Elements of Humanity in Faulkner's A Rose for Emily

          Humans are innately emotional beings; it is one of the traits connected with the predisposition of the human condition. This tendency to feel is directly interconnected with the ability for people to relate to each other. Or perhaps, better stated, that it is simply human nature to involuntarily be empathic. Humans experience a wide range of very puzzling emotions, but empathy is of the most stand out because of its curious function in the human world. A stand-out example of the puzzling function of empathy is displayed by the townspeople of Jefferson when describing the curious existence of Miss Emily Grierson in William Faulkner’s short story, A Rose for Emily. American economic and social theorist, Jeremy Rifkin explores the phenomenon of empathy in his lecture on his theory about the constriction of an empathic civilization. Rifkin explains the physicality of this emotion: “We know if a spider goes up someone's arm and I'm observing it going up your arm I'm going to get a creepy feeling” (Rifkin).  This empathic feeling is exemplified at its most primitive level and Rifkin continues: “We take this for granted but we're actually soft-wired to actually experience another's plight as if we're experiencing it ourselves” (Rifkin). This “soft wiring” is the root of the cause of the human ability to experience empathy; however unusual, the people of Jefferson grant Miss Emily clemency without realizing it. Rifkin explains that “the times that we've empathized with each other, our fellow creatures, it's always because we felt their struggle, we had the depth and empathy and the celebration of life. And we show solidarity with our compassion” (Rifkin). A master of blending themes of compassion and forgiveness into his work, William Faulkner’s stories provoke readers in such a way that, while not apparent at first, they find themselves forgiving the transgressions of a character without even realizing it. Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily is a cruel and coarse call for understanding and compassion.

          Miss Emily’s story is told by the town’s people and this is evident in the way the narrator sometimes speaks for the men and sometimes for the women, but mostly for both. By observing from their outside perspective, the reader finds that they never fully see Miss Emily’s world. All the town can do is guess and gossip. To the town, it is strange and sad to have this near ghost of a human being who, over the course of her life, becomes increasingly reclusive. The third-person perspective helps the reader better connect with the town for a deeper submersion into the world of the changing south. As the reader becomes a part of the town and learns bit by bit about Miss Emily it becomes increasingly difficult not to mirror the attitude of the town. Each face represented by the speaker seems to know that there is something wrong with the situation, but none really has a good solution for the problem, making the story feel more like a confession than an account.

The town conforms and creates an unspoken social adherence they create for how to deal with Miss Emily; each sharing a feeling of responsibility for Miss Emily’s death. A social experiment conducted by researchers at ABC News based on work published by Doctor Gregory Byrnes of Emory University on conformity among strangers found that there are “ways to explain [conformist] behavior… [people] know what their eyes are telling them, and yet they choose to ignore it and go along with the group to belong to the group.” (Conformity: In the Real-Life Lab). The evidence of the social experiment offers an explanation for why the townspeople of Jefferson behaved the way they did. The community knew that something was definitely dead and the smell was coming from Miss Emily’s house, but instead of confronting the southern belle, no one said a word for the sake of what was once considered proper and because they pity her. The people continued to conform to the old social constructs in dealing with Miss Emily even though the times had changed drastically because that is what they saw everyone around them doing out of their misguided sympathy. Thus, Miss Emily and the town could carry on in a sort of peace; the town with their quiet knowledge and Miss Emily in her isolation.

Miss Emily lived a life of extreme isolation in the time when the South was transitioning from slave culture into the modern world. Her father kept her in and away from men because, in those days, it was considered a father’s responsibility to protect his daughters from the evil of men. The narrator says: “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such” indicating their realization and perception of her father’s control by keeping her isolated from men (Faulkner 703). The eerie feel of the house and the strange behavior Miss Emily exhibited when her father died implied that there were other, more disturbing, elements to the relationship between them, meanwhile the town is looking in from the outside and express a feeling of pity that they never outwardly state. Development Through Life: A Psychosocial Approach, a text that explores the contrast between intimacy and isolation, points out that: “The more fully developed the ego becomes, the more it is characterized by clear boundaries.” (Newman). Miss Emily has “a heightened sense of separateness from others” because of the culture she was born into and as she came of age and the world changed she became reclusive (Newman). This isolation was a “major source of was psychological distress” (Newman) for Miss Emily. The depth of that feeling of her separation from the people of the town was only deepened over time, not just by Miss Emily, but by the townsfolk as well. For example, the druggist who was so put off by Miss Emily’s response, or stern lack thereof, would not even return to the counter to finish the transaction after his interaction with her.

The speakers express more evidence of Miss Emily’s extreme isolation is further expressed by the narrator after Homer Barron mysteriously disappears in a tone reminiscent of gossip, saying: “After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” (Faulkner 703). The townspeople express that somewhere along the way Miss Emily lost touch with reality if she had ever had any sense of it in the first place. The townsfolk are aware of her strange behavior when she purchases an engraved toilet set, a man’s suit, and a nightshirt while Homer is away. The whole town could see that something was happening even though they tried to keep positive by commenting that perhaps Miss Emily has married Homer, but even the druggist did not want any part of selling Miss Emily that arsenic. Eventually, the town assumes she will kill herself, the whole town feels sorry for her, but they collectively decide that perhaps it would be for the best and do nothing to intervene. This may sound as though the town is indifferent to her suffering, but that could not be farther from the truth.

The townspeople make seemingly cold comments like: “At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized.” (Faulkner 703), but they need her to be human in order to pity her. It is only through pity that the townspeople could have the compassionate response of letting Miss Emily to her own lonely undoing, regardless of what they may have known. The town makes evident, while never directly addressing it, that they know Miss Emily is a murderer. No one in the town does anything about it, not because they are afraid of her, but because they felt that it would be wrong to disrupt an old woman who has gone insane.

The people of Jefferson are the very definition depicted of the bystander effect. Using the work of many influential psychologists, the documentary: Love, Hate, and Everything in Between: A Film on Empathy explains: “[the] "bystander effect," which is a story from social psychology, which says that when there's a violent incident, the more people who watch this incident, the less likely is there anyone would intervene” (Love, Hate, and Everything in Between). The entire town is very aware of Miss Emily’s evil deed. Murder is not a crime taken lightly in most cases, but the people of Jefferson cannot even come up with a way to approach Miss Emily in the first place, let alone exact punishment for the murder. The film concludes: “level of identification, in terms of in-group or out-group with the victim or with the perpetrator, and the other one is, actually, the effect of the crowd behavior” (Love, Hate, and Everything in Between). Because the town is the group and Miss Emily is the outcast, the townspeople found it easier to identify with one another, which means that, since it is decided that no one in charge will confront or disturb her, the rest of the town, in turn, would follow suit.

Works Cited

"Conformity: In the Real-Life Lab." Films On-Demand, 29 Nov 2015. EBSCOhost.

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Eleventh Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2013. 1203-1204. Textbook.

"Love, Hate, and Everything in Between: A Film on Empathy". Films On Demand. Films Media Group, 2012.

----------Web. 5 Dec. 2015

Newman, Barbara and Phillip. "Intimacy and Isolation." Development Through Life: A Psychosocial Approach. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2011. EBook.

Rifkin, Jeremy. "The Empathic Civilisation." 28 Nov 2015. RSA.