A Rose for Emily (Faulkner)
Short summary
A Southern town, early 20th century. When Emily Grierson died, the entire town attended her funeral.
Years earlier, the mayor had exempted her from taxes, claiming her father had loaned money to the town. When the next generation tried to collect taxes, she refused, insisting she owed nothing and telling them to see the long-dead Colonel Sartoris. Two years after her father's death, a foul smell emanated from her house. Town officials secretly sprinkled lime around the property at night, and the smell eventually disappeared. Her father had driven away all her suitors, and when he died, she initially denied his death for three days. After her father's burial, she became reclusive. A construction foreman arrived in town.
Emily began seeing him, though townspeople doubted he would marry her. She bought arsenic and men's clothing. Homer disappeared after her cousins left town. Emily was rarely seen afterward, growing fat with gray hair. She died at seventy-four. After her funeral, townspeople forced open a locked upstairs room and found Homer's corpse on the bed.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head...leaning forward...we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.
Detailed summary by parts
Part titles are editorial.
Part 1. Miss Emilys death and the tax dispute
When Miss Emily Grierson died, the entire town attended her funeral. The men came out of respectful affection for a fallen monument, while the women came mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one except an old servant had seen in at least ten years.
Her house was a big, squarish frame structure that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires in the style of the 1870s. It stood on what had once been the town's most select street, but garages and cotton gins had encroached on the 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.
Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care for the town, a sort of hereditary obligation dating from 1894 when the mayor remitted her taxes. He invented a tale that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town preferred to repay by excusing her from taxes. Only a man of his generation could have invented such a story, and only a woman could have believed it.
Part 2. The mysterious smell and her fathers death
When the next generation with more modern ideas became mayors and aldermen, they tried to collect taxes from Miss Emily. They sent her a tax notice, then a formal letter, but received only a note on archaic paper stating that she no longer went out at all. A deputation visited her house and was admitted by an old servant into a dim, dusty hall. In the parlor, they met Miss Emily, a small, fat woman in black, leaning on an ebony cane.
She insisted she had no taxes in Jefferson and told them to see Colonel Sartoris, who had been dead almost ten years. She refused to acknowledge the tax obligation and had her servant show the men out. She vanquished them just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That incident occurred two years after her father's death and shortly after her sweetheart deserted her. A neighbor complained to the mayor about a smell coming from Miss Emily's property.
He refused to accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad. Instead, four men crept around her house at night and sprinkled lime around the foundation and in the outbuildings. After a week or two, the smell went away. People began to feel sorry for Miss Emily, remembering that her great-aunt had gone completely crazy. The townspeople had long thought of the Griersons as holding themselves too high. When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her, and people were glad they could finally pity her.
The day after his death, the ladies came to offer condolence, but Miss Emily met them at the door and told them her father was not dead. She did that for three days until the ministers and doctors were about to resort to law and force, then she broke down and they buried her father quickly.
Part 3. Homer Barron arrives and courtship begins
Miss Emily was sick for a long time. When she appeared again, her hair was cut short. The town had contracted for paving the sidewalks, and a construction foreman arrived with his crew. He was a big, dark, ready man with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys followed him to hear him cuss, and soon he knew everybody in town. Presently people began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in a yellow-wheeled buggy.
At first people were glad Miss Emily would have an interest, though the ladies said a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer. Older people said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige. They said poor Emily and suggested her kinsfolk should come to her. She had some kin in Alabama, but her father had fallen out with them years ago. As soon as the old people said poor Emily, the whispering began. She carried her head high even when people believed she was fallen.
Part 4. The arsenic purchase and Homers disappearance
Over a year after they began saying poor Emily, while two female cousins were visiting her, she bought arsenic from the druggist. She was over thirty then, still slight though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes. She demanded the best poison and specified arsenic. The druggist told her the law required her to tell what she would use it for, but Miss Emily just stared at him until he looked away and got the arsenic. When she opened the package at home, written on the box under the skull and bones was: For rats.
People said she would kill herself, and it would be the best thing. When she first began to be seen with Homer Barron, they said she would marry him. Then they said she would persuade him yet, because Homer himself had remarked that he was not a marrying man. The ladies began to say it was a disgrace to the town. The men did not want to interfere, but the ladies forced the Baptist minister to call upon her. He refused to go back again after one visit. The minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama. So she had blood-kin under her roof again. At first nothing happened. Then people were sure they were to be married when Miss Emily ordered a man's toilet set in silver with the letters H. B. on each piece, and bought a complete outfit of men's clothing. People said they are married and were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.
Homer Barron was gone after the streets had been finished. People believed he had gone to prepare for Miss Emily's coming or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. After another week the cousins departed, and within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the servant admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. That was the last anyone saw of Homer Barron. Miss Emily did not appear on the streets for almost six months. When she was next seen, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray. From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years when she gave china-painting lessons.
Part 5. The funeral and the horrifying discovery
When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox. Each December they sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office unclaimed. She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age. The servant met the first ladies at the front door, let them in, then walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again. The two female cousins came at once and held the funeral on the second day.
The townspeople knew there was one room in the region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it. The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill the room with pervading dust. The room was decked and furnished as for a bridal, with faded rose-colored curtains, rose-shaded lights, and a dressing table with crystal and a man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver. Among them lay a collar and tie. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded, beneath it the two mute shoes and discarded socks. The man himself lay in the bed.
The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.
What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay. Upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay an even coating of patient and biding dust. Then they noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of them lifted something from it, and leaning forward, they saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.