Student Question
In "A Rose for Emily," what do Homer, the house, and Emily represent?
Quick answer:
In "A Rose for Emily," Homer may represent Emily’s rebellion against as well as her thwarted escape from her family’s snobbery and oppression. A laborer with crude manners, Homer is exactly the type of person that Emily’s aristocratic family would deem unsuitable for her. Emily’s house, a formerly grand, now-decaying mansion passed down through her family, represents the dying yet oppressive Southern gentility to which Emily clings.
In “A Rose for Emily,” the title character—a descendent of Southern aristocracy—is forbidden to fraternize with any man below her social class. During most of her life, Emily was forbidden to have a suitor deemed unsuitable, which was practically anyone. Only after her father’s death does Emily dare to date a man … and one decidedly not from the upper class. Her final suitor, Homer, may represent Emily’s attempted rebellion against the old Southern order. Her house—a formerly grand ancestral property—represents the antiquated Southern aristocracy from which Emily cannot escape and will not leave.
After her father dies, Emily is left only with their family mansion, a large and unstylishly square 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.
This crumbling ornate structure is...
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the only surviving relic from an earlier era of wealth. In fact, its prestige and location on what used to be the “most select street” are undermined now by “garages and cotton gins” that
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.
Its interior is dark, run-down, and musty, smelling “of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell." Even the stately furniture is covered with cracked leather and dust. Yet pathetic vestiges of Southern patriarchal aristocracy remain in this museum to a faded past:
On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.
Still clinging to former social glory, Emily cannot help but keep a portrait of her father on display, even if it is shoddily displayed and humbly drawn with crayon. After children stop coming to the house to take painting lessons from Emily, the house shuts down to society completely:
The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it.
The house reflects Emily and her family’s refusal to adapt to changing times. Their stubbornness also results in Emily’s sad love life. Due to snobbery and her father’s overbearing authority, Emily cannot date anyone. Her family members
held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such.
A day laborer below her class, Homer Barron is the exact opposite of what her family would want for her as a suitor. With her father out of the picture, though, Emily can defy familial and social expectations by dating him. Homer is a
Yankee—a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group.
Unlike a fair-skinned Southern gentleman, Homer is from the North, works with his hands, speaks loudly, curses, sings, and socializes with “everybody” or common townsfolk. He unapologetically makes himself the center of attention. This unrefined lack of modesty seemingly appeals to Emily. On one of many Sunday afternoons, they drive through town
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.
Emily seems to revel in rebelling against her father and in shocking the townspeople. Nonetheless, some elderly people cling to a classist view to explain her relationship with Homer; they claim that
even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige—without calling it noblesse oblige.
Some people feel sorry for her when they hear Homer confess that
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.
Emily’s father and ancestors would roll over in their graves if they saw Emily consorting with a person like Homer.
Others view their relationship as “a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people.” When her two cousins are called to town to live with Emily, however, Homer Barron disappears. Their presence seems to destroy any hope for Emily to continue dating or even marry Homer. In the end, the house becomes a tomb for both Emily and Homer.
What does Emily represent in "A Rose for Emily"?
Emily Grierson is a symbol of the Old South and its refusal to die in the face of modernity. The townspeople certainly consider Emily to be as much. When she dies, many come to her funeral, because they see her as a "fallen monument" to the South as it was before the Civil War and Reconstruction changed it.
Emily fights the modern world constantly. She refuses to pay taxes because she claims Colonel Sartoris, the old mayor, made her exempt from them. She refuses to allow numbers to be put on her mailbox. She still keeps a Black house servant in a relationship reminiscent of that between masters and slaves in the Old South. Most of all, she never mingles with the townspeople and eventually shuts herself up in her own home, further isolating herself from the modern world.
Despite what power she has, Emily is also a victim of the Old South's values, as evidenced by her submissive role in her relationship to her tyrannical father. He prevented her from marrying anyone and thus leaving him when he was alive. Her aristocratic upbringing has made her cold and unable to form relationships with those she deems lower—with the exception of the rakish Homer Barron, a Northern day worker who becomes her lover. However, even in that relationship, her entitlement and isolation inspire her to kill him.
Ultimately, Emily is a symbol of the Old South's unwillingness to fade away. Everything about her behavior, from her refusal to pay taxes to her keeping Homer's corpse locked away in her house, reflects her symbolic role as a "monument" to that way of life.
In "A Rose for Emily," what do Emily, Homer, and the house represent?
Emily and Homer's disastrous affair is meant to represent the uneasy relationship between the Old South and the North after the Civil War. Emily is a symbol of the Old South: old-fashioned, aristocratic, and snobby. Even though the de facto aristocracy of the Old South has long since died out, Emily continues to insist on certain privileges she received as a result of her social standing decades ago, such as not having to pay taxes.
Homer represents the North, with his industrial connections as a foreman and lack of gentility. He disregards the social codes of the South, courting Emily despite their gulf in social status and perhaps pursuing a physical affair with her despite having no intentions of marriage. Additionally, Homer represents modernity, while Emily represents an outmoded way of life with her antebellum manners.
Emily's house is an extension of herself, more or less, as it, too, represents the Old South. Though lavishly decorated and large, the house is rather creepy and Gothic, as Emily keeps herself shut inside of it as the years progress. Even before Emily becomes a total recluse, her house has the air of decay. Note this passage describing her brief stint as a painting instructor for the local girls:
From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate.
That last section which describes the girls going to the class out of obligation rather than genuine interest establishes Emily and her home as entities tolerated for the sake of tradition, much like the Old South and its customs. However, even tradition can only linger so long. These pupils do not send their own children to continue the lessons with Emily, forcing her into total seclusion and allowing modernity to pass her by. She refuses even to have a mailbox installed by her house.
The sealed bedroom where Homer's corpse lies moldering is perhaps the heart of both the house and Emily herself: dignified and proper on the outside, but hiding a horrible secret within. The final image of Emily's body also presents her in all her faded grandeur:
She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.
The lavish, Victorian bed contrasted with the moldering pillow is a perfect extension of Emily as a symbol of the Old South, which time and cultural evolution have rendered grotesque and anachronistic.
In "A Rose for Emily," what does Emily represent?
Miss Emily Grierson's passing is symbolic of the passing of the Old South, a time in which wealthy white folks with long lines of descent wielded social and political power over their perceived inferiors.
Her stubborn refusal to pay taxes because of a gentleman's agreement her father had with the town demonstrates her unwillingness to change with the times. Even though new government officials with other philosophies have come into power, Emily Grierson clings to the traditions of the faded aristocracy and comes to be seen as a not-quite-sane relic of an earlier era. Her employment of an African American domestic servant recalls the history of slavery and suggests that her thinking has not evolved.
Lastly, Emily Grierson's notion of honor runs so deep that instead of allowing Homer Barron to publicly humiliate her and call into question her respectability, she murders him.
First, Miss Emily is a character, not just a representation of something else, as the story is not a fable or an allegory but a piece of realistic fiction.
One major theme of the story is the relationship between the "old South" with its aristocratic ideals and social stratification and the "New South," which is much more modern and equal but in some ways more crassly commercial and not without prejudices of its own.
Miss Emily comes from a wealthy family and has habits and assumptions based on a certain class structure that no longer exists. She is not really prepared to live in the "New South" and thus is a sort of misfit, but one whose pride in her background and traditions prevent her from reaching out to others in the town for help. While she is in many ways portrayed as a grotesque throwback, some readers also come to admire her indomitable will and ability not to be exploited by Homer.
She can be said to represent the Old Southern aristocracy and its traditions and values.