Rough draft from before

Marxism and A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily is a short story published in 1930 by American author William Faulkner. Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Rather than viewing texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts as material products to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works are viewed as a product of work (and hence of the realm of production and consumption we call economics) (1). Marxist criticism started with Karl Marx and Karl Marx believed that literature shows how that particular society’s economic system is responsible for everything and everything in society. Karl Marx also believed that the history of a society is also a history of class clashes and struggles. Soon this was developed into Marxist Literary Theory. A Rose for Emily is a perfect short story to interrupt using Marxism because the story is pretty much entirely all about class.

Emily Grierson used to teach china painting and this represents that Emily is finically well off because only middle and upper class individuals do because china painting is rather consuming and quite expensive, most people would not be spending money of china-painting. ”A deputation waited upon her, Knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china painting lessons eight or ten years earlier”

Emily was treated as a commodity within her town. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument…”. (1). “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1864 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor-he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father onto perpetuity. Not that Miss’ Emily would have accepted charity” (1).This shows that the other town’s people viewed Emily and her father as people who were high and mighty, almost royalty in their town and that Miss Emily viewed herself in the same sort of way when it says she would never have accepted charity from someone. This stresses to the reader that Emily is of higher status.

Emily’s father viewed that since they were financially well off and high class that suitors for his daughter would have to be of very high class as well. “believed that 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 of them as 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 horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances id they has really materialized” (2). Emily’s father would drive away any man that was in any class longer than him and his daughter.

When Emily’s father died, the town’s people view on Emily soured because she was not as financially stable as she had once been and she was in the same class as the rest of the town. “When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At least they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less” (2). People were happy that Emily no longer had her high class status. Despite their lack of respect toward Emily, they still tried to preserve the illusion of her formerly high status and her perceived greatness. Even when Emily had the corpse of her father in their house and tried to claim to the other town’s people that her father was not dead. The town’s people did not blame her. “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (3). They tried to reason excuses with themselves to show that she was alright.

Just because one’s social and class is high it does not nessecraily make them an happy individual. A Rose for Emily proves this because Emily was not happy despite her high class. Although, after she had lost her financial stability, she still tried to get up with the façade of having a high class while she was shut away in her house. Also when she was conflicted about Homer Baron.