A Rose For Emily

Do you like Faulkner? He’s got sort of grim creepy quality to his writing that appeals to me. I love dusty ghost stories and chaste murders. So I was reading a full text of his short story “A Rose for Emily” (I have no idea if there’s any reference meant in the Emily Rose film) and was struck by two paragraphs:

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, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Naturally, I being a modern babe, associate “the seventies” as the 1970s. After all, they could be described and “heavily lightsome” with all the weird browns and bizarre starburst shapes. However, he means the 1870s and it’s also funny to think of people objecting to garages and cotton gins which to us would be as quaint and darling as a period blacksmith shop. I wonder if people 100 years from now will think Wal-Mart and billboards are charming?

Then this one:

So THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.

I swear I read that five times before I figured out that Faulkner probably wasn’t explicitly saying he was gay. I mean, frankly, it fits the story well enough but it’s not very subtle. I gather “he liked men” mostly meant he enjoyed hanging out with other guys, drinking and gossiping. Still it is a question, isn’t it? I mean, people have always gossiped about that sort of thing, right? Ugh, I’m torn.

Anyhow, it’s a pretty creepy story of a woman who just sort of fades away through pride and madness. Another chilling story for a hot day. Full text here: http://www.ariyam.com/docs/lit/wf_rose.html