Unscrambling the Chronology of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

      The flashbacks and flash-forwards in Faulkner's 1930's story "A Rose for Emily" often confuse first-time readers of the story. After opening with a description of Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1938, the next paragraph will take the reader back to 1894, the next paragraph will jump forward to 1926, and then the next paragraph will jump back to 1896. It is truly very confusing. Before trying to grasp the themes and symbols in the story, however, the reader needs to recognize the actual sequence of events in Emily's life. Fortunately there is enough detail in the story for a careful reader to work out a fairly complete chronology of the events from her birth until her death at the age of 74:


      I. Emily's Birth and Death Dates (1864-1938)

      The phrases "up to the day of her death at seventy-four" (para. #46) and "when she got to be thirty and was still single" (para. #23) tell us that Emily lived approximately forty-four years after the death of her father about 1894. We know her father died about 1894 because that is specifically named as the year Colonel Sartoris "remitted her taxes." Since Faulkner tells us that Emily was already at least thirty when her father died (paras. #23 and #24), this means that she was born about thirty years before 1894 and died about forty-four years after 1894. In other words, Emily was most likely born in 1864 and most likely died in 1938.

      II. Emily's Teens and Twenties (about 1880-1894)

      Upper-class Southern girls like Emily were not allowed to date like girls today. To be seen in public with a young man alone was considered shocking and immoral behavior; so from the time they were about sixteen until the time they married, they stayed at home and received "gentlemen callers." Unfortunately, Emily's father thought that "[n]one of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily" (para. #23); and -- from 1880 when she was sixteen until 1894 when her father died and she was already thirty -- he drove "all the young men" away (para. #26) by threatening or actually beating them with a "horsewhip." (para. #23)

      III. Homer Barron Arrives in Jefferson (1894 or 1895)

      "The summer after her father's death," that is, either in 1894 or 1895, Homer Barron arrives in Jefferson "to pave the sidewalks." (para. #28) (By the way, he wasn't there to pave the streets because in the mid-1890's there was no need to pave the streets of a small town in Mississippi; everyone still used horses or walked.) In the 1890's a Yankee like Homer Barron would be looked down upon by the people of a small southern town like Jefferson, especially "a day-laborer." Then to make matters worse, it wasn't long before the townspeople "began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable." And it wasn't long after that before everyone in town is calling her "poor Emily" and believing "that she was fallen" (para. #31), that is, that she was having a love affair with Homer. The people in the town were almost glad that the "high and mighty" Emily Grierson had lowered herself by having a sordid love affair with a completely unsuitable man like Homer.

      IV. The Love Affair that Leads to Murder (about 1894 to about 1896)

      We know that Emily's affair lasted about a year-and-a-half because it was sometime before the people in the town began to gossip about "poor Emily" and Homer as they rode around Jefferson on Sunday afternoons. And "it was over a year after they had begun to say 'Poor Emily'" before Emily bought the rat poison. (para. #31) So sometime in 1896 Emily bought some arsenic, causing some people to say "[s]he will kill herself." (para. #41) About the time she bought the poison, she had two cousins living with her who were obviously interfering in her affair, so it must have seemed to others that perhaps she was going to poison her cousins. No one suspected she was going to poison Homer, but that's exactly what she did; so sometime in 1896 the "bad smell" episode occurred as Homer's body began to decay.

      V. Thirty Years Later -- the Tax Problem (about 1926)

      We know that thirty years after the "bad smell" episode, Emily was visited by the authorities of Jefferson to discuss her unpaid property taxes. In 1926, she was about sixty-one or sixty-two years old, but Emily "wins" the confrontation about the taxes just as she "won" in the matter of the bad smell: "So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell." (para. #13) It was during this thirty year period that Emily grew fat and old and developed "iron-gray" hair, that her house became dilapidated, that she gave "lessons in china-painting" for about six or seven years around the time that she was forty, and that she refused to put metal numbers on her door and to fasten a mailbox to her door. (paras. #47 and #48) As noted above, nobody suspected that she had murdered Homer, but the good citizens of Jefferson were certainly convinced that Emily was the crazy old maid daughter of crazy old man Grierson living for years alone in a dilapidated old house with only one servant and -- for a short while -- her two crazy Wyatt cousins from Alabama.


      When Emily dies about 1938, we know that she is 74 years old and that the decayed corpse of Homer Barron is found in a locked room in her decaying house. Whatever themes, symbols or other meanings that Faulkner may have intended to present in the story are still widely discussed and argued over more than seventy years after the story was first published, but one thing is sure: the reader without a clear understanding of the timeline of events in this story is likely to be very confused indeed.