Part of the reason
for the widespread popularity of this story is that its gothic elements make it
horrifying enough to be appealing to the popular imagination. Part of the reason for its widespread
appearance in short-story anthologies is that it seems so representative of
typical Faulkner themes and techniques, especially his theme of the decay of
the South, and his experimentation with point of view and narrative time.
A great deal of
criticism has been written about the story, dealing with a variety of thematic
issues and technical approaches. The
most common critical concern is the relationship between the theme of Emily's
denial of time and Faulkner's technique of breaking up the linearity of time in
the telling of the story. Because the
story is not told in a linear fashion, readers sometimes get confused about the
proper order of events; thus determining the sequence of the story has occupied
a number of critics. Most agree that the
basic arrangement is: Emily's father
dies; Homer arrives that summer; Homer deserts Emily; Emily buys the poison;
the smell must be dealt with; twenty years later, Emily gives China lessons;
ten years after that the property tax issue comes up; ten more years after
that, Emily dies at age 74.
To determine
the question of when Emily lay down with the corpse, the only clue is the
strand of iron-gray hair. Although we
have no way of knowing if she lay with the decaying corpse before her hair
turned gray, we do know that her hair started turning gray six months after the
smell developed and that in the next few years it turned the iron-gray that it
remained until her death.
The story is about
the denial of time as a linear series of events, both in the action of Emily's
trying to deny death and in Faulkner's refusal to lay out the story in a linear
fashion. The central passage occurs near
the end when the narrator describes the old men who come to the funeral who
confuse "time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom
all the past is not a diminishing road but instead a huge meadow. . .
."
This spatialization of time is
central to the story, for Emily is not so much a real person as she is an icon,
symbolic of an abstraction, a sign frozen in time and space. The clue to her iconic status is that she looks
bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water or else frozen into an
idol in the window, a sort of "hereditary obligation upon the town. . . .
Dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse." The use of the plural narrator, a kind of choral
voice of the town, supplements this notion of time as spatial and Emily as
icon, for we do not get the sense of one voice recounting an event laid out
neatly in linear time.
Emily's iconic status
is what makes the film version of this story strange and problematical. The thirty-minute film, which stars Angelica
Huston as Emily, makes Emily real and particular rather than symbolic and
general as she is in the written story.
However, perhaps because the director could not ignore the absurdity of
the events if portrayed as if they involve real people, presents the action in
a grotesquely comic way. And indeed,
when we think about it, this tone seems appropriate. Although some critics describe Emily as a
tragic figure, the situation is absurdly comic at the same time.
In the film, for
example, when Emily's father dies of a stroke while eating, he falls down with
his face in his food; when they finally break in and carry him away against
Emily's wishes, he is stiff in his chair and the flies buzz about him. Later, in a scene when we see Emily and Homer
about to make love, the camera cuts to a jack-o-lantern, whose comic/horrific
face stars back at us. In the final shot
of the film, Homer's mummified corpse seems also to stare back with the same
grotesque grin.
There is indeed
something absurdly comic about Emily's story rather than darkly tragic, just as
there may be something comic about the South's efforts to hang on to things
that are long dead. Southern American
gothic fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams, has
always had an element of black comedy.
Tomorrow:Carson
McCullers, "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"
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