Confronting Emily

      I read A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. My professor said Faulkner’s point of view is 3rd person, ok true, and intimate, well...fair enough, but we readers are held at a considerable distance from her, which is a wonder, because the story is entirely about her. How is our vision of his subject, Miss Emily, so thoroughly obscured by the description of it? Her actions contain layers of secrets we desperately need to understand, and just like those ladies at her funeral we want to see inside her house.
 
    The mystery sprouts from a simple question about a universal taxation; taxes, why is she so special? Why doesn’t she have to pay? But in answering the question, Faulkner only waters that growing mystery; through descriptions, details and peculiarities that a reader might be forgiven for thinking are as explanatory as an ellipsis leading right up to their vanquishment “horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.”

    Time and time again we find responsible people finding a way, many ways actually, to bend to her will. She reminds me of a character on Billions, Judge Funt, who “seemed to grow larger as he talked, the way some men can when they're not pretending to dignity and honor but they're actually made of the stuff.” But what is she made of? We don’t know, we only know that it is horribly uncomfortable to confront, and facing it requires tremendous will.

     I envision a lady in a pharmacy, buying arsenic and when Faulkner writes of “her face like a strained flag,” the entire aura of her character brings to my mind an image of her tilting her head back slightly, looking at the druggist over her nose, not condescending necessarily, just observing him shrivel, accused by her silent impervious gaze for a mortal crime of impudence, and not wishing to be impudent, we all succumb, and sell her the arsenic, nullify her taxes, secretly sniff her brickworks and slink about the night to sprinkle lime in her cellar.