How Many Black Lovers Had Emily Grierson?

483 Roundtable on “Miss Emily After Dark” How Many Black Lovers Had Emily Grierson? Scott Romine University of North Carolina at Greensboro IT REQUIRES NO GREAT EFFORT TO CONCLUDE, AS I DO, THE ANSWER TO THE above question is none, and not, as this essay argues, maybe two. Probably tens of thousands of readers have concluded as I do, and probably only a few (notably Thomas Dilworth) have put the number as high as maybe one. Sustaining my claim argumentatively is, however, a trickier matter, requiring at some level a theory of critical error. As it happens, I have some experience with critical error in this story, having received a term paper some years ago based on the assumption that Emily Grierson is represented in the story as an African American. Last year, I received a troubled email from a lecturer in my department who had received a student complaint regarding the consistently negative portrayals of African Americans in his course materials; singled out as the primary offender was, again, Emily Grierson. There is no question, I think, that Emily is represented in the text as white; any competent reader can point to several markers in the story that make it impossible to read her as anything else. I would have ventured to say any casual reader, but in both cases I’ve mentioned, the person reading her as black had devoted significant time to the text, at least enough to write a term paper or a lengthy email message. In both cases, I attributed the error to a cultural association of blackness and abjection; simply put, I read it as racist projection. This essay, however, has caused me to reconsider my judgment. Eventually, Thomas Robert Argiro locates in “A Rose for Emily” traces of the full-blown slate of what we might think of Faulkner’s pollution complex: “betrayal, deception, fornication, incest, miscegenation, murder, necrophilia, [and] passing.” It is true that these violations of communal norms (to which we might add homosexuality, which also makes its appearance in the essay) often come in bunches, either as a matter of narrative fact (Carothers McCaslin adds incest to miscegenation) or, more often, as narrative speculation. In Light in August, for example, the mob gathered to contemplate Joanna Burden’s dead body want necrophilia and Negro rape, not just plain old murder; lacking any evidence, they pin the crime on “Negro” and “knew, believed, and hoped that she had been ravished too: at least once before 484 Mississippi Quarterly her throat was cut and at least once afterward” (288). Later, Percy Grimm ritually sacrifices Joe Christmas as a Negro, a rapist, and homosexual, when there is textual evidence (and that ambiguous) only for the first. Given the ubiquity of the pollution complex in Faulkner’s work, not to mention its notorious indeterminacies, it may seem perverse on my part to read this story as straightforwardly as I do, and to view most of the scenarios posited in this essay as conjured out of thin air. Normally, however, it is the community in Faulkner’s fiction that, when confronted with one form of anomaly—with phenomena that “just d[o] not explain,” as Mr. Compson famously puts it in Absalom, Absalom! —or deviance from its norms, overproduces deviance in reaction. Here, I suggest, it is the critic. Like the hound of the Baskervilles, the community doesn’t bark, even in the presence of the corpse—the “utmost of abjection,” as Julia Kristeva observes, and thus likely (as do the dead bodies of Joanna Burden and Charles Bon) to invoke the community’s standard repertoire of boundary violations (4). I fully agree with Stanley Fish that the only limit on interpretation is whether it is persuasive to other readers. Not knowing whether that is the case—for all I know, I am the only respondent in this forum who finds the argument unpersuasive—let me provide a brief account of why I am predisposed to disagree with this argument before trying to show in more detail why I do. First, I do not share Argiro’s premise that “A Rose for Emily” is an especially indeterminate text, nor that Emily “may be Faulkner’s...