A Rose For Emily - Faulkner #2

Old South and New South in Jefferson

Faulkner had a fascination with the old Southern lifestyle and its attempts to hang on even after the Civil War and Reconstruction. “A Rose for Emily” is a short but effective demonstration of this. His Grierson family was one of the old stock, the respected families of Jefferson, now waning into oblivion.

Miss Emily is the last of the Griersons in Jefferson. She represents the last lady of a dying breed and the new generations do not quite understand the fascination with the formerly affluent family. All they see is a lonely old woman who they pity and ponder on. Faulkner says that the men went to her funeral to show affection to a “fallen monument”, perhaps a monument to times past and eras respected.

The new generation grew up in a situation less affected by prosperous families and affected more by things like the law and the town council. They remember the days of the Old South through stories rather than from experience. The most glaring example of the clash of the two subcultures occurs when the town council are discussing how to deal with the stench coming from the Grierson home. The younger man says to just send a note to the lady, while the older Judge Stevens finds suggestion that appalling.

In a former time, the Griersons would have been beyond reproach, and the affair between Miss Emily and Homer would have been only a gossip conversation between the ladies of the town. But now that the emphasis on the powerful families has been diminished, Miss Emily is considered on the same level as everyone else. The townspeople decide to send the minister to speak with her about the bad example she is setting for the children.

The old South and the emergence of the new South is a key theme within this story. Faulkner used the differences between the two cultures to create conflict between the characters. The declining old South is weakly fighting to survive with its pseudo-aristocracy and the rising new South is attempting to step forward into the 20th century. Miss Emily is caught in the middle of this, as an archaic society sails out of the picture with her at the helm.

Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily"

Conflict and Jefferson

The main source of conflict in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is two cultures out of sync with each other not meshing well. Emily Grierson represents the last bastion of the old Southern lifestyle and the aristocratic-like ladies of the old South. To add to this conflict, Mr. Grierson was extremely overprotective of Emily while he was living and essentially crushed any hope of her living a normal and happy life.

Even within the town leadership, there existed conflicting cultural differences and this was only within a generation, perhaps two at most. On this council, there were “three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generations.” Conflict between council members is first shown during the portion of the story where the people smell an awful stench wafting from Miss Emily’s property. The younger man suggests just sending her a note telling her to clean her place up, while the older men, specifically Judge Stevens, are of the old stock and cannot fathom telling a lady that she or her home smelled offensive.

The sensitive nature of sex out of wedlock stuck discord in the town as well. After Mr. Barron and Miss Emily had been together for some time, the townspeople just accepted that this sin was happening. They considered it a bad example to set for the children and forced the Baptist minister to confront Miss Emily at her home (they felt it uncouth to do it themselves, or were they afraid?). He returned from the Grierson homestead with the conflict unresolved and refused ever to go back.

Finally, as Miss Emily passes, we find the most glaring point of divergence in the story. This conflict exists between the lovers, Emily and Homer. In opening the room that had long been locked, the townspeople discover what had been foreshadowed long before. Mr. Barron wished to leave, to carry on his life while Miss Emily wished only to be together forever. She won this fight. This point of conflict made Emily a murderer and ended the story on a bizarre note.

Whatever you say, say nothing. By Seamus Heaney

I

I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of 'views
On the Irish thing'.
I'm back in winter quarters where bad news is no longer news,
Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads
As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,
Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'?
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree,'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.' '
They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably. .
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.

II

Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite's a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome's
a happy man this night.' His flock suspect
In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make
As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow
When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'
And diagnose a rebirth in our plight
But that would be to ignore other symptoms.
Last night you didn't need a stethoscope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearse and Pope.)
On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering-
The phrase is Cruise O'Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke-while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for words at once both gaff and bait
To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham
Given the right line, aere perennius.

III

'Religion's never mentioned here,' of course.
'You know them by their eyes,' and hold your tongue.
'One side's as bad as the other,' never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung
In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the 'wee six' I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

IV

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja -vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bit and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

Who’s Your Daddy? (Pun Intended!)

The main ideas within this poem are varied and multifaceted; ranging from abandonment and suffering to lack of control and eventual freedom. The author herself tries to simplify the theme of the poem by essentially literalizing it, saying: “The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part-Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other--she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free of it.” (Rosenthal, 81-82)

But Plath’s “Daddy” covers many broad and common emotional bases, while incorporating a universal symbol of torment as an extended metaphor of her speaker’s mental anguish. In the end, it is realized by the reader that the ultimate goal of the speaker from the beginning of the poem was to purge herself of her father’s memory; which finally means expelling his destructive image from her brain and ridding herself of her controlling husband of seven years.

From the onset of the poem, even in the title, it is hinted that the speaker may be a child, or viewing the topic from a childish vantage point. The addressing of her father as “Daddy” is a connotative insinuation that the speaker feels dominated or oppressed by this figure. Initially, she creates a nursery rhyme image of a woman, herself, in a shoe, her fathers. The rhyming scheme is a repetition of the /oo/ sound, intermittently throughout the verse-ends. To me, this sound makes me think of babies, and young toddlers. “Oo” to me is a sound of childhood and of dependence. Further indication of this is provided by the Joycean technique of using infantile words such as “Achoo” and “Gobbledygoo” to provide a mental framework of the speaker.

