The social factors of Emily’s tragedy
William Faulkner’s novel A Rose for Emily describes the situation of the life of the Southern Americans after the civil war, especially the downfallen aristocracy’s living condition. It aims at showing readers the people’s complicated and special psychology in the transitional period with the tragedy of Emily’s life. After reading the novel, we can see that the main elements causing her tragedy are the social factors of history and culture. My discussion falls into two parts: the social background of history and the social background of culture.
As we know, the north and south of America represented two sorts of civilizations before the war respectively: the industrial civilization and the aristocratic civilization. However, the war destroyed the southern economy based on slavery, ruined the aristocratic ideology. Therefore the traditional life style and the value collapsed under the drastic historic change. Emily lived in this transitional period, when the southerners realized the good time of aristocratic life before the war never came back; on the other hand they made great effort to maintain the traditional value, customs, especially protecting the downfallen aristocracy. No doubt that Emily was the last noble. Therefore, she “had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town”, because of which the men went to her funeral “through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument”.
When she was alive, Colonel Sartoris remitted her taxes, by inventing “an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this ways of repaying”. This is the way that the old generation protected the old value, the old ideology. All that they did was just to seek a kind of comfort in mental, emotion, and dream. Consequently, when the monument collapsed, even the very old men (the soldiers who fell in the civil war) attended the funeral “in their brushed Confederate
uniforms”. To some degree, her existence is just to meet a sort of need for the extinct order, functions the standard of a type of culture, and carries a magnificent mission. Yet, her death is for old days, for the history, to a large extent.
As we all know, the southern American culture largely consisted of the traditionalism and Puritanism, the core of which is paternity, woman’s ethics and racialism. In the southern society, what the man worship and protect was not the woman’s life and right, but their chastity and purity. Seemingly, the woman representing the traditional morality possessed superior status; however they were just subjected to the paternity. Therefore, Miss Emily’s father believed that “none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such”. When her father passed away, Homer Barron entered her life and she regardless loved him, a northern man. Actually, Homer Barron represented the northern industrial civilization, conflicting against the southern old traditions. Therefore, the whole town couldn’t tolerate Emily’s behaviors, trying to stop the love. Homer Barron’s coming, in a sense, was an invasion of the northern culture to the south. He and Emily respectively were on behalf of two kind of distinctive culture. The contradiction between the both couldn’t be meditated. It is the paternity, the woman’s ethic and the conflict between the two cultures that caused Emily’s loneliness in her whole life.
In a word, Emily’s tragedy is not just caused by one force but by several factors. But among the factors, it is the social factors, falling mainly into two parts---- the social background of history and the social background of culture, that bring about her tragedy.
