简析《献给爱米丽的玫瑰》中“玫瑰”的象征意义

苗 婷

【摘要】《献给爱米丽的玫瑰》是20世纪伟大的小说家福克纳最优秀的短片小说之一,在小说中,通篇没有提到玫瑰花,也没有人献花给爱米丽。本文分析了玫瑰的多重象征意义,认为它既象征爱米丽的爱情,又象征爱米丽本人,同时还象征着美国南方种植园主制度。

【关键词】象征意义、玫瑰、爱情、美国南方种植园主制度

The Symbolic Significance of the Rose in A Rose for Emily

Miao Ting

【Abstract】

A Rose for Emily is a short story by American author William Faulkner. The term rose does not appear in the text of the novel but simply in the title and the surface, working as a symbol. This paper is intended to analyze the multifold meanings of rose since it symbolizes the love of Emily, Emily per se, and the Southern Slavery in America.

【Key words】Symbolism, rose, love, Southern planters system in America

1.Introduction to A Rose for Emily

First published in the April 30, 1930 issue of Forum, a national magazine, A Rose for Emily was written by American author William Faulkner. And it is Faulkner's first short story.

Faulkner's A Rose for Emily is narrated from the viewpoint of the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, where the Grierson family was the closest thing to true aristocracy. The story presents a powerful argument that privilege can sometimes be a prison. To the outside world, it might have appeared that Miss Emily Grierson grew up in the lap of luxury. However, it was a lonely existence, for her father ruled Emily's life with an iron fist, turning away every suitor the young girl had; no one was good enough for his daughter. Not surprisingly, the first thing Emily did after her father's death was to find a companion and a very unlikely one at that-a Yankee day laborer named Homer Barron. She went out driving with Homer in a flashy yellow-wheeled buggy, and bought him extremely personal articles-a silver toilet set, a nightshirt. Today our first assumption would be that he was her lover, but this was the small-town south, and another time. The townspeople assumed she had gotten married-secretly, of course, because under the circumstances a big society wedding would be in bad taste. For a while Emily convinced herself that the townspeople still respected her. After all, she never really intended Homer to supplant her father in the eyes of the town. He couldn't have, because he was neither a Son of the South nor a pillar of the community; Homer's role was simply that of a consort, filling a vacancy at Emily's side. It was through Emily's arrogance that permitted the purchase of arsenic. This was an act of liberation from her father's restrictions. It then, allowed her to act as she wanted in retrieving what was bereft in result to her father's dominance. The logical conclusion-that Emily had murdered her lover-could not be incorporated into the myth that the townspeople had constructed around her. It was unspeakable, so no one spoke of it. Forty years later, after Emily died the townspeople cautiously entered the house that few had visited since the death of Mr. Grierson, apart from those grandchildren of Colonel Sartoris' china painting lessons. There they were moved, but not really surprised, to find a decomposed skeletal body on a sumptuous bed in a locked room, and Emily's iron-gray hair lying on the pillow beside his head. In A Rose for Emily Faulkner shows the tragedy that resulted from our adherence to social roles that constrain, rather than liberate, our true selves.

2.The Symbolic Significance of the Rose in A Rose for Emily

2.1Rose symbolizing the love of Emily

In William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, Miss Emily Grierson is a lonely old woman, living a life void of all love and affection. Although the rose only directly appears in the title, the rose surfaces throughout the story as a symbol. In contemporary times, the rose also symbolizes emotions like love. The rose symbolizes dreams of romances and lovers. These dreams belong to women, who like Emily Grierson, have yet to experience true love for themselves.

Throughout the life of Emily Grierson, she remains locked up, never experiencing love from anyone but her father. She lives a life of loneliness, left only to dream of the love missing from her life. The rose from the title symbolizes this absent love. It symbolizes the roses and flowers that Emily never received, the lovers that overlooked her.

The domineering attitude of Emily's father keeps her to himself, inside the house, and alone until his death. In his own way, Emily's father shows her how to love. Through a forced obligation to love only him, as he drives off young male callers, he teaches his daughter lessons of love. It is this dysfunctional love that resurfaces later, because it is the only way Emily knows how to love.

Emily in her youth was prevented from marriage due to her father's ignorance and pride. He pushed away all the men who wanted to marry Emily because they were not good enough for her, which can be parsed from the text below:

People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, 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 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 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 if they had really materialized. 1

Therefore, after her father's death Emily was left all alone. Some while after her father's death she met a man called Homer and started an emotional relationship with him. However, Homer wanted to leave the town and turned back to the North. And it also seemed that the town showed the sympathy for Emily due to her having a

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¹Cf. Honggeng Yuan's teaching handout of A rose for Emily, p26.

relationship with a Northerner, Yankee, and Daily-worker. Yet, despite of all this Emily wants to keep her only true love to herself forever. So she poisons Homer with arsenic. In this aspect a rose for Emily is Homer himself.

The rose is a symbol of love as it were, and portrays a beauty that doesn't end, even when it dies. The rose has been used for centuries to illustrate an everlasting type of love and faithfulness. It could be that the rose symbolizes when Emily had killed Homer Barron. She loved him, and she would always love him even in death, just as a rose is still held in high regard even in falling grace. Or it could symbolize a rose for Emily, as she had never been loved and this was her rose.

2.2Rose symbolizing the Southern planters system in America

Rose symbolizes the Southern planters system in America, too. Most of his works takes place in Faulkner's fictional city, Jefferson, in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, including a rose for Emily.

The description of big house, Negro servant, and Tax-free privilege reveals the prosperous time of Southern planters system in America. No matter how noble the rose is, how dazzling the flower is, it will wither one day eventually. The Southern planters system in America is doomed to falling into collapse.

The house of Miss Emily was described as a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been the most select street. Narrator explains how garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood and only Miss Emily's house was left lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. The setting is quite significant to the meaning of the text in the fact that the author shows how the town has transformed while the Grierson residence still remains decaying, as described in the following passage:

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.²

Take another for instance. When the mayor came to her house to discuss her taxes, after sending her three notices in the mail, she repeated that her father took care of it with Colonel Satoris and did not owe anything. Just read the following:

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 1894 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 on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.³

At last, the house is described as having a smell of dust and disuse. In the next paragraph she is described as looking bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Both descriptions of the setting and of Miss Emily are dark and morbid as follows:

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.⁴

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²Similar to Footnote 1, p22.

³Similar to Footnote 1, p23.

⁴Similar to Footnote 1,p33.

The magnificent past was always unforgettable. Emily refused to pay taxes and change her own building frame. But along with his dying, the black male servant has also vanished. All will become history with southern planters system.

Rose symbolizes the Southern planters system in America which started magnificently but defeated finally. The fallen monument is the southern planters system.

3.Conclusion

Symbolism runs throughout the entire story. The rose only directly appears in the title, and surfaces throughout the story as a symbol. In this paper rose symbolizes the love of Emily Rose symbolizes and the Southern planters system in America. Most of the symbolism that is used represents the contrast of Miss Emily's sense of time to reality. Specific characters and descriptions of setting show the difference of the world Miss Emily was mentally living in and the world that really existed.

参考文献

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