40 Fun Facts About A Rose for Emily

In A Rose for Emily, which poison does Emily Grierson demand from the druggist without saying what it is for?

Arsenic arrives at her house in a box the druggist has labelled as rat poison, under a skull and crossbones. The town assumes she means to kill herself.

Which Northern foreman courts Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily and is last seen entering her house at dusk?

Homer Barron was soon driving out with Emily every Sunday afternoon, and the town expected a wedding. When he disappeared, people assumed he had deserted her.

In A Rose for Emily, what do the townspeople notice on the second pillow beside the body?

A strand of gray hair, long and iron-colored like Emily's own, lies in the hollow of a head on that pillow. It tells the town she had been lying beside the corpse.

William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily opens with which event, which the whole town attends partly out of curiosity?

Her funeral gives the townspeople a chance to see inside a house that no outsider had entered for ten years. The men, the narrator says, come out of a kind of respectful affection.

In A Rose for Emily, what does Emily tell callers for three days after her father's death?

That he is not dead is all she will say, meeting visitors at the door dressed as usual, with no sign of grief. She gives way only as the law is about to step in.

When a foul smell spreads from Emily's house in A Rose for Emily, what do four men sprinkle there after midnight?

Lime is spread in her cellar and outbuildings by men who slink about like burglars, because nobody will tell a lady that her property stinks. The odor fades within a week or two.

In A Rose for Emily, what is the name of the manservant who cooks and gardens for Emily Grierson for decades?

Tobe is named only once, when Emily calls him to show her visitors out; otherwise the narrator never uses his name. He is the one person who knows what her house holds.

In A Rose for Emily, what does Emily Grierson refuse to pay when a new generation of town leaders calls on her?

Her taxes had been waived for life by a mayor of the old school, and she simply repeats that she owes nothing. The visitors are shown out with the bill still unpaid.

Which narrative point of view does William Faulkner use throughout A Rose for Emily?

First-person plural narration, all we and our, lets the town itself tell the tale as shared gossip. No single narrator is ever named or described.

A Rose for Emily, with its decaying house and long-hidden corpse, is a classic of which literary genre?

Southern Gothic fiction swaps the haunted castle for the decaying plantation world of the post-Civil War South. Emily's shuttered home stands where those two traditions meet.

In A Rose for Emily, which former mayor does Emily tell her visitors to consult, though he died a decade earlier?

Colonel Sartoris made the arrangement with her in 1894 as a gentleman's agreement, with nothing on the town's books. To Emily, his word still stands.

In A Rose for Emily, which invented debt lets the mayor spare Emily's pride over what she owes?

A loan from her father to the town is the mayor's fiction, since a Grierson would never accept charity. The narrator says only a man of his generation could invent it and only a woman believe it.

In A Rose for Emily, which building job brings Emily's Yankee suitor to town the summer after her father dies?

Paving the sidewalks is the contract that brings a construction company with mules, machinery and a Yankee foreman. Little boys trail the crew to hear him curse and the workers sing.

Whom do the ladies of the town force to call on Emily Grierson about her Sunday drives in A Rose for Emily?

The Baptist minister never told anyone what passed between them, and he refused to go back. His wife then wrote to Emily's relations, asking them to step in.

In A Rose for Emily, from which state do two cousins arrive during Emily's scandalous courtship?

Alabama is where the estranged kin live; they had fallen out with Emily's father over an old relative's estate. The town soon finds them even haughtier than Emily and is glad to see them go.

In A Rose for Emily, what does Emily order from the jeweler with her suitor's initials on each piece?

A silver toilet set for a man was followed two days later by a full outfit of men's clothes, nightshirt included. The town concluded the couple had married.

Which genteel art does Emily Grierson teach the town's daughters in a downstairs studio in A Rose for Emily?

China painting lessons bring girls to her door for six or seven years when she is about forty. When that generation grows up, the pupils stop coming and the front door closes for good.

Which town, the seat of William Faulkner's invented county, is home to Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily?

Jefferson appears in story after story by Faulkner, with the same courthouse square and many of the same families. Its cemetery holds both Union and Confederate soldiers.

A Rose for Emily takes place in which fictional county, the setting of most William Faulkner novels?

Yoknapatawpha is built from Chickasaw words, and Faulkner called it his apocryphal county, even drawing a map of it for one novel. He placed over 50 stories there.

Which Mississippi town, William Faulkner's longtime home, was the model for the setting of A Rose for Emily?

Oxford is the seat of Lafayette County, where Faulkner's family settled when he was a small boy and his father opened a livery stable. He lived there for nearly all the rest of his life.

Which magazine ran A Rose for Emily in 1930, the first national periodical to print a William Faulkner story?

The Forum gave the tale five two-color drawings by Weldon Bailey and split it into five numbered sections. At the time it was a widely read journal with a taste for Southern subjects.

