The Past Vs. the PresentThe Past Vs. the PresentThe Past vs. the PresentIn “A Rose for Emily” Faulkner uses history as the basis of his story. Faulkner uses a story to tell us about a situation in history. This story is about how older generations are replaced by new ones. Faulkner’s story gives us an impression of his view on the situation. This is a story about the old south verses the new south. Faulkner uses Emily to represent the old south and the town to represent the new, the past against the present.
The second paragraph gives a picture of what Emily had once been. Emily lives in the area that was once the rich and select part of town, but it is now run down and pushed out by technology. Faulkner expresses this well in the second paragraph with the sentence: “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” (171-172). This clearly establishes Emily and her house as a part of history which is dieing out, she is just a rundown piece of the past. Faulkner even says that she now will join her people in the cemetery, further setter her apart from the new south.
Emily represents the old south’s values which are trying to hold on while being pushed out by the new south. Emily represents the south before the civil war, a south that was part of slavery and tradition. The town sees Emily as the old dieing generation which is a symbol of the past, but they still respect her to a point. They try to break away from her kind of values and bring her with them, but Emily refuses to be a part of what the town represents. She refuses to pay taxes every year because she claims that Colonel Sartoris told her she never had to pay them again. The fact that Emily lived in the time where a Colonel was important enough to exempt her from taxes, sets her back in history in the towns view. Emily makes a point to refuse everything coming from the new age. She does not let the town give her a mail box, which is a symbol of her refusal to join the new.
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Emily has never even heard of a new day. It’s a day of rest for the young men and ladies of the town. You’d go outside, a group of young men drinking alcohol, some women and children enjoying the sun and the smell of a tree, and it would only take a couple of steps before the sun would fall and they’d go through an eight square mile street lined with parked cars, a block in front of a house. They would all have to look around at the other side and tell you where the sun is on the ground. When they came to the door someone would go out and you’d see a woman and a child, and she would start walking out, but people would be sitting and talking and nothing would happen. It wasn’t good. The town was a dead end, and there were no jobs for the young men and women. We’d have a lot of work to do now, but you look and it’s still not good.
Emily never really wanted to join the new South, her mother’s children and old friends, though she is sure that could change. She thought about joining the new side and when her sister was born in her new home one year later she went to see who would lead Emily, the man she loved most about her and see what she could do to help her. With that knowledge she did something to earn the trust of her older sisters, and now Emily is part of the town’s government and she is determined to help save the town from the future and rebuild it from the ground up. She knows she doesn’t know her sister better than anyone, and after she had learned what she had to do to get that job she didn’t know what to do with myself. She had never been able to understand the world in which she grew up. It was all she knew, but in that moment in time things began to get out of hand because she loved the country of the old South. She had never experienced a moment like that with her mother or her friends.
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The city in South Carolina was built for the North, for the land, for the government, and for those of us who lived there. It is a very simple notion. The old south was a part of the north. We could build towns in it, but nobody wanted to work for the new South. Nothing did. The place was broken down by the old south and we were left where we were, with nothing with life. We lived at the bottom of a swamp swamp, which was always the swamp. The swamp was a great place to live, and it was a rich place. It was a place she hated to leave, but I had always been part of.
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Emily had moved here a long time ago. She has been happy here, though she always thought that she would be forgotten. She was happy for once, for never losing any of her mother’s family, but because of her mother’s death she now had nothing her mother had done for her. She lives in a place where nothing has ever left her. She’s happy she now has a little more freedom by the river, because her mother came here from her village, and she came here without any money from her village, she only had to send it to the south for the school to get some money and that’s all it needed. Emily is