154

The Ultimate Voyeur: The Communal

Narrator of “A Rose for Emily”

Alice Robertson
Alice Robertson is a professor of English and Director of Writing at Western Illinois
University.

Although scholars have only recently begun analyzing narrative per-

spectives throughout William Faulkner’s short fiction, Faulkner himself
was always aware of the necessity of finding just the right method of
“telling” a particular story to what he considered his alien (translate that
as “Northern”) audience. Remarks made in rare public addresses during
his lifetime and private letters published after his death clearly reveal this
awareness. Faulkner believed that a writer was always “simply telling a
story in the most moving and dramatic way he can think to do it . . . to tell
you in the most moving and economical way he can.”1 Not only does this
remark demonstrate Faulkner’s concern for his method of “telling,” but
his repetition of various forms of the verb “tell” accents his awareness
of his function as storyteller while his choice of the pronoun “you” ac-
knowledges his reading audience. Reiteration of the adjective “moving”
further underlines the audience and illustrates Faulkner’s concern that, to
draw alien readers into his text’s unfamiliar Southern world, he must
“move” or emotionally involve them in his narrative. And he knew that
one of the most effective ways to accomplish that involvement was by
creating for individual stories narrative perspectives that enable readers
unfamiliar with his Southern culture to identify with and eventually conflate
with his narrator’s position and thus become the “teller” of the story
themselves.
The secret, as Faulkner understood all too well, was finding the right
perspective for a particular story. A writer should concentrate on telling a
“story from the OUTSIDE instead of the INSIDE” [caps are Faulkner’s]
to discover and develop “the best point of view to approach a story
from, to milk it dry. Not style [but] . . . how to approach a story to tell it
in the manner that will be closest to right that you can do.” (Letters 323,
350) His deliberate capitalization emphasizes his concern with readers
outside a narrative’s world and the author’s need to get them inside that
text through various kinds of narrative manipulations in each story.
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Nowhere in his fictive canon is this deliberate manipulation more

apparent, or more effective, than in Faulkner’s first published and most
often anthologized short story, “A Rose for Emily.” Here, and in every
other narrative in which he recreates Southern women, Faulkner encoun-
tered another serious obstacle in addition to his usual alien reader: As a
traditional Southern male, Faulkner the writer faced the necessity of dif-
ferentiating historically and personally between the “complex interweav-
ing of myth and memory” that had constructed the moonlight and mag-
nolias version of Southern “ladyhood” so prevalent in the South of the
1930s.2 As Henry Louis Gates points out in Catherine Clinton’s Tara Re-
visited, “of the various communities of nineteenth-century women, none
is more complex or enigmatic than the women of the South.” (11) Addi-
tionally, Faulkner’s own personal experiences with Southern women—
his strong-willed mother, his wife Estelle’s “Southern Belle” role, the tom-
boyish Helen Baird, the liberated Joan Williams—-inevitably intermingled
with revisionist historic and literary stereotypes in his Yopknapatawpha
narratives.3 Unlike Gates and Clinton today, Faulkner then did not have
access to original texts like diaries, letters, and papers to help him distin-
guish between historical reality, Confederate revisionist myth, and per-
sonal family lore. He had to write with all three surfacing simultaneously
in his life and in his work.4 This inability to distinguish between historical,
personal, and cultural influences makes Faulkner’s choice of narrative
perspective even more important in these stories because Faulkner must
clarify his female characters for himself as well as for his readers.
In Faulkner’s view, Emily’s tragedy stems directly from internal con-
flict caused by her inability to adapt and function as a Southern Lady in a
changing postwar world:

The conflict was in Miss Emily, that she knew that you do not
murder people. She had been trained that you do not take a lover.
You marry, you don’t take a lover. She had broken all the laws of
her tradition, her background, and she had finally broken the law
of God too, which says you do not take human life. And she
knew she was doing wrong and that’s why her own life was
wrecked. Instead of murdering one lover, and then to go on and
take another and when she used him up to murder him, she was
expiating her crime . . . . In that case it was a young girl that just
wanted to be loved and to love and have a husband and a family.
(Gwyn 58, 185)
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Here Faulkner sketched an upper-class young woman who only wanted

to fulfill her culturally prescribed maternal and familial destiny as wife/
mother but was denied that fulfillment by circumstances she was too
weak to overcome. Indeed, the villain here quickly emerges as none other
than the Grierson family patriarch, Emily’s father, who denied her any
normal social life and deprived her of acceptable suitors because none of
the local young men were quite good enough for her. Faulkner’s narrator’s
opening description of this overbearing parent underscores his unques-
tionable dominance:

