13 Days to Halloween (11) - William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

BLOT: (21 Oct 2010 - 02:06:06 AM)

13 Days to Halloween (11) - William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

There are many ghost stories and campfire tales that become keen in their last lines. You see the practice as far back as Ambrose Bierce [at least, I've always intended to go back further and research], who liked italicising final sentences so that you realize that someone had been a ghost the whole time: "There, on the dresser, was his mama's pink comb!". By the time HP Lovecraft picked up the habit, and EC Comics made an entire industry out of final frame twists; there was fixated in short horror the idea of the finishing blow. These twists did not quite work in longer horror, where the twist usually had to be embedded in the story and not simply spouted off at the end. Some studios, such as Amicus, had fun with a few surprises, but it was after horror's first (Universal) and second (Hammer) heydays that movies and longer horror tomes delved more and more into final-frame trickery, probably due to a generation of horror fans raised on the milk of EC teats. The once noble "twist" became a tired cliché of creature features adoring the final frame of a supposedly vanquished creature roaring back to angry life. New an non-fans cite "sequel bait", but it's not so much sequel bait as a lot of horror writers don't understand the purpose of the final punch. They are throwing in your face that the monster cannot be beaten, not really. This is false. All things can come to an end. The final punch is not for cheap shots, but to kick the legs out from under the reader/viewer: you undermine their comfort zone. And, if you do it right, it sticks with them for a bit.

But what about a side genre to this, a story that does not become horror until the final few lines? A lot of the MR James and Edith Wharton (I KNOW!) ghost stories were around this sort. Some somebody would meant some other somebody, and surprise, they were a ghost! Nothing too shocking there, because you were told you were reading a ghost story and so of course someone is going to be a ghost. What if you, instead, were reading a short story about an old town eccentric, an old woman whose one true love disappeared all those years ago, a child of the South whosepoor life was defined by the men inside of it. And what if you were not told that the last section, alone, makes it at least nearly a horror story? And, while I am asking questions, you were told that William Faulkner wrote it?

"A Rose For Emily", like CP Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", can be read with or without the horror trappings contained within it. It is not hard to picture two stage productions—one focusing on the macabre and one focusing on kind of a genteel melodrama—coming to completely different terms with the handling of the story. I would say this is not unimportant (remember, kids, Uncle Doug always seeks for the hidden allegory in high horror). For now, though, read it in the simplest light and ask yourself one question: what the crap do you really know about all those neighbors to whom you say hello but never dig one whit deeper?

The very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.

You can read the rest here: "A Rose For Emily".

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010