This repetition of a single rhyming sound throughout this poem suggests a psychologically soothing nature to the echo, at least for the author. Platizky, a literary critic seems to suggest that this is not abnormal in elegy type poetry:
“Mourning poems (such as "Daddy") frequently repeat sound or stanzaic patterns (for example, In Memoriam) in symbolic replication of Freud's theory about the child's "fort-da" game in which a child, anxiously separated from a parent, compulsively pushes and pulls a spool forward and backward in an unconscious, ritualized attempt to master the anxiety that is produced by the parent's unreliable presence. Similarly in "Daddy," the compulsively repeated /oo/ sound may defensively perform a like function.” (Platizky, 2)

Control is another imperative issue throughout the poem. Playing off the Holocaust, a common theme of repression and suffering, Plath’s speaker struggles for control over her emotions concerning her father. While it is obvious that the speaker loves her father, it is just as apparent that the memory of his death and her feelings of abandonment because of that tragedy have scarred her image of him. She just wishes to be rid of the pain caused by her thoughts of him.

Plath’s Nazi imagery causes the reader to recreate the pictures of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and all the other horrors that occurred under the watch of Hitler’s Germany while she offers her feelings about her “daddy”, thus making you consider her thoughts in an altered state of thinking. This is an effective metaphor, causing a dark cloud to immediately hang over the verses. Swastikas, Fascists, Luftwaffes, panzer-men: all of these things evoke different and equally disturbing images in readers’ minds. This was Sylvia Plath’s precise intention.

Next is the speaker’s obsession with control, or more specifically lack of control. From the outset of the poem, the woman lacks control over her life; she allows her father’s memories to dictate her emotions. Apparently even before his death, the narrator says that she “never could talk to” him. He was a domineering and harsh man according to the woman, so much so that he controls the speaker’s thoughts beyond the grave. As a result of these despondent thoughts, the speaker feels oppressed by her recollections of him.

There is also a rhythm of control (and again, loss of control) within the poem, created primarily by controlling pace with punctuation. The author is most in command of her feelings in the stanzas containing more end-stops. These “controlled” bits and pieces are frequently the stanzas containing a good number of direct references to Nazi atrocities and German-related things. The author loses control and stanzas become chaotic when the topic shifts primarily to the father and her “model” of him: her husband. Emotion takes control of the verse and reason flies out of the poetical window.

In spending such a massive amount of time wishing for her father to still be alive, and being hindered and depressed by these thoughts, the speaker has gone and found a man she feels is representative of her image of “daddy.” “I made a model of you”, says Plath, seemingly in reference to Ted Hughes, her husband. This assumption is later reinforced by the phrase “I do, I do.”

The wave of negative emotion attributed formerly to the father is now dumped upon the husband. She builds him up to be the fascist, the oppressor, the “man in black with a Meinkampf look.” The feelings she previously had for her father are now blanketed on the man she deemed worthy to take his place in her life. The likeness of the husband in regards to the woman’s recollection of her “daddy” caused her to languish in constant torment for over twenty years. His emotional effect on her was draining, thus the analogy of a vampire sucking the life slowly out of her. And after seven years of him “drinking her blood”, the speaker now has freedom from the grip of the father’s memory. She is elated to be rid of him, and finally to be able to make peace with her memories of her father.

The speaker, in the last stanza of the poem, confronts the father’s memory with the infamous line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”, thus bringing the poem and the pain to some sort of closure. This concept of being “through” brings to mind for me, a sense of emptiness, like quitting. And while the closure is necessary, it leaves much to be known. By “through”, could the author have meant the speaker’s suicide or just a new found apathy towards her tragic childhood? This again seems to be a return to childishness. This is something children do, stamp their feet and cross their arms angrily, pretending that they do not care. Whatever the intended meaning, it does indeed bring finality to a very intense poem.

Sylvia Plath was obviously a tortured soul, for reasons known and unknown to critics and readers. This poem is just one example of her expression of angst from her childhood and its evolution into her emotional distress later in life. This same theme is expressed in many of her other poems, namely, of the ones that I am familiar with, “Lady Lazarus”, “Purdah” and “Metaphors” come to mind.

Notes on Plath's "Daddy"

The focus of the poem tends to focus on control, or the lack of in the speaker’s case.

The title character is essentially the same “Colossus” but it now represents Ted Hughes and Otto Plath.

Portrays father and husband as rigid “fascist” men, but in my opinion, for different reasons.

Her father’s control over her life and emotional state is in his memory. His memory and the memory of his death are the oppressive and controlling factors.

Use of metaphor: “lived like a foot” essentially means that the speaker is beneath this father figure, he walks on her, dominates her.

Plath uses the portrayal of a familiar enemy, the Nazis, in an extended metaphor to create an image of the speakers “reality” of suffering at the hands of this oppressive man.

Perhaps comparing herself to the Jews, the Nazi’s “prey” per say. Therefore the woman in this poem containing the fascist bogeymen assumes the role of the Jew to create a feeling of genuine suffering.

Male oppression upon women is a dominant theme in many of Plath’s poems and prose.

The father figure is described as a sexually dominant, malicious and domineering person.

The female in “Daddy” hates the father figure so much that he must die at her hand. Because of her dependence on this character, she too much die with him, be it emotionally or literally. “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m thru”

Look into Electra complex…

**An explication will eventually form outta these notes. Look for it next week.

"Daddy" by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time ----
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagersnever liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

*thorough explication of this soon