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Visions of America Videos 13 videos
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A Rose for Emily 20516 Views
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Description:
What? She gets a rose and we don’t? Who is this Emily person anyway? What’s she done to deserve such a delightful, aromatic gift?
- Literature / American Literature
- American Literature / All American Literature
- Early 20th-Century Literature / Early 20th-Century American Literature
- Early 20th-Century Literature / All Early 20th-Century Literature
- American Literature / Early 20th-Century American Literature
- Themes / Compassion and Forgiveness
Transcript
- 00:04
A Rose for Emily, a la Shmoop. People have different ways of coping with
- 00:10
loneliness. Maybe they carry on conversations with themselves...
- 00:14
...or sample every ice cream flavor known to man...
- 00:14
...or spend some quality time with their favorite TV series.
- 00:17
However, in William Faulkner's short story, A Rose for Emily...
Full Transcript
- 00:23
...the title character takes drastic measures to assuage her loneliness: she kills the man
- 00:29
she wants to marry so he will never, ever leave her...
- 00:32
...and then she keeps his corpse. Faulkner writes that Miss Emily Grierson <<Greer-son>>
- 00:40
has a disastrous love life...
- 00:41
...on account of her overprotective father...
- 00:45
...and, after Mr. Grierson's death, a boyfriend who doesn't want to say I do.
- 00:52
While Emily's neighbors enjoy talking about her misfortunes in the romance department...
- 00:57
...and pitying her...
- 00:58
...she has no friends, and her only relatives live far away.
- 01:02
So, here's a question: Why is Emily so very alone in Faulkner's story?
- 01:08
Maybe her loneliness is her own fault. After all, Faulkner tells us that Emily refuses
- 01:14
to pay her taxes...
- 01:15
...and then refuses again...
- 01:19
...and again...
- 01:20
...and again. No one likes a freeloader...
- 01:22
...especially one who delivers her refusal in a cold, imperious manner.
- 01:27
Perhaps if Emily made an effort to mingle with her neighbors, she would get invites
- 01:31
to all the local Easter egg hunts, Christmas dinners, and baptisms.
- 01:34
You never know what might happen at a baptism. Or maybe Emily's loneliness is rooted in her
- 01:40
inability to let go of the past.
- 01:43
After all, the only thing Emily wants to do is snuggle with the corpse of her dead, reluctant-to-wed-her
- 01:48
boyfriend...
- 01:49
...the boyfriend she killed with arsenic bought during a shopping spree at her local Jitney
- 01:54
Jungle.
- 01:57
Spending all her time with Not-So-Hot Dead Guy means Emily can't move on with life and
- 02:03
make new, still-breathing friends. Or is Emily's father to blame for her loneliness?
- 02:08
After all, Mr. Grierson was so certain that no one in town was good enough to marry his
- 02:13
daughter that Emily couldn't marry while he was alive.
- 02:16
By dominating Emily and separating her completely from the other townsfolk...
- 02:21
...perhaps Mr. Grierson shaped his daughter's personality in such a way that she is unable
- 02:26
to escape loneliness while she lives. So why is Emily so very alone?
- 02:31
Is she responsible for her loneliness?
- 02:34
Is she lonely because she can't let go of the past and her dead boy-toy?
- 02:38
Or is Emily lonely because her father made it impossible for her to live any other way?
- 02:45
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
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