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Patriarchy -A Look at Puritanism in “A Rose for Emily”
父权制 看《献给爱米丽的一朵玫瑰》中的清教思想
“A Rose for Emily” is William Faulkner’s best-known short story which was originally
published in the April 30, 1930, issue of Forum, then published in two collections of his short
fiction, These 13 (1931) and Collected Stories (1950).
“A Rose for Emily” begins with the death of Emily, an alienated spinster living in
Jefferson, South America in the late nineteenth. In the early times, under the patriarchy of her
puritanical father, Emily is prevented from marrying the townspeople, and therefore after her
father’s death, she is left alone and penniless. Later, she falls in love with the Yankee road
worker Homer Barron, which is disregarded by the whole town and her relatives. As a
member of the stubborn Grierson’s family, Emily arrogantly defies her kin and the
community by insisting on marrying Homer. Unfortunately, Homer has no intention to marry
her. Desperately, Emily buys arsenic, which the townspeople believe she will commit herself
suicide. Afterwards, Homer Barron is never heard from again, assumed to have returned
north. Since then, the door of Emily’s house is closed for good. After her funeral, people
forced into an upstairs bedroom, find Barron skeleton lying on the bed, and Emily has slept
with it over 40 years.
Most of Faulkner’s major works are set in the Deep South called Yaknapatawpha County
and its main town, Jefferson, which closely resembled Faulkner’s native Oxford in Lafayette
County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Living in the traditional southern town
where people are strongly influenced by the puritanism, Faulkner conedemned the inhumane
traditional code of ethics and the ruin of humanitiy of Puritanism in his works. In “A Rose
for Emily”, we can see the Patriarchy and Womanly Morals result in Emily’s tragedy--Under
the patriarchy of her puritanical father, Emily has been deprived of everything that a woman
desires and deserves. She was prevented from marrying the townspeople by her father while
he was alive, and was disregarded for loving a North guy by the townspeople after his death.
Patriarchy is an important part of Puritanism. According to Puritanical beliefs, the father
is the sole power in a family. Puritanism reflected in Emily’s father is largely presented as
Patriarchy. First, there is a very metaphorical description of Emily’s father, “We had long
thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her
father a straddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the
two of them framed by the back-flung front door. “ Faulkner gave a vivid picture of Emily
and her father’s relationship:being controled and to control. Then, apart from the symbolic
image of Emily’s father, there is another aspect suggesting his extreme patriarchy over her.
While Emily was young, her father drove away all the young man around her for fear that she
might be hurt by any of them. Her father is like a guard who tries to drive away anyone or
anything which is against the traditional morals and conventions. Therefore, this deprivation
of inter-personal relationship prevents Emily from being independent and mentally stable.
Actually, he protected her from anyone in the outside world, shying her away from the whole
society. Emily’s dependence on her father continuse even after his death. She refuses to
release his body for burial; she keeps his portrait in a prominent place in her room. Her
father’s influence on Emily is tremendous. As Flauklner puts,” that quality of her father
which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to
die”. As a consequence, after her father’s death when she is in her 30s, Emily is all alone
without anyone to love or anyone who loves her, and ends up lonely all her life till the
moment she dies.
Emily’s tragedy is not individual. The influence that the town's people, her father and
Homer have on her affect and stunt Emily's growth as a person and eventually lead to
Emily’s tragedy. Some attributes of her personality consist of a woman broken over time
through the loss of loved ones, a self-confidence or ego that defines her inability to need or
want help. The roots of the evils are mainly the old tradition and patriarchy with the
Puritanism as its core. Emily is regarded as a symbol of the tradition and the past in the
Jefferson society, which is under the reign of the Puritanism. Though she gets respect and
attention from the townspeople, Emily is never treated with a sense that she is also a flesh
and blood human being. No one ever thinks that maybe she also has the rights to lead a
normal life, and to get what she needs and desires. On the contrary, they destroy all her
chances to be a normal person.
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