. . . we had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a

slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled
silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horse-
whip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.
(Collected 123)

Every element of this scene confirms the hypothesis of Emily as

helpless victim and Mr. Grierson as controlling villain. His posture alone,
“a straddling silhouette . . . clutching a horsewhip,” delineates both his
dominance and her submissiveness to it in a single sentence. Even their
relative physical positioning, she in the background behind him and he in
the foreground with his back to her, indicates the respective importance
of the two Griersons, at least in the communal point of view represented
by the composite narrative voice.
Under his control all her life and then left rudderless by his death,
she even refuses for three days to accept that death and let people
remove the body for burial. Part of a transitional generation caught
between the antebellum South of “cotton wagons” and “cedar-bemused
cemeteries” and the encroaching twentieth century of “garages” and “gaso-
line pumps,” Emily cannot deal with a changing society she was never
prepared to function within alone. Denied the only role she knew, the
sociobiological destiny of wife/mother, she first withdraws completely
from society and then begins to break, one by one, all its unwritten dic-
tums. First she publicly violates proper behavior by keeping company
with a Northern construction foreman although she knows quite well
that Homer Barron is not an “acceptable” man and “a Grierson [should]
not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.” (Collected 124) Next
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she privately violates the strictest dictum of the Southern code of

“ladyhood” and surrenders her virginity to her Northern lover. And
finally, unable to keep him even after this ultimate sacrifice, she poisons
him to stop him from leaving her. To paraphrase Faulkner, she broke the
social code by dating an outsider from a lower class, the moral code by
taking him as a lover, and then the laws of God by murdering him. Emily,
as an “interrogation, a parody and a celebration of the Confederate
woman” in a changing postwar world, defies her culture, and, by subvert-
ing the Law of the Father, simultaneously denies both her father and The
Father, God.5
On one surface level, this narrative appears to be a straightforward
tale, but what makes Faulkner’s story so fascinating is his deliberately
chosen method of “telling” it, his indirect, convoluted presentation of
Emily and her world through the eyes and ears of an unknown, nameless
communal narrative voice. His narrative choice makes this text not only a
compelling personal drama and an effective gothic piece but a clear-cut
example of aristocratic Southern women’s socio-economic cultural di-
lemmas as well. Because Faulkner utilizes a first-person plural commu-
nity narrator throughout, this story presents a unique situation that raises
interesting, often unanswerable questions about the identity and reliabil-
ity of this particular narrative voice. In what Cleanth Brooks labeled “an
excellent example of Faulkner’s skilled craftsmanship,” the collective “we”
narrative voice, a segment of the townspeople, never narrows into a single
“spokesman for the community” (Brooks 7, 8) but provides instead a
fascinating we/they dichotomy that exists throughout the text. This com-
posite communal narrator, who speaks with a single voice, is usually reli-
able for facts but completely ignorant of characters’ motives and there-
fore often misinterprets events personally witnessed or reported second-
hand. Perhaps Faulkner employed this limited character stance because
such a teller cannot logically provide interior privilege into the protagonist’s
consciousness, and he was more comfortable presenting his women char-
acters from external perspectives. Additionally, in a practical sense, Faulkner
wanted to avoid an interior shift into Emily because privilege into her
thoughts would destroy the story’s carefully crafted suspense and wreck
his surprise gothic ending. In fact, the effectiveness of the entire narra-
tive rests on the premise of the readers’ misreading Emily’s motives and
actions just as the narrator does. Thus, his consistent reluctance to pro-
vide interior privilege into a female consciousness here dovetails with the
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requirements of this particular narrative and enables him to create a com-

