A Rose for Emily is a classic short story by William Faulkner.  There are spoilers here, so if you haven’t read it, I suggest doing so before proceeding.  It is a fun, quick read.  If you want, you can read the plot summary on the Wikipedia page.  I will identify the plot points I think are important for my analysis, but will assume the reader is familiar with the story.

SPOILER ALERT

Some technical observations

The story has many layers to it, technical, literary, and symbolic.  For example, on a technical level, Faulkner mostly uses the interesting first person plural point of view.  That is, the story is narrated abstractly by “the town” that refers to itself as “we,” yet using the tone as if it were an individual.  That is, “we” thinks of itself as a single person.  Perhaps this is meant to imply that a single person from the town is telling the story as an old yarn for a passerby on behalf of the rest?  But we are never told who this narrator is or what their actual role is in the story.  They seem to be in on every detail of the plot in an omniscient way that no single person could realistically know.  In any case, this point of view does add a layer of abstraction (for me, anyway).

Another technical twist is how Faulkner really gets us turned around with the timeline.  This type of non-linear plot seems natural in the telling (as if it were told from the collective memory of the entire town).  In fact, the timeline has even been analyzed by computer algorithms to find inconsistencies.

Summary and question

The story is about a woman who killed her lover years ago and has been sleeping with his dead body.  Early in the story it is obvious she killed someone.  Eventually the reader can figure out it is Homer Barron, her lover.  The climax is the realization she has been sleeping with the body.

My question is: how recently had she slept with the body?  My assumption, since I first read the story as a youngster, was that she had been sleeping in that bed with him right up until her death.  But that isn’t consistent with the information in the story.  My conclusion:  Although she died when she was seventy-four, she must have stopped sleeping with the body when she was in her mid-thrities.  What is my reasoning?

A little preamble

Most of the time in the story, Faulkner is just playing with us.  He wants the the reader to believe the town folks are just daft and couldn’t figure out there was a body in the house and that she killed someone (or was about to, depending on where we are on timeline).  Later, when it is mentioned that Homer Barron vanished, we as the reader think we have it all figured out.  You could see that coming from a mile away!  How very clever we are!  In fact, you start to question the competence of Faulkner because it looks like he’s is going to end with a softball murder mystery.  Sure the writing is pretty like poetry, but couldn’t he have had a better, less cliche, plot? 

The clues and my case

The cracks of my established assumptions start in Section V after she dies:

“Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced”

The key terms are “no one had seen in forty years” and “had to be forced.”  Taken literally, “no one” includes her.  That the door had to be forced emphasizes the door wasn’t just locked, but stuck because of neglect.  Also, there is no mention of a key.  If Faulkner wanted to emphasize that she could have, in principle, been in the room over the intervening forty ears, he only needed to add the adjective “locked” to “door.”  But he didn’t. Then they bust it down.  Since she died at seventy-four, going forty years back, she had to be about thirty-four since being in that room.

When they bust into the room they find the body of Homer Barron on a decrepit bed.  The piece finishes with the famous climax:

“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.

Yikes!  It isn’t a murder mystery at all.  We realize that we were supposed to figure out early in the story that she murdered him.  It was a ploy to lead us into a false sense of security.  No, the mystery isn’t that she just murdered him, but had been sleeping with him, perhaps even engaging in necrophilia.  Ew!

Right before the climax, we get a description of the pillow:

 “and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.”

Notice that the second pillow, with the iron gray hair, was as dusty as the room. I assert it also hasn’t been used for forty years.  Indeed, these are the exact words one would use to describe a pillow that hadn’t been used in decades.

All this implies she not only had to be about thrirty-four when she was last in the room, but it was also implies that this was the last time she slept with the body.

Timeline of gray hair development?

Earlier in Section III, he states

“‘I want some poison,’ she said to the druggist. She was over thirty…”

So she must kill Homer when she is older than thirty.

In Section IV Faulkner describes the evolution of her gray hair and the passage of time:

“When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray…”

The paragraph prior describes the period time right after her lover, Homer Barron, disappears.  Then “some time” passes.  Then they “next saw Miss Emily” and her hair is graying and turns grayer and grayer over the next “few years” and it seems to saturate to iron gray at this time.  Then she does the china-painting when she was about forty, presumably when her hair was already saturated gray.  Then there is an extended period when they don’t see her.  When she dies at age seventy-four, she still has the iron gray hair.

So, the timeline of the gray hair on the pillow (as I now interpret it) goes something like this:

1. “Over thirty:” kills Homer with arsenic, hides the body in the house (smell had to start around here, right?)
2. Early-thrities: the town folk next see her again, hair turning gray
3. Mid-thirties: “the next few years” hair turns grayer and grayer, saturating in an iron gray color
4. “About forty:” Starts china-painting, hair already iron gray
5. Mid-Sixties: they try and collect taxes, “vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell”
6. Forties through seventies: seen occasionally in the window
7. Seventy-four: she dies, room is busted open after being closed for forty years, iron-gray hair is next to pillow, bringing us to somewhere around (3) when she last left the iron-gray hair.

Anyway, this is very different from my image of her sleeping with the body up to the age of seventy-four.  The story implies that she last slept with the body as a woman around age thirty-four, leaving the iron-gray strand on the pillow.  After that, she sealed the room for forty years before her secret was discovered by the towns people after she died.

It makes you wonder if her early graying had something to do with the stresses of engaging in necrophilia.

Wrap up

Perhaps all this theory is well known amongst Faulkner scholars and high school English teachers, but I had fun teasing out these clues.

I think I have made a pretty good case, based on the text itself, that she hadn’t slept with the body for about forty years before her death. I’m not sure “if” or “how” this changes any of the story’s message.  Perhaps it implies she herself stopped clinging to the past long ago, but was still willing to let it fester in the sad recesses of her mind.

If you assume she had been sleeping the body until her death, you have to add extra information not provided: perhaps there was a key, perhaps the towns folk kicked up dust and it landed on the pillow, perhaps she lay softly enough on the pillow to not disturb the dust, perhaps by “no one” it means “no one but her.”

Faulkner was more about symbology of the Old South than murder mysteries.  My observations may highlight unimportant details that aren’t important for the basic message.  Still, if my hypothesis holds together, I have another question: why did she stop sleeping with the body when she was thirty four?