The story and poem that I choose to compare were Miss Emily Rose by William Faulkner and Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Both stories centered on the wealth and social status of the central characters. The stories focused on the cultural time of living in the South during the Pre-Civil War. A recurrent theme in the story. Despite the family's fallen fortunes, Emily's father resists allowing any suitors to propose to Emily. Th1is gradually erodes her chances of ever being married. She eventually settles for Homer, but the townspeople see this as an affront to her noble heritage, and she eventually murders Homer and dies a recluse. Emily's inability to realize her father's death and refusal to adapt to a changing world intensify her seclusion.
Miss Emily’s story is certainly bizarre, suspenseful, sad, and mysterious enough to engage the reader’s attention. She is a grotesque, southern gothic character whose neurotic or psychotic behavior in her relationships with her father, her lover, and her black servant Tobe, allows many interpretations. For example, her affair with Homer Barron may be seen as a middle-aged woman’s late rebellion against her repressive father, and against the town’s burdensome expectations but Miss Emily is then symbolic of the religion of southernness that survived military defeat and material destruction.”
“The children of Colonel Sartoris’s” (Page 125) generation are sent to learn china painting from Miss Emily “in the same spirit that they were sent to church” (Page 125). It is because we see her as resembling those angels in colored church windows that her affair with a Yankee makes her a bad example to the young people. The significances, though, is the change in Jefferson’s attitude toward the relationship between Miss Emily a descendant of “Southern” gentility, and Homer, a working man, and a “Northerner” (Page 123). Initially, their coupling horrifies the townspeople, but gradually they come to accept Homer as a good choice for Miss Emily, perhaps as a matter of necessity.
The narrator never speaks or writes as an individual, never uses “I,” always speaks as “we.” As representative of the townspeople, the narrator feels a compulsion to tell the story of a woman who represents something important to the community. No black voices are heard from this voice as it speaks out of old and new generations. Colonel Sartoris’s generation is succeeded by “one with modern ideas” (Page 122); “Emily passed from generation to generation” (Page 125). Even though Miss Emily was a child during the Civil War, she represents to generations past and present the old Deep South of the Delta cotton-plantation highest social class. She is a visible holdover into the modern South of a bygone era of romance and chivalry. Even this new South, striving for a richness based on Northern technology, cannot fully accept the decay of culture and ideals.
Early, the narrator invokes such concepts as “tradition”, “duty”, “hereditary obligation” (Page 121), and custom, suggesting preservation in the community consciousness of those old values. The community’s sense of time is predominantly chronological, but it is also like Emily’s, the confused, psychological time sense of memory. Like many women of the defeated upper class in the Deep South, Miss Emily withdraws from the chronological time of reality into the timelessness of illusion. The insanity of clinging to exposed illusions is suggested by the fact that Miss Emily’s “great-aunt went “crazy” (Page 123) and that Miss Emily later appears “crazy” to the townspeople. Ironically, even within aristocratic families there is division.
Immediately after the narrator refers to Miss Emily as being like an “idol” and to her great-aunt as “crazy,” Faulkner presents this image, symbolic of the aristocracy: “We had long thought of them as a tableau”, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father’s spraddled silhouette in the background, his back to her, clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the backflung” (Page 123). Her father’s rejection of her suitors is like the defeated aristocracy’s rejection of new methods of creating a future. Emily’s refusal to accept the fact of her father’s death suggests the refusal of some aristocrats to accept the death of the South even when faced with the evidence of its corpse. Perversely, she would have to cling to “that which had robbed her, as people will” (Page 123). However, the modern generations insist on burying the decaying corpse of the past. “A Rose for Emily” is highly symbolic. Miss Emily is described as a fallen monument to the chivalric American South. Re-enforcing the themes of change and decay, her house, once an elegant mansion, has become a decaying eyesore in the middle of a neighborhood that has changed from residential to industrial. Another prominent symbol is the crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father, associated with the oppressive hold of the past on the present. Although less elegant than an oil portrait, the crayon portrait is important to Miss Emily, and it is seen by the rare visitor who enters her house.
Miss Emily preserves all the dead, in memory if not literally. “See Colonel Sartoris,” she tells the new town fathers, as if he were alive. The townspeople are like Miss Emily in that they persist in preserving her dignity as the last representative of the Old South her death ends the Grierson line; after she is dead, the narrator preserves her in this story. The rose is a symbol of the age of romance in which the aristocracts were obsessed with delusions of grandeur, pure women being a symbol of the ideal in every phase of life. Perhaps the narrator offers this story as a rose for Emily. As a woman might press a rose between the pages of a book, she keeps her own personal rose, her lover, preserved in the bridal chamber where a rose color covers everything. “The man himself lay on the bed” is shock enough, justified by what has gone before, but “the long strand of iron-gray hair,” the charged image that ends the story, shocks the reader. The story seems to imply that people must come to terms with both the past and the present; for to ignore the first is to be guilty of a foolish innocence, to ignore the second is to become a monster and inhuman, above all to betray an excessive pride such as Emily Grierson's before the humbling fact of death. The story suggests that man’s plight is tragic, but that there is heroism in an attempt to rise above it.