摘 要 .......................................................................................................... 3 Contents ...................................................................................................... 4
I..Introduction ............................................................................................. 6 II. Southern Literature and Its Traditions ............................................... 8 2.1 The Southern Myth ............................................................................................... 8 2.2 Southern Literary Renaissance ................................................................. ..........9 III.What Led to the Tragedy of Emily ................................................. 11 3.1 The Aristocratic Status ........................................................................................ 11 3.2 Her Father's Control ........................................................................................... 12 3.3 Emily's Own Conflicts ......................................................................................... 13 IV.Thematic study .................................................................................... 13 4.1 A Dirge for Emily ................................................................................................. 16
4.1.1 A \16 4.1.2 A Satire of Love ............................................................................................ 17 4.1.3 Dignity and Struggle ..................................................................................... 17 4.2 A Eulogy Dedicated to the Demolished World .................................................. 19
4.2.1 Patriarchy and Moral Concept of Southern Woman ..................................... 19 4.2.2 Downfall of the Traditional Southern Values ................................................ 21 V.Conclusion ............................................................................................ 19
References ................................................................................................................ 24
I. Introduction
William Faulkner is the major writer to emerge from the Southern Literary Renaissance and one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. Faulkner came from an old, proud, and distinguished Mississippi family, which included a governor, a colonel in the Confederate Army, and notable business pioneers. Critics generally agree that he did not graduate from high school, and that he dropped out of the University of Mississippi after a couple of years.
His great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the “u” was added to
Faulkner?s name by mistake when his first novel was published, and he retained the misspelling), a southern novelist and Confederate officer, was the one who had imposed the greatest impact on him. He viewed his great-grandfather as his idol, and decided to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, hoping to be a gallant fighter pilot. However, the war ended before he could go to the battlefield. Then he went back to Oxford to pick up his pen as a writer, just like his great-grandfather did. Besides, Colonel Falkner, who appears as Colonel John Sartoris in Faulkner?s fiction, had a distinguished career as a soldier, both in the Mexican War and the American Civil War.
Through Faulkner's life, he completed 19 novels, four collections of about 70 short stories, and 2 volumes of poems under his name. Among them, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Wild Palms (1939), and The Hamlet (1940) are his great novels. All of Faulkner's major novels reflect his southern rootedness. His 15 novels and most of short stories are set in his native state of Mississippi. Beginning with Sartoris (1929), 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.
As a regionalist, he was very critical of southern society. By using local, family, and Mississippi history, Faulkner created a fictional world to explore the underlying causes for the downfall of the South. His fiction remains a strong sense of fragmentation in social community and a loss of love and a lack of emotional response within the individual himself. He was also a great avant-garde experimenter. He successfully adopted some modern literary techniques, such as the device of stream-of-consciousness, the multiple points of view, a circular form, authorial transcendence, the non-chronological order, and so on. His stylistic innovations under the influence of James Joyce, his mastery of external and internal landscape , the incredible range of characterization in his fiction , and the affirmative spirit that provides a philosophic base for his work - all these promise to make him a writer for the ages , a master in the Southern Literature.
Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his \A Fable which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955.
Although his novels are better known and more widely read, many of the same characters and ideas found in them are introduced in his short stories. So reading William Faulkner?s short stories is a good way to approach his major works, as well as to make a general understanding on the Southern Literature.
The first of Faulkner's short stories to appear in a major magazine with national circulation, A Rose for Emily is by far his best-known, most reprinted, most widely read, and most discussed short story. It is one of the best examples for us to learn Faulkner's Southern works.
A Rose for Emily was originally published in April 30, 1930, issue of Forum. A slightly revised version was published in two collections of his short stories, These 13 (1931) and Collected Stories (1950). It has been published in dozens of anthologies as well. It relates a short story about the life and the death of a declining aristocrat, Emily Grierson，who was reduced to a \From the viewpoint of an anonymous resident of Jefferson, Mississippi, where the Grierson family was the closest thing to true aristocracy, the story details the strange circumstances of Emily's life and her odd relationships with her father, her lover, and the people in Jefferson, and the horrible secret she hid--she poisoned her lover, Homer Barron, who wanted to discard her, and slept with his body until she died.
II. Southern Literature and Its Traditions 2.1 The Southern Myth
Southern Literature is the most unique in American culture, and plays an
important role in the history of literature.
To speak of the southern culture, the Southern Myth must be mentioned. The Southern Myth emerged from the original plantation myth, and was their recreation of the southern social ideal, as well as a means of beautifying the old southern lifestyle and the social system. It contained six notions. The first was the southern knight tradition. They considered their ancestors as the British knights and were proud of themselves. Second, they thought highly of farming, and held that farming brought them virtue, while industry led to vice. The third was a strong sense of class. They regarded the plantation owner as the aristocracy who had inestimable advantages to be the master of slaves and the savior. Fourth, the Civil War was a sacred cause in defense of their independence and the black people. The fifth was a belief in white superiority, which really had a profound and lasting influence in the history. Last but not least, a stereotype of a Southern \was pure, elegant, sacred, and was an ideal of the culture of the Old American South.
The six notions not only represented the southerners' life attitude, showed their intense desire and emotion, but also reflected the social and historical environment. The Southern Myth passed from generation to generation, and in the southerners' memory and imagination, the southern life had been gradually becoming perfect and attractive, regardless of whether it was the actual situation or not. Then, the southerners' explanation of the six myths exceeded the southern reality, and even many southerners thought the myth of the American South was the real South.
As the important part of the southern culture, the Southern Myth does deserve the southerners' cherish. But when they totally trapped themselves into the myth and turned their backs to the social reality, this kind of blind worship should pay for the decline of the American South in the later years. 2.2 Southern Literary Renaissance
The southerners did not realize their self-deception under the great influence of the Southern Myth until the Civil War broke out. The southern society experienced a