Saturday, December 26, 2009

In A Rose for Emily by Faulkner, what was Emily's father's generation?

In "A Rose for Emily" (Faulker), there is information in the story that allows us to infer that Miss Emily's father was part of the Civil War generation. We also know that the story was written in 1930, a mere 65 years after the war.  We are told that Miss Emily was given a dispensation for taxes, in perpetuity, upon the death of her father in 1894.  The Civil War was from 1861 to 1865, and Miss Emily, upon the death of her father, is clearly regarded as old enough to be the chatelaine of her deceased father's household. This means that certainly her father was old enough to have been alive during the Civil War and likely, actually, to have been old enough to have fought in it.  This is reinforced by the fact that Colonel Satoris, the mayor of the town, seems to have been a contemporary of Miss Emily's father, and he does treat her in a fatherly manner, including this dispensation of taxes for her.  He would not be called Colonel unless he had fought in the Civil War.  Furthermore, Miss Emily is buried in a cemetery of Civil War veterans, and it seems safe to assume she is being buried in a family plot, where her father must be, likely as one of those veterans. 

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