munal structure for this text that forces readers to focus on Emily’s sur-
rounding community from the very beginning.
Although Faulkner never identified his composite narrator, readers
discover several identifiable characteristics of the mysterious “we” from
the narrative tone and certain kinds of remarks, both characteristics im-
portant here because this tale is completely conveyed through “the par-
tialities and distortions of a concerned narrator” (Kinney 250) who knows
Emily’s history and appears to be sympathetic toward her plight (Brooks
8). First, this emotionally involved “we,” present on the narrative scene
before her father’s death, there during her romance with Homer Barron,
and still there years later after her funeral, spans three generations of
Yoknapatawpha’s historical time: Jefferson’s old-guard aristocracy repre-
sented by Colonel Sartoris and Emily’s father, the transitional generation
of Emily and her contemporaries, and the “rising generation” of the
New South who ignore traditional communal responsibilities when they
send her tax notices. Second, this “we” exists as a composite voyeur who
watches Emily for almost forty years. Here Faulkner’s repetition of visu-
ally-oriented verbs like “watch” and “see” underscores this consistent
voyeur perspective because they create a composite narrator who only
watches, who never interferes with the action described. A sample page
of text reaffirms this perspective three times: “we sat back to watch devel-
opments”; “that was the last we saw of Homer” and “When we next saw
Miss Emily, she had grown fat.” (Collected 127) Other similar passages
document this narrator’s careful and extremely close observation of the
aging spinster—”We could see her in one of the downstairs windows”—
an admission that includes at the very least occasional visual monitoring
of her home; at the worst, it becomes literally a sick “peeping tom” con-
fession. This physical situation within the narrative, incidentally, provides
an excellent visual metaphor of the narrative voyeur stance Faulkner de-
veloped so completely in this story. On the outside looking in, narrator
“we” sees and hears a great deal in forty years but never participates in
any of the narrative action. (Interestingly, this particular stance can also
be viewed as an extension of alien readers standing outside Faulkner’s
Southern house of fiction looking in at the first of many Faulkner exter-
nal representations of the Southern female consciousness.)
This narrator’s limited sources of knowledge create another
detached characteristic because, although “we” actually witness some of
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the narrative events (liming the house, for example), “we” gather much
information second and third hand from others’ observations, generally
accepted facts and unfounded gossip. In some instances, the narrator
fails to obtain any information at all: “We had long ago since given up
trying to get any information from the negro” man who worked for Emily
all those years (Collected 128). In such cases, “we” sometimes imagine the
details “we” fail to uncover, a practice that can, and does, lead to several
serious misreadings of certain narrative events (their belief that Homer
has left town, for instance).6
This communal voice continually misreads events because “we” are
operating without interior privilege and only have access to limited exte-
rior sources. The narrator does, nevertheless, present an accurate voicing
of Southern communal values through this time period. For example,
when Emily buys the brushes and suit, “we” assume, because “we”
believe in the Southern tradition that all ladies marry, that she will wed
Homer. When she purchases the poison from the druggist, “we,” unable
to imagine a lady murdering anyone, jump to the conclusion that “she
will kill herself.” (Collected 126) In both instances, readers temporarily as-
sume what the narrator assumes and only learn the truth later in the text
when the narrator discovers the mistakes.
Again, Faulkner’s narrative process involves readers by simultaneously
putting them through the same detective paces “we” undergo as the “tell-
ing” shifts back and forth through narrative time, presenting non-chro-
nological bits and pieces of information and thus preserving until the
very end the suspense so essential to the story’s success. In addition,
Faulkner’s retaining the composite plural community viewpoint rather
than narrowing it to an individual voice and his inclusion of multiple
generations in the plot enable him to create a comprehensive milieu de-
picting shifts in postwar Southern culture for almost half a century. From
this plural voice, readers receive not only Emily, the character, but her
milieu as well—Jefferson’s built-in, positive values (a sense of communal
responsibility takes care of Emily), its constrictive class structure (a lady
would never marry a “day laborer”), its rigid gender prescriptions (be-
cause a lady cannot work for a living, she is allowed to give totally useless
but socially acceptable china painting lessons) and its chivalric manners
(Colonel Sartoris refusing to tell a lady she smells bad). Readers also wit-
ness massive changes in Jefferson itself—automobiles replacing the old
mule wagons, for example—that reflect the rapidly modernizing South
of Faulkner’s own time.7
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Most important, Faulkner’s methodology here—forcing readers to

cope with continual shifts in narrative time and to simultaneously sort
out the jigsaw pieces of actual fact from communal surmises and gos-
sip—entice and involve them in the necessary reconstruction of Emily
and her personal and communal history from the very first paragraph.
Since he never provided a chronological pattern of events or explicitly
distinguished between what actually happened (narrative truth) and what
the communal narrator believes happened (guesswork based on partial
and sometimes distorted information), readers must go through the de-
tective paces of reconstructing events for themselves and then place those
events in the correct narrative sequence. “A Rose for Emily” is indeed a
difficult read but well worth the effort because Faulkner’s techniques here
allowed him to present Emily as an accurate and fully delineated example
of the victims of the Southern Lady prototype as well as an unforget-
table Southern grotesque living out a gothic horror story. He achieves,
then, both his original compelling literary intention of “telling about the
South” and his financial goal of creating popular marketable magazine
fiction.
As a bonus, the continuous communal perspective helps readers see
how Southern culture, with its restrictive class and gender structures, could
distort and destroy someone like Emily. Unable to escape her culture as
Linda Snopes does in The Mansion two generations later or adapt to it as
Drusilla Hawks does temporarily during the Civil War depicted in The
Unvanquished, Emily Grierson, under the patriarchal thumb from the be-
ginning, never had a chance; and perhaps that is why Faulkner titled his
story as he did because he, still the Southern gentleman at heart, wanted
to give a rose to a “poor woman [who] had had no life at all” simply
because she could neither cope with or defy the white male plantocracy
that controlled her world. (Gwyn 87)
Victims like Emily, rebels like Drusilla (The Unvanquished),
extensions like Granny Millard (The Unvanquished), antitheses like Narcissa
Benbow (Sartoris) and prototypes like Aunt Jenny Dupre (Sartoris)—all
variations of the revisionist Southern Lady prototype—still populated
Southern culture in Faulkner’s lifetime and, because he recognized them
all, they populate his Yoknapatawpha serial as well. What all these female
figures have in common is the way in which Faulkner presented them—
from the outside in, from either a male character’s external construction
or through an omniscient narrative voice, also suspiciously male in tone
and attitude.8 His methodology matters because this particular process
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of character delineation creates for readers, not an internal view of the

