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Free Rose For Emily Essays: A Misfit Stands Still

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Free Rose For Emily Essays: A Misfit Stands Still
A Misfit Stands Still Short stories are a fast-paced form of literature. With little time, an author must draw in the reader, show what they are trying to portray, and bring the events to a close in a memorable way. Faulkner 's work, “A Rose for Emily,” executes these goals admirably. The setting is particularly important in this work, as Faulkner uses settings to aid his depiction of Miss Emily Grierson and her conflicts with both the town and time. The spatial setting of “A Rose for Emily” is in Jefferson, a town in Faulkner 's famed, fictional Yoknapatawha county in Mississippi, where Faulkner 's description of the town and Miss Emily 's home quickly indicates that she is a misfit. The general setting is the town itself, where Miss Emily 's “big, squarish frame house . . . …show more content…
Faulkner pictures the home 's original condition quite clearly for readers: “[the house is] white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the [1870s]” (516). However, time has brought changes to the home as well. When the men of the new generation come to call regarding the taxes, “[t]hey [are] admitted . . . into a dim hall from which a stairway [mounts] into still more shadow. It [smells] of dust and disuse. . . .” and “[w]hen the Negro [opens] the blinds . . . a faint dust [rises] sluggishly about their thighs” (517). When Miss Emily dies, after “[falling] ill in the house filled with dust and shadows,” Faulkner pictures her “in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight” (521). Without proper care, the house deteriorates into “an eyesore among eyesores” (516) both inside and out. Time rolls on steadily for the town, for the house, but not for Miss Emily who stubbornly resists every change that time

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