Questions for discussion: reading 4 theme: Men and Women
Press Ctrl + click or cut and paste into your browser to open any hyperlinks for the stories.
4) A short story by William Faulkner called “A Rose for Emily”:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html
a) Notice the descriptions of Emily at the beginning, when she is elderly.
Can you find a metaphor or a simile there? (You need to know the difference between those two
“figures of speech” meant to be taken figuratively, not literally.) When you say someone
is a pig, you do not mean it literally. The same is when you say to someone you eat like a
bird. It is not meant literally.
The description of her hair color is literal, real, and it
also becomes a significant detail at the very end.
b) Think of metaphors and similes you use in your own conversation. List a few.
It is a good thing for writers to use metaphors and similes!
c) Who is narrating this story (that is not the same as saying who wrote it)?
d) Notice that the narrator says in the first sentence, “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our
whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen
monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house […].
Is this a criticism of women’s values or priorities? Is the portrayal of Emily a criticism?
e) When she bought arsenic, what did the townspeople think?
f) Homer was the one man that Emily seemed to care about.
Why did people think poorly
of him? (It may have to do with geography…)
g) At the end, what do people find in the locked room? What exactly happened?
h) Did you notice the line: “When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we
had said, ‘She will marry him.’ Then we said, “She will persuade him yet,’ because
Homer himself had remarked–he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the
younger men in the Elks’ Club–that he was not a marrying man”?
Did it mean anything to you at first?
Does it mean anything in retrospect?
i) Considering all that the author writes about Emily, do you think he, William Faulkner, is
showing bias against women?
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