「에밀리를 위한 장미」연구- 요크너퍼토퍼 세계로의입문

Abstract

A Study of “A Rose for Emily”: An Initiation into the Yoknapatawpha World William Faulkner’s first published short story, “A Rose for Emily” is a gateway to the Yoknapatawpha world that Faulkner created. It’s because Faulkner shows the central theme of tragic view of life as well as the various experimental techniques in “A Rose for Emily.” An anonymous narrator, identified as “we”, can be regarded as a kind of spokesman for the little town of Jefferson, Mississippi. The narrator shows the personal history of Emily as a symbol of decline of the Old South. In a decaying mansion, Emily shuts away from the outside world in voluntary isolation. The narrator indicates Emily dominates the Jefferson society in a series of confrontations such as tax remit, bad smell, the purchase of arsenic, and sexual deviance with Homer. After her father’s death, Emily becomes ruled by her sexual desire and anger, not by a Southern code of lady and is read by Jeffersonians as an insane woman from sexual dissatisfaction. Though Jefferson society condemns, Emily stands on her iron will and dignity and destabilizes not only the Southern history, culture, and class, but subverts them. When she realizes that Homer will desert her, she decides to go back into the past and finally, she kills him and takes the dead Homer with her. Her final horrible deed indicates the determination to conquer and retain both time and the male world in her own way. But her inviolated world has been invaded by the outside force after her death. It can be said that by depicting Emily’s tragedy, Faulkner is sympathetic to the suffered’s lives and sets a high value on the attempt to overcome tragic human circumstance. That is the universal truth he search in the Yoknapatawpha world.