A Rose for Emily

            William Faulkner is considered one of America's most influential writers. Because of his deep Southern heritage, Faulkner tends to write from a Southern prospective (randomhouse.com 1). Faulkner was born Spetember 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi (randomhouse.com 1). He began writing poems as a school boy, but dropped out of high school in 1915 (randomhouse.com 1). Faulkner was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction; however, heworked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Brothers (randomhouse.com 1). Faulkner died July 6, 1962, of a massive heart attack (randomhouse.com 1). Before his death, William Faulkner wrote the chilling tale of Emily Grierson in a short story titled "A Rose for Emily." This nostalgic story is about a woman that shuts herself off from the rest of the world. The purpose of this essay is to review three critical commentaries of "A Rose for Emily.".
             According to Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, "'A Rose for Emily' is a story of horror. We have a decaying mansion in which the protagonist, shut away from the world, grows into something monstrous, and becomes as divorced from the human as some fungus growing in the dark on a damp wall. Miss Emily Grierson remains in voluntary isolation away from the bustle and dust and sunshine of the human world of normal affairs, and what in the end is found in the upstairs room gives perhaps a sense of penetrating and gruesome horror" (Brooks and Warren 158). Miss Emily is one of those persons for whom the distinction between reality and illusion has blurred (Brooks and Warren 158). Brooks and Warren also add, "Miss Emily is obviously a pathological case. The narrator indicates plainly enough that people felt she was crazy. All of this explanation prepares us for what Miss Emily does in order to hold her lover - the dead lover is in one sense still alive for her - the realms of reality and appearance merge" (Brooks and Warren 158).