disappearing world of Southern nobility.

The outside of the large, square frame house is extravagantly decorated. The roofs, tips, and scrolled balconies are the trademarks of an immoral style of architecture that became popular in the 1870s. By the period of time the story takes place, much has improved. The street and neighborhood, at one time wealthy, perfect, and fortunate, have lost their upright as the kingdom of the exclusive. The house is in some ways an addition of Emily: it shows its “persistent and constant decay” to the town’s inhabitants. It is a testimony to the strength and protection of tradition but now seems out of place among the cotton coaches, petrol pumps, and other engineering symbols that surround it.

Emily’s house also characterizes estrangement, psychological illness, and passing away. It is a sanctuary to the living historical past, and the closed upstairs bedchamber is her gruesome award room where she preserves the man she would not agree to leave her. Like when the crowd of males scattered lime along the foundation and ground to neutralize the horrid smell of decomposing skin, the townsfolk creep along the edges of Emily’s life and property. Trying, but failing to get in it. The house, like its possessor, is an object of captivation for the townspeople. They venture their own vivid imaginations and understandings onto the decaying construction of the house and cryptic figure inside. Emily’s passing is a chance for them to gain admission to this prohibited kingdom and authorize their wildest ideas and most sensationalistic theories about what had happened on the inside of the house.

The setting of this story was to clarify the upcoming generations and how they dealt with their heritage. This explanation helps us picture a crumbling, fictional Mississippi settlement in the post-Civil War in the south. We are also able to see how Miss Emily resists changes by all means. The bridal chamber/crypt, that was broken into during Emily’s memorial service helps to specify the different bodily facts of the standards, thoughts and arrogances of the place in different times. Emily’s house was the only household that did not change at all, while the others made theirs beautiful in the town.

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