Who is Faulkner's Emily?

105 WHO IS FAULKNER'S EMILY? Peter L. Hays University of California, Davis The only scholarship about the provenance of William Faulkner's protagonist in his short story "A Rose for Emily" suggests that Emily Grierson was named from John Crowe Ransom's poem "Miss Emily Hardcastle, Spinster, " a poem published in 1924, five years before Faulkner wrote his story.1 Ransom's poem, as its title implies, is about a woman who considers herself too good for local suitors and so remains a spinster until she is carried off by grizzled Baron Death. As such the poem is typical of Ransom's carpe diem poems, and the collocation of the name Emily, her role as spinster, the presence of a suitor named Baron, the event told from the point of view of an anonymous townsperson, and her death as the occasion for the memoir all lend credence to the critics' supposition. They offer, however, no proof that Faulkner read Ransom nor any reason why Faulkner would want to pay tribute to the proud, unloving woman of Ransom's poem; they also overlook the fact that Faulkner's Emily was based on a cousin, Mary Louise Neilson, who had married a "Captain Jack Barron, a Yankee who had come into Oxford with the W. G. Lassiter Paving Company when the streets had been paved."2 Ransom's poem indicates that his Emily is a spinster by choice: We [suitors] were only local beauties, and we beautifully trusted If the proud one had to tarry we would have her by default.3 In contrast, Faulkner's picture of his Emily conveys that she is unmarried, but not by choice. First, the narrator alludes to the family's snobbishness and the protectiveness of her father: . . . The Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought ofthem as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.4 (The narrator's consciousness of melodrama is underscored by both the horsewhip and the word "tableau.") Second, her elaborate preparations are presented, echoing Dickens' Miss Havisham's, for her wedding to Homer Barron. If, as Levitt suggests in his article, Ransom and Faulkner are punning on "baron and barren," the ladies both childless and unfulfilled, then the tribute of Faulkner's rose to a proud, barren, unchaste, poisoning necrophiliac is all the more puzzling. One answer to this dilemma, of course, is the critical reading that sees Emily as a type of the South, proud in defiance of modern times and the breakdown of chivalry,5 or exhibiting an "independence of spirit and pride 106Notes [which] can, and does in her case, twist the individual into a sort of monster, but, at the same time, this refusal to accept the herd values carries with it a dignity and courage."6 Faulkner had ambiguous sympathies with his recalcitrant, unreformed characters, admiring their pride and courage while criticizing their inflexibility, as he does with Joe Christmas, Isaac McCaslin, the entire Sartoris clan, and even Thomas Sutpen. But in depicting their stubbornness, Faulkner presents some measure of the forces they contend with, so that their arrogance may seem admirable, like the Old South itself. Obviously there are parallels with Miss Emily Grierson, but her repressive father, the social conventions limiting her freedom, and her unwilling-to-marry lover hardly seem comparable to the racism faced by Joe Christmas, the curse of slavery and the despoliation of the wilderness troubling Ike McCaslin, the Civil War and World War I with their sense of the death of a way of life and guilt for the survivors. So the issue is whether Faulkner would give Emily a rose for her stubborn inflexibility in the face of changing times, even though that attitude causes her to commit murder and necrophilia and then immure herself for the rest of her life, or whether there is another reason for the tribute. And another possibility...