consciousnesses of individual Southern women, but rather an external
vision that summons up an aristocratic white male’s projection of what
he believed those women were, or, more precisely, what he felt those
women ought to be.
Since Faulkner wrote from within his culture, his fiction cannot help
but represent, to some degree, that culture’s dominant white male per-
spective. Therefore, his “outside in” technique also provides, on the sur-
face at least, formulaic versions of the plantocracy’s male-
constructed female “ideal.” But underneath that surface, none of his up-
per-class women really conform entirely to the moonlight and magnolias
prototype of the ornamental virgin uniting the closed society by signify-
ing White Superiority. Instead, his fictional women, because they never
quite fit the stereotype, interrogate, disrupt and even begin to dismantle
the male revisionist myth of Southern womanhood. If readers examine
what Faulkner’s women actually say and do (look at their words and ac-
tions within a text rather than the male narrators’ analyses of their speeches
and acts), they discover, even in weak Emily’s failed attempts to defy and
deconstruct the dominant plantocracy, Faulkner’s awareness of prevail-
ing revisionist history and his chronicling of that history’s failure to con-
tinue to dominate Southern thinking of the 1930s and ‘40s. Indeed, Emily
is not only the last Grierson; she is also one of the last of a rapidly
vanishing breed, that pedastaled Southern lady who, even in her historical
prime, existed only in the psychic fantasies of the male plantocracy who
created her.

Ways into “A Rose for Emily”

Engaging students with a text is always problematic, and Faulkner is a

particularly difficult author to teach. But there are activities and
assignments a teacher can use to help students into the text of any story;
“A Rose for Emily,” though convoluted and complex, is very teachable.
My suggestions here—a series of exercises, homework assignments and
in-class discussions—are just one possible sequence of pedagogical ac-
tivities. Individual teachers should accept, reject, rearrange, and supple-
ment these suggestions to fit their lesson plans and time frames.
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Pre-Reading Suggestions

1. Have students describe, orally or in writing, their own communi-

ties. Such descriptions should include, but are not limited to, each
community’s geography, size, economics, education levels, moral values,
political orientation, etc.
2. Get students in class to list all the different communities they
belong to (family, school groups, religious groups, sports groups, etc.)
and rate them in order of importance—which communities influence
them the most? the least? why?
3. For homework, let students write about a time when they felt
restrained or limited by a community they belong to.

Post-Reading-Suggestions

1. Create a narrative time line on the board in class and have the
students fill in the events in chronological order. Begin with the earliest
incident in Emily’s life and end with the discovery of the hair on the
pillow. Let the students fill in the rest.
2. Try to identify the communal narrator of the story through class
discussion. It can’t be “the citizens of Jefferson” because “we” watch
“them” (both groups are citizens) lime the house. Ask questions that try
to narrow down the possibilities—Is it a group of men or women or
both? What generation does the narrator belong to? What social class?
What race? etc.
3. Divide the class into groups to try to determine why Faulkner
chose the particular kind of narrator he did. Group One discusses and
reports on what the story would be like told from Emily’s interior con-
sciousness. Group Two examines what an omniscient narrator would do
to the story. Still another group can consider an outsider’s (not a citizen
of Jefferson) point of view, etc. Another can investigate what Toby’s
point of view would do for (or against) reader involvement.
4. In class, list all the facts you discovered about Emily. Then list all
the “guesses” that were wrong, and finally what we still don’t know (if
anything) at the end. These are the jigsaw puzzle pieces Faulkner scrambled
for us to sort out to make sense of the story. Did we succeed?
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End Notes