A Rose for Emily was reprinted in which 1931 book, William Faulkner's first volume of short stories?

These 13 was named for its thirteen stories and dedicated to Faulkner's wife Estelle and their baby daughter, who had died days after her birth. It later became a collector's item.

Which honor for 1949 did William Faulkner, author of A Rose for Emily, receive a year late beside Bertrand Russell?

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 was held over and presented in December 1950. Faulkner so disliked the fuss that his teenage daughter heard the news in her principal's office.

Asked by students in 1957 where A Rose for Emily came from, what kind of tale did William Faulkner call it?

A ghost story was his phrase, and he said the whole thing grew from one picture in his mind, a small detail in an abandoned house. At another session he said Emily's particular tragedy was invented.

Which British band put a song titled A Rose for Emily on the 1968 album Odessey and Oracle?

The Zombies' keyboard player Rod Argent wrote it, and critics disagree over whether it retells Faulkner's tale or only borrows the name. It was taped at EMI's Abbey Road studios.

Which band's 2004 song To the End loosely retells A Rose for Emily on the album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge?

My Chemical Romance gave the tale one of the album's heavier, punk-inspired tracks, placed third in the running order. The record's main themes are love, loss and revenge.

Where was William Faulkner writer-in-residence in 1957 when he took students' questions about A Rose for Emily?

University of Virginia audiences heard him at thirty-six public events over two spring terms, and most sessions were taped. Over 28 hours of the recordings were later digitized.

In an early rejected draft of A Rose for Emily, which surname did William Faulkner give Emily instead of Grierson?

Wyatt survives in the published version as the name of an elderly relative whose estate the family quarrelled over. Faulkner revised the tale once more for its 1931 book publication.

Which eighty-year-old mayor in A Rose for Emily hears complaints about the smell from Emily's house?

Judge Stevens asks how anyone can accuse a lady of such a thing in person, so the problem is dealt with quietly after dark. His family name recurs across Faulkner's fiction.

In A Rose for Emily, which relative of Emily Grierson does the town remember as having gone completely mad?

Her great-aunt's madness is why the town says insanity runs in the family, a remark it makes when Emily is still single at thirty. A quarrel over the old lady's estate had split the family.

In A Rose for Emily, where does Emily's Yankee suitor drink with the younger men of the town?

The Elks' Club is named in the same breath as his own remark that he is not the marrying kind, which makes the town pity Emily all the more. The fraternal order had been founded in New York in 1868.

Which French phrase does the narrator of A Rose for Emily supply when Emily is seen with a day laborer?

Noblesse oblige, the duty that comes with high birth, is the narrator's label; the older people never use the phrase. They only voice pity and say her kin should come to her.

In A Rose for Emily, which church do Emily's people attend, a detail given as the ladies oppose her courtship?

Episcopal is the narrator's word for her family, dropped in as an aside while the town's ladies scheme to stop her Sunday drives. It is one of the few plain facts the narrator gives about the family.

In A Rose for Emily, which town body sends a deputation into Emily Grierson's dusty parlor to demand payment?

The Board of Aldermen met specially after she ignored a notice and a formal letter and declined the mayor's offer of his car. Its spokesman stumbles to a halt while she stays standing and never asks them to sit.

In A Rose for Emily, what does the old manservant do after admitting the first callers at Emily's death?

He walks out and vanishes through the back of the house, without a word to anyone about what he has known for decades. By then his voice had grown rusty from disuse.

How does William Faulkner arrange the events of Emily Grierson's life in A Rose for Emily?

As non-linear flashbacks, the tale circles back and forth through decades and saves its darkest secret for the last page. Told in sequence, the ending would be no surprise.

In A Rose for Emily, in what hired vehicle are Emily Grierson and her foreman seen driving on Sunday afternoons?

A yellow-wheeled buggy with a matched pair of bays came from the livery stable for each outing. Older townspeople watched from behind closed shutters and whispered their pity.

Magazine sales in the year A Rose for Emily appeared helped William Faulkner buy which run-down Mississippi house?

Rowan Oak got its name from Faulkner himself, after the rowan tree for peace and the live oak for strength; neither grows on the grounds. The 1844 house had stood empty for seven years.

In the town's lasting picture of the Griersons in A Rose for Emily, what does Emily's father clutch in the doorway?

A horsewhip in his hand and his back turned to her, he fills the foreground while Emily stands behind him, slender and dressed in white. The image sums up how he drove her suitors away.

Explaining A Rose for Emily to students, William Faulkner said Emily's father kept her home because he wanted what?

A housekeeper was all the old man wanted, Faulkner said, calling him selfish and the tale one of a natural instinct crushed until it came out in tragic form. In the story, the town blames Grierson pride.