1. This quote, from his 1962 West Point Address, found in

Meriwether’s edition of Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, underscores
Faulkner’s concern for narrative techniques, a concern reiterated in let-
ters of advice he wrote to aspiring young writer Joan Williams, and in
remarks made during question-and-answer sessions recorded when he
was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, 1957-58.
2. Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited, p. 15. By comparing historic
records (diaries, journals, letters, etc.) with revisionist history and media
myths, Clinton first details and then deconstructs the South’s most f
amous icon, The Southern lady.
3. Joel Williamson, in William Faulkner and Southern History, notes
several times the parallels between real life Southern women Faulkner
knew and his literary recreations. Earlier, Joseph Blotner, Faulkner’s of-
ficial biographer, actually set up specific real life models for certain fic-
tional characters in his paper “William Faulkner: Life and Art,” read at
the Faulkner Conference and reproduced in Fowler and Abadie’s Faulkner
and Women.
4. Joel Williamson, in William Faulkner and Southern History, notes
several times the parallels between real life Southern women Faulkner
knew and his literary recreations. Earlier, Joseph Blotner, Faulkner’s of-
ficial biographer, actually set up specific real life models for certain fic-
tional characters in his paper “William Faulkner: Life and Art,” read at
the Faulkner Conference and reproduced in Fowler and Abadie’s Faulkner
and Women.
5. Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, p. 2. Agreeing
with Roberts, Catherine Clinton in Tara Revisited explains that the nine-
teenth century Southern male gaze was “virtually obsessed with female
innocence. The notion of white women as virginal precipitated a whole
series of associations… [like] pure as the driven snow (with its inherent
connotation of coldness [non sexuality]).” (87) This gaze romanticized
white women while it simultaneously restricted them
legally and socially. The male plantocracy’s taking such a stance
enabled them to merge and then sanctify the apparently opposing bina-
ries of virginity and motherhood and create what Deborah Clarke in Rob-
bing the Mother calls a “strategy of containment, veiled in a rhetoric of
worship.” (189) This artificially created and totally controllable icon of
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“ladyhood” became, as Roberts points out, “the central symbol of the

South’s idea of itself,” a kind of cynosure of Southern virtues (2).
6. Numerous critics have advanced theories about the identity of
this unnamed narrator: some believe “we” are the rejected suitors, driven
away years earlier, who now maliciously watch as the one who rejected
them falls herself; others favor a female “we” composed of Emily’s peers
of that middle generation. Either view can be supported by vindictive,
envious remarks like, “So she got to be thirty and was still single, we were
not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with the insanity in the family
she wouldn’t have turned down all her chances if they had really materi-
alized” or “Now she would know the old thrill and the old despair of a
penny more or less.” (Collected 123) Such comments fit either envious
females or former jealous suitors but, in reality, the narrator’s identity
remains nebulous because there is simply not enough evidence within the
text to prove either case.
7. Dewey Grantham’s The South in Modern America documents these
widesweeping changes that began as part of Roosevelt’s attempt to bring
America out of the Depression. The South, already severely depressed
before the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was literally, as Grantham states,
an underdeveloped third world colony economically dependent on the
rest of the nation. The economic aid for roads, schools and health care
that poured into the South in the early 1930s and the WWII industries
and training camps that followed a decade later marked the beginning of
the rise of the industrial, urban “New South” of the second half of the
twentieth century. Grantham documents these related processes in chap-
ters five, six, and seven of his composite history.
8. The one exception to this practice in these short stories is Elnora
of “There Was a Queen” but she is black, not aristocratic, and for some
unknown reason, Faulkner seems to have been more comfortable view-
ing the world from what he conceived of as a black female perspective
(the Dilsey section of The Sound and the Fury is a prime example) rather
than a white female one.
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Works Cited

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House,

1974.
Brooks, Cleanth. First Encounters. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
Clark, Deborah. Robbing the Mother. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.
Clinton, Catherine. Tara Revisited. New York: Abbeyville Press, 1995.
Faulkner, William. Collected Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
—. Essays, Speeches and Public Letters. Ed. James B. Meriwether. New
York: Random House, 1956.
—. Sartoris. New York: Signet Classics, 1964.
—. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. Ed. Joseph Blotner. New York:
Random House, 1977.
—. The Unvanquished. New York: Vintage, 1966.
Grantham, Dewey. The South in Modern America. New York: Harper
Collins, 1994.
Gwyn, Frederick L., and Joseph Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University.
New York: Vintage, 1959.
Kinney, Arthur F. Faulkner’s Narrative Poetics: Style as Vision. Amherst: U
of Massachusetts P, 1978.
Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood. Athens: U of Georgia
P, 1994.
Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Ox-
ford UP, 1993.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor. Oxford, England: Oxford,
UP, 1983.